One of my students and a former student who is currently stationed near there have both recently sent me photos of memorials at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

"Iron Mike"

Vietnam

Global War on Terror

"328th Rock" (First World War)

a memorial to an individual soldier, Francisco "Marty" Martinez

These memorials make a study in what one might call "internal" military memorialization. All the memorials are on the base, accessable to civilians only after passing the controls at the gate. They represent how the military presents itself to itself. The use of military insignia, acronyms and badges on the memorials mark them much like a uniform marks the living soldier with certain attributes which are earned and then worn as an outward indicator. The names are given with military ranks, something untypical for local town or church memorials. To an even greater extent than in other memorials, the dead are kept in their service identity.

The memorial to the fallen airborne infantrymen from the "Global War on Terror" (shown above) is interesting in that the name of the war also indicates a justification for the fallen. It contrasts with other memorials which are for conflicts which require additional justification - for example for "freedom" in the case of the Fort Bragg Vietnam War linked here.

Over twenty new sites of memory have been added to sites-of-memory.de from the Ruhr industrial area of Germany. I did not have the time to search the down town areas. I focused entirely on cemeteries in Dortmund, Bochum and Essen. Memorials from Mühlheim will follow soon.

I was surprised to not find monumental memorial complexes for the bombing in Dortmund or Essen. They have large cemetery sections for their war dead, and they are mostly civilians buried there, but no large memorial complexes focused on the bombing like in Darmstadt or Pforzheim or even a special section for the bombing victims like in Stuttgart or Karlsruhe.

The new memorials also include some new additions to the section on civilian accidents involving mines and a factory and several new gravesites for concentration camp victims, Soviet POWs, and other victims of the Nazis. There is also a well-hidden memorial to policemen and citizens who fell combatting the revolutionary disturbances in Essen in 1920.

Travel to all these sites was backed by a research grant from American Public University.

Until yesterday, the previous record for the number of hits at sites-of-memory.de was 675 and the record number of unique visitors was under 200. A typical day has been 50 to 80 unique visitors with something over 100 total hits. Well, yesterday, the site got 988 visitors and 1,195 hits. The statistics only log the details of the last 100 hits, so I am not sure what happened.

The memorial to Hessian cavalry in Darmstadt got 48 of the last 100 hits, so perhaps there is a link to that from some popular site. However, the "came from" statistics show only low-volume links and search engine results.

Update:
This morning I discovered a lot of traffic from stumbleupon.com where someone who goes by the name tpq62 has posted a link to sites-of-memory.de and a quote from the sites-of-memory.de introduction. His blog has some interesting links to resources on progressive history including a site on Helen Keller. Her life would make a fantastic study in collective amnesia.

The memorials from the main cemetery in Pforzheim are now online. They include two memorials from local guilds in memory of their colleagues who died in the war (the butchers' memorial is shown here), the "Honor Cemetery" for the fallen of the First World War, the "Honor Field" for the fallen in the Second World War, a memorial to POWs, and the civilian mass grave for the 17,000 victims of the Allied air raid on 23 February, 1945. There is also a memorial to a man executed for mutiny during the Revolution of 1848-1849 in Germany. Together with the Wallberg memorial "rubble hill" posted some months ago, all material I have available from Pforzheim is now posted.

The Sites of Memory webpage has moved off of hatlie.de and over to its own domain: . The links here in the blog have been brought up to date, as have all links internal to the Sites of Memory site itself. Many external links, however, including many on the various city and monument pages at Wikipedia, are still connected to the old URLs. I will be spending a few minutes every morning over the next several days correcting those links in small, tolerable doses.

The rest of the long-promised Estonia, Iceland, Washington, D.C., Pforzheim and Frankfurt sites have been put on the back burner while other projects consume my large blocks of time.

Tomorrow is All-Saints Day and I plan to be attending and documenting memorial services at the Tübingen Bergfriedhof for a coming essay on memorial culture in Tübingen.

I have begun processing and uploading dozens and dozens of memorials from my trip to Washington, D.C. So far, I have only the most popular and well-known memorials up: The Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial, the Korean War, World War Two and Vietnam Veterans memorials, the First Division and Second Division and African American Civil War memorials, and the little-known "Titanic" memorial on the waterfront from the national capital and the U.S.M.C. "Iwo Jima" memorial in Arlington, Virginia. I have also put up a local memorial from Sharpsburg, Maryland, the Antietam Battlefield National Cemetery, and some local memorials in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota and Jamestown, North Dakota.

Over time, "Sites of Memory" will eventually include several dozen more memorials from around Washington, D.C., all the important memorials from Arlington National Cemetery and a complete photographic documentation of the Antietam National Battlefield. About 20 memorials from around Germany and other parts of Europe are also on the way.

Women in Vietnam!

I neglected to photograph (or even see) the Women in Vietnam Memorial on the Washington Mall. If anybody has a good photographic record of that memorial and wants to publish it at "Sites of Memory," please get in touch!

