BERLIN AS MOVABLE FEAST
A very short story of three fountains, one column and my local bronze foundry
In life, like in offshore tax evasion or current world politics, nothing should be taken for granted. Not even architecture. For instance: what you pass on your daily way to work (or leisure) and seems to have been anchored at a given spot since the day one, might be, in fact, a beautiful transplant from an entirely different place. Something that for historical reasons is quite common in Berlin.
Take the fountain known as Wrangelbrunnen in Grimmstraße in Kreuzberg. Designed by Hugo Hagen, it had its first address in Großer Tiergarten (Big Tiergarten as opposed to the Kleiner Tiergarten directly next to it) - a magnificent park stretching westwards behind the Brandenburg Gate. After only 25 years of residence this nautical piece of art, unveiled on Kemperplatz in 1877 and named in honour of General Field Marshall Friedrich von Wrangel (Prussian hero of Napoleonic Wars), it had to move to make space for another water-spouting monument commemorating another icon.
Wrangelbrunnen was replaced by Rolandbrunnen - a gift to the city of Berlin from Kaiser Wilhelm II. As for Rolandbrunnen itself, it was meant to complete the southern end of the Siegesallee, a broad boulevard that once connected Kemperplatz with Königsplatz. The latter, renamed Platz der Republik after the last Kaiser’s demise is now a spreading green in front of the Reichstag building.
Interestingly, the central spot in Königsplatz belonged then to another famous "art transplant": Berliner Siegessäule with the gilded statue of Viktoria, better known as Goldelse, on its top. Until 1939 Goldelse looked upon Berlin from the place German MPs and the Chancellor can see right outside their windows today.
Goldelse, made not of gold but of gilded bronze, and Wrangelbrunnen have another thing in common: both of them, as well as the destroyed and dismantled Rolandbrunnen, had their bronze elements cast at the same foundry of Hermann Gladenbeck. At a place where the author of this text is penning these words: in Berlin-Friedrichshagen.
And if you happen to be in New York and in the vicinity of Central Park, the Conservatory Garden there holds another beautiful work straight from Berlin-Friedrichshagen and the Gladenbecks’ foundry: the Three Dancing Girls aka Untermyer Fountain, donated by the Untermyer family in 1947, are Berlinerinnen, too. Literally so: the artist, Walter Schott, hired young Berlin working-class women to pose as his models.
