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Berlin's Fairytale Fountain

 

One of the most popular, and most charming, elements of Berlin's Friedrichshain Park is the Fairytale Fountain, or Märchenbrunnen, just inside the western entrance to the park.

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It's easily the most elaborate fountain in the city, but despite its present good condition and appearance it's had a hard life, with cycles of damage, repair, new damage, incomplete restoration, and finally, in the past fifteen years a restoration to as near its original state as possible.

P126062620220815_150933P1260632Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, above; The Seven Ravens, below

The fountain complex didn't have an easy start in life, either. It was planned by Berlin's Municipal Art Department in 1893, a relatively prosperous time in the still-new German Empire. But prosperous or not, the cash for the project wasn't all there and the million-mark champagne project started withh an 80,000-mark beer budget. Construction stopped every time the cash ran out.

1913 Postcard1913 postcard shows the fountain shortly after its opening

It wasn't until June, 1913 that it was finished and opened to the public. The final construction costs were helped by making it a project to celebrate Kaiser Wilhelm's 25th anniversary on the throne that month.

P1260619P1260634In this version, Hansel and Gretel are saved by a duck. Lucky Hans has a pig

Three sculptors from southern Germany—Ignatius Taschner, Georg Wrba and Josef Rauch—created the 106 sculptures of animals, children, fairytale figures and putti. The large figures surrounding the fountain are Taschner's and represent figures from several of Grimm's Fairy Tales. A few, such as the Man-Eater and the Giant's Daughter are gone, deemed too scary for today's kids.

P1260635P1260624Little Red Riding Hood... and the wolf

The park and the fountain suffered heavy damage in World War II, and most of the sculptures disappeared—the damaged figures were found in a nearby garden in 1950. The 1950-51 restoration used rough copies and a simplified garden layout instead of a complete restoration.

Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-T00008,_Berlin,_Märchenbrunnen,_SkulpturenThe statues recovered in 1950 after wartime damage

More complete work on restoration took place in the early 1970s and again in the early 1980s. But in the 1990s, after German reunification, the fountain became a repeated victim of vandalism, with graffiti on the structures and many of the statues damaged or stolen.

P1260610P1260611P1260620The woman in the colorful dress spent almost an hour posing for pictures

Finally, in 2005, with funding from Berlin, the EU, the federal government and private donors, a full restoration was started, and finished in 2007. Among new features added were a fence around the area and night-time barriers that have prevented a return of the vandalism.

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I'm clearly not fully up-to-date on either Grimm's or other aspects of German folklore, so I have no advice on the meaning of most of these rather unusual pairings of children and animals. No prizes, but if you can chip in identification, please feel free to comment!

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Land animals on their own look down on the fountain from atop the colonnade, while 'wetter' ones, such as the turtle, hang around the fountain which features, in addition to the water jets, seven squirting frogs.

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Following the path around the fountain and past the colonnade, you come to a quieter fountain, with more sculpture. Several young children and their mothers were in the area, with the children climbing on the statues, up to a few moments before this picture. A very elderly woman in a very severe-looking dress chased them away with her cane and a loud lecture on how to behave. Apparently, not like the children immortalized in stone!

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The best part of every trip is realizing that it has upset your expectations

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