Angel Garden

The angel garden

The Engelsgarten is a city park named after the Engels family, who came from the politician and philosopher Friedrich Engels, among others , in the Bergisch city of Wuppertal .

Location and description

The facility is located west of the Old Market and thus the center of the Barmen district . The Engelsgarten is bordered to the east by the Wuppertal Opera House , Friedrich-Engels-Allee runs to the north and Wittensteinstrasse to the south . In the west is the Engels House (it is not the house where Friedrich Engels was born, but one of the family homes where Engels grew up and which is now a memorial to him) and the Museum for Early Industrialization , which together make up the historical Form center .

Flower arrangement in the Engelsgarten

On the paved square with flowerbeds in front of this, which forms the western part of the Engelsgarten, the sculpture Die stark Linke (also called Engels Monument ) by the Austrian sculptor Alfred Hrdlicka, who died in 2009, was presented to the public in July 1981 . The eastern part of the garden consists of a lawn area with partially protected trees and a public car park at the opera house. There on the southeastern edge is the Friedrich Engels memorial stone at the original location of the house where Friedrich Engels was born. The house where he was born was destroyed in World War II.

The remains of an old tree population, including a Norway maple ( Acer platanoides ), three beeches ( Fagus sylvatica ), a horse chestnut ( Aesculus hippocastanum ) and a hazel tree ( Corylus colurna ), still come from the Engels family's former garden. The horse chestnut is now recognized as a natural monument .

When Erich Honecker visited the Engels house on his first trip to Germany in 1987, Udo Lindenberg gave him a leather jacket and a guitar. The funeral for Pina Bausch in August 2009 was broadcast live on a large screen in Engelsgarten, as there were not enough seats in the opera house for visitors.

In 2010, the People's Republic of China offered the city of Wuppertal a gift of a 3.95 meter high Friedrich Engels statue for the Engelsgarten. This offer was accepted by the city council in November 2013 with a large majority. The sculpture by sculptor Zeng Chenggang was unveiled in June 2014.