Personification of Szczecin - Sedina

On 23 September 1898, at the Tobruk Square in Szczecin in front of the contemporary seat of the city authorities, in the presence of Keiser Wilhelm II Hohenzollern and his wife Augusta Victoria, the monument of Sedina, also known as Manzelbrunnen, from the name of Ludwig Manzel, a sculptor who won the competition for the monumental fountain for Szczecin, announced in 1894 by the Prussian National Art Committee, was unveiled. The artist who came from Pomerania, born in 1858 in Kagendorf (today Nau Kosenow) near Anklam, was educated and settled in Berlin, created a monument ˗ a fountain presenting a young woman with a sail on her arms, standing at the bow of the cog: a sea guard of wealth. Apart from the woman’s figure evoking associations with the German Freya, goddess of weather, winds and affluence, the monument also presents Mercury, the god of merchants, mediation and a man, a personification of industry, as well as a nymph and two sea dragons ˗ representatives of Poseidon’s kingdom. The fountain, embodying the power of the Hanseatic city of merchants, became the symbol of the pre-war Szczecin and its showpiece greeting the visitors who arrived to the Oder metropolis by train. This no longer existing monument, favouring the traditional middle class taste, was willingly reproduced in books, magazines and in the form of numerous editions of postcards and high-volume reproduction pictures. The collections of the Szczecin museum feature a reduced bronze cast of Sedina ˗ the main character from the fountain, executed in the famous Berlin metal casting shop Gladenbeck&Sohn. It is an example of the fad for reduced versions of well-known large size sculptural works which took place the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. The miniature sculpture can be treated as a type of artistic artefact used for interior decoration of burgher homes.

Dariusz Kacprzak