German Colonial Museum

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German Colonial Museum (left) next to Lehrter Bahnhof in Berlin , 1900

The German Colonial Museum was a museum in the Berlin district of Moabit that existed from 1899 to 1915 and provided information about the German colonies .

history

Map section in Berlin-Moabit , 1915
German colonial exhibition 1896, forerunner of the colonial museum

In the fall of 1896, the Berlin trade exhibition closed , with the “1. German Colonial Exhibition ”, the Berlin public should be interested in the German colonies. After the successful conclusion of the exhibition, the question arose what should happen to the objects that had been painstakingly collected. The organizers decided to “keep the collection of raw products from the German colonies and products made from the same in the colonial exhibition together after the end of the exhibition and to make it the basis of a colonial museum”. From the beginning, the aim of the museum was less a scientific approach than a propagandistic one that was intended to arouse interest in the German colonies among the population. State-of-the-art exhibition techniques such as photographs, panorama presentations and the reconstruction of "realistic" scenes were used for this.

With the support of Adolph von Hansemann and the support of the colonial department of the Foreign Office , Kaiser Wilhelm II was able to inaugurate the German Colonial Museum on October 13, 1899 in the building of the former Marine Panorama .

Structure of the exhibition

The tour of the Colonial Museum began in a representative entrance area, where a bust of Wilhelm II entitled The Patron of our Colonies was the eye-catcher. The first showroom was the import hall , followed by the export hall . First, the import room provided information about the products that were shipped from the German colonies to the Reich, such as B. rubber , cocoa, tropical woods or precious stones. Products that German companies exported to the colonies, such as fertilizers, tropical medicine, wire and machines, were exhibited in the export hall. According to the original plans, an export sample warehouse was to be developed from these rooms by 1920 .

Huts from Togo in the German Colonial Museum

The main attraction was the replica of the East African Rufiji River valley in the middle of the large dome building, which was illustrated by a flowing watercourse that the visitor crossed over boulders. On the first floor there was a reading room where you could take a look at the colonial literature and newspapers from the colonies. Protestant and Catholic missions presented their work in other rooms .

The other museum departments were hygiene as well as geography , history , statistics and colonial life, divided into individual so-called “protected areas” . In the German-Cameroon department one could enter the replica of a veranda of a non-commissioned officers' mess, which offered a panorama from Douala to the Atlantic . In the Togo department you could see houses that were true to the original , and a Herero camp was found near German South West Africa . Kiautschou was represented by Chinese street life and a view of the bay with naval ships. The German New Guinea area offered u. a. a coastal panorama, huts or stilt houses with all kinds of everyday objects and typical regional boats including fishing rods and nets.

Many individual items complemented the respective departments. These included loot from the colonies (e.g. the Hendrik Witboois chair ) and colonial memorabilia, such as the flag that Adolf Lüderitz once hoisted in Angra Pequena . In addition to these historical objects, stuffed animals, photographs or relief maps of the cities of Swakopmund , Dar es Salaam and Neu-Langenburg illustrated the facets of the colonial regions.

The German Colonial House operated a café in the Colonial Museum, in which food from overseas territories was served.

Further development

In 1900, the joint stock company "German Colonial Museum " under the chairman of the supervisory board, Hans Lothar von Schweinitz, came into the hands of the German Colonial Society , which from then on made all decisions until the museum was closed. As early as 1906, the colonial museum hit the headlines for the first time because of its red numbers. The entrance fees did not fully cover the operating costs and it was decided that the colonial museum would receive money from the funding pots of the ethnological museum . Its director Felix von Luschan wrote in 1906:

“I did not particularly calculate [...] the colonial museum that now exists at Lehrter Bahnhof. According to an alleged wish of His Majesty the Emperor, this should initially only be preserved for schools etc. and for many reasons it must be affiliated to the Royal Museum of Ethnology [...]. I think that this museum, as a colonial panorama, could somehow be placed in a corner of our new building in such a way that it does not interfere with the rest of our operations. "

The aforementioned merger never took place. In 1911 the Deutsche Kolonialzeitung reported that 481,259 visitors had visited the museum since it opened in 1899 and 2,931 lectures had been given. How successful the museum was actually received by the general public remains unclear. The German Colonial Museum did not come back into the black, and so it closed in 1915 for financial reasons.

Parts of the holdings (a total of 3,342 objects) were sold to the Linden Museum in Stuttgart in 1917 . The remaining almost 70,000 exhibits were probably stored in the archive of the Ethnological Museum in the Weimar Republic and exported to the Soviet Union as looted art during the Second World War .

literature

  • Albert Gouaffo: Knowledge and Culture Transfer in a Colonial Context. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-8260-3754-2 .
  • Ralph Jessen, Jakob Vogel: Science and Nation in European History . Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-593-37155-3 .
  • Ulrich van der Heyden, Joachim Zeller (ed.): Colonial metropolis Berlin. A search for clues . Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-8148-0092-3 .
  • Ulrich van der Heyden: The German Colonial Museum in Berlin. A unique item in imperial Germany. In: The Bear of Berlin. Yearbook 2012 of the Association for the History of Berlin. Berlin / Bonn 2012, pp. 79–96.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hans Lothar von Schweinitz: Germany and its colonies in 1896. Official report on the first German colonial exhibition . Berlin 1896, p. 361.
  2. ↑ Ralph Jessen; Jakob Vogel: Science and Nation in European History. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 85.
  3. ↑ Promote and raise interest in colonial politics. In: Ulrich van der Heyden; Joachim Zeller (Ed.): Colonial metropolis Berlin. A search for clues. Berlin 2002, p. 143.
  4. ↑ Albert Gouaffo: knowledge and cultural transfer in the colonial context. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2007, p. 47.
  5. ↑ German colonial newspaper. No. 28, 15 July 1911, p. 477.
  6. ↑ Albert Gouaffo: knowledge and cultural transfer in the colonial context. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2007, p. 48.
  7. ↑ Cornelia Esser: Berlin's Ethnographic Museum in the Colonial Era. Notes on the relationship between ethnology and colonialism in Germany. In: Berlin in the past and present. Yearbook of the Berlin State Archives. 1986, pp. 65-94.

Coordinates: 52 ° 31 ′ 21 ″  N , 13 ° 22 ′ 5 ″  E