Rathenau memorial

[lethargic_man]

Today's Berlin tour itinerary takes us to the memorial to the foreign minister Walther Rathenau, who was gunned down on this spot, less than two miles from our flat, by right-wing extremists in 1922, during the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic:

Image once again taken from Wikipedia under a Creative Commons licence

The plaque reads: "The Liberal Democratic Party of Germany, to the memory of Walther Rathenau, Reich^* Foreign Minister of the German Republic. He fell on this spot at the hands of a murderer, on 24 June 1922. The health of a people comes only from its inner life—from the lives of its soul and its spirit. October 1946"

There is a square named after him in Berlin, with a rather odd sculpture in it, which I have just discovered, in the course of locating an image to show here is entitled "Two Concrete Cadillacs in the shape of the naked Maja". Er, right...

* I discovered recently that the Weimar Republic and its institutions continued to bear the description Reich (meaning empire, but can also apparently mean realm) of the former German Empire simply because the parties involved in setting it up couldn't agree upon an alternative...

I promise the next entry won't be as morbid as the last couple...