Wissmann Monument (Hamburg)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Wissmann Monument in Dar es Salaam (1909)

The Wissmann monument is a statue with an eventful history created in honor of the colonial governor Hermann von Wissmann, who died in 1905, by the sculptor Adolf Kürle . It was created for Dar es Salaam in the former colony of German East Africa (now mainly Tanzania ). Later heavily controversial politically, it is now a museum in Hamburg .

presentation

The figure ensemble comprises three bronze figures, which were arranged on a 2.20 meter high sandstone plinth. It was about 4.5 meters high.

The base was a work from the workshop of the court stone mason L. Niggl from Breslau , for which the material was obtained from the company's own quarries near Albendorf in Silesia .

The 2.6 meter high statue of Wissmann in bronze was placed on the stone pedestal : in the upright pose of a conqueror, in uniform and with a pith helmet , supported on a lowered sword, looking into the distance. At the foot of the pedestal and at the foot of the Wissmann sculpture, looking up at it, stood the 1.7 meter high figure of an Askari in the typical uniform with a banded cap. She held a lowered imperial flag over the third figure, a slain lion. On the front of the base was a plaque with the life data of Wissmann, on the back there was an inscription in German that praised Wissmann's deeds and qualities. On the left side was a text in Arabic and on the right an address in Swahili in Latin letters : "Our Lord of old, he calmed the coast and pointed us on the right path."

Wissmann's colonial power over humans and animals is expressed in the assistant figures of the askari and the lion, in their structure and size. The pose and the gaze of the askari make clear the position of the servant towards the master. The lowered imperial flag, however, indicates a funeral rite, the flag spread over the coffin, military honors. Wissmann was called the Lion of Africa by his admirers . The present-day racist and disconcerting depiction was described at the beginning of the 21st century in the Africa-Hamburg project by the artist and urban space researcher HMJokinen as follows: “In mythical, Wilhelmine-pathetic imagery, a strong hierarchy between 'black' and 'white' is established here . The construction of 'being white ' finds its [sic] expression here in a symbolic, exaggerated and condensed form. "

history

Inauguration in Dar es Salaam (April 3, 1909)
Wissmannplatz in Dar es Salaam with the monument

The memorial was planned and erected on the initiative of the German Colonial Society . Initially, a boulder with a relief medallion was planned.

East Africa

However, as there were plenty of donations, the concept was expanded and a statue was created. After production in Germany, it including the base was transported by ship to German East Africa and set up on the place named after Wissmann in Dar es Salaam. The inauguration took place on April 3, 1909 in Dar es Salaam in front of the "colonial community", veterans of the Wissmann troops, Askaris and Arab dignitaries from German East Africa and Zanzibar were present . The governor Albrecht von Rechenberg held the inauguration speech.

Interwar period

After the First World War and the loss of the German colonies, the new British mandate seized the monument in Dar es Salaam, dismantled it (without the base) and brought it to London . There it was initially misused as a billboard, then exhibited as a war trophy in the Imperial War Museum . The Foreign Office and the central colonial administration of the Reich Ministry for Reconstruction succeeded in negotiating the return to Germany with the English and French governments in 1921.

Hamburg was chosen as the new location in order to emphasize the special importance that the city had “in the relations between the German motherland and the former colonies, and [in view of] the fact that Hamburg, the largest German Aus and Port of entry that concentrated interests for overseas countries. ” In November 1922 it was set up with a new plinth in the garden next to the dome of the Hamburg University , which was founded in 1919 and which previously housed the former Hamburg Colonial Institute. Even the inauguration celebrations were politically controversial, the then non-party Hamburg mayor Arnold Diestel stayed away from the ceremony, as did high-ranking representatives from the Reich. The colonial institutes determined the scene with "colonial revisionist speeches and symbols" and called the monument "the general colonial monument in Germany, which is intended to keep the memory of what was lost alive and to remind people of the striving to regain the overseas colonial territory."

During the National Socialist era , the monument was stylized as the most important colonial consecration site in Germany. Wissmann was considered to be "the great mercenary and soldier leader of the colonial times of the Germans fighting in Africa" . At the numerous national colonial celebrations it was a symbol of the humiliation caused by the colonial loss and the "colonial guilt lie". During the Second World War , the figure of Wissmann fell from its pedestal on April 14, 1945 in an air raid .

