The Victory Column

That glittering figure rising above the Tiergarten is Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory, and Berliners have always called her "Goldelse," which roughly translates as Golden Lizzy. She stands 8.3 metres tall on top of a column that climbs nearly 67 metres into the sky, and she has been watching over this city through some of its most turbulent years.

When architect Heinrich Strack first designed the column in the early 1870s, it was meant to honour a single Prussian military victory over Denmark in 1864. But Prussia kept winning. By the time construction finished, it had also defeated Austria and then France, and those three wars together had forged a brand new nation: the German Empire. So the monument grew in meaning, and the gilded cannon barrels wrapped around its lower sections, sixty in total, twenty from each war, became a permanent record of that transformation.

Originally the column stood directly in front of the Reichstag. In 1938, the Nazi government relocated it here and added an extra section, making it taller and more imposing.

After World War II, Soviet and French officials wanted it demolished. British and American forces said no. Golden Lizzy survived, still standing, still watching.