Barricade at the castle garden
Revolutionary barricade
Barricades are particularly dramatically charged symbols of the revolution of 1849. Especially in Saxony, where 250 people were killed in barricade battles in May 1849, they also became a subject of visual art. The painter Julius Scholtz (1825-93) depicted a very vivid Dresden barricade scene.
As a close-up, it conveys an impression of the intensity of the confrontation between the irregulars (here in bourgeois clothing) and the Prussian-Saxon military. It also documents the “architecture” of the barricades: torn out cobblestones, wagon wheels, wooden barrels. The latter (French barrique = barrel) also led to the name barricade.
The barricade myth
As a symbolic place of resistance against oppressive authorities, the barricades have often given rise to myths – as was the case in Kirchheimbolanden.
Mathilde Hitzfeld provided the necessary personification for a myth [Standort 59]. An illustration published in 1893 shows the twenty-three-year-old with a black, red and gold flag on a barricade. In 1905, the Kirchheimbolanden “Lokalanzeiger” also commemorated Mathilde Hitzfeld in an obituary: “She took part in the barricade fight in Kirchheimbolanden and tried in vain to stop the advance of the Prussians with a small band of daring freedom heroes. The newspaper text and book illustration are thus in line with each other.
However, since no barricade battles took place in Kirchheimbolanden in 1849, a dramatic event is constructed – not as “fake news”, but as an incentive for emotional imagination and transfiguration.
But the events of June 14, 1849 were no different shortly afterwards. A letter from the irregular Joseph Regnier from Mainz provides information: “It was a strange state of mind we were in, we had forgotten everything around us and thought it couldn’t be any different.”
