This academic reader is a result of the research conducted by the study project "War and its Memorialisation" which was organized by the Chair of Architectural Conservation during the summer semester 2019. The publication aims to study the relationship between a memorial and the actual military events it refers to, looking both at the military history of the events that led to the establishment of the memorial and at the symbolism, architectural styles and artistic choices and meanings of war memorials. These short papers investigate the relationship between the military history of a place and its memorialisation by looking at what actually happened in the war and how these events relate to the story that is told, in artistic terms, by the memorial. They interpret memorials trying to unpack what ’spin’ the memorial put on the events and which ulterior motivations and purposes are contained in it, discussing key aspects such as truthfulness, grief and reconciliation on one side and propaganda, ‘fake news’, chauvinism or straightforward war-mongering on the other side. This publication contains a selection of short papers prepared by students who joined the study project. They focus on twelve memorial sites: the Asiago War Memoria (Italy); the Beaumont-Hamel Memorial Park (France); the German Cemetery in Langemark (Belgium); the Mały Powstaniec sculpture of the “Little Insurrectionist” in Warsaw (Poland); the Memorial for Peace and Reconciliation in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (South Korea); the Mutiny Memorial in Delhi (India); the Ossuary of Monte Grappa (Italy); the Martyrs’ Memorial in Port Said (Egypt); the Rwandan Genocide Memorials (Rwanda); the Soviet War Memorial in Tiergarten, Berlin (Germany); Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. (USA) and the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo (Japan).
Heinemann et al. (Tue,) studied this question.