Angel of Peace (Mannheim)

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The Angel of Peace (2013)

The angel of peace in Mannheim is a way of thinking and a memorial to the victims of Nazism and the Second World War , the 1951-52 by the sculptor Gerhard Marcks was created. Further names are Mannheimer Engel and Todesengel ; the vernacular calls the sculpture Die schepp 'Liesel (The crooked Liesel) .

prehistory

In August 1949, the Association of Those Persecuted by the Nazi Regime (VVN) applied for a plaque to be installed on Georg-Lechleiter-Platz commemorating the resistance fighter Lechleiter and those who were executed with him. In the course of the debate about the application, the group of victims of National Socialism mentioned on the memorial plaque was expanded to include all those who were persecuted for political, religious or racial reasons, were imprisoned in concentration camps , were deported from Mannheim and died elsewhere. This was approved by the VVN.

In August 1950, the Social Democratic Lord Mayor Hermann Heimerich wanted the victims of the World War to be included; he also questioned the suitability of the Lechleiter Square in Schwetzingerstadt . Heimerich strove for a uniform day of remembrance for the struggle against National Socialism and the civil and military victims of the war, conceived as an obligation to political renewal and peacefulness. At the end of 1950, the mayor proposed a memorial on Schillerplatz in the city center.

Heimerich's ideas found support from the CDU and SPD . The CDU municipal council and Nazi persecuted Florian Waldeck said that the party barriers should fall before the majesty of death. The KPD community councilor Anette Langendorf , whose husband had been executed as a member of the Lechleiter group and who was herself imprisoned in the concentration camp, took an opposing position . Langendorf advocated a memorial for the victims of the war, but pointed out that among the victims of the war “there were people who went to war with great vigor and enthusiasm for Hitler and wanted exactly the opposite of it for which resistance fighters voluntarily sacrificed their lives. ”In the Mannheim population, especially among the soldiers' associations, the idea of ​​a common memory sparked considerable resistance.

The local council provided the funds for a memorial to the victims from 1933 to 1945; a KPD application for a memorial plaque on Lechleiter-Platz was postponed and, when it was repeated in 1952, had no chance of realization.

sculpture

In early 1951, the city commissioned Gerhard Marcks to design the memorial. Marcks, one of the most important German sculptors at the time, had been defamed by the National Socialists in the exhibition " Degenerate Art ". After the liberation , Marcks created the memorial for the ride across the Styx at the Hamburg-Ohlsdorf cemetery , and his designs were supposed to be based on his sculpture Die Mourning in Köln.

Marcks chose the motif of an angel . He started out from ideas of ancient Persian mythology , according to which the angel is the son of man who flies over the earth on Judgment Day . The sculptor had already created two angel sculptures in 1937 and 1940. The latter, created under the impression of the death of his sister and bearing her facial features, was destroyed in the war. In the second half of the 1940s, Marcks had made several draft sketches of angel figures, in which he aimed for greater stylization and ornamentation .

The Mannheim angel has a strong relief-like structure except for the fully plastic head; he spreads his arms in front of his wings. The slope of the vertical axis together with the raised feet gives the impression of a floating angel. The angel's wings and robe are drawn with parallel lines. His left hand is bent back slightly, his right hand is slightly raised. The director of the Mannheimer Kunsthalle, Walter Passarge , saw “in the painfully restrained expression of the bitter face with the huge, 'captivating' eyes” an “excess of suffering”. Together with the inscription - "Es admon die Toten" and "1933–1945" - it is the passionate admonition to the survivors. According to the historian Christian Peters, the angel casts a spell over the viewer, but prevents quick identification. The combination of artistic standards, serious warnings and political messages make up the special quality of the monument. The inscription "included and did not exclude"; it made it clear that "1945 would not have been conceivable without 1933".

Marcks' draft initially sparked skepticism from Mayor Heimerich and Mannheim municipal councilors, which later gave way to approval and admiration. A local council said that with the angel a memorial would be created that would be a symbol for Mannheim for centuries and a serious warning for the population. In April 1952, the Mannheim Administrative Committee voted unanimously to buy the work of art. The three meter high angel figure was cast in the summer of 1952 by the Düsseldorf bronze caster Schmäke and placed on a two meter high sandstone plinth in square B 4 next to the Jesuit church at the beginning of November .

inauguration

Adenauer's speech at the inauguration ceremony

The Angel of Peace was consecrated on November 16, 1952, the day of national mourning. In front of around 5000 visitors, Lord Mayor Heimerich referred to the historical importance of Schillerplatz, the “most venerable square” in the city with the pre-war location of the Mannheim National Theater , the location of the premiere of Schiller's “Robber” , in which the poet contrasted the tyranny with the ideal of noble humanity have. Heimerich gave the numbers of fallen and missing soldiers stationed in Mannheim, civilians killed in air raids and Jews deported from Mannheim . He remembered resistance fighters like the Lechleiter group and remembered the refugees and displaced persons who had come to Mannheim after the end of the war.

