Beney-en-Woëvre – Then and Now
Excursus: former German military cemetery Beney-en-Woëvre
“Sweet and honorable
is death for the fatherland.”
belonged to the most frequently used aphorisms in the German Empire during the militarization that also took place poetically. The saying graced postcards, posters, flags, and monuments. At the end of 1914, it was also found above the entrance portal of the newly established German military cemetery in the small French village of Beney-en-Woëvre between Metz and Verdun. Variously modified, the sentence goes back to a verse from the Odes of the Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace), which, complete and freely translated, read as follows:
“dulce et decorum est pro patria mori:
mors et fugacem persequitur virum
nec parcit imbellis iuventae
poplitibus timidoque tergo.”
“It is sweet and glorious to die for the fatherland:
Death follows even the fleeing man
and does not spare the cowardly hams and backs
of the war-unwilling youth.“
“Wayfarer, stand still and say a prayer for me.
Tomorrow another will come and pray for you.“
stood at the entrance to the cemetery from 1916 onwards, at any rate. Probably with regard to the longer-term and more intensively required burial space, the entrance portal had been redesigned with thicker tree trunks. For those soldiers who had meanwhile devised a new dedication and who had already had to lay to rest dozens of the remains of their sweet and honorably fallen comrades behind the original portal, their own wartime experience will have been the deciding factor for the change of mind regarding a new inscription.
In a school essay from 1916 on Horace’s introductory quotation, whose author is said to have been a 17-year-old high school student from Augsburg named Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht who was already enterprising at a young age, it states:
“(…) The statement that it is sweet and honorable to die for the fatherland can only be evaluated as purpose-driven propaganda. Saying farewell to life is always difficult, in bed as on the battlefield, most certainly for young people in the prime of their years. Only empty heads can push vanity so far as to speak of an easy leap through the dark gate, and even this only as long as they believe themselves far away from their final hour. But when the Grim Reaper approaches them directly, they take their shield on their back and scamper away, like the emperor’s corpulent court jester at Philippi who devised this saying. (…)”
That Berthold Brecht, who, due to a heart condition and the clever intervention of his father, was spared direct front-line service in the First World War, did not receive top marks or commendations for such insights in the third year of the war goes without saying.
As early as December 1890, German Emperor Wilhelm II—looking back at his own time at the Kassel gymnasium and his studies at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Bonn—had stated in his opening speech at the “School Conference” (also “December Conference”), the expert congress held in Berlin for the reform of high school teaching methodology:
“Whoever has attended a Gymnasium themselves and has looked behind the scenes knows where it falls short. And above all, it lacks a national basis. We must take German as the basis for the Gymnasium; we are supposed to educate young national Germans and not young Greeks and Romans! (…) We must make German the basis. The German essay must be the center around which everything revolves. (…) Therefore I say, away with the Latin essay, it is a hindrance to us, and we are wasting our time for German because of it.”
Such statements, correspondingly agitative slogans, and their own gruesome experiences during the First World War have inspired many intellectuals and post-war authors like Erich Maria Remarque to emigrate and to create figures such as senior student Paul Bäumer and schoolmaster Kantorek in the multiple times filmed bestseller “All Quiet on the Western Front”. The words put into the mouth of schoolmaster Kantorek surely would have been spoken frequently in the euphoria of the summer of 1914 in such or a similar manner and with full fervor in school classrooms and university lecture halls, whereas by 1916 no longer:
“(…) Believe me, I know that cheap praise for heroic deeds means nothing to you. I didn’t need to teach you that first. Rather, we have striven to be worthy of what is now demanded of us. And if need be, to charge against the enemy in the front line, for Emperor, God, and Fatherland, to be ready for that, that is true virtue. Soon the war will be over, surely without heavy losses. But if sacrifices must be made, then let us think of the Latin phrase that so many a Roman warrior bore on his lips when he stood in combat on foreign soil: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – Sweet and honorable it is to die for the fatherland. (…)”
were AI-edited (notice pursuant to Art. 50 Regulation (EU) 2024/1689).