Imperial Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898) was one of the most publicly revered figures in Germany for a long time due to his role in the formation of a German nation state. Countless memorials, monuments and buildings (for example Bismarck Towers) were created in his honour. The nationally-minded German middle classes in particular honoured Bismarck as the "forger of German unity" and as a national heroic figure.
Just three years after Bismarck's death, 300 Bismarck associations existed in Germany, so that his person became virtually omnipresent in the public sphere as a result of the "monument mania" of the time. The Bismarck cult grew in the wake of nationalism right up to the First World War and reached its peak in 1915 in the middle of the war with the celebrations in honour of his 100th birthday. In Bremen, too, numerous celebrations were held on 27 March 1915 to mark the occasion, which were very lavish in view of the wartime situation.
Nevertheless, Bismarck's reputation was never undisputed. Even during Bismarck's lifetime, and even more so in later times, people took offence at his repressive policies, especially against social democrats and socialists, but also at his opposition to the Catholic Church in the so-called Kulturkampf. His Junker-like demeanour, his strictly conservative world view and his unconditional commitment to the Prussian monarchy also contributed to a divided memory of his role in German history.
Despite his initially dominant position in the politics of the German Empire, Bismarck was dismissed as Chancellor in 1890 by the young Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859-1941). Wilhelm ignored Bismarck's admonitions for predictability in foreign policy, but Bismarck himself achieved enormous posthumous popularity through his memoirs "Thoughts and Memories", published shortly after his death in 1898: at around 500,000 copies, they were among the best-selling biographies in Germany at the time. The third volume of the memoirs, which deals with his dismissal crisis in 1890 and Kaiser Wilhelm II's character flaws, was not published until 1919 and cemented Bismarck's reputation as a political thinker and "helmsman" by criticising the monarch.
In the German public, but also in historical research, the fact that Bismarck was also the person who laid the foundations for Germany's role as a colonial power by establishing "German protectorates" in Africa in the area of international relations under the sign of imperialism was long ignored. In the opinion of many historians, Bismarck acted more out of domestic political considerations and contrary to earlier commitments. He set aside his colonial scepticism towards German trade interests, particularly from the major German ports and trading cities of Hamburg and Bremen, and from then on, as Chancellor of the Reich, bore decisive responsibility for all colonial policy decisions, including military expeditions.
Today, this responsibility for Germany's role as a colonial power and for the actions of European powers, particularly in Africa, has become a further and very powerful point of criticism in addition to the already very ambivalent view of Bismarck.
Representatives of a traditional image of Bismarck always emphasised his merits (in addition to the founding of the nation state, also the establishment of the world's first modern social security system) and cited his initially reserved attitude towards the colonial question as a reason why anti-colonial accusations against his person were unjustified and out of place. Since the 1970s, however, and increasingly for some time, this has been questioned with great vigour, especially by historical research on the colonial era.
After all, at the Berlin Conference convened by Bismarck in 1884/1885 in Berlin (the so-called Congo Conference), the African continent was effectively divided up among the European powers with colonial ambitions at the time - with some dramatic detrimental consequences for the countries concerned to this day.
In addition, the German "protecting power" status for the later German colonies initiated by Bismarck in 1884 ultimately enabled colonialism and racism with consequences such as disenfranchisement, disempowerment, expropriation of indigenous peoples and even genocides committed against them.
Bremen had direct relations with Otto von Bismarck that went beyond imperial politics and later veneration, as Bismarck had already visited Bremen in 1853 as a Prussian envoy to the Bundestag. Bismarck's visit to Bremen and Bremerhaven on 15 June 1869 together with General Helmuth von Moltke in the entourage of the Prussian King Wilhelm I and other princes was particularly lavish. According to contemporary witnesses, Otto von Bismarck was greeted more enthusiastically by the people of Bremen than the Prussian king on the occasion of this visit - early evidence of Bismarck's particular popularity in the Hanseatic city.
