Memorial Hohenwestedt Memorial for the Fallen of the First World War

The communities of the parish of Hohenwestedt built a memorial for the fallen of the First World War on a hilltop visible from afar at the edge of the village of Hohenwestedt. According to the design of Albert Brodelten, who had grown up in Hohenwestedt, this imposing and probably largest memorial for the fallen of the First World War in Schleswig-Holstein was built from 1920.

He was municipal garden director in Berlin from 1910 to 1926 and, among other things, helped plan the garden of the Villa Liebermann at Wannsee in the villa colony Alsen. The memorial was framed by a ring of boulder masonry, into which the name plaques of the fallen were embedded. Lime trees planted in even distance should result in a closed tree wreath, while low hawthorn hedges filled the spaces of the wall slices. A double oak stood in the centre of the grounds. In 1921 the memorial was dedicated. In 1998, BHF Landscape Architects were commissioned to carry out maintenance and restoration work on the listed memorial. Extensive arboricultural measures had to be carried out on the lime tree wreath and the hawthorn hedges, which had largely died in the shade pressure of the lime trees, were replaced with hornbeams.
Information on Albert Brodersen has been compiled by the Landesamt für Denkmalpflege Schleswig-Holstein: http://www.historischegaerten.de/exhibition/Schleswig-Holstein/PDF/01BRODER.PDF

The following text was provided by the Landesamt für Denkmalpflege Schleswig-Holstein as part of an exhibition on this monument by Dr. Margita M. Meyer Eva von Engelberg-Dockal and Henrike Schwarz:
A Schleswig-Holstein citizen as a Berlin garden director and his memorial in Hohenwestedt
Albert Brodersen was born on 16.11.1857 as the son of the estate manager Andreas Brodersen and his wife Ingwersen Albertine Christine geb. Meyer on Gut Ascheberg. When his father became Rentamtsmeister in Hohenwestedt in 1869, the family moved there. After about ten years of practical training in various renowned nurseries and after numerous study trips that took him to England, Italy, France, Vienna, Paris, Moscow and Budapest, he completed his training in Potsdam-Wildpark in 1884. In 1887 he married Dorothea Körner, daughter of the well-known landscape gardener Körner in Steglitz, and after the death of his father-in-law he continued the business together with his brother-in-law. During these years he created around 20 large landscaped grounds, mainly for major industrialists in the Rhineland, but also in Berlin and Poland. His best-known gardens are the Lehrbach House near Bergisch-Gladbach, the palace park in Biesdorf for the Siemens family, the Königspark in Guben and numerous villa gardens in Potsdam, Grunewald and on the Wannsee. Urban development projects, the construction of racecourses in Cologne and other sports facilities have also been handed down. His good contacts and excellent reputation as a landscape gardener probably led to his being appointed Hermann Mäch- tig's successor as Berlin garden director in 1910. He was not only a very experienced and extremely well-educated gardener who was well versed in all practical areas of horticulture, but also always behaved diplomatically in the sometimes bitter and polemical debate between "landscape gardeners" and the architecturally determined reformers of the new garden art movement around 1900. Taking the example of the dispute as to whether it was still in keeping with the times to implant a wildly romantic waterfall in the Viktoriapark in the metropolis of Berlin, which was exploding with social and economic developments, instead of giving this waterfall an architectural form, as propagated by the reformers, he simply remarked "The dispute is idle.... Both have their justification."
Just as he accommodated the wishes of his clients as a free contractor, so must his work as Berlin garden director, where the magistrate gave him his tasks: the expansion and transformation of Berlin's greenery into Volksparke, the planting of avenue trees in the streets, the establishment of playgrounds and urban ornamental squares, of school gardens for the education of the population, and so on. - he completed the whole spectrum of tasks of a municipal green administration - and only in the details can Brodersen's characteristics be found. It must also be taken into account that during his fifteen years in office (1910 - 1925) the economic and political conditions, especially during and after the First World War, left no scope for new garden dreams. And so he is not only chronologically in the middle of his predecessor and successor - the rather conservative Mächtig, who preserved the heritage of the Lenné-Meyer school and could hardly open up to the new age - and his successor - the visionary Erwin Barth, who in the short heyday of the Weimar Republic Berlin won its social green spaces, which are still valid today.
Brodersen died of a heart attack in Berlin on 4 January 1930.