Bismarck Tower (Ettlingen)
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The Bismarck Tower in the Baden-Württemberg city of Ettlingen is a Bismarck monument erected in honor of the first German Chancellor, Prince Otto von Bismarck , who was dismissed in 1890 .
It is located about halfway up the western slope of the Wattkopf mountain . The tower is 17 m high and has a square floor plan (5.3 m × 5.3 m). Until the 1940s, fires were lit in the four fire bowls on the tower during midsummer celebrations . Today the tower serves as a lookout tower , from which, in good weather, a view of the Vosges and the Palatinate Mountains is possible.
Building history
In the winter semester of 1899/1900, the student body at the Karlsruhe University of Fridericiana founded a “Student Committee for the Construction of a Bismarck Pillar” to coordinate and finance the monument construction. The construction was to be financed primarily through donations: the student body organized money collections, garden parties and variety shows , the city of Karlsruhe itself donated 1,000 marks and the university professors gave public lectures, the entrance fees of which were intended to benefit the building project. The city of Ettlingen did not contribute to the costs, but had the access route to the tower built. Since the students had miscalculated when calculating the costs, there were still 10,000 marks missing by the time the keystone was laid, but the professors advanced them to them. This gave the Bismarck Tower in Ettlingen the nickname “Debt Tower”.
The forest land on which the tower was to be built was made available by the forester Rudolf Widman, because he had acquired some forest parcels in Ettlingen at the beginning of 1900. The students were very interested in this property, as there was a long tradition of solstice celebrations with torchlight procession on the Wattkopf. The Karlsruhe architect Friedrich Ratzel provided the design for the tower . An artist from Karlsruhe made the Bismarck coat of arms on the mountain side of the tower.
The tower is built from red sandstone blocks that were broken near the Wattkopf. In its upper third, the square tower has four three-quarter columns that taper slightly towards the capital . On the capitals there is a stone slab on a narrow beam , in which four forged braziers with a side length of 0.5 m are embedded.
The keystone was set on April 1, 1901. On June 21 of the same year, on the day of the summer solstice, the building was inaugurated with a torchlight procession and the subsequent first ignition of a fire in the braziers.
use
The Bismarck Tower was originally designed only to allow a fire to be lit in the braziers on festive and memorial days. On the south side of the tower there is an entrance to its staircase, but this entrance was only used for lighting the fires. Initially, the Bismarck Tower did not serve as a lookout tower.
Six days after the inauguration, the Bismarck Tower was handed over to the city of Karlsruhe by means of a deed of gift on June 27, 1901, which led to the fact that the tower property became a Karlsruhe exclave in the area of the city of Ettlingen.
Annually on Bismarck's birthdays on April 1st and on the summer solstice, student celebrations were held there and fires were lit in the braziers. The tradition ended in 1914 but was resumed in the Weimar Republic until it was interrupted for 20 years in 1933.
In the 1940s, a fatal accident occurred at the Bismarck Tower, so the access to the staircase was walled up; in 1947 the tower was renovated for the first time - but only temporarily. From 1953 until the 1960s, fires were lit there every year on the Day of German Unity , but not on the tower, but behind it. Midsummer celebrations were also held again.
The city of Ettlingen had long tried in vain to get the Bismarck tower over; It was only in the course of regulating the boundaries of the district in 1977 that the city of Karlsruhe handed the tower over to Ettlingen free of charge. Today the tower is a listed building , and after thorough renovation in 1998, it has been accessible to the public as a lookout tower since May 1999. For this purpose, a steel spiral staircase was built into the tower and a steel viewing platform was attached on the city side at the beginning of the column at a height of 12.45 m .
See also
Web links
Coordinates: 48 ° 56 '34.5 " N , 8 ° 25' 17.4" E