Waldersee monument

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The monument to Field Marshal Alfred von Waldersee on the edge of the Eilenriede

The Waldersee Memorial in Hanover is a colossal statue created by the sculptor and architect Bernhard Hoetger , which exaggerates Field Marshal Alfred von Waldersee . The statue forms the perspective conclusion of the Kleine Pfahlstrasse in the Hanover district of Oststadt .

history

Hoetger, an expressionist artist who was actually far removed from such a topic, created the design for the memorial as a commissioned work, without an invitation to tender or a competition having preceded it.

The idea of ​​having a Waldersee monument erected in Hanover went back to the city director Heinrich Tramm , who presented the proposal to the city council on June 17, 1910. Waldersee had dealt with Hanover several times, in 1866 as a young officer, later as commander of a Uhlan regiment and chief of the general staff of the 10th Army Corps, and finally as Inspector General of the 3rd Army Inspection. In addition, he died on March 5, 1904 in Hanover and was also buried in that city. The fact that Tramm could be sure of receiving the emperor's approval, which at that time had to be obtained before a monument was erected, was not due to these local references, but to the fact that Waldersee played a decisive role in 1900 had played in the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion . At that time, Wilhelm II demanded that Beijing be razed to the ground, and in his address to the troops on July 27, 1900, the well-known sentences “Pardon will not be given! Prisoners are not taken! Whoever falls into your hands will be for you ”etc. uttered. In July 1911, the city of Hanover approved 10,000 marks as the first contribution to the memorial to be erected, later the Saxon War Ministry and various army corps participated in the financing, so that a sum of 56,000 marks was raised by December 14, 1912 and just under a year later 61,000 marks were available.

A committee for the erection of the monument under Tramm's chairmanship had dealt with the question of the place of installation since 1911. At the meeting of the Monument Committee on December 4, 1913, the unanimous decision was made to locate the building in Hohenzollernstrasse opposite the Walderseesche Haus .

At this meeting, in order to accelerate the process - he would like to see the memorial completed by spring 1914 - Tramm proposed to forego an invitation to tender etc. and to award the contract directly, and also immediately named the name of the artist he had in mind : Professor Hoetger is one of the most brilliant sculptors currently alive, and one can expect an original and worthy treatment of the subject from him. This suggestion was not contradicted either and Tramm was then able to enter into negotiations with Hoetger, who was initially supposed to present sketches. Hoetger decided on a representation of Waldersee, which should go beyond a mere portrait and show the general as a representative of his time. The memorial was to be made of shell limestone and surrounded by a fence made of lances, as he himself explained when presenting the sketches. The plans were approved and Hoetger, who was not called up for military service, chiseled the seven individual blocks from June 1914 to March 1915 from which the figure was to be composed. A ceremony on the occasion of the unveiling of the monument should be omitted in view of the seriousness of the situation, but one did not want to wait until the end of the war to erect the monument . Therefore, the finished memorial was handed over on March 21, 1915 without any celebrations.

description

Hoetger renounced abstraction and, as Dietrich Schubert wrote, stayed with his 4.50 meter high monument "in the mimetic area" and created an "image with symbolic features". He depicted Count Waldersee in a uniform coat standing in front of a narrow wall. In his right hand the Walderseefigur holds a general's staff over a helmet, in the left a shield that tapers downwards. The impression that the figure is standing in a kind of niche is created by the eagle draped over the Count's head like a canopy . The figure does not stand directly on the actual base of the monument, but on a compact kite .

The sign reads the motto “With God for Emperor and Empire”, the base block bears the inscription “General Field Marshal Graf von Waldsee” on the front and the text “The honorary citizen of the city of Hanover - the glorious champion for the greatness of Germany ” on the back Dedicated in faithful memory by his friends 1914–1915 ”.

Hoetger went back to the past: the letters of all inscriptions are stylized like a rune , wall figures between canopy and console were in vogue at the time of high Gothic and the figure of Roland , which the Waldersee memorial is reminiscent of, is in Thuringia , Saxony , from the 13th century and northern Germany verifiable. The medieval Roland figures, however, usually have a sword attached as a legal symbol, not the pointed shield of the Waldersee monument.

Hoetger was not the only artist who became aware of the medieval Roland depictions again at the beginning of the 20th century: Bruno Taut, for example, called the Roland of Brandenburg a “real expressionist work of art”, and the Roland type is also represented by Hugo Lederer's Hamburg Bismarck monument , the from about the same time as the Waldersee monument.

