Germania

The Germania Building is an eight-story Beaux-Arts / Classical Revival building at 135 W. Wells St. in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was built in 1896 for George Brumder to house the headquarters of his burgeoning publishing empire, and in 1983 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. For more than a century it has stood at the corner of Wells and Fourth streets, a stone monument to the German-language press that once made Milwaukee the publishing capital of German-America.

A Headquarters for an Empire

By the mid-1890s Brumder's company had outgrown its earlier quarters. In 1896 he built a new home for the enterprise at 135 W. Wells St., an eight-story, 117,752-square-foot building designed by the German-trained architects Schnetzky & Liebert. At the time of its construction it was the largest office building in the city of Milwaukee, a fitting seat for the largest publisher of German-language materials in the United States. Its roofline was marked by the characteristic copper pickelhaube domes that still identify it today.

The Name and the Figure

The name Germania reached back beyond Milwaukee, beyond even the printing trade. It was the name Roman geographers gave to the lands of the Germanic peoples, and in time it became, like Britannia for Britain, a female personification of the German nation, shown with sword, shield, and imperial crown. Brumder had already given the name to his newspaper and would give it to his bank; above the door of the new building he placed the figure itself, a ten-foot, three-ton bronze statue of Germania set on a pediment over the entrance, watching over the city.

The Vanishing Statue

The figure did not survive the First World War. As anti-German sentiment rose in 1918, the building was renamed the Brumder Building, and the statue was removed discreetly in the night. For a time it was stored by the sculptor Cyril Colnik, but efforts to trace its fate have proven futile. One theory holds that it was melted down for scrap during the Second World War; another speculates that it may have gone to the Smithsonian Institution, and possibly still rests there, unmarked. The bronze figure above the door is gone; the mystery of where it went remains.

From Presses to Parking

Seventeen years after Brumder's death in 1910, the printing presses were removed from the basement levels of the building, giving the city its first underground parking garage. The name was changed back to the Germania Building after a significant renovation in 1981, and two years later, in July 1983, the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. The presses were gone, the statue was gone, but the name had returned to the stone.

The Milwaukee Fourteen

In 1968 the Brumder Building became the scene of a significant protest against the war in Vietnam. Nine Milwaukee draft boards maintained their offices on the second floor. On the evening of September 24, fourteen activists, later known as the Milwaukee Fourteen, entered the building and removed about ten thousand files. Those files were then carried outside across Wells Street, to the area now known as Postman Square, and burned. The building that had once printed the news of a community now became, for one night, a stage in the national debate over the war.

Later Years

In early 2007 the building was sold to a Milwaukee-based investor group led by Santino “Sonny” Bando, for slightly more than four million dollars, from a suburban-Chicago investment trust. The building had suffered a decline in tenants and a foreclosure sale in 1990, but was, at the time of the sale, ninety-five percent occupied. Bando, who also owned the historic Iron Block Building, said he liked buildings of that kind “because you can't really build them anymore.” The Germania Building, more than a century after Brumder raised it, remains one of downtown Milwaukee's landmarks.