Siegesallee


The Siegesallee was a broad boulevard in Berlin, Germany. In 1895, Kaiser Wilhelm II ordered and financed the construction and expansion of an existing alley with a variety of marble statues, which was finalized in 1901.
About 750 m in length, it ran northwards through the Tiergarten park from Kemperplatz, to the former site of the Victory Column at the Königsplatz, close to the Reichstag. Along its length the Siegesallee cut across the Charlottenburger Chausee.
The marble monuments and the neobaroque ensemble were ridiculed even by its contemporaries. Berlin folkore dubbed the Kaiser Denkmalwilly for his excessive historicism. Moves to have the statues demolished were thwarted after the end of the monarchy in 1919.
The Siegessäule and the figures were moved by the Nazi government to the Großer Stern in 1939 to allow for larger military parades and conventions.
Some of the monuments were lost in the aftermath of the Second World War. The allied forces had the alley erased and the area replanted. The Soviet War Memorial was erected there, deliberately crossing the former Victor Avenue of its foes in a symbolic act immediately after the end of the war.
Currently the remaining figures are being repaired and exhibited in Spandau. They will be part of the exhibition Enthüllt – Berlin und seine Denkmäler. The track itself was reconstructed as a footpath in 2006.

History

Contemporary reaction

It was on 27 January 1895, the 36th birthday of William II, German Emperor, that the Siegesallee took on a whole new meaning with the commissioning by the Emperor of almost 100 white marble statues. Intended as a personal gift to the city, supposedly to make it the envy of the world, the statues were created by 27 sculptors under the direction of Reinhold Begas over a period of five years, starting in 1896. Dedicated on 18 December 1901, they consisted firstly of 32 "main" statues, each about 2.75 m tall, of former Prussian royal figures of varying historical importance, in two rows of 16, evenly spaced along either side of the boulevard, while behind each one were two busts of associates or advisors mounted on a low semi-circular wall, making 96 sculptures in all.
The whole construction was widely derided by art critics, and regarded by many Berliners as grossly over-indulgent and a vulgar show of strength. It was dubbed the ″Puppenallee″, as well as the Avenue of the Puppets, Plaster Avenue, and other unsavoury titles. Even the Emperor's own wife Augusta Viktoria, had reportedly been unhappy about it and had tried to persuade him not to go ahead with it, but all to no avail. Just one woman has been depicted, Elisabeth of Bavaria praying on her knees before her husband. The lack of women was already noted by the contemporaries.
Some of the protests turned on the fact that Italian artisans in Berlin did the actual sculpting while artists of the Berliner Bildhauerschule just provided models in plaster or clay. Wilhelm's opening speech, the infamous Rinnsteinrede, portrayed Modernism and Impressionism as a descent of art into the gutter.
Karl Scheffler wrote a devastating criticism in 1907, comparing the Siegesallee to an overly patriotic out of tune amateur brassband concerto. The Siegesallee was still a popular place to stroll or relax, however.
The figures were used to teach the history of Brandenburg to pupils. A series of essays in a prestigious school, the Joachimsthalsches Gymnasium, reached the Kaiser. On behalf of Professor Otto Schroeder, the pupils had to interpret the contrapposto—the leg position of the marble leaders—and from that deduce their personalities. The Kaiser gave better marks than the teacher and provided some ironic notes. The whole affair was made public in 1960 by an Eastern German writer, Rudolf Herrnstadt under a pseudonym.

After the monarchy

In 1918 and 1919, among others, Hans Paasche asked to have the statues destroyed. The soldiers and workers council of Berlin decided to keep them. Kurt Tucholsky had written a poem, asking to keep the figures silent, as monuments of a great era.
The statues remained in place until 1938, when they got in the way of the grand plan by Adolf Hitler to transform Berlin into the Welthauptstadt Germania, to be realised by Albert Speer. The avenue was set to disappear under the new North-South Axis, the linchpin of the plan, and so on Speer's direction the entire construction was dismantled and rebuilt in another part of the Tiergarten, along a south-east to north-west running avenue called ″Großer Sternallee″ that led to the Großer Stern itself, the main intersection of roads in the centre of the Tiergarten, one of the other roads being the Charlottenburger Chausee. In its new location it was given a new name — ″Neue Siegesallee″. The Victory Column was moved also, to the middle of the Großer Stern, where it remains to this day.
, August 2009
Many of the statues were damaged in World War II, while a few were smashed completely. Generally though, the avenue survived, more or less, while all around was a scene of devastation. Most of the Tiergarten's 200,000 trees were shattered by bombs and artillery shells and finally cut down for fuel by desperate Berliners. In the 1948 movie The Berliner, Otto Normalverbraucher, played by Gert Fröbe, as a former German soldier returning to civilian life, gives an ironic salute to the figures.
However, the statues were seen by the Allied powers as a symbol of Imperial Germany, and in 1947 the British Occupation Forces dismantled the Siegesallee remains, these apparently being bound for the Teufelsberg, the largest of the eight huge rubble mountains around Berlin's perimeter.
State curator Hinnerk Schaper intervened, however, and buried most of the statues in the grounds of the nearby Schloss Bellevue, today the official residence of the Federal President of Germany, in the hope that one day, when Germany could be more accepting of monuments to its past, they might resurface. In 1979 they were duly rediscovered and disinterred, and many of the survivors were relocated in Berlin's first sewage pumping station, which had since its closure in 1972 been restored and installed a museum called the Lapidarium, at Hallesches Ufer, along the north bank of the Landwehrkanal, near the site of the former Anhalter Bahnhof. In October 2006 however the museum closed. The building was put up for sale with a future gastronomic function envisaged for it, and the remaining 26 Siegesallee statues and 40 sidebusts were moved in May 2009 to the Spandau Citadel.

Sculptors who worked on the project