Vacation in Hamburg: Visit to the Museum of Hamburg History – Travel

If a museum is 100 years old and you can see it, that is not generally taken as a compliment. And then if a child asks innocently during a tour of the Hamburg History Museum, “What do adults find so great about museums?”, one immediately senses the curators’ panic fear of having failed in the eyes of a youth without books and patience . And that despite the fact that the constant call for contemporary forms of presentation with computer-generated “content” in some places has already led to exhibitions becoming flattened like Instagram channels.

Now, after a century, the pressure to make a huge collection of artefacts compatible with new “viewing habits” is also leading to radical measures in Hamburg. The museum, which opened in 1922 on the old Wallring between the Reeperbahn and Michel, will close its permanent exhibition for four years in February 2023 and completely modernize it. So the next few months will offer one last opportunity to roam an interestingly unfashionable collection that shows all of its historical layers. The idea of ​​how history stays alive is presented in one of the largest city history museums in the world for as long as 100 annual rings.

The construction of the nested house during the First World War followed the concept of avoiding the harmonizing influence of museum architecture. Stylistically uniform large forms always give the impression of having culturally completed something. But the magnificent city history museums of the turn of the century, such as the Bavarian National Museum or the Märkisches Museum in Berlin, established a different tradition. As a style collage of different building cultures, these are famous predecessors of Fritz Schumacher’s design, which, however, did not mix any architectural styles. For the imposing L-shaped courtyard building, he testified to the epochs through originals – for which his quiet brick building provided the framework.

The legendary master builder of Hamburg, who shaped the city like no one before him until he was deposed by the Nazi state, used more than 300 spolia, i.e. components of lost town houses. Formative building elements that were saved after the great fire of 1842, such as the emperor statues in the town hall or the portal of the destroyed Petrikirche, were recycled by Schumacher from the building yard, as were columns, inscriptions, figureheads, coats of arms, windows, painted ceilings and entire rooms.

Open detailed view

From the facade to the representative stairwell to the furthest corner under the roof, there are such built-in antiquities whose modern curse is that they look so incredibly old. But while even visitors who value the authenticity of things more than their digital likeness may complain that the lighting and lettering here occasionally date back to the typewriter age, the concrete reliving of the city’s earlier habitats is still genuine. Perhaps also because of the mustiness in a museum, which sensually underscores everyday life in times without electricity, gas heating, double windows and full insulation.

The fact that time has stood still in many places in this house must not only be understood as a sacrilege of an eternally underfunded museum education, but can also be read as an intense contrast to the present and our media image of history. Nowhere is this demonstrated more vividly than in the large model railway hall. In contrast to Hamburg’s most popular attraction, the miniature wonderland in the warehouse district with action-packed micro-worlds, the playing field for hobby engine drivers opened in the museum in 1949 is a panorama of the post-war period.

Each character, from the homeless man playing the violin to “Kirsten” waving “to the North Express” at the Schlachthofbrücke, represents the story of a time of upheaval in a coherent multidimensional context and for people who can no longer remember the reconstruction personally. If all these playful tales of a cutely idealized epoch of hope were to disappear as files in a digital application, they would be as fleeting as a Tiktok video.

The collage of epochs that Fritz Schumacher realized in architecture can be found in the many pedagogical approaches of the past hundred years in the house. Wooden city models depicting Hamburg in different centuries, life situations recreated on the steerage deck of an emigrant ship, in a grocery store or a St. Pauli pub, a reconstructed synagogue room, a shared flat from the 1960s or showcases with yellowed explanatory notes can be found in the total heterogeneous growth in didactics as well as projectors and computer screens, videos and apps. In fact, all of the offers satisfy curiosity in their own way, whether it’s about the plague, syphilis and the French era, or about coins, the port and student protests.

Open detailed view

The somewhat crowded ambience of the museum, in which even such a famous piece as the alleged skull of the pirate Klaus Störtebeker, nailed to a beam, is only presented in the corridor, naturally has the greatest appeal for people who also use junk shops and flea markets as a voyage of discovery enjoy.

This antiquity will now be clarified in the coming transformation, when significantly fewer than 5,000 of the more than 500,000 objects in the museum will continue to be exhibited. For this, the topic of “colonialism” should finally be adequately commented on, which as a small artistic intervention compared to the production of glory for Hamburg’s overseas merchants is badly neglected at the moment.

After the announcement for the €36 million repositioning of the museum that the permanent exhibition would be aligned with thematic strands such as migration, media, postcolonialism, the environment and LGBTIQA+, it can be considered certain that the brittle and storable originality of this museum will evaporate – and the museum so that it becomes a little more similar to many other museums. This may be necessary so that today’s digitally socialized children can find these museums great as adults. But something historical is also lost in the process, which can still be experienced in this spooky castle for Hamburg history. Grown Aura. Before it disappears into the distant memory like Kerstin’s Nord-Express, it would be a compliment for the curators of the past 100 years if many more visitors came.