Georgi Dimitrov Museum

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ceremony for the opening of the museum on June 18, 1952 in front of the Imperial Court building

The Georgi Dimitroff Museum in Leipzig was the largest museum in the GDR dedicated to a single person . It existed from 1952 to 1991 in the Reich Court building . The museum was officially subordinate to the Ministry of Higher Education and Technical Education and was therefore not a municipal institution of the City of Leipzig.

history

History and planning

Chinese delegation in the Georgi Dimitrov Museum, 1952
Statue of Dimitrov in the vestibule of the house with Chinese delegates, 1952

After the Reichstag fire in the night of 27 to 28 February 1933, Berlin and adopted immediately Reichstag Fire Decree (Reichstag Fire Decree) began in Leipzig at the local Supreme Court from 21 September of the same year the so-called Reichstag fire trial . One of the main defendants, the Bulgarian communist and later Prime Minister of the country, Georgi Dimitrov , played an important role in this. Well prepared and rhetorically skilled in German criminal law , Dimitrov succeeded in inflicting a serious defeat on the National Socialists in the show trial . Dimitrov and two other Bulgarian co-defendants were acquitted.

In 1950 the city of Leipzig and the Saxon state government decided to convert the building of the former imperial court, which had been inoperative since 1945, as a museum in honor of Dimitrov and as a cultural center . After the GDR Minister of Justice Max Fechner and representatives of the Bulgarian embassy in the GDR had visited the premises , it was recorded that the historic plenary hall in which the trial took place was to be restored to the appearance of 1933. At the end of the year the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the SED approved the project, and the opening date was July 2, 1951 - the second anniversary of Dimitrov's death. The Museum of German History in Berlin was entrusted with the conception of the content . The museum for the history of the German labor movement , which had been housed in the Reich court building since 1949, was to take over the museum development and processing of the objects shown and collected on site .

At the beginning of the coming year, the plans were put into concrete terms: A replica of the cell from the prison in Leipzig , in which Dimitroff was imprisoned before and during the trial, was to be built on the level of the plenary hall, and the entire second floor of the building was planned for the museum.

The opening was postponed several times for various reasons, but ultimately it took place on June 18, 1952 - on the occasion of Georgi Dimitroff's 70th birthday.

From opening to dissolution

Walter Ulbricht , then General Secretary of the Central Committee of the SED, and Magdalena Baramowa, a sister of Dimitrov, spoke at the ceremony on June 18, 1952 for the opening of the museum . In front of the building, the renaming of the forecourt to Georgi-Dimitroff-Platz was announced in front of around 50,000 participants at a rally . On July 2, 1952, the GDR State Council Chairman Wilhelm Pieck visited the museum.

At the time of the museum opening, only the plenary hall and the simulated prison cell could be viewed. In the coming months, a cinema room was inaugurated behind the plenary hall, plus six more rooms on the second floor, mostly equipped with display boards, consisting of Berlin reproductions of Dimitrov, the Reichstag fire and trial, and the history of communism in Bulgaria and Germany. In addition to the permanent presentation, since the museum was founded there have been mostly smaller changing exhibitions one to three times a year, which were presented in the dome hall of the building. In 1954 more than 100,000 visitors were counted for the first time, two years later already 200,000. For the most part, these numbers consisted of delegations and organized visitor groups from the GDR and numerous other socialist countries.

Since 1956, the plenary hall has served as a location for film productions that dealt with the life of Dimitrov and the Reichstag fire process. In 1965, under the direction of the new director Hans Bernhard, who had been appointed three years earlier, a newly designed permanent exhibition was opened. At the time, the museum had 15 exhibition rooms on around 1,500 square meters. From 1967 onwards there were annual meetings in the house with members of institutions from all over the GDR who bore the name Georgi Dimitrov . B. Company collectives and schools. In 1972, for example, 480 participants attended the meeting with various events.

Between 1968 and 1988 the museum published the ten-part series of the Georgi-Dimitroff-Museum Leipzig . In 1972 the institution was awarded the Silver Patriotic Order of Merit . In 1982 the permanent exhibition was revised again, three years later the last and most comprehensive museum guide was published. In February 1989 the GDR Council of Ministers assigned a new exhibition focus to the museum : “The struggle of the German working class against the reactionary class justice with special consideration of the Reichsgericht”.

