0158 Was Jesus in the Wehrmacht?

National-Religious Commemoration in Central Europe

Abstract

Jerusalem sites representing the Passion of Christ shape the landscape of Catholic Central Europe. Several architectural evocations of Jerusalem commemorate contemporary agony, namely local victims of the World Wars. Placing soldiers within the narrative of Christ’s Way of the Cross serves a political-ideological agenda as well as a psychological need of local populations, giving meaning to the soldiers' deathsand placing them in a salvific context. In this paper two case studies, the Calvary of Klagenfurt and the Way of the Cross in Syców (Groß-Wartenberg), are presented to highlight this phenomenon.