page_title: Prussian National Monument for the Liberation Wars
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Prussian National Monument for the Liberation Wars / History
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Nationaldenkmal auf dem Kreuzberg, Berlin Selbst fotografiert, September 2004 GNU FDL
context_page_description: The Prussian National Monument for the Liberation Wars is a war memorial in Berlin, Germany, dedicated in 1821. Built by the Prussian king during the sectionalism before the Unification of Germany it is the principal German monument to the Prussian soldiers and other citizens who died in or else dedicated their health and wealth for the Liberation Wars fought at the end of the Wars of the Sixth and in that of the Seventh Coalition against France in the course of the Napoleonic Wars. Frederick William III of Prussia initiated its construction and commissioned the Prussian Karl Friedrich Schinkel who made it an important piece of art in cast iron, his last piece of Romantic Neo-Gothic architecture and an expression of the post-Napoleonic poverty and material sobriety in the liberated countries.
  The monument is located on the Kreuzberg hill in the Victoria Park in the Tempelhofer Vorstadt, a region within Berlin's borough of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. The monument was conceived at a time of deteriorating relations between the reactionaries and the reformers of the civic movement within Prussia. The monument is of cast iron, a technique en vogue at the time.
context_section_description: The monument by Karl Friedrich Schinkel has been called the «relatively modest outcome of grandiose plans». This is because the monument resembles the spire top of an earlier project by Schinkel, a national memorial church with the working title Nationaldom designed in summer 1814, and a second draft in January 1815. However, like many other projects the memorial church never materialised due to lacking money. The compulsory contributions to France (thaler 41.73 million [=154.5 million Francs] alone by the Treaty of Tilsit), levied during its supremacy, which Prussia could mostly only raise by way of credit from various creditors, French and of other nations, heavily weighed as debts to be amortised and serviced on the budgets of municipalities, cities, states and other corporations until the 1870s.
  Already in late 1813 other projects for monuments had been launched by Ernst Moritz Arndt, Karl Sieveking, Johann Heinrich von Dannecker, Leo von Klenze, Friedrich Weinbrenner. Schinkel considered for his project to ask the magistrate (city government) of Berlin to build a memorial. So like jumping the ship also the initiative for a war memorial did not originate with the king.
  On 17 March 1813, when the king had jumped on the bandwagon for the liberation wars, he established the military decoration of the Iron Cross, backdated to March 10, late Queen Louise's birthday. He commissioned Schinkel to design the Iron Cross after a royal sketch. The Iron Cross was a decoration of a new kind, available for every soldier, who had turned from subjects of different estate status into citizens by the establishment of the Prussian citizenship in 1810, therefore there were no status barriers to get the Iron Cross.
  On 26 June 1818 Schinkel commissioned the Royal Prussian Iron Foundry (Königlich Preußische Eisengießerei) to cast the pieces for the monument, including its statues. The foundry estimated costs of thaler 20,646. After negotiations on 27 August 1818 the merchant Gottfried Wilhelm August Tietz, the farming burgher Johann Friedrich Götze and Christian Weimar (Weymann) sold the top of the Götze'scher Berg (today's Kreuzberg) measuring 1.5 Prussian Morgen (2,839.83 m² (30,567.7 sq ft)) and an access road branching off from Methfesselstraße. On 4 September 1818 the king approved the stipulated price of thaler 1,100 and an additional 400 as compensation for fixtures. The adjacent land, measuring 72 Morgen (18.38 ha (45.4 acres)), remained property of Götze, Tietz and Weimar. The king confirmed the price.
   
  Duke Charles of Mecklenburg arranged the laying of the foundation stone for 19 September 1818, attended - among others - by Tzar Alexander I, Christian Daniel Rauch and Schinkel. An iron cast memorial medal was issued on that occasion and the proceeds were used for war invalids. A bit northeast of the monument, deeper on the slope thus not blocking the view, a guard's house was erected after Schinkel's design in 1821. It was a brick structure in Gothic Revival style adorned with a Lombard band all around beneath the eaves of the flat pyramidal roof. On 1 January 1822 the invalid Martin Herborn moved in, employed to guard the monument. By the end of the 19th century a milk bar (Milchkuranstalt) moved in. The abandoned building was demolished in the 1950s, its site is now used by a ball playing cage.
  For the inauguration of the monument Frederick William III chose the 30 March 1821, the seventh anniversary of the conquest of the Montmartre in the Battle of Paris. The inauguration was attended by the royal family, the Prussian generality, the senior pastors of all Protestant congregations of Berlin, and as guests by Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia and his wife Alexandra Feodorovna (Charlotte of Prussia), as well as by thousands of other spectators. Court preacher Bishop Rulemann Friedrich Eylert held an inaugural prayer.
  The national monument is crowned by an Iron Cross. On the occasion of the inauguration the king renamed Götze'scher Berg into Kreuzberg (i.e. cross mountain) after the Iron Cross topping the monument. The monument is ad
caption: The Prussian National Monument for the Liberation Wars
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