In December 1989, the then director of the Museum of Fine Arts Dieter Gleisberg publicly called for the museum to be dissolved, referring to the cult of personality . The exhibition was continued for a short time in mid-1990 under the title Reichsgericht, Rechtspflege und Democratic Alternative 1871–1918 , before the institution was renamed the Museum of the Reichsgericht - Research Center on September 27th of that year . On December 11, 1990, it was decided to liquidate the museum, and on July 1, 1991 the museum was closed. The collections are partially accessible in the Leipzig City History Museum .

Museum collections

In 1962, under the director Bernhard, a collection concept was drawn up for the first time, which included 11 focal points:

  • Resistance in Leipzig against National Socialism
  • Protests against the Reichstag fire and trial
  • Judge in the Reichstag fire trial
  • Witnesses in the Reichstag fire trial
  • Journalists in the Reichstag fire trial
  • Audio documents and shorthand records of the Reichstag fire process
  • Photo collection on the Reichstag fire trial
  • Architects of the Reichstag building
  • General collection of documents
  • Poster collection
  • Library

At the time the museum was closed, the collections comprised around 15,000 documents and 12,000 photographs , around 15,000 thematically related newspaper clippings , around 11,300 books , 1,185 sound carriers , 1,129 posters , 863 coins , medals and badges , 553 objects (e.g. furniture , Clothing or weapons ) as well as 283 works from the visual arts . The collections of documents, photographs and sound carriers consisted largely or entirely of reproductions. In addition, the representational and art objects were often gifts from other museums, which often only had an indirect bearing on the focus of the institution's collection.

literature

  • Georgi-Dimitroff-Museum Leipzig . Leipzig 1955.
  • Georgi Dimitrov Museum. Standard guided tour of the permanent museum exhibition . Leipzig 1967. (Leipzig City History Museum, library, sign .: B 67/370)
  • Georgi-Dimitroff-Museum Leipzig. Guide to the permanent exhibition . Leipzig 1985.
  • Dieter Deiseroth (ed.): The Reichstag fire and the trial before the Reichsgericht . Publishing company Tischler, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-922654-65-7 .
  • Ursula Oehme: Dimitrov versus fine arts - a house of "unhappy remembrance" is being restructured . In: Das Reichsgericht , ed. from the City History Museum Leipzig. Edition Leipzig, Leipzig 1995, ISBN 3-361-00446-2 , pp. 116-133.
  • Volker Rodekamp: The Dimitrov Museum - the stylization of Dimitrov in the GDR and its effects on the collection . In: Bettina Limperg, Klaus Rennert (Hrsg.): Symposium 120 years of imperial court building. Event of the Federal Court of Justice and the Federal Administrative Court on 29.-30. October 2015 in Leipzig . CH Beck, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-406-69300-7 , pp. 259-270.

Web links

Commons : Georgi-Dimitroff-Museum  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Volker Rodekamp 2016, p. 275.
  2. ↑ a b c d Volker Rodekamp 2016, p. 263.
  3. ↑ Volker Rodekamp 2016, p. 264.
  4. ↑ Volker Rodekamp 2016, pp. 262–263.
  5. ↑ Ursula Oehme 1995, p. 123.
  6. ↑ a b Volker Rodekamp 2016, p. 265.
  7. ^ Sächsisches Tageblatt of June 2, 1972.
  8. ↑ Series of publications by the Gorgi-Dimitroff-Museum Leipzig. In: SBB StaBiKat. Berlin State Library, Prussian Cultural Heritage, accessed on July 16, 2018 .
  9. ↑ Volker Rodekamp 2016, p. 266.
  10. ↑ Volker Rodekamp 2016, p. 267.
  11. ^ Sächsisches Tageblatt of December 13, 1989.
  12. ↑ Volker Rodekamp 2016, pp. 268–269.
  13. ↑ Volker Rodekamp 2016, pp. 269–274.