Fritz Reuter, 1893
Franz Engelsman
Humboldt Park
East of North Humboldt
Drive and north of West Division Street
This nine-foot tall bronze statue depicts Fritz Reuter
(1810-1874), a German writer who was arrested and sentenced to death by the
Prussian government for his purported participation in a student-activist
group. Although his sentence was eventually commuted he did spend seven years
in prison. Despite suffering from poor health after this experience, Reuter
became a popular novelist who contributed to the development of regional
dialect literature, as he wrote in Plattdeutsch,
the Low German vernacular of northern Germany.
The artist, Franz Engelsman, was a native German living
in Chicago when he won the competition to create this memorial. More than
50,000 people attended the dedication on May 14, 1893. The granite column
originally featured bronze bas-relief scenes from Reuter’s stories but they
were stolen during the 1930s and never recovered.
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