Identity building after the rupture. Post-war memorials in Central and Eastern Europe

The massive Mărăşeşti Mausoleum commemorating war victims in Romania. The memorial project, which had been initiated in 1919 by the National Orthodox Society of Romanian Women, took almost two decades to complete. Photo: Andrei Stroe (CC) commons.wikimedia.org

In Poland and the Baltic states, countless monuments dating back to tsarist Russia were torn down. In several cases, this happened even before the end of the war and the establishment of independence. In Warsaw, for example, the statue of Governor Ivan Paskevich was dismantled in 1917 with the authorisation of the German occupiers who had arrived following Russia’s withdrawal.

Demolishing old identities

After the end of the war, monuments erected during Russian rule were systematically removed by the new authorities in Poland and the Baltic states. Russian Orthodox churches were also destroyed. The most conspicuous example in Poland was the razing of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in the 1920s which had dominated Warsaw as a symbol of tsarist rule and cultural Russification, while the Nevsky Cathedral in Tallinn narrowly escaped destruction. At the same time, in Poland’s western regions, formerly annexed by Prussia, statues of German monarchs and political rulers were toppled from their pedestals. In newly established Czechoslovakia, numerous visual remnants of the Austro-Hungarian dominance were removed. One spectacular example was the blowing-up of the Árpád monument in Dévin, Slovakia, in 1921. The statue of the Hungarian progenitor had been a particular bone of contention due to its highly symbolic location surmounting a Slavic castle regarded as a cradle of the Slovak nation.

Although seemingly destructive in nature, the demolition of monuments also had a constructive aspect. By abolishing signs of foreign rule, it contributed to the construction of national identities in the new states and its symbolic impact was far greater than the limited effort required. In contrast, the erection of new monuments took a lot longer and was far more expensive. Moreover, in the years following the turmoil of the war, new memorials were not always a priority and some projects became very lengthy. Nevertheless, a significant number of conspicuous monuments and memorials were put up in Central and Eastern Europe in the interwar period.

Commemoration practices were shaped by different perspectives. As in the West, the war had been a traumatic experience in the eastern part of Europe. Numerous towns were destroyed and in many places the death toll was even higher than in Western Europe. But seen from a political perspective and regarding future prospects, the deaths were arguably not senseless. More than just an attempt to come to terms with the trauma, commemorating the war was also a means of nation-building and state-building. Consequently, it was associated with the revival or invention of traditions in order to stabilise the societies in the newly founded, re-founded or reshaped states.

Ideally, the commemoration of war should help create a united country. However, in the predominantly multi-ethnic and religiously heterogeneous states, the identity models connected with remembrance mostly did not address the whole population. They were exclusive rather than integrative. An example of this is the Mausoleum of Mărăşeşti, an outstanding memorial for the war victims in Romania. It stands on the site of the victorious Battle of Mărăşeşti in 1917 which played a central role in Romania’s war historiography and commemorative practices.

Speaking to one group

The Mausoleum to the Heroes of Mărăşeşti (Mausoleul Eroilor de la Mărăşeşti), designed by the architects George Cristinel and Constantin Pomponiu, was inaugurated in 1938 after a construction period of almost fifteen years. It contains crypts with the remains of about 6,000 soldiers and a funerary memorial to General Eremia Grigorescu, the Romanian commander at the Battle of Mărăşeşti. With its compact cylindric tower topped with a dome-like conical roof and standing on a massive, terraced base with rough stone cladding, the monument dominates the landscape and is evocative of a fortress. The frieze surrounding the tower depicts the battle while the inscription above the entrance dedicates the memorial to “the Glory of the Nation’s Heroes”. The shape of the tower refers to the Tropaeum Traiani monument in Adamclisi, the most significant relic of the Roman presence on Romania’s territory, thereby claiming a national heritage going back to antiquity. But there is also a reference to the Orthodox Christian tradition by virtue of the cross on top of the tower. The Christian Orthodox character of the memorial is also underlined by the Chapel of Glory at the centre of the mausoleum.

The memorial project, which had been initiated in 1919 by the National Orthodox Society of Romanian Women, took almost two decades to complete, and for various reasons it did not always enjoy the full support of the Romanian government. Nonetheless, it played a key role in the official mourning and remembrance culture of the Romanian state. This was expressed not least by the presence of King Carol II and numerous state officials at the inauguration ceremony, which drew thousands of people from all over the country to the small town of Mărăşeşti. Devoted to mourning and commemoration, the Mărăşeşti mausoleum was also a monument to the triumph of a country whose territory had grown by nearly half thanks to the outcome of the war. Thus, the monument bore a nationwide meaning and message, but, as the historian Maria Bucur concludes, the nation of the multi-ethnic state was defined exclusively. This is expressed by the inscriptions in Romanian, the cross topping the monument, and the chapel addressing solely the Orthodox Christian part of the population. This tendency to more or less explicitly speak to only one dominant ethnic group of the state is typical of most post-First World War monuments in the eastern part of Europe.

