the editorial team
expanded from MuGot – Museo Gotica Toscana. The Guide, Florence, Edizioni Gotica Toscana 20241
Where it is, how to get there
Linked to the history of the Gothic Line and the battles in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines is the great German War Cemetery at the Futa Pass, a 30–40 minute drive from the MuGot, just under thirty kilometres away. To get there, take the SP 503 to the Giogo Pass, descend to Firenzuola and from there take the SP 116 west (left) towards the Futa.
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1. The information in turn is drawn mainly – but not only – from https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cimitero_militare_germanico_della_Futa
Il Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge and Dieter Oesterlen ,the Architect
The cemetery is the largest built in Italy by the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, the private association that, on behalf of the German federal government and with the support of donations and public funds, cares for the graves of German war dead abroad. In 1955 Italy and the Federal Republic of Germany reached an agreement on the burial of soldiers who had died on Italian soil. Built from 1961 to a design by the German architect Dieter Oesterlen, the cemetery was inaugurated on 28 June 1969.2.
“In spring 1959 Dieter Oesterlen received the commission and the project timetable from the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge for the Deutscher Soldatenfriedhof am Futa-Pass – the Futa Pass between Florence and Bologna – and built its essential parts between 1961 and 1964.” From the work of this architect, his history and his collaboration with his team it emerges that the German Cemetery at the Futa must be understood as a work of art: “The theme of the sacred recurs; indeed his activity in this field is especially intense. It brings Dieter Oesterlen together with some artists we find again at the Futa Pass, such as Helmut Lander, the mosaicist, and Fritz Kühn, the iron sculptor. Almost in parallel with the German war cemetery, between 1964 and 1967, Oesterlen was designing the Zwölf-Apostel-Gemeindezentrum at Hildesheim-Waldquelle (the Church of the Twelve Apostles).”3
The architect is driven by a strong sense of history. The war is still there, part of that landscape. The Futa Pass, crossed by the front in September 1944, is a place of battle, of men and machines fighting each other, of crackling weapons, of life and death. One step from Bologna, one step from the end. This is the meaning of the spirals designed by Oesterlen.
“A spiral of the kind that embraces people and can take hold of the earth while turning towards the sky – that is the sketch made on site to explain the meaning of the work to the Italian building firm. Wholly Tuscan earth is theopening, all Germanic the climax towards the summit and the crypt. The Mugello landscape, used to the Medici fortresses that face this place from across the valley (San Piero a Sieve the largest and most astonishing of all), records the accounting of death of a difficult, controversial memory, softened by those walls as the local farmers build them, in roughly hewn pietra forte, now blooming with yellow lichens. Units deployed in battle, field by field, headstone after headstone.”
These are the words with which Francesco Collotti describes the meaning of the work conceived and built by Oesterlen. The German Cemetery at the Futa should therefore be understood as a poem that takes us away from war while reminding us of it with a monument to peace, where reflection on the meaning of life becomes deep and ancestral: almost natural5.
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2. Photos and much of the information are taken from F. COLLOTTI, Il paesaggio dei caduti. Dieter Oesterlen, Cimitero Militare Germanico, in “Casabella. Rivista di Architettura”, DCCCXXV (May 2013), pp. 70–89.
3. Quotes from idem, p. 72
4. Idem, p. 74.
5. The text not quoted is by Daniele Baggiani.
The structure, the meaning
The cemetery stands on the top of a hill at 950 m, around a concrete bunker. It is well signposted from the road and well worth a visit.
The entrance is crowned by a majestic triangular wall of grey stone rising above the stepped terraces of the graves, set amid the surrounding vegetation typical of high-altitude landscapes – mainly conifer woods of silver and Norway spruce and broadleaf trees such as beech and sycamore.
30,683 bodies of German soldiers were received there, coming from 2,069 different Italian municipalities.
The German Cemetery covers about 12 hectares. It extends over the slopes of the hill in a series of terraces along which the graves are laid out. The burial plots are on stepped green terraces crossed by concentric paths and stairways. The 16,000 grey granite slabs bearing the soldiers' names are grouped in 72 sectors of different sizes; each slab bears the names of two or four soldiers in sequence, although many of them have no name – they are unbekannte Soldaten, unknown soldiers.
A two-kilometre wall of grey sandstone in staggered, irregular blocks winds around the hill up to the top. The last spiral culminates in an imposing pyramidal wall that rises like a shard, enclosing on two sides the courtyard of honour, beneath which lies the memorial crypt. The courtyard paving and one face of the monumental wall are enriched with a decorative facing of irregular inlays of pietra serena, travertine, granite and marble.
Let us follow Francesco Collotti's words again to understand the design, the place we see and can experience in the shadow of so many graves. “Not far from the ANAS road house towards the Pass [of the Futa], the access road to the spiral turns off. The threshold of the sacred here is a small, entirely unrhetorical building housing the custodian and the entrance. A light, elegant wing, wholly within the best post-war German architecture, rises above some stone walls and conceals the everyday, introducing the sacred announced by a large pivoting gate flanked by a slightly inclined retaining wall of large stones. Some direct paths (Radialwege), planted with oaks alternating with poplars and made of flights of steps cutting across the slope and the contour lines, give a view of the top, but the true ascent belongs to the spiral, from which the crosses project in high relief – crosses that seem at the same time swords pointed austerely at the ground, held by ancient giants, present yet invisible.”
“In the reports accompanying the work, Dieter Oesterlen engages in dialogue with the landscape of his beloved Italy and declares a cultivated, refined involvement in the discreet act of building its ground – and this landscape in particular, among the most beautiful. Oesterlen follows the little roads that cut through the vineyards, der Art von Weinbergsteigen. At the root of the project is a survey of the site with a very accurate description of the native species and the vegetation, dated 4 January 1961.”6
From Oesterlen's love of the landscape springs the feeling of pity that overcomes the visitor on those steps, among those graves. And always the same question: ‘why did you come here to kill, to die here?’
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6. F. COLLOTTI, The landscape of the fallen. Dieter Oesterlen, German Military Cemetery, in “Casabella. Rivista di Architettura”, DCCCXXV (May 2013), p. 74.
The Crypt
The crypt below is lit by three ribbon windows opening in the west-facing wall, where the missing war dead are commemorated. A second crypt, entered from the north side, holds the remains and headstones moved from the former military cemetery at Cervia.
“Unlike the use of nature outside, the interior of the crypt is not in local stone but in schwarzer Schiefer, Trittflaeche Bruchrauh (black slate, saw-cut just as it comes from the mountain quarry), and the firm of Philipp Holzmann Aktiengesellschaft of Frankfurt am Main took care of it, with page after page of bills of quantities worthy of military accounting.” When you leave the exterior, so well set in the Italian landscape of Tuscany and the Apennines, and cross the threshold of the crypt, “you enter German soil […]. And we are in the earth, again in the crypt, beneath the courtyard of honour. Fritz Kühn again designs and casts for the crypt a single, outsized crown of thorns that resembles an anti-tank barrier, hieratically labelled “Ehrenhalle Plastik” on the drawing, as if use and memory were suspended.”7.
It only remains to recall that the German War Cemetery at the Futa Pass designed by Dieter Oesterlen is in every respect a work of art. We hope you will visit it and that it will awaken in you, as it did in us – and stayed with us – the need to open a conversation with history, a dialogue with the defeated that leads us to understand and to firmly cultivate the peace that can now be felt here.
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7. Idem, p. 78.
The video
