On the facade of the former Reichsbank building in Hamburg, three figures encapsulate the city’s history: a man who may be an artisan or farmer representing the area’s early origins; a Hanseatic merchant-shipowner of the Middle Ages and, what likely seemed in the early 1900s, the epitome of civilization, a merchant-banker, top-hatted, sneering and surrounded by the evidence of his wealth.
Today, the building, facing Hamburg’s Inner Alster Lake, is occupied by an art gallery. It was heavily damaged during World War II and rebuilt after.
