Omgaan met het erfgoed van de 'vijand'. Duitse WO1-monumenten op stedelijke begraafplaatsen in België
(2016) Volkskunde — Vol. 117, n° 1, p. 1-20 (2016)
Files
Volkskunde_TCDL_jan-apr201611.pdf
Open Access - Adobe PDF
- 5.41 MB
Details
- Authors
- Abstract
- During the First World War, the Germans established monuments in Belgium to commemorate their fallen soldiers. They built these memorials in the front region, but also in the city cemeteries on Belgian territory under German occupation. In this article, we study the history of the German FWW monuments built on the three main city cemeteries of occupied Belgium: the Cemetery of Brussels in Evere, Schoonselhof in Antwerp and Robermont in Liège. The Germans built these monuments without asking permission and without submitting any designs to the city councils of Brussels, Antwerp or Liège. This raises some questions. How did the city councils react to this breach of municipal law during the war, when the occupation regime limited their capacity to take decisive actions? How did they deal after the war with the monumental heritage that the enemy had constructed during the war on ‘their’ cemeteries? Did they decide to respect and to maintain the German monuments, or did they tore them down as soon as they had the opportunity? We argue that these monuments are more than just local curiosities. The German monuments of the city cemeteries in occupied Belgium functioned as real arenas. During the almost one hundred years of their existence, their meaning and importance was renegotiated. For nearly a century, they have been a battleground where Belgians and Germans accepted, denied or even challenged each other’s war memory, depending on the political and economic context of both countries.
- Affiliations
Citations
Vanraepenbusch, K., & Havermans, A.-M. (2016). Omgaan met het erfgoed van de ‘vijand’. Duitse WO1-monumenten op stedelijke begraafplaatsen in België. Volkskunde, 117(1), 1-20. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/36436 (Original work published 2016)