In Slovakia, the memorial to General Milan Rastislav Štefánik on Bradlo Hill is comparable to the Mărăşeşti mausoleum in its state-wide significance as well as its appearance as a monumental architectural landmark dominating the landscape in a rural area. Although the burial mound in the vicinity of the town of Brezová pod Bradlem, perhaps Slovakia’s best-known monument, is not strictly speaking a First World War memorial, by commemorating the Slovak military commander and statesman it evokes the crucial significance of the war on the road to national emancipation. As a co-organiser of the Czechoslovak Legion, which fought against Austria–Hungary and Germany, and a co-founder of the Czechoslovak National Council, Štefánik had contributed decisively to the achievement of sovereignty, albeit within a confederation with the Czechs.

After his tragic death in a plane crash in 1919, Štefánik was glorified as the liberator of Slovakia and even sacralised as a martyr. This was reinforced by the unexplained cause of the crash which fuelled theories of an assassination by an anti-Slovak conspiracy. Štefánik’s death was considered by many contemporaries a blood sacrifice for the redemption of Slovakia from a millennium of slavery.

The tomb near his hometown, Košariská, became a national shrine. It was designed by Slovak architect Dušan Jurkovič, who was already renowned for more than 30 soldiers’ cemeteries he had designed for the Austro–Hungarian army in West Galicia between 1916 and 1918. The cemeteries were widely acclaimed for their original adoption of regional vernacular forms combined with traditional elements of sepulchral art and their sensitive integration into the landscape.

At Bradlo, however, Jurkovič referred to universal architectural motifs. The starting point for the memorial’s design was the ephemeral funeral decor in 1919, also devised by Jurkovič. Even so, it was not until 1928 that the monument was consecrated. Štefánik’s sarcophagus was placed on the large top surface of a truncated pyramid fashioned from rough stone and framed with four massive obelisks rising into the sky on top of the hill. The monument’s archaic force and roughness are reminiscent of a prehistoric temple, lending a timeless significance to Štefánik’s life and death.

More than symbols

It was not only the monuments directly or indirectly related to the First World War that were the focal points for identity constructions in the new states. In the Czech part of the Czechoslovak state, two pre-independence monuments in particular took on this role: the equestrian statue of Saint Wenceslas and the Jan Hus memorial. This was made possible by the relatively liberal nationality policy in the late Habsburg Empire which gave the national movements and the autonomous regional authorities, in various parts of the empire, plenty of scope for symbolic politics.

The monument to Saint Wenceslas, unveiled in 1913, commemorates the 10th century Duke of Bohemia, the Czech patron saint and martyr. It symbolises not only the thousand-year-old Christian tradition but Bohemian statehood. Due to the latter meaning, on October 28th 1918 the statue on Wenceslas Square served as the backdrop to the public proclamation of the independent Czechoslovak state. In 1929, the area around the monument was one of the venues used to celebrate the millennium of Saint Wenceslas.

The Jan Hus memorial on Prague’s Old Town Square glorifies the Bohemian church reformer, who was executed at the Council of Constance in 1415. However, the monument does not primarily commemorate his significance for religious history. Since the 19th century, Hus, who had preached in the Czech language, had been venerated by the Czech national movement as a pioneer of national emancipation. His struggle against the medieval church was seen as a forerunner of the Czech resistance to Catholic Austria and the dominance of German culture. The erection of the monument was politically highly contested, not only because it challenged the Habsburg monarchy, but also because Hus, being a heretic, was unacceptable to much of the Catholic Czech population. Accordingly, the Austrian authorities forbade a public unveiling ceremony of the finished monument on the 500th anniversary of Hus’s death in 1915, to the disappointment of the memorial’s initiators who had spent 25 years raising the funds for its erection.

The big ceremony at the Hus memorial was finally held a decade later when the Czechoslovak state commemorated the anniversary of Hus’s execution. The involvement of the state drew some criticism and protest, mainly among non-Czech citizens as well as pious Catholics who did not feel represented by Hus and, instead, identified with Saint Wenceslas. Despite these conflicts, the commemoration received much support, not least from state founder and president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, who was presented as a legitimate heir of Jan Hus. In her study of the political use and perception of Saint Wenceslas and Jan Hus in the 1920s, Cynthia J. Paces explores the antagonisms surrounding the two monuments, which represented two poles of Czech identity-building. In some respects, the disputes can be seen as exemplary for the period. As political monuments were focal points of identity-building in post-First World War states, arguments and conflicts around them were the rule rather than the exception.

