Laudator Temporis Acti

Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1998), p. xlii (notes omitted):

Most (though not all) of the war memorials which stand in squares, schools and churchyards all over Europe, whether they portray idealized warriors, mourning women or (as at Thiepval) merely list names on stone or bronze, insist that those who died in the war did not die in vain. 'Morts pour la Patrie' is the most frequently encountered inscription on French monuments aux morts, whether heroic, civic or funerary. 'Deutschland muss leben, auch wenn wir sterben müssen,' reads the legend of the Dammtor memorial I used to pass every day as a student in Hamburg: 'Germany must live, even if we must die.' Only a few memorials venture to suggest that the 'sacrifice' of those they bring to mind was in vain.

Thiepval, Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, designed by Edwin Lutyens (erected in 1928-1932; photograph by Chris Hartford): Hamburg, Dammtor-Bahnhof, Kriegerdenkmal für die im Ersten Weltkrieg gefallenen Soldaten des Hamburgischen Infanterie-Regiments Nr. 76, aka 76er Denkmal, designed by Richard Kuöhl (erected in 1936): James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 337-338:

This seemingly indestructible military monument by Richard Kuohl [sic] was erected by the Nazis in 1936 near the entrance to Hamburg's wondrous Botanical Garden at the Dammtor. A massive cube of granite blocks, it is encircled by a frieze of marching German soldiers, four abreast in profile relief. In Gothic script typical of the Third Reich, the monument is dedicated to the memory of soldiers from Hamburg's Second Hanseatic Infantry Regiment number 76 who fell in the 1870-71 war and in the First World War.

Despite its militaristic tenor and Nazi origin, the monument might have remained undisturbed had it not been for a line of poetry by Heinrich Lersch inscribed on one side: "Deutschland muss leben, auch wenn wir sterben müssen" (Germany must live, even if we have to die). In the midst of the surrounding devastation after the war (this monument was practically the only edifice left standing in the Dammtor after the bombing), this verse had taken on a mock hollow ring in 1945, a perceived affront to the dead of all wars.

As antiwar sentiment rose over the years, Kuohl's monument came under siege by demonstrators, who smeared it with paint and took hammer and chisel to its stone reliefs. It has incited full-fledged rock-and-bottle riots between skinheads and police, as other police and antiwar marchers battled in the streets nearby. At the same time, veterans of the Second Hanseatic Infantry Regiment number 76 continued to honor their fallen comrades at the monument's base, and the city continued to clean the monument and repair its vandalized facade. At one point, Radio Bremen invited listeners to turn out en masse and swaddle the monument in rags, blankets, and linen—à la Christo. All the networks covered this live "TV happening," to the great concern of local Christian Democratic Union politicians and veterans groups still attempting to protect the monument from its pubic. Eventually, the city gave up cleaning the monument, caught between its popular rejection as a glorification of war and the veterans' need for a place to honor their comrades. Having withstood the Allies' bombs, the monument also defeated the townspeople's own attempts to demolish it.

This memorial stone had become, in the punning vernacular, a "Stein des Anstosses"—an annoyance, a stone of contention—that just wouldn't go away.

The line from Heinrich Lersch (1889-1936) comes from his poem "Soldatenabschied," Herz! Aufglühe dein Blut: Gedichte im Kriege (Jena: Eugen Diederich, 1916), pp. 14-15. It was parodied by the Hamburg punk rock group Slime in their song "Deutschland muss sterben, damit wir leben können."

When my son was a small boy, he thought Gutzon Borglum's statue The Aviator (1918) at the University of Virginia was a statue of Spiderman: