In Flanders Fields Museum

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In Flanders Fields Museum
Cloth Hall
Data
place Cloth Hall , Grote Markt 34, B 8900 Ypres , Belgium
Art
opening 1998
Number of visitors (annually) ~ 200,000 (2010)
management
Website

The In Flanders Fields Museum (IFFM) is a war museum redesigned in 1998 in the city center of Ypres . The museum is housed in the reconstructed cloth halls of the city next to the belfry ( UNESCO World Heritage Site ) and has housed a reopened permanent exhibition on the First World War in Belgium since 2012 . The name of the museum is based on the war poem In Flanders Fields by the Canadian John McCrae .

The coordinator of the facility is the historian Piet Chielens .

history

The In Flanders Fields Museum opened in Ypres in April 1998, replacing an existing exhibition in the region. It attracts many of the approximately 500,000 tourists who visit the battlefields of World War I in Flanders each year. Similar to the Imperial War Museum in London, it tries to realistically portray warlike phenomena from history such as trenches .

From 2011 it was redesigned with the aim of receiving more visitors from all over the world. In June 2012 the revised exhibition opened, as a result closer to the common soldier . Several private individuals donated exhibits from the family collections. Several state guests visited the museum to mark the 100th anniversary of the First World War. It sees itself as part of the Peace City of Ypres and its conception is integrated into a peacekeeping network.

Visitor numbers

The museum had more than 2.9 million visitors in the period from 1998 to 2011, which corresponds to around 215,000 per year. After the new opening in summer 2012, the number rose to 187,000 visitors (in 6.5 months). In 2013 the museum had 295,000 visitors and on the 100th anniversary of the First World War in 2014 it reached well over 400,000, which is the highest level to date.

Rooms and exhibits

Tours

In Flanders Fields Museum (2016)

The War Museum welcomes its guests with an interactive , personalized Poppy bracelet. In Flanders Fields offers four tours: Chronological Walk , Thematic Walk , Iconic People Walk and Reflective Walk .

From a social and military historical perspective, the pre-war period and the four-year events on the Western Front , whether in Westhoek , Nieuwpoort or Armentières, are presented in a multimedia and lifelike manner. The events in the Ypres arc such as the Battle of the Yser , the Flanders Battles and the Hundred Days Offensive as well as the craft of trench and mine warfare , war propaganda , prisoner-of-war warfare and medical care are examined in more detail.

In addition, the visitor is encouraged to climb the belfry with 231 steps, which has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1999, to get an impression of the former battlefields and the surrounding area.

Exhibits

It shows more than 2,000 exhibits a. a. Uniforms , weapons and utensils . Multimedia systems such as touch screens, video projections and soundscapes bring the events of the years 1914 to 1918 closer to the guest.

Artist in Residence

In Flanders Fields Museum (2008)

In addition, installations by an artist in residence will be integrated into the exhibition :

Knowledge center

A knowledge center with archive , some of which can also be accessed online, has over 5,000 books on the First World War, as well as maps, photographs, newspapers, magazines, diaries, letters and other documents. An attached database contains approx. 400 biographies on personal stories of the time.

The museum also exhibits the multi-volume Ireland's Memorial Record , compiled by the Irish National War Memorial in the 1920s, with the names of 10,000 civilians and fallen soldiers of the warring nations.

In 2014 the “Center for Historical & Archaeological Aerial Photography” was opened together with the Department of Archeology of the University of Ghent and the Province of West Flanders , which houses over 20,000 documents on the front area at that time.

Museum education

There are on-site museum education offered concepts for children and adolescents. The museum offers excursions to explore the Ypres arch and workshops with class sizes of up to 40 people. For example, the German military cemetery Langemark , the British and French war cemeteries ( Saint-Charles de Potyze ) and the Menenpoort can be visited.

There is close cooperation with the neighboring institutions Oorlog en Vrede in de Westhoek and La Coupole .

Award

literature

  • Tobias Arand : Between Emotion and Distance - Two Museum Ways of Approaching the First World War. The 'In Flanders Fields Museum' Ypres / Belgium and the 'Historial de la Grande Guerre' Péronne / France . In: History, Politics and Their Didactics 31 (2003) 1/2, pp. 74–83.
  • In Flanders Fields Museum, Thorsten Brinkmann (Ed.): Warfare canaries. [Published to accompany the Exhibition Thorsten Brinkmann, "Warfare Canaries", 2014, In Flanders Fields Museum, Ieper, 5 July 2014 - 4 January 2015] . Textem Verlag, Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-86485-072-1 .
  • Christian Th. Müller : In Flanders Fields Museum, Ieper . In: AKM -Newsletter , Vol. 12 (2007), No. 1, p. 21 f.
  • Thomas Thiemeyer: Continuation of the war by other means. The two world wars in the museum (= war in history . Volume 62). Schöningh, Paderborn u. a. 2010, ISBN 978-3-506-76919-0 , p. 67 ff.

Web links

Commons : In Flanders Fields Museum  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stephen Miles: From Hastings to the Ypres salient. Battlefield tourism and the interpretation of fields of conduct . In: Richard Butler, Wantanee Suntikul (Ed.): Tourism and War (= Contemporary Geographies of Leisure, Tourism and Mobility ). Routledge, Abington 2013, ISBN 978-0-415-67433-1 , p. 223.
  2. ↑ 400,000th bezoeker voor In Flanders Fields Museum in 2014 - Ieper . wo1.be, October 20, 2014.