Passchendaele Memorial Garden Germany

The remembrance garden commemorates the many thousands of Germans who died in the Westhoek during World War One. The basalt and Weser sandstone that were used here are typical German materials. Until today, the exact number of Germans who fell in this region, and even of those who fell during the Battle of Passchendaele, remains unknown. The opening in the large basalt block therefore symbolises a ‘unknown emptiness’. The aperture above refers to the Neue Wache in Berlin, which is the central memorial site for victims of war and tyranny in the German Federal Republic. An opening in the roof of that building exposes a statue of Käthe Kollwitz, ‘Mother with her dead son’, to the weather outside. Käthe Kollwitz lost her son Peter in Flanders. He was buried in the German war cemetery of Vladslo where her well known ‘Grieving Parents’ sculpture stands.

The most important plant in the garden is the rose. Just like the poppy, the red rose symbolises suffering and the bloodshed of war. Also, these old German roses refer to the poem ‘Die Rosen im Garten’, written by Ernst Stadler. He wrote this poem in 1914, the year he was called to fight for Germany. Ernst Stadler was European, his aversion to war was well known. However, he had no choice but to fight which brought him to Flanders. On the 30th of October 1914 during the First Battle of Zonnebeke, a grenade exploding at Zandvoorde, a borough within the municipality of Zonnebeke, ended his life. In this poem, it seems as if Ernst Stadler compares the young Germans men, the ‘flower of the nation’, with roses that are blooming in the summer of 1914 and are facing an uncertain fall.

‘The roses in the garden’ – Ernst Stadler 1883-1914
The roses in the garden are blossoming again.
Daily, they shoot up in thick bundles into the sun
But what luxuriant tenderness is gone
with which their earlier blossom trembled in the yard
of white and red starry fire.
They leap more lustily,
as if pouring from lacerated veins,
over the heftily swollen flesh of leaves.
Their wild blossoming is like the gasp of death
that carries the passing summer on into the uncertain light of the fall.

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Source

• Text: Luc Van Waeyenberge
• Photos: Luc Van Waeyenberge
• Informatiebord Kasteeldomein Zonnebeke