In 1871, the year the German Empire was founded, the Bremen Senate appointed Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (together with Helmuth von Moltke) as an honorary citizen of Bremen, who was honoured many times in the following years and given generous gifts. On his 70th birthday in 1885, for example, he was honoured with a gift of 270,000 marks from donations. The Bremen Artists' Association organised celebrations and festivities to mark all of Bismarck's birth anniversaries and in 1890 Bremen contributed 20,000 marks towards the erection of a national monument to Bismarck in Berlin.
In addition, the Bremen Parliament, Bremen citizens and patriotic Bremen women sent elaborately designed greetings and congratulatory addresses to Otto von Bismarck on various occasions by the Bremen artist Arthur Figer.
Shortly after Bismarck's death in 1898, the Bremen businessman and patron Franz Ernst Schütte (1836-1911), co-owner of the Deutsch-Amerikanische Petroleum Gesellschaft (DAPG, later ESSO AG), campaigned for a Bismarck monument next to the old town hall. Together with the mayor Alfred Dominicus Pauli (1827-1915) and a convened commission, he very successfully encouraged the people of Bremen to donate money for the new monument. More than 200,000 marks (!) were to be collected by the time the monument was erected, from which it could be financed without public funds.
Numerous suggestions for the location of such a monument were considered - and rejected - from Altmannshöhe to Liebfrauenkirchhof. In 1898, a specially convened memorial commission, including experts from outside the city, came out in favour of a location on the Domshof, but without reaching agreement on the exact placement.
In 1904, the prominent Munich sculptor Adolf von Hildebrandt (1847-1921), who was appointed to the commission by Mayor Pauli, suggested the north-west corner of the cathedral during an inspection. This location was accepted, and a competition was deliberately avoided for the realisation, as Hildebrandt (1847-1921) received the commission for the monument. Art gallery director Gustav Pauli in particular had campaigned for Hildebrandt
Influenced by his stays in Italy and his study of antiquity, he designed an equestrian statue on an unusually high pedestal, inspired by statues of military leaders of Italian Renaissance city republics - such as the monument to Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice (1481 by Andrea del Verrochio) or the Gattamelata in Padua (1447 by Donatello), which in turn were dependent on the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome and were both erected in relation to church buildings.
In other words, the monument to the Free Hanseatic City was not modelled on monarchical image types, but on examples from city republics of the Italian Renaissance. However, completion took several years due to the workload of the sought-after artist. A plaster model was completed in 1908 and exhibited in the Kunsthalle.
The inauguration of the equestrian statue, which was celebrated with great fanfare, could only take place on 9 July 1910, twelve years after the first call for works.
In Prussia, depictions on horseback were actually reserved for princes or ruling heads. The fact that this Prussian regulation is said to have been ignored in Bremen with Pauli's rumoured remark "So much the better! We are not in Prussia" is often interpreted as an expression of an "independent Hanseatic position", but this cannot be substantiated. Hildebrandt's design undoubtedly catered to Bremen's preference for equestrian monuments: in previous years, equestrian statues had been created in Bremen for Kaiser Wilhelm I (1893), Kaiser Friedrich III (1905) and Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke (1909), the latter of whom, like Bismarck, was not a reigning prince.
However, Bremen erected the first Bismarck on horseback in Germany in 1910, which also has a unique selling point due to its prominent location directly next to the cathedral. Even later, this depiction of Bismarck remained unique for monuments. Only one other equestrian statue of Bismarck is known (monument on the Wöhrder Wiese in Nuremberg, 1915 by Joseph Floß and Theodor Fischer).
In Bremen, the three "fathers of the fatherland" Bismarck (Domshof), General Helmuth von Moltke (Unser Lieben Frauen) and Kaiser Wilhelm I (west side of the town hall) were thus honoured with three equestrian monuments in close proximity to each other. A nationally unique triad, to which further monuments were added: The Willehad Monument stood directly in front of the Bismarck Monument on the Grasmarkt, the Teichmann Fountain dominated the Domshof and the Town Hall was virtually surrounded by horsemen and heralds.
