But by the 1930s Germany was changing, and in 1931 the architect Heinrich Tessanow was commissioned by the Prussian state government to convert the Neue Wache in the Unter Den Linden into what was known as the ‘Memorial for the Fallen of the War’. During the Weimar period in Germany there was no thought of such a thing the feeling of defeat and the more pressing problems of the economy and competing political ideas made it impossible. In the years following the Great War of 1914-1918 France, then Britain and finally America selected unknown soldiers from the shell-torn battlefields to be buried in a place of honour. In Germany such sentiments on a national level are unheard of, but it wasn’t always so. As the 11th November approaches here in Great Britain, thoughts turn to the remembrance of those who fell in the two World Wars and more recent conflicts.
