Der Fackelträger — The Torchbearer

Der Fackelträger — The Torchbearer

After Arno Breker.

The fire carried forward through the dark. Prometheus, the watchman, the lightbringer. Here the flame is not stolen from the gods so much as held out in front of the body that must follow it.

Not a decorative piece, but a figure of summons. The open right hand stops the viewer; the raised torch tells him where to look. Order is not only imposed. It is announced. Like Siegreicher Krieger and Der Rächer, this is one of Breker’s monumental reliefs for the unbuilt heart of Germania — planned at about five metres for Speer’s Großer Bogen and the long frieze program of the north–south axis, a war monument dedicated to the fallen of the Reich.

The courtyard bronze Die Partei is a different work: a standing torch-bearer at the Ehrenhof of the New Reich Chancellery. This is the wall relief. Period photographs by Charlotte Rohrbach fix the pose — stride, cloak at the hip, palm out, flame high. Like many of Breker’s state commissions, the large original did not survive the end of the war intact. Studios at Wriezen and Jäckelsbruch were burned or emptied. Plaster models were smashed. Stone and bronze were scattered. It is reasonable to assume the full architectural version never left the model-and-photograph stage, or that a stone cutting was lost in the same dispersal that swallowed the rest of the Germania program. That remains speculation. What is documented is the destination and the image.

Long believed lost, investigations in 2015 recovered three massive granite reliefs by Breker — identified as Der Rächer, Der Wächter and Kameraden — outside a warehouse in Bad Dürkheim. Each was reported at around 40 tons, in 49 pieces. *Der Fackelträger* was not named among them.

Today the original monumental relief is not on public display. A bronze version of this composition is reported at the Arno Breker Museum in Schloss Nörvenich. The large architectural panel has not been restored to a wall.

Carefully restored and digitally prepared from surviving photographs to preserve depth, texture and shadow. Printed on museum-grade matte paper.

This edit is exclusively offered through Thuleism. No comparable high-resolution edition is widely available elsewhere.

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Details

- Museum-grade matte paper

- Archival pigment print

- Thick, durable stock

- Designed for framing

Each piece is set within the format, rather than printed edge to edge. The margins are intentional allowing the work to breathe and to be easily framed in widely available standard frames.

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Age restrictions: For adults

EU Warranty: 2 years

Other compliance information: Meets the small parts and magnetic flux index level requirements.

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