Dying Youth (Kubica)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Monument ensemble: remembering for the future - Lidice memorial by Jürgen Waller , 1989 (left); Dying youth by Herbert Kubica , originally 1936 (right)

The dying boy is a 1936 by Herbert Kubica created bronze - statue , originally in the time NS in the center of Bremen's Old Town as a heroic monument to the fight the Bremer Soviet Republic fallen members of the volunteer corps Freikorps Caspari and the Division Gerstenberg was set up.

Today it stands in a slightly different version in the Bremen ramparts as part of a memorial ensemble designed by Jürgen Waller in 1989 and with an extension of ruin-like elements - the Lidice memorial  - to the destruction of the Czech village Lidice and the murder of its residents during the Second World War remembered in June 1942 by German Wehrmacht soldiers . The young man's statue has been a listed building since 1973.

The dying youth

Historical background

The Bremen Council Republic, proclaimed in autumn 1918 after the military collapse of the German Empire at the end of the First World War, was bloodily suppressed in February 1919 by the Gerstenberg Division, which was sent by the Reich government and reinforced by the Caspari Freikorps . 24 soldiers and 28 armed workers were killed in the fighting.

History of origin

Since 1933, veterans of the Gerstenberger and Freikorps have increasingly demanded that the Bremen Senate erect a memorial for their fallen soldiers . However, he had his own memorial plans, which resulted in the memorial erected in 1935 for the people of Bremen who died in the First World War . Therefore, in January 1934, he completely abandoned his half-hearted support for the Freikorp project. After some back and forth about the choice of location and the course of the competition, the private initiators chose a position in front of the choir of the Liebfrauenkirche on Schoppensteel (path between town hall and church) and a design by the Bremen sculptor Herbert Kubica , whom the Bremen architect Eberhard Gildemeister had advised.

Dying youth , in the current version that has existed since 1955 in the ramparts

The young man's statue

The statue of the “dying youth”, as Kubica himself called it, was erected in 1936 and had the inscription on the base block: “In the fight for Bremen's freedom on February 4, 1919, Caspari and the Gerstenberg division fell in the ranks of the Freikorps ...” (it was followed by Names).

The clearly larger than life figure held up a laurel branch in his left hand as a sign of victory. The labile state, the sharp turn of the head, down-setting arm and half-closed eyes are the only little clear evidence of the death of the fighter, whose design is otherwise the very ideal-typical canon of classical Greek sculpture , such as the Diadumenos of Polyklet oriented . The posture and the motif of the wound are also reminiscent of The Bronze Age by Auguste Rodin , a major work of modern sculpture. The contemporary criticism also criticized the monument as too ideal and not too heroic.

The post-war fate of the monument

After the sculpture survived the Second World War in an underground bunker, it was temporarily exhibited in the Bremer Kunsthalle and re-erected in 1955 in the Bremer Wallanlagen as a purely aesthetic art object, but without a victory sign and on a new base without base inscription.

The Lidice memorial

A re-politicization of Kubica's statue of a youth in the Bremen Wallanlagen, albeit with a reevaluating sign, happened in 1989 - just the year when a comparable process led to the reinterpretation of the Bremen colonial monument into an anti-colonial monument - when Jürgen Waller , Rector of the Bremen University of the Arts , added a "counter-monument" related to the youth figure.

Charred beams and ruinous remains of brickwork symbolize the burned down Lidice , where the 172 men of the Czech village were murdered by German police and Wehrmacht soldiers on June 9, 1942 in an act of revenge for the attack on Heydrich . "Remembering for the future - Lidice memorial" was the programmatic name Waller gave the double memorial, which reinterprets a (at least in terms of its original function) pre-fascist sculpture through new contextualization as a memorial against war crimes.

literature

  • The governing mayor (ed.): The key. Bremen contributions to German culture and economy. Hauschildt, Bremen, 2nd year 1937, issue 6, DNB 013085212 , p. 37.
  • Beate Mielsch: monuments, free sculptures, fountains. 1800–1945 (=  Bremen volumes on cultural policy , volume 3). Schmalfeldt, Bremen 1980, ISBN 3-921749-16-6 , pp. 43, 58, figs. 86–87.
  • Frank Hethey: "So far there is no memorial commemorating yours". The project of a Bremen Freikorps monument - the way to the statue of Herbert Kubica. ( online at user.uni-bremen.de; only digitally available, but the most thorough representation from around 2001, based on many sources).
  • Heike Kammerer-Grothaus: Art and works of art in the ramparts. In: Stadtgrün Bremen (ed.): Between lust and walk. 200 years of Bremer Wallanlagen. Edition Temmen, Bremen 2002, ISBN 3-86108-670-0 , pp. 210-235, here: 222-224.
  • Wiltrud Ulrike Drechsel (ed.): History in public space. Monuments in Bremen between 1435 and 2001. Donat, Bremen 2011, ISBN 978-3-938275-84-9 , p. 29 ff.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On this juxtaposition in detail Hethey, chap. 2 with note 27–71.
  2. ↑ Hethey, chap. 3
  3. ↑ See Fig. 87 in Mielsch.
  4. ↑ May 22, 1936 list; Inauguration on October 11, 1936.
  5. ↑ Kammerer-Grothaus, p. 222.
  6. ↑ Hathey, n. 145th
  7. ↑ Conceptions of monuments and “local monuments” have been dealt with by Peter Springer in: Ekkehard Mau and Gisela Schmirber (eds. :): Sculpture and public space today , pp. 92-102.

Coordinates: 53 ° 4 ′ 29.2 "  N , 8 ° 48 ′ 48.3"  E