ULM, Germany – This attractive town on the Danube River is endowed with dozens of memorials dedicated to those who suffered in the two world wars, with one memorial in particular, a group of seven inscribed slabs surmounting a knoll in the main cemetery, serving officially as Ulm's all-encompassing memorial to the victims of Nazism.
But there is a local controversy about these memorials, and it reflects a larger fact of German life. Even now, on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, this country still has not settled on how to remember the victims, or whose suffering and losses are entitled to be commemorated.
A small group of young people has been getting attention in the local newspapers as it argues – in pamphlets and at public meetings – that the array of Ulm memorials fails to honor one category of people: those who deserted the German army, many of whom were executed during the war.
"It's completely obvious that World War II was a horrific crime," said one group member, 18-year-old Johanna Nimrich. "It's impossible to understand why people who participated in the war are honored, but those who resisted participation are not."
Nimrich and the five other young people, who organized around opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, want to honor the deserters, who, in their view, were acting morally in response to a war defined by its immorality.
Their demand, that a large work by the artist Hannah Stuetz-Mentzel honoring the deserters be displayed permanently in some public place, is certainly a local issue, given only modest coverage by Germany's national press.
But other thoughts and arguments have emerged in recent years as well, including an insistence by historians and others that Germany be allowed to mourn its own suffering in the war, not the least of which was the suffering caused by the Allied bombings.
Meanwhile, also making themselves heard are members of the millions of ethnic German families who were deported from Eastern European countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia after the war, and who want public recognition of their loss.
The roots of the Ulm initiative date 18 years, when a group of opponents to the draft in Germany commissioned Stuetz-Mentzel, a local artist, to create a work dedicated to the deserters. Stuetz-Mentzel produced a large metal sculpture that showed a series of slabs, from quite small to quite large, in which the smallest slab initiates a domino effect, causing the larger slabs to lean over.
"The idea is that even the smallest level soldiers can influence higher ones," she said recently.
In 1989, Stuetz-Mentzel and her supporters placed the sculpture in a public place on the outskirts of Ulm where some deserters are believed to have been executed. But the city authorities ordered her to remove it. As a consequence, for the past 16 years, Stuetz-Mentzel's work has been stored in the small garden of a local English teacher, Hildegard Henseler, where, from time to time, people stop by to see it.
Then, a few months ago, the small group of high school students in Ulm heard about Stuetz-Mentzel's semi-discarded sculpture. The City Council has rejected the students' demands that the work be given a public home. The students and their supporters suspect that is because desertion is still too delicate a subject, especially in a city like Ulm, which is home to a large German army base. But Ulm's mayor, Ivo Goenner, a 52-year-old Social Democrat, denies that that is the case.
"The deserters are included already in the general monument as victims of the Nazi regime," Goenner said in an interview in his office. "It's not so much a matter of deserters, as it is a matter of principle, not to have more memorials."