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 Munchausen riding a cannoball
book illustration by August von Wille
Source:Wikipedia
 Munchausen riding a cannoball
Poster of the 1943 movie
Source:posterdb.de
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The real Baron Hieronymus Karl Friedrich Freiherr von Münchhausen was a German nobleman who "... fought for the Russian Empire in the Russo-Turkish War of 1735–1739. Upon retiring in 1760, he became a minor celebrity within German aristocratic circles for telling outrageous tall tales based on his military career. After hearing some of Münchhausen's stories, Raspe adapted them anonymously into literary form, first in German as ephemeral magazine pieces and then in English as the 1785 book, which was first published in Oxford by a bookseller named Smith. The book was soon translated into other European languages, including a German version expanded by the poet Gottfried August Bürger. The real-life Münchhausen was deeply upset at the development of a fictional character bearing his name, and threatened legal proceedings against the book's publisher. Perhaps fearing a libel suit, Raspe never acknowledged his authorship of the work, which was only established posthumously."
"The fictional Baron Munchausen is a braggart soldier, most strongly defined by his comically exaggerated boasts about his own adventures. ... The Baron's stories imply him to be a superhuman figure who spends most of his time either getting out of absurd predicaments or indulging in equally absurd moments of gentle mischief. In some of his best-known stories, the Baron rides a cannonball, travels to the Moon, is swallowed by a giant fish in the Mediterranean Sea, saves himself from drowning by pulling on his own hair, fights a forty-foot crocodile, enlists a wolf to pull his sleigh, and uses laurel tree branches to fix his horse when the animal is accidentally cut in two."
Passages quoted from Wikipedia
The larger than life bronze statue shows Münchhausen riding a cannonball during the Russo Turkish War, surveying the Turkish defense and thus enabling the Russians to re-conquer the Otchakovo fortress. In 1982 sculptor Dietrich Rohde created a number of Münchhausen statues for schools and day-care centers in Potsdam and Brandenburg. This one is now placed in front of the Potsdam-Stern community center.
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