Position in Hoetger's complete works

According to Schubert, the Waldersee memorial and the first draft of the Niedersachsenstein are among the ideological works that include the "timeless" nude figures from Hoetger's creative phase before the First World War and the works that were created after he became a pacifist in 1918/19. stand out clearly. They have "official character" and are characterized by "participation in the official ideology of the Hohenzollern ". He closes his essay on the memorial with the following sentences: “So the [...] memorial [...] proves to be a concretization of the ideological wishes of a certain social client group [...] and, on the other hand, an attempt by an expressionist artist, to make this ideological sense vividly effective in a synthesis of medieval formal traditions and proto-expressionist design methods without going back artistically to historicism . "

reception

Opposition to the monument arose early on. In the Deutsche Volkszeitung of January 25, 1916, an anonymous author described the memorial as a “Mummenschanz” and “inartistic horror”. He criticized the portrayal of a field marshal as Roland, since the Roland column was a symbol of its own jurisdiction and had nothing to do with Waldersee's military function. In the spring of 1935, a former citizen of Hanover, CW Kühns, requested that the monument be changed. The dragon, he argued, could offend the Chinese nation. But Hanover's Lord Mayor Arthur Quantity opposed this request and declared that carving away the dragon would mean disguising the monument. The only human change that the monument has undergone over the years was a deepening of the name inscriptions on the front.

Hans Werner Dannowski , who inspected the memorial after a visit to the neighboring Villa Seligmann , found Hoetger's crusader-like Waldersee "a sculpture of error". Otherwise he values ​​Hoetger very much as an artist, but the “sheer size and monumentality” is not enough to save the world, it is rather a matter of “a sense of proportion and attentive listening and looking”.

See also

literature

  • Dietrich Schubert : Hoetgers Waldersee Memorial from 1915 in Hanover , in: Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch , 43 (1982), pp. 231–246; as a PDF document from the Heidelberg University library

Web links

Commons : Walderseedenkmal (Hannover)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Hans Werner Dannowski: Hanover - far from near: In city districts on the move , Schlütersche GmbH & Co. KG publishing house and printing house, 2002, ISBN 978-3877066539 , p. 29; limited preview in Google Book search
  2. ^ Helmut Zimmermann : Kleine Pfahlstrasse , in which: The street names of the state capital Hanover . Verlag Hahnsche Buchhandlung, Hannover 1992, ISBN 3-7752-6120-6 , p. 143
  3. ↑ See Dietrich Schubert: Hoetgers Waldersee-Denkmal von 1915 in Hannover , in: Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch , 43 (1982), p. 231–246, here p. 234 digitized .
  4. ^ Dietrich Schubert: Hoetgers Waldersee monument from 1915 in Hanover , in: Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch , 43 (1982), pp. 231–246, here pp. 234–236 digitized .
  5. ^ Dietrich Schubert: Hoetgers Waldersee monument from 1915 in Hanover , in: Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch , 43 (1982), pp. 231–246, here p. 238 digitized .
  6. ↑ Quoted from: Dietrich Schubert: Hoetgers Waldersee-Denkmal von 1915 in Hannover , in: Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch , 43 (1982), p. 231–246, here p. 240 digitized .
  7. ^ Dietrich Schubert: Hoetgers Waldersee monument from 1915 in Hanover , in: Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch , 43 (1982), pp. 231–246, here pp. 238–240 digitized
  8. ↑ Dietrich Schubert: Hoetgers Waldersee monument from 1915 in Hanover , in: Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch , 43 (1982), pp. 231–246, here p. 242 digitized .
  9. ^ Dietrich Schubert: Hoetgers Waldersee monument from 1915 in Hanover , in: Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch , 43 (1982), pp. 231–246, here p. 244 digitized .
  10. ^ Walderseedenkmal und Heimatpflege , in: Deutsche Volkszeitung , January 25, 1916, quoted from: Dietrich Schubert: Hoetgers Waldersee-Denkmal von 1915 in Hannover , in: Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch , 43 (1982), pp. 231–246, here P. 241 digital copy .
  11. ^ Dietrich Schubert: Hoetgers Waldersee monument from 1915 in Hanover , in: Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch , 43 (1982), pp. 231–246, here p. 241 digitized .

Coordinates: 52 ° 23 ′ 5.5 ″  N , 9 ° 45 ′ 18.9 ″  E