But what did people in Bremen associate with the Bismarck monument and what was his person honoured for in the monumental equestrian statue?
In addition to contemporary appeals for donations, speeches and reports, the monument itself still provides an answer to this today. In a stately gesture, the figure of the Imperial Chancellor holds out a scroll to the viewer instead of a commander's baton. This refers to the imperial constitution and the founding of the empire and thus to Bismarck's role in the founding of the Wilhelmine empire as a result of the Franco-Prussian War of 1871-1872. This is hardly surprising, as Bismarck was revered throughout the empire as the person who completed the founding of the empire. From Bremen's perspective, however, the gesture of the monument contains a special and important message: after all, Bremen's participation in the war against France had also secured its continued existence as a federal state within the empire - a moment in the history of Bremen's independence that is still constitutionally effective today.
Bismarck's role in German colonial policy played no part in the erection and design of the Bremen monument. This had developed considerably by the time the monument was erected in 1910, and Bremen's economy and shipping industry benefited considerably from this. Nevertheless, contemporary sources do not indicate that Bremen wanted to honour the colonial politician Bismarck with the monument - the national dimension overshadowed this aspect in the perception of the Wilhelmine era.
Nevertheless, Bismarck's role as the initiator of German colonial power was by no means forgotten in Bremen. On 24 April 1909 - one year before the inauguration of the monument - the Bremen branch of the German Colonial Society celebrated the 25th anniversary of Bismarck's dispatch, with which the future colony of "German South West Africa" came under the "protection" of the German Reich, as the "25th anniversary of German colonial policy".
During the late German Empire, the First World War, the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era, the Bismarck monument stood largely unchanged and unchallenged at the north-west corner of the cathedral until the beginning of the Second World War. During the Second World War, the bronze sculpture was temporarily removed and walled into a niche on the north side of the cathedral to protect it - a by no means self-evident protective measure, which was due to the recognised high artistic quality of the monument. Other Bremen monuments, however, such as that of Kaiser Wilhelm I, were melted down for war purposes.
In the young Federal Republic, however, the monument came under the scrutiny of a now much more critical public, in which voices were raised against its re-erection (according to a vote by the SPD parliamentary group in the city parliament). Nevertheless, it was re-erected in 1952 (at the decision of Mayor Wilhelm Kaisen).
When the debate about its re-installation had long died down, it was listed as a valuable monument in 1973, a decision that went largely unnoticed and unquestioned by the public. When material decay on the plinth reminded people of the need to preserve the monument (see below), the funding for the restoration was met with approval, but also questions and opposition.
In 2000, a campaign organised by Bremen's city marketing department on the occasion of an exhibition at the Kunsthalle caused outrage among readers: textile artist Wiebke Schmidt had costumed Bismarck and his horse as the "Blue Rider" with a blue knitted bib, cap, gauntlets and saddlecloth.
In the meantime, the monument had long since become the subject not only of controversy, but also of scholarship and research. As early as 1911, the year after it was erected, Gustav Pauli, the director of the Kunsthalle, had described the processes surrounding the commissioning and erection of the monument in an expert work. In 1980, Beate Mielsch gave it a modern and technically sound art-historical treatment in her book on Bremen monuments. In the anthology "Geschichte im öffentlichen Raum. Denkmäler in Bremen" (Drechsel, 2011), however, there was no contribution on the Bismarck monument.
Nationally, it was the subject of an excellent analysis by the art historian Wolfgang Brönner in the anthology "Das Rathaus im Kaiserreich" (1982). In the volume "Bismarck und der deutsche Nationalmythos" (1994), edited by the Bremen historian and Bismarck expert Lothar Machtan, Reinhard Schiffer devoted a detailed work to it, analysing it as a "special case" among the German Bismarck monuments.
