Wertheim Glass Museum

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Main building of the museum (half-timbered building from 1577)

The glass museum in the Franconian town of Wertheim in Baden-Württemberg at the confluence of the Tauber and Main rivers presents and documents the history and use of glass as a material from antiquity to today's high-tech products. The museum, founded in 1976, has 650 m² of exhibition space and has around 16,000 visitors a year.

"To convey regional and international history as well as the diversity of glass as a material, these are the goals of the Glass Museum, which in its teaching show over 3500 years of glass manufacture and glass application - from drinking glass to laboratory glass - vividly revives." The museum director has been Marianne Tazlari since 1993 .

Location

The museum has been located in a half-timbered house built in 1577 ( Kallenbach's House or Large House ), which was part of the Löwenstein-Rosenberg court complex , and - since 1996 - in a neighboring half-timbered house from 1588 ( Small House ) . The two buildings are separated from each other by an inner courtyard.

Stolperstein project : In the museum house at Mühlenstrasse 24, Liesel Keller, a bourgeois daughter, who was born in 1886, spent a difficult youth that she was no longer mentally capable of. From 1910 she was in a nursing home and was “only kept in a poor institution after 1937.” Under the Nazi regime she was “relocated in 1940 and murdered en masse with gas in killing centers along with 70,000 other inmates” ( Action T4 ). The life story of the woman was compiled by Wertheim students in 2012; In 2013 a memorial stone of the Stolperstein Wertheim project was set into the pavement in front of her parents' house .

View along the museum building to Wertheim Castle on the hill

history

The nearby Spessart had numerous forest glass works in the Middle Ages , but the tradition of glass production in the region and town did not begin again until the 20th century. The founder of the Wertheim Glass Museum was a Thuringian, the Ilmenau glass physicist Hans Löber (1900–1978), who left the GDR with a group of specialists in 1949 and established a laboratory glass factory at his new home in 1950. This existed until 1993.

During the years of his entrepreneurial activity, the company founder and first managing director of the Wertheim glassworks (1950-1993) collected historical glass from all epochs and founded the Förderkreis Wertheimer Glasmuseum e. V. - today: Glass Museum Wertheim e. V. - who is the sponsor of the museum, which opened on May 29, 1976. The building we moved into has been completely restored. After the founder's death, the museum was expanded and redesigned several times.

A special feature in 1994 was the exhibition with glass objects by Wilhelm Wagenfeld , in which "workpieces from the stage of the idea sketch to the sample" were documented. The classic of "perfectly shaped consumer goods", which "resisted a star cult of the designer and called itself a pattern maker, also gave the industry a certain amount of time to become friends with the new product."

Museum concept

The museum concept claims a holistic presentation of the material glass in order to convey the diversity of the material from production and processing to its use in science, technology, medicine and industry as well as in everyday life. It shows how the techniques have changed and refined over the centuries, how the use developed from simple utility glass to mass production, but especially to high-quality products and also glass art objects. The material glass was of great importance in industrialization .

The extensive presentation is not based on a chronological sequence, but rather enables visitors to proceed based on their own interests thanks to the alphabetical order (“from A to Z”).

Antiquity: Roman divider jar, Syria, 2nd - 3rd century AD.

Exhibits and presentation

The history of the glass is conveyed in showcases with explanatory texts, in free-standing presentations or even 'scenarios'. The topics of the museum range from ancient glass from Egypt, the Roman Empire, the Orient - to simple beginnings in the European Middle Ages and their artistic and technical differentiations in modern times, to the inventions of modern times and the spectrum of today's uses and creations. The focus is regularly on separate exhibitions.

Large house

  • In the entrance area, a 1 m tall glass bead tree with a diameter of 60 cm in the style of the East German Christmas pyramid by Eva-Maria Schmidt hangs from the ceiling .
  • The museum shop is located on the ground floor , including replicas of historical glasses, contemporary glass art and historical, modern Christmas tree decorations made in our own workshop.

Attached is the workshop with the museum glassblower , who shows the further processing of glass from glass tubes and rods in front of a flame at 1600 degrees Celsius. Interested visitors have the opportunity to blow their own glass balls. In Advent, employees of the museum show the silvering of glass Christmas tree decorations .

