Tag: Kassel

It is an impressive memorial against deportation and elimination: ‘Die Rampe‘ (the ramp) by German artist Eva Renée Nele Bode (known as E. R. Nele; her father was the founder of the documenta). It was inaugurated in 1985 on the former grounds of the Henschelwerk factory at Kassel, Germany – producing locomotives, lorries and busses, but also tanks, airplanes and missiles. The company used around 6.000 forced labour workers for their purposes. When the artist was a child she could watch the transport of forced labour workers within freight cars; creating this work was also a way to cope with her traumatic childhood memories.

The city of Kassel, Germany is full of interesting artworks – some better known and some lesser. At the Schillerstraße you can find a pretty long mural created by the artist Daniel Ricardo Ortiz Polido from Nicaragua and the inhabitants of the social facilities located directly on the other side of the street. The ‘diakom‘ for example offers jobs and advanced training to people with mental handicaps. This art work shows the world through the eyes of addicts and mentally ill persons.

It is one of the places tourists at Kassel, Germany normally don’t get to see because of its location: the Park Schönfeld is a public park in the south of the city and part of a green connection between the Karlsaue and the Habichtswald. It is named after Nikolaus Heinrich von Schönfeld (born 1733) who also built a beautiful house – the Schlösschen Schönfeld – here.

At the southern end of the Staatspark Karlsaue of Kassel, Germany you can find the Blumeninsel Siebenbergen – an artificial island within the Küchengraben created in 1710 and designed in the year 1820. It is an island on which between April and October a vast number of flowers can be admired. It is a mix between local and exotic plants.

When you’re walking along the Fulda close to the Orangerie at Kassel, Germany you might be a bit surprised to see a giant pickaxe close to the river. Or you might be not surprised as you can see many artworks throughout this city regularly hosting the art exhibition documenta. Why would you enlarge a pickaxe massively and put it at this specific place?

If the inhabitants of Kassel, Germany talk about the ‘Buga‘ than they mean something different than the rest of the country. ‘Buga‘ here refers to the Fuldaaue, an area that was redesigned by the Bundesgartenschau 1981 (federal horticultural show, abbreviated as ‘Buga‘). Kassel has seen two Bundesgartenschauen: in 1955 when the Karlsaue was restored after the war and in 1981 when within the Fuldaaue the ‘BUGA-See‘ as a swimming lake with different small beaches was created.

Within the Staatspark Karlsaue at Kassel, Germany you can find a big lake – the Aueteich (wetland pond). Within there is an island called Schwaneninsel (swan island) you can’t reach unless you swim over or wait until the water is frozen in winter times. On the island you can see a neoclassical temple with a golden sphere on top: it symbolizes the planet jupiter and is part of the ‘Planetenweg‘ showing the distances of the planets in scale 1:495 millions.