The memorial soon found its way into younger online media:
For example, in 2021 in the digital LauschOrten with the very personal and critical reflections of the writer Artur Becker. It is to his credit that, as a writer from Bremen with a Polish background, he brings echoes into Bremen's reception history for the first time, asking how the memorial affects people who do not have an exclusively Bremen/German biographical background. In Becker's case, it evokes completely different associations to those previously known in Bremen: firstly, the "Catholic hunter" and then the fate of the "Poles under the Prussian yoke". Becker's perhaps polemical, but nevertheless direct and very personally thoughtful reflection opened up a new, important path of reception.
It is no coincidence that Becker's "Polish-backed" reflections coincide with the colonial-critical initiatives of recent years. These were first touched upon in 2016 when the memorial was integrated into a march from the Übersee-Museum to the Städtische Galerie as a site of Bremen's colonial history during a performance by Kenyan artist Syowia Kyambi.
With the digital publication "Colonial Heritage in Bremen's Urban Space", the topic then became a permanent part of Bremen's reception in 2022. It contains Toffa's reflections on the "Otto von Bismarck Monument" from the perspective of the African scholar Ohiniko Mawussé. In September 2022, Toffa also presented his analysis of Bismarck and his Bremen monument at a panel discussion on this topic at the Haus der Wissenschaft.
Despite the more frequent presence of the monument in colonial-historical contexts in recent times, it must be noted that the monument is perceived to be far behind the "Bremen Elephant", which has been rededicated as a post-colonial memorial.
For example, the most recent and most comprehensive anthology to date on the subject of Bremen, "Stadt der Kolonien" (Aselmeyer 2024), does not include an article on the Bismarck monument, which is, however, dealt with in the "Unbequeme Denkmäler" issue of the journal Denkmalpflege in Bremen under the heading "Dekolonialisierung" (Todenhöfer 2024).
So how present is the Bismarck monument in the city and in current debates?
Compared to its prominent location, it stands conspicuously inconspicuous in the public space. This may be due to its non-dominant position next to the cathedral and its unusually high plinth. The anti-colonial artistic intervention "at eye level" briefly dissolved this distance in July 2024. Using scaffolding, the artist Rainer Weber enabled interested parties to briefly get very close to the otherwise distant Chancellor and look him in the eye.
Otherwise, only those who want to see the memorial will notice it. This also applies to the reception of the memory of Bismarck: it can only be understood by looking closely.
Adolf von Hildebrandt chose Nummulite limestone from the Salzburg region for the facing of the monument plinth, which was realised according to a design by Carl Sattler (1877-1966). The ashlar design of the plinth created a reference to the façade structure of the cathedral, while the colour of the material formed a deliberate contrast to the sandstone tone of the cathedral.
Ten years after the inauguration of the monument, the limestone had already been severely damaged by the northern weather conditions, so a copper covering was added. After being walled up during the Second World War, the equestrian statue was placed back on the plinth in 1952, but the copper covering was omitted for cost reasons.
Impregnation and caulking of the plinth panelling in the 1970s and 1980s led to further loss of substance. Due to the visibly poor state of preservation, the Bremen State Office for the Preservation of Monuments commissioned detailed investigations in 2018. While the bronze statue showed no signs of damage, the condition of the plinth was worrying. The masonry core was soaked, the shell limestone joints were already soft and the iron clips between the facing bricks were heavily corroded and partially blown up.
The plinth and the stone from the period of construction have an important significance as a material deliberately chosen by the artist, which is why the structural strengthening and refurbishment was carried out in a way that was gentle on the building and appropriate to the material. Underneath a new copper cover on the plinth, additional stainless steel bands were installed around the perimeter and defects in the facing bricks and joints were filled with similar materials.
Even if the prominent position of the Bremen statue in terms of urban planning has attracted and will continue to attract a great deal of criticism, it must be noted that the monument itself has been distanced from the person of Otto von Bismarck: Changes to the substance and appearance of the monument are ruled out by the preservation order because the monument is to be authentically preserved as an important testimony to the times in order to offer future generations the opportunity to come to terms with it.
Text: Staatsarchiv Bremen, Landesamt für Denkmalpflege, Focke-Museum, Landeszentrale für politische Bildung
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