Venetian wing glasses - replicas by museum glassblower Ralf Marlok
  • On the upper two floors , the more than 3000 year history, manufacture and use of glass is presented using selected exhibits as an example, with which the visitor can recognize the glass technological advances and the associated development from luxury glass to today's indispensable material for industry, technology and science. The focus is on the original forest glass from the regional area in its various forms (cabbage, Nuppenglas, Römer, tankards and bars), on Silesian and Bohemian cut glass from the 18th century, high-quality Venetian wing glass and glass from the 19th century. Modern glass and high-tech products from Wertheim's special glass industry round off the cross-section through the eras of European glass history.
  • The play station course with 35 glass play stations has existed since 2006 as an interactive presentation based on the model of the Federal Association of German Children's and Youth Museums , in which not only children and young people 'grasp' the many facets of the material glass in a playful way.
  • The Alois Wienand Collection has been on display since 2016 , a collection of samples with 75 replicas of historical glasses that the former glassmaker from the Wertheim glassworks made using the techniques he researched and experimentally (re) developed from the Middle Ages and the early modern period based on originals and reconstruction drawings and made book templates. Celtic glass arm rings are a specialty.
: Millefiori -Paperweight, Silesia, around 1840, from the Peter von Brackel collection

Small house

Here, cultural-historical connections are conveyed in depth on the individual topics:

  • The historical Christmas tree decoration collection (1840 to today) in memory of the origin of the Wertheim laboratory glass industry in Thuringia, supplemented by modern Christmas tree decorations and the three meter high "Wertheimer Glass Tree" by the artist couple Bormann-Arndt.
  • The Glasperlen-Kabinett has existed since 1998 and , based on a bequest, included the collection of the Mainz archaeologist Thea Elisabeth Haevernick (1899–1982), which consists of over 3000 oriental, Roman and Venetian glass beads from the 1st millennium BC. Existed until the Middle Ages. Glass beads from the 16th century to modern works from the holdings of the Wertheim Glass Museum complete the history of these glass objects. There are also exhibits that are given to the museum as part of the annual glass bead symposium held in Wertheim .
  • Since 2001, the Scientific Glass Cabinet has been using the example of 13 scientists - u. a. Galilei, Newton, Edison, Fraunhofer and Schott - the use of glass as an aid for their inventions: telescope, microscope, light bulb, spectrometer.
  • The Paperweight Cabinet was set up in 2015 - with 800 paperweights from the collector Peter von Brackel , which presents the history of glass paperweights from 1840 to today's collector's item.
  • The mobile energy trail, which can be borrowed , has existed since 2009 with 28 experimental and playful stations on the subject of energy, with the aim of sensitizing children and young people in particular to the subject of energy and promoting sustainable thinking and action.
Sculpture of "Parsifal" by Claude Wetzstein

Wertheim Parzival tour

As early as 1976, the founder of the Glass Museum, Dr. Hans Löber, acquired one of the limited copies of the Parzifal glass sculpture by the French glass artist Claude Wetzstein. The reference to " Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, who is said to have written part of his verse novel at Wertheim Castle , has not lost any of its relevance to this day," wrote the museum in a statement and so the Wertheim Parzival project group organized in October 2012 Starting from the castle, across the old town, a circular route with banners, “which explain and quote 14 moments from Parzival's exciting life. [...] Many [citizens] have welcomed 'that something is now being offered again on a cultural level in the city.' "

Special exhibitions (selection)

In the changing special exhibitions, a wide range of techniques of glass production is shown - mostly in connection with the products of companies or the works of artists. Works based on regional or national traditions or themes related to glass, such as “ ships in a bottle”, perfume bottles and postage stamps with glass motifs are also presented.

  • 1978: Vera Liskowa, hand-blown glass from the CSSR
  • 1980: Glass from the USA. 17 glass artists from the studio glass movement
  • 1986: Women create hot glass
  • 1989: Modern glass from Thuringia
  • 1993: Jan Adams' glass garden
  • 1994: Ten Wertheim glass workshops
  • 1995: Bottle games. Desire for glass. 15 play stations and 2000 years of bottle stories
  • 1996: Cup in a glass net. Diatret cuts by Josef Welzel
  • 1998: why not? … Parisian revue jewelry of the 1950s and 60s
  • 2002: "Out of fire" - 50 years of Baden-Württemberg - 52 years of the Wertheim glass industry
  • 2007: The Forest Collection: Studio Glass from the 1960s to Today
  • 2009: Red glass smaller than 10 cm. Scholze Collection
  • 2016: The fascination of bees - crystal clear and pitch black

literature

  • Heinz-Peter Mielke: Glass Museum Wertheim. A guide through the holdings , publisher: Förderkreis Wertheimer Glasmuseum eV, Wertheim 1977.
  • Glass Museum Wertheim , Georg-Westermann-Verlag, Braunschweig 1991, with further references
  • From craft glass to high-tech fibers , Ed .: Schuller GmbH, Wertheim 1996. ISBN 3-00-000519-6 .

Web links

Commons : Glass Museum Wertheim  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Glass Museum Wertheim in: Die Umwelt, August 1994, p. 17.
  2. Information in the brochure: Project Stolperstein Wertheim, Comenius-Realschule, VidP Dieter Fauth.
  3. Schwäbische Zeitung: A 'quality fool' formed everyday objects , May 28, 1994.
  4. Fränkische Nachrichten: The right words in the right place , May 11, 2012, p. 17.

Coordinates: 49 ° 45 ′ 29.5 ″  N , 9 ° 31 ′ 3.9 ″  E