Elvis Presley is set to return to a German town where he lived in the late 1950s as a U.S. Army private, in the form of a nearly 6-foot-tall bronze statue. The statue will be placed by August in Bad Nauheim on a pedestrian bridge spanning the aptly named Usa River, where Presley took part in a photo shoot in March 1959.
To prepare for the statue’s arrival, the bridge’s vertical, postwar railings were replaced with decorative wrought-iron ones similar to what was there when the pictures of Presley were taken.
The statue will be on the bridge in time for Bad Nauheim’s annual Elvis festival, when the usually quiet spa town is transformed into what it describes on its website as “a sea of Cadillacs, petticoats and Elvis quiffs,” with rock ‘n’ roll as the soundtrack.
The photo shows Elvis fans Meike Berger and Angela Storm with the life-size bronze statue of Elvis Presley at the Rincker foundry in Sinn, Germany. They initiated a GoFundMe page to raise money to produce the statue, modeled after a photo of Presley, that will be placed on a bridge in Bad Nauheim, Germany.
The celebration of the life and music of Bad Nauheim’s most famous former resident was canceled last year because of the coronavirus pandemic, but this year's festival is scheduled for Aug. 13-15, health conditions permitting, the organizers have said. It’s always held around the anniversary of Presley’s death in Memphis, Tenn., on Aug. 16, 1977.