Chancellor Konrad Adenauer then gave a short, general address. After the regional bishop Julius Bender and the apostolic protonotary Wilhelm Reinhard as the representative of the Freiburg archbishop, the regional rabbi Robert Raphael Geis spoke . According to the historian Hans-Joachim Hirsch, he introduced "the reality of the Holocaust into the celebration":

“It is a different matter whether you die in a fight from man to man, whether you die in an air raid or whether you find an end in the gas chambers of the East. And that also makes a difference whether you can imagine a grave somewhere or whether there is no longer a grave anywhere in the world where loving thoughts can make a pilgrimage. "

- State Rabbi Robert Raphael Geis

In the run-up to the event, there had been disputes between the two organizers of the ceremony, the city and the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge . The Volksbund insisted on a delayed rally in Mannheim's main cemetery . The city administration gave the impression that the association of commemorating the war graves and commemorating the political victims was “not pleasant” for the Volksbund. Mayor Heimerich stated in a letter to the Volksbund that he had long felt it was a grievance that the memorial days for the different groups of victims were "celebrated on different days and under different aspects", but the Volksbund could not change its mind.

Memorial site

In 1953 the memorial ceremony for the day of national mourning took place in a smaller form at the Angel of Peace . Before the day of national mourning in 1954, the soldiers 'and returnees' associations clearly stated that they did not want to be named at the celebration together with the Jews and other victims of National Socialism. When the city administration became aware that the soldiers' associations were preparing a big ceremony in the cemetery, they canceled the event at the Angel of Peace in order not to exacerbate the separation. The commemoration, initially organized solely by the Volksbund, took on an increasingly military character in the years that followed. From 1958 onwards, the city, the Volksbund and the working group of military associations, to which the mutual aid community of the members of the former Waffen-SS (HIAG) belonged, invited to the event at the cemetery. For the historian Christian Peters it is “more than just a nuisance” that former members of the Waffen-SS called on the Mannheim population and thus also survivors of the Holocaust to an event at which the victims of persecution and resistance were also remembered.

On May 7, 1955, on the tenth anniversary of the end of the war, an "hour of reflection" took place at the Friedensengel , to which Mayor Heimerich invited the Protestant theologian Helmut Gollwitzer . In front of several thousand people, Gollwitzer warned, "Remembrance is a duty, even and especially when it hurts". For Gollwitzer, the Angel of Peace “opposed our flight into oblivion, with which we want to undo what happened”.

Since 1954, a wreath has been laid informally on the Angel of Peace on the day of national mourning. In May 1983, the Friedensengel was moved to a less prominent location in the E 6 square next to the hospital church , as residential buildings were to be built on Schillerplatz. According to information from the 1990s, the Angel of Peace served as a starting point or destination for actions by the peace movement or anti-fascist organizations.

The far-reaching goals that Mayor Heimerich in particular pursued with the Angel of Peace were barely achieved: Sebastian Parzer stated in 2008 that Heimerich, as a person persecuted by the National Socialists, had a “different instinct”, which is evident, for example, in his dealings with the Jewish community in Mannheim . His concept of a central memorial service in the city center, which is connected to the Angel of Peace , could not be implemented. According to Hans-Joachim Hirsch, the Angel of Peace had an "important function in commemorating the horrors of the Nazi era" because of its prominent former location. The attempt to involve broad sections of the population associated with the monument “must be considered at least partially unsuccessful”. Not only the Jewish community must have felt duped by the general dedication of the angel, so Hirsch 2005. For Christian Peters, too much was expected with the hope of renewal, for which the angel should stand. Heimerich's concept was the attempt to unite contradictions that could not be unified in reality. The emergence of the soldiers 'and returnees' associations increased the difficulties in establishing a new tradition of commemorating the dead. "Talking about the victims, publicly addressing the special role of the persecuted, disrupted the integration process of millions of followers of National Socialism into the German democracy," said Peters in 2001.

