Karolinenplatz Obelisk: Thirty Thousand Who Did Not Come Home
Why is it significant?
Walk out into the traffic circle and stop under the obelisk, a dark needle of metal rising from the centre of a perfectly round square. Cars circle it like satellites. Look closely at its base, though, and you will find not a victory but a grief, cast in letters.
Key Facts
| Place | Karolinenplatz Obelisk: Thirty Thousand Who Did Not Come Home |
|---|---|
| Address | Karolinenplatz, 80333 München, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.14440, 11.56940 |
| Part of Walk | Isar-Athens: Munich's Königsplatz, the Pinakotheks & the Blue Rider |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk out into the traffic circle and stop under the obelisk, a dark needle of metal rising from the centre of a perfectly round square. Cars circle it like satellites. Look closely at its base, though, and you will find not a victory but a grief, cast in letters.
Karolinenplatz was laid out from 1808 by the architect Carl von Fischer, the first piece of a brand-new royal suburb outside the old city walls, and it was named after Queen Karoline, wife of Bavaria's first king. That king, Max Joseph, owed his crown to Napoleon. In 1806 the French emperor made Bavaria a kingdom, and in return Bavaria sent its sons to fight in his wars.
In 1812 Napoleon marched into Russia, and some thirty thousand Bavarian soldiers marched with him. Very few came back. They died of cold, of hunger, of typhus and Cossack raids on the long retreat from Moscow. A year later Bavaria quietly changed sides and joined the alliance against Napoleon. So when Leo von Klenze's obelisk was unveiled on the eighteenth of October 1833, the anniversary of the great Battle of Leipzig, the inscription had a delicate job to do.
Read it, and you will see how it was solved. One side remembers the thirty thousand Bavarians who found death in the Russian war. Another adds, in effect: they too died for the liberation of the fatherland. They had, of course, died fighting for the very emperor Germany later celebrated defeating. Monuments, it turns out, can be as diplomatic as kings.
In the 1930s the streets around this square filled with offices of the Nazi party, whose headquarters stood a short walk east along Brienner Straße. Since 1957 one of the buildings on the circle has housed the Amerika Haus, a centre for transatlantic culture... a deliberate answer to that past. Now head west, towards Königsplatz, and look for a long brick basilica tucked in just behind the museums.