Großer Stern and the Victory Column
Why is it significant?
In the middle of the roundabout a red granite column shoots up out of the traffic, ringed with golden bands, and on top a golden winged woman holds a laurel wreath high over the trees. Berliners call her Goldelse, golden Else.
Key Facts
| Place | Großer Stern and the Victory Column |
|---|---|
| Address | Großer Stern 1, 10557 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.51450, 13.35010 |
| Part of Walk | Glass Dome and Golden Angel: Berlin's Reichstag, Tiergarten & Victory Column |
| Generated | Generated |
In the middle of the roundabout a red granite column shoots up out of the traffic, ringed with golden bands, and on top a golden winged woman holds a laurel wreath high over the trees. Berliners call her Goldelse, golden Else. Officially she is Victoria, the goddess of victory, more than eight metres tall and weighing around thirty-five tonnes.
The Siegessäule, the Victory Column, was inaugurated in 1873 to celebrate three wars that Prussia won in quick succession, against Denmark, Austria and France, the wars that created the German Empire. Look closely at the column's grooves: those golden shapes are gun barrels, captured cannon, gilded and set into the stone like trophies.
But Goldelse did not always stand here. She originally rose in front of the Reichstag, where you started this walk. In 1938 and 1939 the Nazis moved the entire column to this roundabout as part of their grand east-west axis, and they added an extra drum to make it taller, so the whole monument now stands close to sixty-seven metres high. The statues of Bismarck and his generals were moved too, and you can still see them around the edge of the circle.
The Großer Stern, the Great Star, is much older than the column. When the Tiergarten was still the hunting ground of the Prussian rulers, straight paths met here like the points of a star, so hunters could see down long lines through the forest. Later the column became a stage. In Wim Wenders' film Wings of Desire, angels sit on Goldelse's shoulders watching over a divided city. In 2008 Barack Obama spoke here to around two hundred thousand people, and for years the Love Parade turned this roundabout into the world's biggest open-air dance floor.
If you climb the narrow spiral stairs inside, nearly three hundred steps, you reach a platform just under her feet with the whole green forest of the Tiergarten spread out below. Use the underpasses to leave the roundabout towards the south-east, and follow the paths into the woods to a quiet pond with a little island.