Monument collapse

In 1949 the monument was erected again. In 1961 there were first protests against the monument when students asked the university management to remove the "compromising props of Wilhelmine colonialism" . Both the artistic inferiority and the dubious effect on African fellow students were denounced. After six years of protests, the Wissmann figure was torn from its pedestal for the first time in 1967, but then placed again. After students pulled the bronze down again in a public campaign in 1968, the city of Hamburg decided not to re-erect it and stored the monument in the cellar of the Bergedorf observatory . Parts of the monument, such as the sword on which Wissmann relied, have been lost. A monument to Hans Dominik , with a similar fate, which originally stood in Kribi , was dismantled by the new French colonial power after the First World War and later reached Germany, is also stored in the observatory.

Musealization versus storage

The stored exhibit has been shown publicly several times since 1968:

  • In 1987, an exhibition at Kampnagel under the title Männnersache - Bilder, Welten, Objects referred to the memorial as a satirical symbol of colonial adventure romance . The Wissmann figure was lying on its back on the floor, the Askari figure was staring at the ceiling.
  • In 2004/2005, the Africa-Hamburg project set up the ensemble of figures to stimulate discussion over a period of fourteen months at the Hamburg Landungsbrücken . At the same time, the initiators switched to an open website where contributions to the discussion could be entered. This was accompanied by events, art performances and school activities. During this exhibition period, it was damaged again by smears of paint.
  • Between November 2005 and October 2016 the memorial was again stored in the basement of the Bergedorf observatory .
  • From October 2016 to May 2017, the toppled and damaged Wissmann monument was part of the German Colonialism exhibition in the German Historical Museum for seven months .

We are talking about a permanent presentation in the controversial Tanzania Park in Hamburg-Jenfeld , which is reminiscent of Hamburg's colonial policy.

literature

  • Winfried Speitkamp: The cult of the dead around the colonial heroes of the German Empire. In: zeitblicke. 3 (2004), No. 1 (PDF; 99 kB), accessed on August 18, 2010.
  • Gordon Uhlmann: The Hamburg Wissmann Monument: From the colonial sanctuary to the post-colonial debate memorial . In: Ulrich van der Heyden and Joachim Zeller (eds.): Colonialism in this country. A search for clues in Germany. Erfurt 2007, pp. 281–285.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ C. Gäbert, A. Steuer, Karl Weiss: The usable rock deposits in Germany . Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft , Berlin, 1915, pp. 130–131.
  2. ↑ a b c d Speitkamp.
  3. ↑ a b c memorial. Page 4. In: afrika-hamburg.de. Project Africa-Hamburg, accessed on November 18, 2017 .
  4. ^ Rochus Schmidt: How to honor our great African . In: Becker / Perbandt / Richelmann / Schmidt / Steuber: Hermann von Wissmann. Germany's largest African . Berlin 1911, p. 574 ff.
  5. ↑ Committee for the restoration of monuments from the colonies in a letter to the Hamburg Senate of April 19, 1922, quoted from Manuel Sarrazin: Hamburg's role in German colonial policy ( Memento of December 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 986 kB) , accessed August 18, 2010.
  6. ↑ Hamburger Nachrichten of November 4, 1922, quoted from: Manuel Sarrazin: Hamburg's role in German colonial policy .
  7. ↑ From the Hamburg Colonial Institute to the University. Presentation by Rainer Nicolaysen on June 15, 2016. In: lecture2go.uni-hamburg.de. University of Hamburg , accessed on November 18, 2017 (video).
  8. ↑ Winfried Speitkamp : Colonial monuments . In: Jürgen Zimmerer (Ed.): No place in the sun. Places of remembrance of German colonial history . Frankfurt 2013. ISBN 978-3-593-39811-2 , pp. 409-423 (418).
  9. ↑ Jokinen: Colonial Monuments and Participatory Sculpture - Cultures of Remembrance, Myths, Antitheses, Inversions. In: Archiv The thing - Platform for Art and Criticism , accessed on August 18, 2010.
  10. ↑ Marcel Jossifov: The dream of the renovation of the German empire , in: Die Welt / N24 , article from October 15, 2016, accessed on March 12, 2017.
  11. ↑ [1] , dhm.de, German colonialism. Fragments of its past and present