Today in Ulm a memorial to Wehrmacht deserters was unveiled – 17 years after it was constructed! Pictures, background information and links are available at Sites of Memory.

The controversy cuts right to the heart of all the problems surrounding Germany's post war culture of memory and identity. On the one hand, there is every effort to reject Nazi Germany as a source of traditions and symbols. These controversies rage across several fronts of symbolic politics: the naming of barracks after Nazi-era military heroes, the use of particular public spaces, the recognition of certain dates. On the other hand, biographies and families are, like in any other country, tied into the war years, making total rejection of the period very difficult. The difficulty is illustrated by the fact that it took the German parliament until 2002 to revoke the convictions of the 15,000 men executed for desertion under the Nazis, despite the long-standing recognition of Nazi crimes and illegality.

The difficulty stems from the instinctive feeling in any society that any recognition of deserters is a recognition of those who reject that society. In a recent classroom discussion of why societies have war memorials at all, one of my students said it was because the society seeks a way to thank those who the society called upon to give their lives. Society selects members to die. If we think about it that way, then honoring deserters would make those who answered the call and those who didn't equal, in a way dishonoring the obedient. Markus Kienle, one of the sponsors of the Ulm memorial, has emphasized its inclusive nature, adding to the pantheon of wartime victims, not detracting from it.

What if a society's motives for making that call to die, its methods of enforcing it, and the total public ethic of that society change dramatically and it comes to reject an earlier version of itself? Does it therefore turn the tables on the question of who gets honor and who doesn't? How much more controversial would a deserters' memorial be in a country without such a level of introspection, without such an obvious and universally recognized record of villainy? France recently forgave its World War One deserters. I am not aware that any other countries have followed suit.

Do the big questions of the regime and the war make a difference at the local village level or, at the front line, at the company level, where ideology or nation was likely less important than the fact that every man in the line might decide the fate of all in the next battle, where every man missing can be seen as having sought to save his own skin at the expense of his fellows? Does the righteousness or injustice of the war make a difference at that level? Are those in Germany who reject these memorials – such as some Bundeswehr officers or the Ulm city council in 1989 and 1995 – thinking, perhaps subconsciously, in those terms?

The message at the unveiling went even further than honoring those who refused to fight for Hitler. The texts read there by the Jugend für Frieden group called on or strongly implied a total rejection of any service in any military. Might that be the implication that opponents of the memorial fear the most, that society must retain its right to call on its members to die, regardless of the changes in regimes or public ethics? Is there a real fear that honoring deserters from back then might offer hope to deserters now or in the future that they, too, will be thanked (if perhaps under a different regime)? We find ourselves thrown back on the 60 year discussion in Germany since the rearmament about whether societies need armies in principle. Do those who reject the memorial expect another levee en masse to be necessary? Are those who support the memorial on terms of total disarmament naïve?