Hamburg is considering how to deal with the huge Bismarck monument in the city. But a competition for this has failed for the time being. Hamburg’s Senator for Culture, Carsten Brosda, explains why.
Hamburg has the largest Bismarck in the world. The statue of the Iron Chancellor on a hill on the Reeperbahn measures around 34 meters. The monument, unveiled in 1906, had been renovated and cleaned for nine million euros in recent years. But since the “Black Lives Matter” demonstrations in Germany, Bismarck statues have been attacked again and again. The host of the Berlin “Congo Conference” in 1885, at which the Western powers divided the African continent among themselves, is to be branded a colonial criminal. Following this post-colonial discourse, the Hamburg Senate decided to place the heroic memorial on the Elbe in a new critical context.