The first half is done. After almost seven years of construction, part of the Deutsches Museum has a new look. That’s good news, because at one point it looked like the whole project was going to spin. The construction costs exploded, the architects went broke, and new holes kept opening up – in the concrete as well as in the budget. Until the very end, everyone involved trembled as to whether the opening date, which had been postponed several times, could be kept. But now 19 exhibitions have been dusted off, revised and revived with new ideas, from nuclear physics to agriculture. They seem airier, clearer, the mustiness of the post-war period has disappeared. New things were added to historical machines such as the first diesel engine and spatial installations such as Justus von Liebig’s chemical laboratory: a talking robot or a look inside the eye.
But one thing cannot be overlooked: the renovation of the almost 100-year-old building cost so much money that little was left for modern exhibition concepts. And so there are now many showcases in the halls, with tiny text panels on which nothing more than numbers, data and facts can be found. That may be enough for engineers, but not for everyone else. Anyone who really wants to learn something here is just as dependent on moderators as in the past, who explain what is not self-explanatory. Will the digital natives be fascinated by this “most modern German museum of all time”? Those who want to get excited about science and technology so that they can shape the world of tomorrow? After the first impression this is doubtful.
And what about the promise that, as a technology museum, you will also be open to social issues? At best, it has been partially redeemed. Yes, many things can be added via app or rental tablets – films, music, interviews, biographies. You could tell something about the dazzling personality of Robert Koch, whose incubator for cultivating bacteria is in a display case. Or about Otto Hahn, whose nuclear fission table the museum owns and who Albert Einstein said was one of the few scientists who stayed upright during the Nazi era. Or about Marie Curie, the two-time Nobel Prize winner, who trained women on X-ray machines during the First World War.
You have to see the whole thing as a “work in progress”. Hoping that work will be done in many places. That will be necessary anyway, because unlike an art museum, a technology museum has to react to new developments. Now the second half begins. And it could also be a time for learning and for exchanging ideas with visitors.