Bruno Schmitz

Bruno Schmitz (21 November 1858 – 27 April 1916), was a German architect best known for his monuments in the early 1900s, closely working with sculptors like Emil Hundrieser, Nikolaus Geiger and Franz Metzner for integrated architectural and sculptural effect.

Schmitz's single most famous work is the massive 1913 Völkerschlachtdenkmal (People's Battle Monument) located outside of Leipzig, Saxony, designed with local architect Clemens Thieme. The Monument was inaugurated in 1913 by Kaiser Wilhelm II. Bohemian sculptor Franz Metzner designed the powerful and strangely scaled interior figural-architectural 'colossal masks of fate.'

Along with the Leipzig moument, Schmitz designed the Kyffhäuser Monument and the Kaiser Wilhelm Monument at Porta Westfalica, bringing him the distinction of designing the three largest war monuments in Germany. All of them are rough, primitive masonry structures in a style that blends Romanesque precedents with modernist touches, and all of them are associated with German nationalism in the period between the World Wars.

Schmitz also designed the 1897 Deutsches Eck in Koblenz, the 1901 Soldiers and Sailors' Monument in Indianapolis, Indiana, the German Pavilion at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, the 1906 Rheingold Wine House in Berlin, the elaborate Carl Hoffman Tomb at Berlin's Old St. Matthew's Church, and a number of the Bismarck towers.

Schmitz' daughter Angelica Schmitz (1893 - 1957) was the wife of the Ukrainian-American sculptor Alexander Archipenko.

External links

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* [http://www.bismarcktuerme.de/website/ebene3/archit/schmitz.html On Schmitz's Bismarck Towers, in German]