Peasants' War Panorama
Based on Friedrich Engels' 1850 book The Peasant War in Germany, Thomas Müntzer as an early revolutionary became an icon of historical materialism in East Germany. At the 450-years jubilee of the battle, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) charged the rector of the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts, Professor Werner Tübke, with the creation of a monumental panorama painting. The work in a specially erected rotunda was finished in 1987. It is 123 m/404 ft in length and 14 m/46 ft in height and depicts more than 3000 individuals.
Despite the Politburo's plans modelled on the Battle of Borodino panorama at Poklonnaya Hill in Moscow, Tübke realised a rather pessimistic vision of a resigned Müntzer standing alone among battling troops, a Bundschuh flag on the ground at his side. The panorama was inaugurated by Kurt Hager and Margot Honecker as deputy for her husband on September 14, 1989, thus eight weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Read more about this topic: Bad Frankenhausen
Famous quotes containing the words war and/or panorama:
“The dead have been awakened—shall I sleep?
The world’s at war with tyrants—shall I crouch?
The harvest’s ripe—and shall I pause to reap?
I slumber not; the thorn is in my couch;
Each day a trumpet soundeth in mine ear,
Its echo in my heart.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“It was a comfort in those succeeding days to sit up and contemplate the majestic panorama of mountains and valleys spread out below us and eat ham and hard boiled eggs while our spiritual natures reveled alternately in rainbows, thunderstorms, and peerless sunsets. Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)