Division of remembrance

However, in no other state was identity building as divisive as in Germany, the once-powerful empire which had lost the war and forced to cede a significant part of its territory – feeling humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles. In the Weimar Republic, monuments were erected on a massive scale. In its final years, there are thought to have been more war memorials in Germany than in any other country in the world. While mostly initiated by right-wing organisations, agitating more or less explicitly against the republic, there were also memorials of republican or left-wing origin. Monument production hence reflected the political division of remembrance. Regarding the war memorials in Berlin, Christian Saehrendt coined the term “trench warfare of monuments” (Stellungskrieg der Denkmäler).

Neither civil society nor state institutions were able to agree on the erection of a memorial with a nationwide, unifying message. The clearest example of this inability is the failed project for the Reichsehrenmal (Imperial Memorial) for fallen German soldiers. Already broached during the war, in 1924 the idea for such a memorial was adopted by the German government which hoped it would have an identity-building effect on the country’s traumatised, politically fragmented society. In fact, it had the opposite effect. From the outset, it proved impossible to agree on the memorial’s location, and the animosities between politicians, state institutions and veterans’ associations thwarted all attempts at reconciliation.

In sharp contrast with the plan for a unifying Reichsehrenmal project, another memorial was built with a distinctly divisive character. The Tannenberg-Nationaldenkmal (National Memorial to the Battle of Tannenberg), which was unveiled in 1927 after a three-year construction period near Hohenstein in East Prussia (today Olsztynek), had been initiated by revanchist veterans’ associations and largely financed with donations. The project was contentious from the beginning. The succession of cabinets of the central government only supported it intermittently whenever nationalist forces had gained the upper hand. The memorial commemorated the victory over Russian troops in the (misleadingly named) Battle of Tannenberg in 1914. In the initiators’ view of history, this triumph was part of the centuries-old struggle for German dominance in this part of Europe and, above all, a revenge for the defeat of the Teutonic Order against Polish–Lithuanian troops in the First Battle of Tannenberg (Battle of Grunwald) in 1410. In order to symbolically link the two clashes, the battle in 1914 was also named after the village of Tannenberg, even though the main fighting had taken place several kilometres away.

The monument’s architecture, designed by Johannes and Walter Krüger to express the glorification of military power, had some aspects in common with the memorials in Mărăşeşti and Bradlo, being another huge structure towering over the landscape in a rural location. It consisted of a massive, octagonal wall surmounted by eight towers forming a fortress-like ring with a soldiers’ grave in the centre topped by a cross. The main architectural points of reference were Castel del Monte (a 13th century citadel built for Emperor Frederick II) and the prehistoric monument Stonehenge. With such references to the medieval Holy Roman Empire and an imagined proto-Germanic culture as alleged sources of the German spirit of strength, the Tannenberg monument followed some patterns of tradition-building developed since the 19th century. On the other hand, its aggressive, sharp-edged monumental forms were a harbinger of architectural developments in the Third Reich.

The Tannenberg Memorial could be seen as a monumentalised threatening gesture by the loser of the war to neighbouring Poland. Given this symbolism, it was for its initiators the true Reichsehrenmal. Nonetheless, in the early 1930s the German government tried one more time to revive the official Reichsehrenmal project. However this attempt was in vain because in 1935 Adolf Hitler officially declared the Tannenberg Memorial to be the Reichsehrenmal, fulfilling the desire of its initiators. At this time, the monument was remodelled and upgraded to serve as the last resting place of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who was admired as the victor of the Battle of Tannenberg, and after his death exploited by the Nazis as their forerunner and ideological patron.

The Tannenberg Memorial was a symbolic stronghold of the nationalist and revanchist forces which destroyed the Weimar Republic and paved the way for Hitler’s takeover of power. Its elevation to Reichsehrenmal in 1935 signalled their triumph. Yet just a few years later, the Tannenberg Memorial was destroyed along with the Third Reich. It was partially blown up by retreating German troops in 1945. In the 1950s the remnants were removed on the orders of the Polish authorities. It was probably the biggest victim of a new, vast wave of monument destruction in the eastern part of Europe.

This essay is based on a text from the forthcoming book titled Architecture of independence in Central Europe prepared by the International Cultural Centre (ICC) in Kraków for the exhibition with the same name showing at the ICC Gallery from November 9 2018 – February 10 2019.

The author would like to thank Bettina Haase, Frank Hadler, Nicolas Karpf, Greta Paulsen, Karin Reichenbach and Anna Reindl for their advice and assistance; and Chris Abbey for linguistic improvements.

Arnold Bartetzky is an art historian and architecture critic. He is head of the department “Culture and Imagination” at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) in Leipzig and an honorary professor of art history at the University of Leipzig. His fields of research include architecture, urban planning, monument preservation and political iconography from the 19th century to the present.

1918, Central and Eastern Europe, memorials