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 (Befreiungskriege) 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.Sibylle Badstübner-Gröger, Michael Bollé, Ralph Paschke et al., Handbuch der Deutschen Kunstdenkmäler / Georg Dehio, see references for bibliographical details, p. 267. .

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. Its younger socket brick building is faced with grey Silesian granite and was designed by the Prussian architect Heinrich Strack and realised by the Prussian engineer Johann Wilhelm Schwedler. Its centerpiece is a tapering turret of 60 Prussian feet (), resembling the spire tops of Gothic churches."Gross gedacht und klein geraten: Berlins Kreuzbergdenkmal wurde deshalb zum eindrucksvollen Zeugnis deutscher und preußischer Geschichte", in: monumente, Deutsche Stiftung Denkmalschutz (ed.), No. 1/2 (1997), p. 30.

Dedication

On the eastern side of the monument under the memorial inscription for the Battle of Großgörschen (aka Lützen) there is the dedication: "The King to the People, which at his call magnanimously offered its wealth and blood for the Fatherland, to the Fallen in memoriam, to the Living with acknowledgement, to Future Generations for emulation."In the German original: "Der Koenig dem Volke | das auf seinen Ruf hochherzig | Gut und Blut dem Vater= | lande darbrachte den Gefal= | lenen zum Gedaechtniß den | Lebenden zur Anerken= | nung den künftigen Geschlech= | tern zur Nacheiferung". Cf. Michael Nungesser, Das Denkmal auf dem Kreuzberg von Karl Friedrich Schinkel, see references for bibliographical details, p. 48. . This dedication was authored by August Boeckh, a member of the philosophical class of the Prussian Academy of Sciences commissioned to write it.Michael Nungesser, Das Denkmal auf dem Kreuzberg von Karl Friedrich Schinkel, see references for bibliographical details, p. 50. . Frederick William III had rejected three alternative proposals by the philosophical class. This dedication may be considered problematic, inasmuch as it was not the king who had called his people, but the stubborn people, commoners, lower-ranking bureaucrats, military men, and members of the nobility who had stolen a march on the king.

People who had earlier welcomed and benefited from Napoleon's reforms and who, like those in other nations had been inspired by his earlier "Republican" ideals of emancipating commoners as citizens, started to resist when he betrayed these ideals by making himself Emperor, levying burdensome compulsory contributions for his projects designed to aggrandize himself and his family, impoverishing not only his own people, but those of other nations, and above all bringing about the deaths of thousands in seemingly unending wars.Michael Nungesser, Das Denkmal auf dem Kreuzberg von Karl Friedrich Schinkel, see references for bibliographical details, p. 20. . At the same time the blocus, a measure against free trade, unfairly enforced favorable exchange rates of most European nations toward France while at the same time attempting to eliminate their far more profitable trade with Great Britain.

In 1813 the defeated and intimidated king, forced into a coalition with France since 1812,Ferdinand Pflug, "Aus den Zeiten der schweren Noth. Nr. 8. Der Landtag zu Königsberg und die Errichtung der Landwehr", in: Die Gartenlaube (1863), Heft 3-4, pp. 44–56, here p. 44. against the will of his people refused the risky attempt to shake off the French supremacy in the wake of Napoleon's defeats in Russia. Ludwig Yorck, commanding the Prussian units supporting the French, had declared their neutrality towards the Russians without royal accord. In early 1813 irregular units, guerrillas lacking royal sanction, began to form, swearing their allegiance to the German Fatherland rather than to the king.Michael Nungesser, Das Denkmal auf dem Kreuzberg von Karl Friedrich Schinkel, see references for bibliographical details, p. 21. . On 7 February 1813 the East Prussian estates unanimously voted for financing, recruiting, and equipping a militia army (Landwehr) of 20,000 men, plus 10,000 in reserve, out of their funds, following a proposal designed by Yorck, Clausewitz, and Stein. The hesitant king could not stop this anymore, but was forced to enact it on March 17 in his address entitled An mein Volk ("To My People").Michael Nungesser, Das Denkmal auf dem Kreuzberg von Karl Friedrich Schinkel, see references for bibliographical details, p. 29. .

