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The Bismarck Memorial, Germany is located in Tiergarten in Berlin. It is a prominent statue dedicated to Prince Otto von Bismarck, the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Prussia and the first Chancellor of the German Empire. This massive memorial portrays Bismarck in his traditional garb as the Chancellor. He is seen standing above the statues of Atlas, Siegfried, a woman and a sphinx. - Atlas shows Germany’s world power status at the end of the 19th century.
- Siegfried, the dragon-slayer of the Song of the Nibelungs, is shown to be forging a sword to portray Germany’s mighty industrial and martial power.
- A woman with a slain panther underfoot symbolizes the suppression of sedition imposed by the legal authorities of the state.
- A woman atop the sphinx – a creature with the body of a lion and head of a man – reads a document to emphasize statesmanship. The statue along with the famous Berlin victory column (that commemorated Prussian victory against Denmark in 1864) in the Bismarck Memorial was once located in the Reichstag Building (the Parliament of the German Empire) before they were moved by Adolph Hitler in his program to recast Berlin as the Welthauptstadt Germania or World Capital (the name by which Hitler referred to Berlin). The colossal statue has weathered a remarkable amount of shrapnel damage during WWII, but the Bismarck Memorial, Germany has survived largely unharmed till date. In fact, the monument has been saved from complete destruction as the old garden before the Reichstag was entirely obliterated in the war. The entire sculpture weighs 625000 kilos. It is considered by many to be the expression of Imperial Germany’s cult of Bismarck and an important development in the history of German memorial art, for it examines the political privileges of the citizens in the face of dramatic social change.
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