Thursday, March 01, 2007

Vacation Pictures - Monuments and Such

Like a lot of cities with a long history, Munich and other places have a lot of monuments commemorating famous people or events.
This is the fellow who started it all - Otto I, the first duke of Bavaria. The building behind him used to be a palace, and it now houses the Bavarian State Chancellery. The statue faces the monument Bavaria had erected to their war dead (pictures of which are on this post) and the Hofgarten, or Court Garden (which you'll see in a subsequent post).
The upper picture is the Feldherrnhalle, or General's Hall, erected by King Ludwig I. The statues are of two commanders, one from the Thirty Years' War and the other from the wars against Napoleon, flanking a statue of Bavaria. The lower picture is myself standing in front of the statue of Bavaria.

A nice obelisk, ordered erected by King Ludwig I in honor of the 30,000 Bavarians who died in Napoleon's Russian campaign.

This picture and the one directly below is the State War Memorial. The inscription on the stone reads "To Our Fallen," and is interesting because in order to see the statue within you have to descend into a crypt beneath the stone. Someone had placed a bouquet of paper flowers at the feet of the statue.
This memorial's from Friedrichshafen and is in honor of the dawn of airship travel. It was restored about 1950 or so.

At Thereseienwiese, the field where the Oktoberfest is held each year, a 100-foot statue of Bavaria towers from a hill overlooking the field. Behind it is a hall of fame enshrining famous people. You can climb up inside the statue and look out over the field for 2 Euro, but my feet were killing me by this point.
Near one of the entrances to the German Museum stands a statue to the Iron Chancellor, Prince Otto von Bismarck. The statue displays the public persona and the myth that grew up around him, but I've read that he used to write poetry in his spare time. Can't be all bad.
During my travelogue blogs from last October, I related the story of one Kurt Eisner. Eisner overthrew the Wittelsbach monarchy in November 1918 and became the Minister-President of the People's Republic of Bavaria. The plaque and outline below are on a sidewalk in downtown Munich, and commemorate the exact spot where, on February 21, 1919, Eisner was murdered.


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