As early as November 1954 , the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung saw the angel of peace “succumbing to the fate of spiritual isolation; Without the community that gathers around him every year, he stands in a vacuum and lacks the unifying function ”. Mayor Heimerich, shortly before the end of his term in office in the summer of 1955, considered the memorial to be not yet fully recognized by the population. He told Helmut Gollwitzer that the soldiers' associations “differentiate between heroes and victims and do not want their heroes to be named at the same time as the victims”.

Web links

Commons : Friedensengel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Günter Busch (ed.): Gerhard Marcks. The plastic work. Propylaeen Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1977, ISBN 3-549-06620-1 , p. 364.
  2. ↑ Christian Peters: "Fortunately we are an exception" Mannheim in the fifties. Thorbecke, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-7995-0905-4 , p. 65.
  3. ^ Encyclopedia of the FA Brockhaus publishing house (ed.): Der Brockhaus, Mannheim. 400 years of the city of squares - the lexicon. FA Brockhaus, Mannheim 2006, ISBN 978-3-7653-0181-0 , pp. 207 f.
  4. ↑ Peters, exception , p. 65 f.
  5. ↑ Peters, Exception , p. 66.
  6. ↑ a b Sebastian Parzer: Mannheim should not only rise up as a city of work ... The second term of office of Mannheim's Lord Mayor Hermann Heimerich (1949–1955). Regional culture, Ubstadt-Weiher 2008, ISBN 978-3-89735-545-3 , p. 189.
  7. ↑ Peters, exception , p. 66 f.
  8. ↑ Peters, Exception , p. 67.
  9. ↑ Parzer, Mannheim , p. 189 f.
  10. ↑ Walter Passarge : Gerhard Marcks and his Mannheimer Engel. In: Mannheimer Hefte, 1952 Issue 3, pp. 2–6, here p. 4.
  11. ↑ Busch, Gerhard Marcks, pp. 310, 364.
  12. ^ Passarge, Gerhard Marcks , p. 6.
  13. ↑ Peters, Exception , p. 69.
  14. ^ Peters, exception , p. 68 f;
    Parzer, Mannheim , p. 190.
  15. ^ Passarge, Gerhard Marcks , p. 4.
  16. ↑ Parzer, Mannheim , p. 191 f;
    Peters, exception , p. 72 f;
    Victims and fallen call for purification and understanding. In: Mannheimer Morgen , November 17, 1952, p. 6;
    All speeches at the ceremony are printed in: Mannheimer Hefte, 1952 Issue 3, pp. 11–16.
  17. ↑ Hans-Joachim Hirsch: “I called you by your name”. The memorial sculpture for the Jewish victims of National Socialism in Mannheim. (= Small writings of the Mannheim City Archives, No. 23 ) Publishing office v. Brandt, Mannheim 2005, ISBN 3-926260-65-3 , p. 72.
  18. ↑ Quoted in Hirsch, Namen , p. 72.
  19. ↑ Peters, exception , 70 f.
  20. ↑ Peters, Exception , 74-78.
  21. ↑ Peters, Exception , 78.
  22. ↑ Parzer, Mannheim , p. 192 f.
    Hirsch, Namen , p. 72 (quotations).
    Hirsch dates Gollwitzer's speech to the day of national mourning in 1955. A report on Gollwitzer's speech in: Work quieter, more silent and grateful. In: Mannheimer Morgen , May 9, 1955, p. 10.
  23. ↑ Peters, Exception , p. 75.
  24. ^ City of Mannheim: Angel of Peace (accessed on July 16, 2017)
    The Angel of Peace comes to E 6. In: Mannheimer Morgen , May 4, 1983, p. 13.
  25. ↑ Ulrike Puvogel, Martin Stankowski with the assistance of Ursula Graf: Memorials for the Victims of National Socialism. Volume 1, 2nd edition, Federal Agency for Civic Education, Bonn 1995, ISBN 3-89331-208-0 , p. 59 ( download )
  26. ↑ Parzer, Mannheim , p. 264.
  27. ↑ Hirsch, Namen , p. 72 f.
  28. ^ Peters, Exception , pp. 73 f., 77 (quotation, emphasis in the original).
  29. ↑ Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung, November 20, 1954, quoted in Peters, exception , p. 75.
  30. ↑ Heimerich's letter to Helmut Gollwitzer dated January 31, 1955, quoted in Parzer, Mannheim , p. 192.

Coordinates: 49 ° 29 ′ 23.9 "  N , 8 ° 27 ′ 43.7"  E