Deserter monument

A walk-on X-shaped concrete sculpture on Ballhausplatz in central Vienna, directly opposite the Chancellery and the Hofburg. Designed by the German artist Olaf Nicolai and inaugurated in 2014, it commemorates victims of the Nazi military justice - above all Wehrmacht deserters, long branded traitors in Austria even after 1945. Only in 2009 were they collectively rehabilitated. On the upper step of the sculpture the word all glows in inset light letters, after a poem by the Scottish writer Ian Hamilton Finlay. A long political fight preceded the project. Today tourists often walk past it without noticing on their way from Heldenplatz to the Volksgarten; the memorial sits deliberately not as a centerpiece but as part of the everyday square.