Tour · Monaco di Baviera · Monument
Shot in the Back - Kurt Eisner Memorial
Set into the pavement opposite the Palais Montgelas, a steel plate traces the chalk outline of Kurt Eisner, Bavaria's first prime minister, who was shot in the back and head on this spot on 21 February 1919 while carrying his own resignation speech to parliament.
Su questo luogo
Most people step over it without noticing: a steel plate in the pavement of Kardinal-Faulhaber-Strasse showing the silhouette of a fallen man, drawn the way police chalk a body at a crime scene. On the morning of Friday, 21 February 1919, Kurt Eisner, the journalist who had proclaimed the Bavarian Republic three months earlier, left his office in the Foreign Ministry inside the elegant Palais Montgelas across the street and set off for the Landtag in nearby Prannerstrasse to announce his resignation. He never got there. Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley, a 22 year old student and former cavalry lieutenant who had reportedly been rejected by the ultranationalist Thule Society because of his mother's Jewish ancestry, stepped up behind him and fired two shots at close range into his back and head. Eisner died on the spot; his bodyguards shot Arco through the neck, and the surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch saved the assassin's life. Barely an hour later a revolutionary worker named Alois Lindner stormed the Landtag and shot Interior Minister Erhard Auer in revenge, killing two more men. Arco was sentenced to death in January 1920, pardoned to life the next day and freed in 1924. Around one hundred thousand people followed Eisner's coffin to the Ostfriedhof, yet it took seventy years before the sculptor Erika Maria Lankes gave the city this quietly devastating memorial, inaugurated in 1989.
Fatti principali
- 2 shots — Fired at close range into Kurt Eisner's back and head by Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley on 21 February 1919, only steps from the door of his ministry.
- 100000 mourners — The estimated number of people who followed Eisner's funeral procession through Munich to the Ostfriedhof on 26 February 1919.
- 1989 year — The steel pavement plate by Erika Maria Lankes was inaugurated on the 70th anniversary of the murder, in the pavement in front of Kardinal-Faulhaber-Strasse 14, opposite the Palais Montgelas.
📍 Promenadeplatz 2, 80333, München