Katzenbalgen, the Monument to Homeless Cats

In Braunschweig, Germany, where the streets Hutfilter, Damm and Kattreppeln meet in the pedestrian zone, the most gorgeous, humorous and unconventional monument of the city has stood since 1981, the “Katzenbalgen” stele by Siegfried Neuenhausen, a former professor at the Braunschweig University of Art and one of the most outstanding personalities in Lower Saxony’s art scene.

The monument is impressively large and looks like a high stele, on which a variety of bronze cats are fixed in different poses. All people who see the monument for the first time notice its incredible realism.
The memorial opened more than 30 years ago, became now one of the main attractions of Braunschweig and it calls people to behave more attentively to the animals.
Only the most attentive people can correctly count the number of bronze cats that have settled on the stele.
For several years, the homeless cats are a difficult problem for many German cities but, in any case, “Katzenbalgen” literally means cat fight, and the original idea was that cats used to be able to play, scrap and fight in the streets and this imagines what it would have looked like. Probably the idea was inspired by the name of the street “Kattrepplen” which sort of has “cat” in it….