Today, four new sites went up, bringing the total to 100:

• The Soviet Victory Memorial in Vienna, Austria (shown here) is the latest contribution by Douglas Gleeson, bringing the total number of countries on the site to 11.
• New contributor Katharina Uhl from the University of Tuebingen has a picture of a Soviet memorial to a submarine commander in Kaliningrad
• and a picture of "Mother Russia"
from the same city.
• Finally, I put up the Wallberg memorial, a memorial to the bombing of the city of Pforzheim, a hill actually built out of the rubble of the city.

There is now a guestbook at the Sites of Memory page, so please stop by and say hello!

The Sites of Memory page continues to expand rapidly. I have tightened up the links and recommended readings sections and revamped the site for easier use. There are now separate collections for five different theme categories as well as the all-encompassing list of markers by location. The total is now 96 pages up with 752 photos of over 100 memorials from 10 countries.

Since February I have gone memorial hunting in Karlsruhe and the nearby cities of Rottenburg and Herrenberg. My newest work online includes:

• Several memorials and memorial complexes in Karlsruhe, including memorials to the Franco-Prussian War, the Baden troops killed supressing the Revolution of 1848, the air raid and military dead of the two world wars, and others. The air raid memorial to those killed in World War One is especially touching because it includes the graves of 70 children killed while visiting the circus in 1916.
• Several memorials in Rottenburg, including a stone memorializing the burning of a heretic in 1527, the martyrdom of the state president of Württemberg, who was killed by the Nazis, and the local military cemetery.
• The memorial to the Baltenregiment in Tallinn, Estonia. These are historical photos, from the 1920s, from the Herder Institute archive in Marburg. It is the first example of what I hope will be a growing collection of photo documents of memorials and monuments which no longer exist.

I am now being helped by other contributors. Several more of my students have let me use their material online, although only one of there projects is up so far. Nicola Zwingmann, a fellow historian in Tübingen, sent me photos she took in Turkey. Mark Keck, another university friend, has begun contributing old pictures of his travels at home in the States, Poland and the Ukraine. Douglas Gleeson, a World War Two enthusiast who ran accross my site on line, is contributing material faster than I can put it up from places in Ireland, Italy, Germany and Poland. He is planning a trip to Germany, Poland and Ukraine this summer and has promised to keep contributing.

Already online are:

• Several sites near Anzio with photos by Douglas Gleeson
• An Atatürk memorial in Istanbul by Nicola Zwingman
• Two incompletely-documented sites in Wicheta, Kansas and a memorial to Americans who died for Poland (shown here in the upper right) by Mark Keck.

Coming soon to Sites of Memory:

• I currently have about a dozen contributions from my current history students which will, given student permission, go online when the semester ends in a few more weeks.
• a new domain name for easier reference
• The whole site is being revamped with smaller photo .jpg sizes for quicker dowloading and viewing
• photos of memorials in Herrenberg and several small towns
• several memorials in Pforzheim, including the impressive air-raid memorial atop the local hill made up of rubble from the city
• photos of the no-longer-exsitent Baltische Landeswehr memorial in Riga which was put up in the 1920s and destroyed twice
• photos of the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, one of the most significant landmarks for the history of democracy and unity in Germany

The Sites of Memory collection continues to grow rapidly.

• There are now 72 pages of memorials and other markers
• including 613 photographs.
• There are 19 pages of memorials from Tübingen. I am pretty sure that the collection now includes all sites in Tübingen related to the wars of 1870-1945 and the Holocaust.
• There are nine markers from Marburg
• and eight markers from Darmstadt
• The Holocaust collection now includes 11 sites
• And the Franco-Prussian War collection now includes eight sites.

The photo shown here is from atop the hill near the castle in the city of Marburg and represents the second-oldest event so far in the collection. The marker was put up in 1910 to memorialize the execution of German patriots by the French in 1809. One of the executed men was a veteran of the American side in the American Revolutionary War. Information and links can be found at that marker's page.

The Sites of Memory webpage continues to grow. I have now added five new pages with memorials from the German city of Muehlacker/Enz and downtown Stuttgart. The new sites include cemeteries for the fallen of both world wars as well as two Franco-Prussian War markers. There are now 44 pages with over 50 memorials and a total of 386 photos.

The monument to the Franco-Prussian War (shown in image) is an example of a relic with virtually no current relevance occupying prime real estate. On the one hand, nobody pays any attention to it, other than the teenagers who sit around on it on summer evenings and drink beer and smoke. I don't even think tourists take much notice of it. It takes up a full city block only two or three blocks off of the prime shopping street in Stuttgart, right off of Schlossplatz, where all the tourists come. On purely rational, economic grounds, it should probably be destroyed or moved to some park somewhere and the space used for something else. On the other hand, the city is obviously still spending money on its maintenance. The statue, pedastal and obelisks are all in very good condition. The obelisks appear to have been recently rennovated at no small cost. The inscriptions listing the battles and events of the war are clearly readable in gold script.