In addition to the many destructions and deaths they leave behind, wars also have a long afterlife in terms of memory culture. Already a few years after the First World War, for instance, in itself already in the last months of the war, German society tried to give meaning to the lost war, the fighting, the privations, and the mass deaths - and thus to give these events a new meaning. Often enough, the various groups of actors, such as war veterans, instrumentalized the senseless deaths of soldiers to swear revenge or "loyalty for loyalty." This kind of war memory can be identified for almost all war memorials, honorary and memorial monuments from different periods. Many such stone witnesses are firmly anchored in today's cityscape, but for most of them the bon mot of the Austrian writer Robert Musil applies, according to which "the most striking thing about monuments is that you don't notice them".-__-0000-__- With this, the author already addressed the almost insoluble contradiction of these commemorative efforts about 100 years ago: If monuments are actually supposed to ensure remembering, their frequently soon reveal forgetting.-__-0001-__-.

As a social expression of a way of dealing with the victims of war that is set in stone, war memorials are visible evidence of political as well as cultural negotiation processes that need to be reconstructed in the present day and whose symbolisms need to be interpreted - this interpretation is particularly interesting for the interwar period, when memorial culture as such experienced a boom. At that time, civil society formulated soldierly values and virtues that seem alien from today's perspective. Not infrequently, mourning is instrumentalized to avenge the supposed Versailles dictatorship peace. Dying is described as heroic death, death is heroized. A large number of Wolfsburg's war memorials of the First World War are to be read against precisely this historical background.

According to a recent census, there are 42 war memorials, honorary and memorial monuments in Wolfsburg, most of which refer to the First World War. In addition, there are those commemorating the Battle of the Nations near Leipzig, the Franco-Prussian War as well as the Second World War. They differ particularly in their individual architecture, imagery and symbolic language, which is difficult to access for today's viewers - if they do happen to notice one of the monuments. The monuments analyzed here as examples -__-0002-__- and embedded in their contemporary historical contexts make social and socio-historical phenomena clear, for example the widespread militarism of the time as well as the growing nationalism that arose after the lost First World War.