Behind the modern façade of the Oldenburg City Museum (Stadtmuseum), three nineteenth-century villas contain art works and cultural history exhibits from the 17th to the 20th centuries. Two of these villas belonged to the wealthy art collector Theodor Francksen (1875-1914), who bequeathed the houses and his extensive art collection to Read More …
A claque, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries, was a group of people who were paid to applaud certain singers or actors, and to boo others. This group of four statues, called The Claque, was created in 1987 by Guido Messer. The statues are now located by the Enz Read More …
In the night of July 30, 1943, a devastating fire-bomb attack destroyed large parts of Hamburg and started a huge fire-storm. The fire in this neighborhood was so intense that it consumed all the oxygen from the air, causing the people who had taken refuge in one of the underground Read More …
High above the city of Belfort, in front of a steep cliff and just below the citadel, is a large sculpture, the Lion of Belfort. This Lion is 21.5 meters long and 10.7 meters high, making it quite large but no longer one of the largest sculptures in the world, Read More …
On Princes Street in the center of Edinburgh there is a tall (200 feet 6 inches = 61.1 meters) monument to the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), with this statue at its base. Scott was the author of numerous books including the novel The Bride of Lammermoor, published in Read More …
The Hammering Man is a 21-meter metal statue by the American sculptor Jonathan Borofsky, located in front of the city entrance to the Frankfurt Trade Fair. When the statue was commissioned in 1990 it was intended as a symbol of Frankfurt’s industrious economy. But at some point in the early Read More …
The I. G. Farben building — seen here from the top of the Main Tower in 2004 — is one of the few large buildings in Frankfurt that was not bombed during the Second World War. Legend has it that General Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered the building spared so he Read More …
Recently I took a different route than usual on my daily social-distancing bicycle ride and ended up at the new Westend Campus of the Goethe University, where I hadn’t been for several years. (I studied at the old campus of the same university here in Frankfurt nearly half a century Read More …
If you ever have the duty of naming a new museum, you would be well advised to call it something else, rather than “The New Museum”, because 165 years later it might still (or again) be there and not be as new as it once was. The same goes for Read More …
In the Restoration period of the nineteenth century, every self-respecting European country had to have a King. So when Belgium declared its independence from the Netherlands in 1830, finding a King was the first order of business. There was no tradition of a Belgian royal family (in fact no tradition Read More …