“Sigi who?” asks the bearded man in the baseball cap. “Summer? I don’t know.” Well, the man is obviously not from here, Altötting is standing on the delivery van of his carpentry shop, which is in front of the former Kaut Bullinger building with the empty shop windows and the everything must go posters, Rosenstrasse 8. The man is with me right now drove his car over a piece of ground where one of the most popular Munich residents usually has his place: Sigi Sommer.
In July it would have been 25 years since the life-size bronze statue donated by the RS Schulz family of publishers stood in the pedestrian zone: Blasius, who died in 1996, as a stroller with a newspaper under his right arm and his left casually in his trouser pocket. But now he’s gone, Sigi Sommer. As if swallowed up by the ground, including the base plate. All that’s left is dull, gray concrete. And people who don’t even know the writer, journalist and co-founder of the Cowboy Club Munich. sad thing.
The monument to Sigi Sommer has been in the pedestrian zone for almost 25 years.
(Photo: Stephan Rumpf)
But how can this quite stately gentleman just disappear like that? It might be a bit too heavy to tuck under your arm. “It wasn’t us! We just got here,” asserts the bearded man from Altötting. The question remains: Whodunit? What do the neighbors know? In the case of the bread-on-the-hand saleswomen at the Vinzenzmurr butcher’s shop, they have already noticed the loss of the bronze (“I’ve also been surprised that he’s gone”), but no conclusive explanation for it either.
Across the street in the Rosen pharmacy, you have an unobstructed view of the scene of the crime, but the men and women in their white coats didn’t notice anything being taken away. It is believed that Sommer’s disappearance could possibly be related to the construction site at number 8. “It’s going to be demolished,” says a pharmacist, and her colleague, after Sport Schuster and Ruffinihaus, is already preparing for the next major construction site in front of his door: “There’s supposed to be another floor up there.” Whether demolition or expansion: Apparently, the summer simply got in Sigi’s way. Rather uncomfortable – and with diligence – he was already alive.
The building department then confirms the construction site thesis: the statue was dismantled and is now stored at number 8, at the expense of the construction site operator. Case number Sigi Sommer … solved. Incidentally, he had already disappeared in 2012, also due to construction work. When he can return to his usual place and continue walking is open. One can only hope that his neighbor, an equally stately plane tree, does not have to give way to investors as well.