Who cares about Otto? The monument of Otto von Bismarck in Bielefeld between commemoration, forgetting, and intervention

Monuments remain physically present long after the commemorative practices and shared interpretations that once sustained them have eroded. This article examines this process through the history of the Bismarck monument in Bielefeld, Germany, from its inauguration in 1903 to the present. Drawing on archival sources, newspaper reports, city council records, and documentation of recent interventions, it traces three successive memory regimes: national-heroic commemoration, postwar historicization and spatial marginalization, and the contemporary pluralization of meaning. It shows that political ruptures do not necessarily coincide with mnemonic change and that forgetting often unfolds gradually through shifting practices, spatial contexts, and communities of memory. Treating forgetting not as erasure but as a constitutive operation of memory, the article argues that the erosion of established meanings creates the conditions for new and competing historical appropriations.