Steubenplatz (Potsdam)
The Steuben Place is a triangular square in Potsdam , after the Prussian - American General Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben is named. The square is bounded by Schloßstraße in the north, the city palace in the east, the Wrestler Colonnade and the Marstall in the south and Friedrich-Ebert-Straße in the west. The Steuben Monument stood in the middle of the square until 1945.
history
The square was called Fiakerplatz ( le fiacre , French rental coach ) until 1911 because the carriages for inner-city traffic to and from the city palace and the numerous inns in the area were waiting there. Frederick the Great had the square paved and a drainage channel created for the remains of the waiting horses. Friedrich Wilhelm III. remove the pavement around 1820 and create a decorative square with trees. Popularly it was given the name Kommandanturgarten because of the adjacent commandant's office in the former Plögerchen inn .
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As a token of German-American friendship, the United States Congress presented the German Reich in 1911 with a second cast of the bronze statue of Baron Steuben , created by Albert Jaegers , which played a key role in the reorganization of the Continental Army and in the victory at the Battle of Yorktown in the American War of Independence in 1781 . On the occasion of the unveiling of the Steuben monument in 1911, the Fiakerplatz was renamed Steubenplatz .
The first cast of the bronze statue is in Lafayette Park near the White House in Washington. In return, the German Empire gave the United States a bronze statue of Frederick the Great, created by Joseph Uphues , which now adorns the parade ground of the United States Army War College in Carlisle , Pennsylvania. Like the Friedrich monument on the Potsdamer Plantation , it is a bronze copy of the marble original on Berlin's Siegesallee .
The Potsdamer Steubendenkmal bore the inscription:
- DEDICATED TO THE GERMAN EMPEROR AND THE GERMAN PEOPLE BY THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AS A SIGN OF UNINTERRUPTED FRIENDSHIP. MCMXI
In 1945 the statue was damaged, overturned from the base and initially put into storage. In 1950 the SED magistrate had the bronze melted down together with the statues of the Prussian kings (Frederick the Great on the plantation , the soldier king in the pleasure garden , Frederick William III on Wilhelmplatz ). When Potsdam was transformed into a socialist city, Steubenplatz was lost in a large intersection.
On the occasion of the 750th anniversary of Berlin in 1987, a new cast of the Washington Steuben monument was set up in front of the US headquarters in Zehlendorf . In 1994, after Germany was reunified , another bronze cast of this was made and set up on the 200th anniversary of the general's death near his old location on Schloßstraße with the participation of representatives of the US government .
After the completion of the new buildings on Steubenplatz, including the Plögerchen Gasthof and the hotel “Zum Einsiedler” , the monument should return to its old location in the middle of the square.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Friedrich Nicolai : Description of the royal residence cities Berlin and Potsdam and all the peculiarities located there . Berlin 1779, p. 872, footnote **
- ↑ http://www.goethe.de/ins/us/was/pro/vtour/dc2/future/steuben/en_tmb3.htm
- ^ Rainer Lamprecht: Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben . Hub Verlag, Potsdam 2012, p. 55
- ↑ potsdamermitte.de
Coordinates: 52 ° 23 ′ 43.5 " N , 13 ° 3 ′ 34.5" E