"Memento 190" - a temporary memorial at the station of Oppenau commemorating the 190 war deads of the Black Forest town.

On 12 August 2014 the memorial with the 190 names was inaugurated. The commemoration ended with "The good Comrade", a lament written by Uhland in 1807.

Numerous citizens followed the invitation and experienced an evening in a thoughtful mood.

Bernhard Münchbach opened the ceremony with a deliberate fanfare.

In his salutatory Tim Otto Roth articulated his personal concern as artist, art historian and citizen of Oppenau.

SWR radio editor Willi Keller cited poems from Augsut 1914 glorifying the war in a barely comprehensible way from present-day perspective.

Willi Keller amplified the gloomy and depressing mood reading between the poems the names of the war deads of Oppenau.

The poems were selected by the literary scholar Miriam Seidler.

A small exhibit presents documents from 1934 illustrating the historical background of the demolished memorial. The exhibit can be visited on request.

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In summer 2014 a memorial in the Black Forest town Oppenau commemorating the soldiers killed during World War I was demolished to construct a parking. Although the renovation of the memorial was commissioned by the municipality, the city council hasn’t decided yet on a new site to reconstruct the memorial. This why that in the year of the centennial of World War I there is no venue where to commemorate all the 190 killed persons from the city and its surrounding villages. This circumstances motivated the artist Tim Otto Roth to initiate a temporary memorial in his Black Forest hometown. More...

12 August 2014. Inauguration of the temporary memorial displaying all the 190 names of the war deads from Oppenau. In this occasion of this commemoration ceremony the radio (SWR) editor Willi Keller will read poems written in the first months of war. Start: 19:30, open to the public.
1 August 2014.  The display started operation presenting the declaration of war of Germany to Russia. On 3 August 2014 the telegraphed declaration of war of Germany to France was presented. The telegram arrived fragmented in quite a dadaist manner.
15. November 2015. The temporary memorial was switched off in occasion of the re-inauguration of the renovated memorial at the German Remembrance Day. The memorial was re-erected fifty meters away from its original position right beside a children's playground. The new place ignores the former grove like arrangement of the memorial in combination with the steles commemorating the fallen soldiers from World war II. Above all the statues were turned around 135 degrees towards East.