Brothers Grimm Museum Kassel

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The historic Palais Bellevue housed the museum

The Brothers Grimm Museum Kassel (BGM) was located in the Palais Bellevue in Kassel until October 31, 2014 . It was dedicated to the life and work of the Brothers Grimm with a focus on the children's and household tales they had collected . In the course of the conceptual realignment and the construction of the GRIMM WORLD Kassel it was closed.

The 1959 by the city of Kassel and the Brothers Grimm Society e. V. founded museum was in the administration and sponsorship of the city of Kassel. A three-person board of trustees, to which the Brothers Grimm Society sent a representative, was responsible for the museum director's personnel matters and questions of content. The director of the museum was Bernhard Lauer .

The Brothers Grimm Museum saw itself not only as an exhibition space, but also as a library, archive and research institute. It claimed to be the national and international central location for coordinating Grimm research and other interests in the Brothers Grimm. There were internal scientific discussions about this claim. Since 2006, the current and future role of the Brothers Grimm Museum has also been discussed in a broad national public.

There is currently a virtual museum.

history

Double portrait of the brothers Wilhelm Grimm (left) and Jacob Grimm by Elisabeth Maria Anna Jerichau-Baumann, 1855

The museum was established in 1959 from collection items that were contributed by the then Murhardschen und Landesbibliothek (MuLB), the city of Kassel and, on a smaller scale, by the Brothers Grimm Society, and were significantly expanded through new acquisitions and donations.

The first exhibition rooms as well as the administration and archive of the museum were opened on January 4, 1960 , Jacob Grimm's 175th birthday, in the Murhardschen and Landesbibliothek in Kassel. The founding director was Ludwig Denecke , who was also responsible for some of the museum's basic acquisitions (main part of Ludwig Emil Grimm's artistic estate , household items and letters from Lotte Grimm's family ). The museum was part of the Murhardschen and Landesbibliothek until the early 1970s. In terms of personnel and with regard to a large part of the Grimm holdings, this remained so until the joint management of both institutions was no longer possible due to the establishment of the Kassel University Library. Ludwig Denecke and his successor Dieter Hennig managed the museum and the library in personal union. Under Hennig, the museum's exhibition moved to the ground floor of the Palais Bellevue (see below, location problems ). The first showrooms were opened there on October 21, 1972 , and the exhibition space in today's state library and Murhard library was given up. Over time, the museum expanded to all four floors of the palace after other facilities moved out of the historic building. Important collection items that were made available from the holdings of the state library or the MuLB during the period of the personal union had so far remained in the BGM against the will of the library. This problem became even more explosive, as the museum director described the most valuable of these exhibits, the hand copies of the Brothers Grimm's "Children's and Household Tales", which are part of the UNESCO World Heritage Document , as the property of the Brothers Grimm Society.

In 2010 and 2011 the museum was closed because the Palais Bellevue was being renovated. In 2012 the exhibition was reopened on the first and second floors.

exhibition

The permanent exhibition contained a number of exhibits that were intended to illustrate the everyday life of the brothers and, to a lesser extent, were directly related to them. In the Palais Bellevue, a splendid feudal building from the 18th century, attempts were made to reconstruct the living space of the two brothers with Biedermeier furniture . Before the renovation of the Palais Bellevue, an adventure world was staged on the third floor. Some of the works of his brother Ludwig Emil Grimm , who was a painter, draftsman and engraver, were also on display.

One of the most important exhibits was the Grimm copy of the children's and house fairy tales from 1812/1815. It was included in the list of World Document Heritage by UNESCO in 2005. The personal copy is on loan from the Kassel University Library. Like many other valuable Grimm objects, it came from the old Kassel State Library, which was merged with the less damaged Murhard Library in Kassel after the Second World War due to the destruction of most of its book collections due to the war and later expanded to form the Kassel University Library.

The changing exhibitions mostly had fairy tale motifs, the reception of which in the past was preferably illuminated by book illustrations (in original or reproductions). The Brothers Grimm Museum had one of the largest existing collections of editions of the Grimm fairy tales.

Location problem

The northern gate guard building on Brüder-Grimm-Platz. The Brothers Grimm lived on the top floor
The palace along the “Schöne Aussicht”, with the Neue Galerie in the background

From summer 2006 to spring 2007, only the ground floor of the museum was temporarily open, as serious structural defects in the historic spiral staircase from 1790 led to the staircase being blocked. The entire building was reopened for Documenta 2007 after historic wooden doors in the palace had been replaced by fire doors. A children's book exhibition (Witzel Collection) was shown on the ground floor and first floor until 2008. The permanent exhibition about the Brothers Grimm was located on the second floor, and an “interactive fairy tale adventure world” on the third floor. Apart from the structural deficiencies, the Palais Bellevue was a problematic location for such a museum and with the existing structure did not satisfy its expansion plans. The house was also not administratively defined as a museum building. A fundamental renovation would require the prior definition of the purpose of use as a museum, which would result in a variety of requirements, such as the installation or extension of a second staircase. That would have entailed further questionable interventions in the historical structure of the building, especially since the Palais Bellevue was and still is the only former city palace of the landgrave / electoral house of Hessen-Kassel in Kassel that is still largely preserved inside .

