This pompous equestrian statue of King Ernst August I, who ruled the Kingdom of Hannover from 1837 until his death in 1851, is located directly in front of the main railway station. People often agree to meet “under the tail”, meaning at the rear end of Ernst August’s horse. The Read More …
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 …
Louis XIII (1601-1643) has not gone down in history as one of France’s outstanding kings. He was not a popular swashbuckler like his father, Henri IV, nor was he an awesome long-lived Sun King like his son Louis XIV. At age eight-and-a-half Louis XIII became king when his father was 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 …
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 …
This bronze statue of the playwright Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799), the author of The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, among other plays, is on display in Paris at the corner of Rue Saint-Antoine and the Rue des Tournelles, in the 4th arrondissement near Place de Read More …