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Updated: May 7, 2025
The preparation of the plan for the Siegesallée has occupied many years, and the learned historiographer of my House, Professor Dr. Poser, is the man who put me in a position to set the artists clear and intelligible tasks.
He set forth his art creed in a speech which he delivered on December 18, 1901, to the sculptors who had executed the Hohenzollern statues in the famous Siegesallée at Berlin, and which ran substantially as follows: "I gladly seize the occasion, first of all, to express my congratulations and then my thanks for the manner in which you have assisted me to carry out my original plan.
"This I can even now tell you the impression which the Siegesallée has made on the foreigner is quite an overpowering one; everywhere respect for German sculpture is making itself perceivable. May you always remain on these heights, may such masters stand by my sons and sons' sons, should they ever come into existence!
Thus everything has worked for the aggrandizement of the future Kings of Prussia, everything has brought grist to the mill of Sans-Souci. No dynasts in modern times, not even the Bourbons nor the Habsburgs, have been more obsessed with the pride of race. A double avenue of gaudy statues in Berlin has been erected in the Siegesallee, or Alley of Victory, to illustrate the glories of the House.
I believe that this experiment, if I may so call it, as made in the Siegesallée, has succeeded. "... I have never interfered with details, but have contented myself with simply giving the direction, the impulse. "But to-day the thought that Berlin stands there before the whole world with a guild of artists able to carry out so magnificent a project fills me with satisfaction and pride.
But the symphony of the Berlin dawn is ours now, fräulein, and have done with intrusive memories, corroding reflections. What are my people doing in Berlin at this hour? What are these prowling Al-Raschids about? Do they know the sorcery of the virgin morning light of Berlin as it falls upon the Siegesallee and gives life again to the marble heroes of Germany?
Fancying, perhaps, that I had not been quite fair to modern German painters later I may consider the ghastly sculpture which, like that cemetery of stone dolls and idols, the Siegesallee in the Berlin Tiergarten, has paralysed plastic art in that country I determined early in the autumn of 1912 to visit again the principal cities, going as far down as Vienna and Budapest.
"And so must an honest, proper artist act. The art which descends to réclame is no art be it lauded a hundred or a thousand-fold. A feeling for what is beautiful or ugly has every one, be he ever so simple, and to educate this feeling in the people I require all of you. That in the Siegesallée you have done a piece of such work, I have specially to thank you.
This attitude, too, is admirable, but on the other hand lies the danger, such is poor human nature, that the individuality will be that which the Emperor wishes it to be, not the artist's independent individuality To the foreign eye all the Hohenzollern statues in the Siegesallee, with the exception possibly of two or three, seem to have much the same individuality, though that again may be due to the nature of the subject and the foreigner's inherent and ineradicable predispositions.
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