The Brothers Grimm Society and the City of Kassel initially spoke out in favor of expanding the museum (with administration, library and research facility) at the Palais Bellevue site. Possible additions and extensions were presented as part of an architecture competition. The authenticity of the building was cited as an argument against moving. However, this was not undisputed: the palace has undergone significant changes several times since it was built in 1715 as an observatory for Landgrave Karl . Until 1956 it housed apartments of the Landgrave family of Hesse. The brothers' relation to the building was rather small, even if they lived in the neighborhood for about ten years. A former home of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm still stands on Brüder-Grimm-Platz (the building was damaged in World War II, and the partition walls of the former Grimm's apartment were removed during the renovation into today's administrative court). The state of Hesse, especially the former Hessian Minister for Art Udo Corts , offered the option of relocating the museum to this larger property. This option, however, was not supported by the cultural mayor of the city of Kassel and the director of the Brothers Grimm Museum.

Another residential building belonging to the Brothers Grimm in Kassel, which has been preserved to this day, is located in the street "Schöne Aussicht", number 9, as is the Palais Bellevue. This building was sold a few years ago by the heirs to the municipal housing association in the expectation that it would be used as a museum should be, for example for the Spohr Museum housed in the Palais Bellevue (until 2009).

Instead, the city of Kassel had the new GRIMMWELT Kassel built on the vineyard from 2013 to 2014 .

Stocks; Library and archive

The museum housed an extensive collection of books and manuscripts, some of which belonged to the State Library and Murhard Library and the Brothers Grimm Society, partly at the Palais Bellevue location, partly in the administration and archive rooms in the Murhard building, and partly in other depots. According to the museum director, the museum had around 100,000 items in its collection. Only a very small proportion of these holdings went directly back to the Brothers Grimm. In addition to the personal copies of “Children's and Household Tales” and “German Grammar”, the sofa from Jacob Grimm's study, a box with a miniature portrait of the Grimm brothers' mother or a picture from Wilhelm Grimm's study should be mentioned here. Other exhibits came from the families of their Kassel relatives. Particularly important was the large inventory of drawings and graphics by Ludwig Emil Grimm, most of which the museum had acquired directly from the artist's descendants.

The specialist library of Germanist Ulrich Pretzel had the largest share of the total number of objects in the BGM's holdings with around 50,000 volumes. This was taken over by the Brothers Grimm Society in 2004 from the Technical University of Darmstadt , which in turn acquired it from the family in the 1980s and since then has not had the capacity to incorporate it in Darmstadt and make it available for use. In addition to the Pretzel library, the depots of the Brothers Grimm Museum contained three further literary bequests : from Karl Schulte Kemminghausen , Leo Weisgerber and René van de Zijpe (around 14,000 volumes and several thousand archival and artistic documents, including larger holdings of the Grimm researcher's estate Wilhelm Schoof ).

Due to the existing spatial and usage problems, the BGM collections were only partially accessible to the public. In addition to the technical difficulties of use in the broadest sense, researchers from various specialist areas who did not belong to the inner circle of the museum and society have repeatedly criticized for more than ten years that access to the holdings maintained by the Grimm Museum is made difficult for them. This particularly affected the autograph collection and the collections of graphics and hand drawings.

literature

  • Bernhard Lauer: The Brothers Grimm - Life and Work , Kassel 2005, ISBN 3-929633-37-X
  • Dieter Hennig: Brothers Grimm Museum Kassel. Catalog of the exhibition in Palais Bellevue , Kassel 1973
  • DER SPIEGEL (18/2006), Scholars: Ammenmärchen from Kassel , Hamburg 2006
  • Bernhard Lauer: Possibilities and limits of museum presentation of the Brothers Grimm - memorials and exhibitions 1885 to 2015. In: Yearbook of the Brothers Grimm Society XIX – XX. Kassel 2019, pp. 7–144.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Virtual Museum ; "The virtual Brothers Grimm Museum enables you to visit the permanently closed exhibition on the life and work of the Brothers Grimm in the historic Palais Bellevue."
  2. Fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm. Retrieved August 31, 2017 .
  3. grimms.de , accessed on December 15, 2012.
  4. stadt-kassel.de , accessed on December 15, 2012.

Coordinates: 51 ° 18 ′ 35 "  N , 9 ° 29 ′ 38"  E