The nightmarishly large 1913 Völkerschlachtdenkmal (Nation's Battle Monument, or Monument to the Battle of the Nations) stands outside of Leipzig. Seems impossible, but it does.

Architect Bruno Schmitz, and sculptors Christian Behrens and Franz Metzner.

Architect Schmitz is remarkable for working closely with his sculptors, using the same sculptors repeatedly, and his memorial architecture serves mainly as a frame and setting for the sculptural form.

Bruno Schmitz designed the three largest war memorials in Germany, all of them built around 1900, all three still standing despite their strong German Imperial military-nationalist associations. The Völkerschlachtdenkmal is a pile of masonry so gigantic that your first thought is, Martians, and your second more serious thought is, this is a quite a thing.

You might actually feel it more than think it. A gravitational pull.

All three Schmitz war memorials have been politically inconvenient but protected by their own bulk. In this case that's 300,000 tons of stone and granite and a good deal of concrete (reinforced concrete, still an experimental process then). Hitler spoke here in an attempt to appoint himself heir to this German-nationalist mystical-war-destiny-feeling of the 1910s. After Hitler the denkmal became an irritating ideological stone in the craw of the East German government when they inherited it circa 1948. Despite its associations the only practical thing was to just leave it standing outside of town, draped in "explanation" from the "authorities". For the way it communicates, or let's say forcefully asserts, its imagery and a set of uncomfortable social-political values, today it still requires a certain amount of today's "explanation" from today's "authorities".

 

Photo by Ijon Tichy

The other two largest war memorials in Germany are the Kaiser Wilhelm Monument at Porta Westfalica, and the Kyffhäuser Monument, built to crown a mountaintop in Thuringia on the ruins of an ancient fort, judging from photographs a spectacle straight out of Wagner, under which Barbarossa lies, not dead, but asleep until the ravens cease to fly, when he will awaken to restore Germany to its former glory.

The sculpted work at the Kyffhäuser is fascinating, borderline disturbing. The photo above is just a taste of it, the 22-foot Barbarossa on his Stygian throne, carved out of an outcropping of sandstone on-site by sculptor Nikolaus Geiger, as if Barbarossa is rooted to the spot, resting, waiting, connected to and drawing power out of the earth until the time comes. It's a compelling thing.

 

The exterior work here was planned out and begun by the sculptor Christian Behrens, obviously the kind of huge and time-consuming project that could take years of your life and years off your life. Behrens completed the Saint Michael relief, which, you'll notice, is helpfully labeled. Then he died, in 1905, mid-project, at the age of 53.

The work was continued by Behren's former stonecutting student back in Breslau, a kind of genius, a fellow named Franz Metzner.

Before I throw you another name and another life story of another obscure Austrian artisan, let me stop here and explain why architectural sculpture is worth your attention to begin with. Two reasons.

Because of the emotional impact, because it communicates so powerfully. The emotional message of this building isn't all that pleasant or reassuring, but there's a strong expression there. Combining figures in architecture is so laden with meaning that it's a kind of tangible magic. Because of the book I'm writing with Einar, I've looked at a couple thousand examples now and the combinations and effects remain fascinating. If you don't feel it, then I just can't explain that part to you.

And because architectural sculpture was so hard to accomplish, it deserves respect. It's not as if producing credible freestanding figural sculpture is a particularly easy craft to begin with. To quote a 1923 letter to the New York Times, from a stonecutters' union rep, defending their request for a raise:

A stone carver is an artist and a skillful mechanic. He must be an expert in freehand drawing. He must be a modeler. Styles of at least a score of different periods in history must be common knowledge to him. A study of nature in its various forms is necessary – foliage, flower and fruit, as well as the anatomy of the animal and the human body. He must have an inborn and cultivated sense of harmony and contrast. But all these studies and talents are nil if he cannot use the chisel and the mallet and the different tools of his profession on delicate and costly material for sculpture, natural stone, marble and granite. A different technique is necessary to apply to limestone, marble, granite and sandstone.

...Not to mention crushing your thumbs all the time. Before you point out the difference between stonecutters (largely working-class chiselers) and sculptors (largely gentleman modelers), Metzner learned his trade the hard way, crushing his thumbs.

Sculpture is difficult enough without fitting in onto a damn building, making it consistent with the style and overall aesthetic presence of a building, getting the composition and proportions right, making it visible enough on the facade in the sunlight, this is another whole dimension of difficulty. It's an aesthetic tightwire act, too. One false move, the whole thing looks ludicrous.

Inside the Völkerschlachtdenkmal there's a Krypt.

Mourning clone knights, twelve of them I think, in a steadying stance. Gigantic faces ("Masks of Fate") that take that idea of emotionally expressive architecture to a strange extreme. The dreamlike difference of scale between the two. On the tier up above, monumental seated figures of Opferwilligkeit (Victim Willingness, Sacrifice), Volkskraft (People's Strength) with suckling twins, Glaubensstaerke (Faith), and other figures carved into columns representing God-knows-what. The feeling of power in this Krypt is partly attributable to the German nationalistic theme, partly attributable to the gravity and strength of the figures, and partly attributable to that experimental relationship between figure and setting, suggesting a world of other alternatives that never developed.

 

Franz Metzner's thing was that he not only excelled at this impossibly difficult task, and excelled at getting the muscles right and making his figures' backs and necks as expressive as dancers' backs and necks, he went farther and rearranged the classical vocabulary and invented a bunch of new relationships of figure-to-building.

One relationship, sort of a simple butcompelling relationship, is on top of one of Europe's architectural landmarks. Metzner was responsible for the four very eccentric male green nudes at the top of Josef Hoffman's 1904-1911 landmark Palais Stoclet in Brussels. Actually the figures aren't as eccentric as their presentation, facing outward in four directions on a stepped platform.

 

Metzner worked in at least three worlds, three continental art scenes around 1900: the Otto-Wagner-Vienna-Secession-Jugendstil scene, this politically charged German-war-memorial-and-Bismarck-tower scene, and the Prague nationalism scene where he inspired a generation of younger sculptors to put hermes all up and down the Vaclav Nameste.

He was also a link to -- of all people -- Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1910 Metzner met up with the vacationing Frank Lloyd Wright, and Metzer had a direct influence on Wright's "conventionalization" of the human figure and its incorporation into the Midway Gardens. Unfotunately Wright was unable to sculpt a human figure and unable to effectively collaborate with a sculptor, so this turned out to be a fascinating dead-end.

Another experiment in the relationship of figure-to-building can be seen at Jose Plecnik's 1905 completely bizarre and wonderful Zacherl House in Vienna where a line of hunched and highly stylized atlantes support the cornice with their necks. These hunched figures reoccur in another then-famous Berlin landmark, das Haus Reingold, kind of a glamorous super-beer-hall popular immediately before World War II, also designed by Bruno Schmitz. All these hunched figures retain their muscular credibility while becoming an architectural element, stable and straining, dynamic and still, both at once.

Born in 1870, Metzner died at age 49. Much of his work was destroyed in the war.

Back to Bodies in Stone

To The Field Guide to Architectural Sculpture