Memento maris (strider)

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Memento maris (1980)

Memento maris is a large sculpture by Gerhart Schreiter in Bremerhaven .

history

In the 1960s, the Elbinger Platz traffic junction was built in Geestemünde . The community of our beautiful Bremerhaven initiated a limited competition for the creation of a sculpture that should symbolize Bremerhaven's orientation towards the sea. The designs by Schreiter and Gerhard Olbrich made it to the final round . Schreiter's draft - "the thing" - sparked a heated argument with letters to the editor in the Nordsee-Zeitung .

location

Inaugurated on July 26, 1968, the 15 m high sculpture made of concrete and steel stands in a (then still open) green area on the east side of Elbinger Platz. At this point the branch canal to the Holzhafen Geestemünde ran parallel to Bismarckstrasse, which was filled in in 1937/38 .

layout

“A slender column grows out of a plinth made of joined and mutually penetrating cuboids, continuing the motif vertically and stretched, as it were, which expands into a voluminous head with cross-shaped projections pointing in the four cardinal directions. The latter are partly bulbous, partly disc-shaped with bulley-shaped openings and, when viewed in a generously abstract way, are reminiscent of ship details such as the bow, stern or cross-section.

The meaningful name of the work can also be read here:

MEMENTO MARIS

Remember the sea, i.e. the ships, the ports and shipyards and especially the people who work there.

As a cheerful coronation and playful counterpoint to the heavy concrete-gray molding compound, three mast-like, fine-line poles rise up, which swing slightly in the wind and from which hang weakly curved, metallic rectangles with zigzag, diamond and wave ornamentation. They make you think of pennants, sails or even radar antennas.

From the conception, initially clear and rather strictly architectural, the composition surprises with carefully used intuitive ideas. In the changing play of light and shadow, the round and the angular, the small and the massive, the right and the oblique, the dynamic and the static, the bulging and the perforated, the calculated and the spontaneous stand in tense polarity to one another. There is no doubt that the monument, with its classic, modern design language, will be able to claim a top position among contemporary German large-scale sculptures. "

- Jürgen Schmidt (1980)

The “sails” have been loosened (by wind) and have not yet been replaced despite the distortion of meaning.

  • inscription

  • View from the west

  • View from the southeast

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Jürgen Schmidt: Large sculpture "Memento maris" (Elbinger Platz). In: Lars U. Scholl (Hrsg.): Bremerhaven - a port history guide. Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum / Ditzen, Bremerhaven 1980, pp. 109–111.

Coordinates: 53 ° 32 '5 "  N , 8 ° 35' 23"  E