A man stands on a high pedestal. He is bound and wearing only a loincloth. His body is very thin and his face expressionless. The work of art is made of basalt. Basalt is a dark-coloured volcanic stone. The carbon dioxide in the air has changed the stone. It is now much darker than it used to be.
The Berlin Wall between East and West Germany was built in the early 1960s. Under this impression, the city council of Osnabrück commissioned the artist Gerhard Marcks (1889–1981) to create a work of art for the public space. The pedestal bears the inscription “to the victims for truth and freedom”. This is intended to commemorate two important events in Germany: the assassination attempt on Hitler by Stauffenberg on 20 July 1944 and the East German uprising in the GDR on 17 June 1953. The sculpture is still actively used today on several memorial days, for example for wreath-laying ceremonies.