Thanks for the AlJazeera link!

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/06/debate-confederate-monuments-intensifies-170619082627175.html

War is no struggle of the people or nations but a method to rob them.

And Freiburg did very well to put the war monument into the darkest corner available.
The Franco-German war was a mass slaughter. The German uniformed idiots were equipped with gun firing 5 or 7 bullets with a single magazine. Felling some ten thousand French men – per hour ….

One of the fusiliers (the blind but motivated butchers) was Otto Lilienthal ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal), so traumatised of what he had done and witnessed he was hardly able to get back into a normal life. His battle lastet for ever.
He became the clown of his community, a pacifist when the generals reigned.
A toy manufacturer in his brother’s factory.

His flying machines he tried to sell as peace makers, something totally different from the arms industry meanings:
” with these machines we can fly away if the enemy aproaches, national defense will become impossible since soldiers/people simply would leave the field and go for more peacefull countries”

https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Absturz-mit-Folgen-Flugpionier-Lilienthal-starb-vor-120-Jahren-3290054.html

His selling slogan was one of the reasons why the German army had no Luftwaffe in WWI, the generals were afraid of deserters from the abatoir of humanity.

The idea to smelt the war monuments is a good one. Maybe a big national heap of shame would be better, all the guns and medals and crap onto one big heap.
And a very big pedestrian zone around it, nothing like a Siegessaeule with millions of cars per day, killing ….

The reason Socialist East Berlin (Yes, the political ideal was to one day transition to Communism, but the actual ecomic system organising the country was Socialism. There’s a big difference. Communism isn’t actually possible on a state level.) had lots of (heavily subsidized) public transport was not so much listening to the people but rahter that most people just couldn’t afford a private car, and even if you could, you had to be on a waiting list for years until you got a slot to buy one. It wasn’t so much that East Germany couldn’t produce more cars, it’s that most cars (and most other industrially made goods) were produced for export. Also, I think the fact that the State barely had enough foreign currency to buy enough oil (and fossil-fuel-based products, like fertilizers) for basic needs as it was, so they didn’t want to encourage private citizens to use gasoline, too. This state of finances was less because of the Socialist system per se (though that system of course offered less opportunity for self-correcting if the technocratic central planners got something wrong), and more because the country was too small and resource-poor to be viable as an industrial-economy nation (as opposed to the Swiss service-economy, for example). Being forced into high military spending by the Cold War and paying 99 Billion (in 1953 money!) in war reparations to the Soviets when West Germany only paid 2 Billion to the Allies (and then got the Marshal Plan) also had something to do with the collective poverty of the East German citizenry. It’s a minor miracle the country managed to rebuild from the ruins of WW2 at all, even if the highrise buildings had to be cheap and ugly to be built quickly enough to solve the housing crisis. And people DID like to move into them when they were first built – at least they had a roof that didn’t leak, they had central heating instead of dirty coal ovens in the rooms, and you didn’t have to share a singe bath in the corridor with your neighbors. (Western towns like Freiburg may not have seen much infrastructure destruction, but Berlin and the other Eastern cities and towns certainly did – partially because the Allies carpet-bombed the area when the Red Army was just arriving to march in, to destroy as many military and industrial assets (e.g. machinery, scientists, enriched uranium stockpiles) as possible before Stalin could get his hands on them. And I’ve read that over all the larger cities of Germany, the average level of housing stock destruction was 80%. Freiburg is not at all a typical German city.)