As an international place of remembrance, it unites for the first time the names of all the soldiers who gave their lives here, whether friend or foe, in alphabetical order. The visually restrained oval form nestling in the landscape, yet partly cantilevered out over the slope, is 129 metres long and 75 metres wide. The dark, curved concrete enclosing wall at first conveys the impression of a hermetically closed form, a piece of abstract, sculpturally conceived landscape art. Via a trench cut in the ground, however, visitors have access to the interior – a broad grassed area that, at the opposite end, flows out beneath the enclos-ing structure, which cantilevers over the sloping topography at this point. A narrow peripheral path 328 metres long leads round the inside of the wall, from where views out to the surrounding landscape are afforded at only two points. The faceted inner surface of the wall, however, reveals itself as a shimmering band of 500 zigzagging panels in bronze-coloured stainless steel, on which are printed the names of nearly 580,000 solders of all nations who gave their lives here.
The complex load-bearing structure of the memorial is not visible. It consists of prefabricated wall elements, corbels, ground and roof slabs in ultra-high-strength fibre-reinforced concrete. The cantilevered section of the oval – a third of the whole – is a bridge-like structure with a maximum span of 56 metres. To ensure that the homogeneous appearance of the memorial is not impaired by ancillary beams, anchors and the like, prestressing steel was integrated at the top and bottom of 49 of the 122 concrete segments.
