Brickhenge

The day before I left Essen, I decided I had to find this place that I'd seen in a coffee-table book about the metro area. It was too weird to pass up.

It was actually rather difficult to find, but I ended up stumbling across it just as I was about to give up, having walked through way too many garden allotments and gotten too many dirty looks.

What this is is a (former) monument to the Freikorps or paramilitaries of the early interwar period, in ways the forerunners of the SA thug squads which Hitler later rode to power. The monument has long since been stripped of its bronze memorial plaques, and is now just a Stonehenge-like ring of brick columns topped with either concrete or stone ashlars.

For scale, note the woman sitting on top of the ring, reading (just left of center).