page_title: Siegesallee
section_title: After the monarchy
hierarchical_section_title: Siegesallee / After the monarchy
caption_attribution_description: English: The original route of the Siegesallee in Berlin-Tiergarten in December 2003. Self-created Dec 2003
context_page_description: The Siegesallee was a broad boulevard in Berlin, Germany. In 1895, Kaiser Wilhelm II ordered and financed the construction and expansion of an existing alley with a variety of marble statues, which was finalized in 1901.
  About 750 m in length, it ran northwards through the Tiergarten park from Kemperplatz, to the former site of the Victory Column at the Königsplatz, close to the Reichstag. Along its length the Siegesallee cut across the Charlottenburger Chausee.
  The marble monuments and the neobaroque ensemble were ridiculed even by its contemporaries. Berlin folkore dubbed the Kaiser Denkmalwilly for his excessive historicism. Moves to have the statues demolished were thwarted after the end of the monarchy in 1919.
  The Siegessäule and the figures were moved by the Nazi government to the Großer Stern in 1939 to allow for larger military parades and conventions.
  Some of the monuments were lost in the aftermath of the Second World War. The allied forces had the alley erased and the area replanted. The Soviet War Memorial was erected there, deliberately crossing the former Victor Avenue of its foes in a symbolic act immediately after the end of the war.
context_section_description: In 1918 and 1919, among others, Hans Paasche asked to have the statues destroyed. The soldiers and workers council of Berlin decided to keep them. Kurt Tucholsky had written a poem, asking to keep the figures silent, as monuments of a great era.
  The statues remained in place until 1938, when they got in the way of the grand plan by Adolf Hitler to transform Berlin into the Welthauptstadt Germania, to be realised by Albert Speer. The avenue was set to disappear under the new North-South Axis, the linchpin of the plan, and so on Speer's direction the entire construction was dismantled and rebuilt in another part of the Tiergarten, along a south-east to north-west running avenue called ″Großer Sternallee″ that led to the Großer Stern itself (literally ″Large Star″), the main intersection of roads in the centre of the Tiergarten, one of the other roads being the Charlottenburger Chausee. In its new location it was given a new name — ″Neue Siegesallee″ (New Victory Avenue). The Victory Column was moved also, to the middle of the Großer Stern (and increased in height in the process), where it remains to this day.
  Many of the statues were damaged in World War II, while a few were smashed completely. Generally though, the avenue survived, more or less, while all around was a scene of devastation. Most of the Tiergarten's 200,000 trees were shattered by bombs and artillery shells and finally cut down for fuel by desperate Berliners. In the 1948 movie The Berliner, Otto Normalverbraucher (″Otto Average-Consumer″), played by Gert Fröbe, as a former German soldier returning to civilian life, gives an ironic salute to the figures.
  However, the statues were seen by the Allied powers as a symbol of Imperial Germany, and in 1947 the British Occupation Forces dismantled the Siegesallee remains, these apparently being bound for the Teufelsberg (Devil's Mountain), the largest of the eight huge rubble mountains around Berlin's perimeter.
  State curator Hinnerk Schaper intervened, however, and buried most of the statues in the grounds of the nearby Schloss Bellevue, today the official residence of the Federal President of Germany, in the hope that one day, when Germany could be more accepting of monuments to its past, they might resurface. In 1979 they were duly rediscovered and disinterred, and many of the survivors were relocated in Berlin's first sewage pumping station, which had since its closure in 1972 been restored and installed a museum called the Lapidarium, at Hallesches Ufer, along the north bank of the Landwehrkanal, near the site of the former Anhalter Bahnhof. In October 2006 however the museum closed. The building was put up for sale with a future gastronomic function envisaged for it, and the remaining 26 Siegesallee statues and 40 sidebusts (and numerous others housed there) were moved in May 2009 to the Spandau Citadel.
caption: The original route of the Siegesallee in December 2003
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