However, this civic act of initiating Prussia's participation in the War of the Sixth Coalition was distasteful to the monarch, who again and again delayed implementing his promise of 22 May 1815 to introduce a parliament and a constitution for the entire kingdom. Rather, the monarchs allied against Napoleon subsequently granted themselves the right to suppress the rights previously granted to the citizens and to reverse all the reforms which had done away with feudalism. On 21 March 1819, Frederick William even forbade his subjects to address any further petitions for him to fulfill his promise. The reaction prevailed against the patriotic zeal of the populace.

Alternative names The ponderous officialese name evoked many alternative names developed for the monument. Other names are Nationaldenkmal zur Erinnerung an die Befreiungskriege/Freiheitskriege (i.e. national monument in memory of the liberation/liberty wars, a more extended version), Befreiungsdenkmal (i.e. liberation monument), Kreuzbergdenkmal (i.e. Kreuzberg monument, however, there are at least five more monuments on the Kreuzberg sparsed in Victoria Park, which covers most of that hill), Kriegsdenkmal auf dem Kreuzberge (war monument on the Kreuzberg, somewhat indifferentiated), National-Monument, Schinkeldenkmal (i.e. Schinkel monument, however, it is not a monument of Schinkel, but one by Schinkel), Siegesdenkmal (i.e. victory monument), Volksdenkmal auf dem Tempelhofer Berge (people's monument on the Tempelhof hill, however, it was the king's monument, with statues displaying the faces of many royal siblings, and the hill had been renamed by the king into Kreuzberg in 1821).

Location The monument is located on the top of the Kreuzberg in the Tempelhofer Vorstadt. Between 1888 and 1894 the Victoria Park (Viktoriapark) was laid out around the monument. The monument, topped by an iron cross, became name-giving for the hill it stands on, before mostly called Tempelhofer Berg, but also denoted by many other names in its history. Hundred years after the inauguration of the monument, the VIth borough of Berlin, established on 1 October 1920 and provisionally named Hallesches Tor, was renamed into Kreuzberg on 27 September 1921.Klaus-Dieter Wille, Spaziergänge in Kreuzberg, see references for bibliographical details, p. 21. .

History

The monument by Karl Friedrich Schinkel has been called the «relatively modest outcome of grandiose plans».In the German original «relativ bescheidene Ergebnis grandioser Planungen» cf. Berlin: Kunstdenkmäler und Museen, Eva Börsch-Supan, Helmut Börsch-Supan, Günther Kühne and Hella Reelfs, Stuttgart: Reclam, 21977, (=Reclams Kunstführer Deutschland; vol. 7), p. 301. 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.Michael Nungesser, Das Denkmal auf dem Kreuzberg von Karl Friedrich Schinkel, see references for bibliographical details, p. 22. . 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 TilsitPeter Brandt in collaboration with Thomas Hofmann, Preußen: Zur Sozialgeschichte eines Staates; eine Darstellung in Quellen, edited on behalf of Berliner Festspiele as catalogue to the exhibition on Prussia between 15 May and 15 November 1981, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981, (=Preußen; vol. 3), p. 80. ), 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.Michael Nungesser, Das Denkmal auf dem Kreuzberg von Karl Friedrich Schinkel, see references for bibliographical details, p. 24. . Schinkel considered for his project to ask the magistrate (city government) of Berlin to build a memorial.Michael Nungesser, Das Denkmal auf dem Kreuzberg von Karl Friedrich Schinkel, see references for bibliographical details, p. 26. . So like jumping the ship also the initiative for a war memorial did not originate with the king.Michael Nungesser, Das Denkmal auf dem Kreuzberg von Karl Friedrich Schinkel, see references for bibliographical details, p. 25. .

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.Michael Nungesser, Das Denkmal auf dem Kreuzberg von Karl Friedrich Schinkel, see references for bibliographical details, pp. 22 and 29. . 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.Michael Nungesser, Das Denkmal auf dem Kreuzberg von Karl Friedrich Schinkel, see references for bibliographical details, p. 30. .

On 26 June 1818 Schinkel commissioned the Royal Prussian Iron Foundry (Königlich Preußische Eisengießerei) to cast the pieces for the monument, including its statues.Michael Nungesser, Das Denkmal auf dem Kreuzberg von Karl Friedrich Schinkel, see references for bibliographical details, p. 46. . 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 () and an access road branching off from Methfesselstraße.Michael Nungesser, Das Denkmal auf dem Kreuzberg von Karl Friedrich Schinkel, see references for bibliographical details, p. 38. . 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 (), remained property of Götze, Tietz and Weimar. The king confirmed the price.