It is an admonition to the living to make good the sacrifice of the dead

It is an admonition to the living to make good the sacrifice of the dead - "let us, the dead of war, live through you, the living".

This was a sentiment which was strong in the 20s and which caused much further catastrophe. The implication is - and was then - that Germany had lost the war because of a "stab in the back", an idea used by Hitler to foment violence against those he accused of being Germany's enemies within, principally Jews.
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It may be that any official reticence over the first war is strong because to open a debate about remembrance of that first war's military victims is to open a debate about German military victims of the war which followed.
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"To our beloved only child, to the sun of our lives, [referendar]* Albert Lowinsky, Sergeant in the 2. Guards Field Artillery Regiment, born 5 December 1891. Died for the fatherland at Menin in Flanders on 25 November 1914.

"That which has passed will not return. But it has gone down shining brightly and it will keep sending its light back for a long time."

* Trainee teacher/civil servant

There may be no sense in Germany of a national soul-searching over the First War (as there is in Britain), but that doesn't mean that nobody is thinking about it. A book by Christopher Clark, an Australian historian based at Cambridge University, has become a run-away best-seller in its German translation. "The Sleep-walkers" analyses the run-up to the war and paints a picture of blunders and misunderstandings in the complexities of European imperial politics.<a href="http://lisaere.mee.nu/"lisaere

This is why Germans like the book so much, according to Michael Epkenhans, the Director of Research at the centre for military history for the German armed forces at Potsdam. "Christopher Clark's book is selling like hot cakes," he says, "because it gives Germans the feeling that everybody has to be blamed for starting World War One and not only the Germans. You see elderly people with gleaming eyes as they listen to him lecture or read his book. They feel it tells them that many were guilty and not only Germans."
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The view that Germans were especially guilty emerged immediately after the war in the Treaty of Versailles which imposed heavy reparations on Germany (a burden which, incidentally, the great British economist John Maynard Keynes warned in 1919, would lead to disaster: "But who can say how much is endurable, or in what direction men will seek at last to escape from their misfortunes?"
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That debate has now been re-opened among historians in Germany by Christopher Clark's book. There will be a learned debate just before the anniversary in August.
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But the nation itself is not really engaged.

There is another immense cemetery a short distance from Tempelhof. It is the Jewish cemetery at Weissensee, and among its 115,000 graves are those of 12,000 Jewish German soldiers who gave their lives for their country. Jews rallied to the flag in greater proportion than their numbers in the population warranted.