International Newspaper Museum

International Newspaper Museum Aachen (2019)

The International Newspaper Museum in Aachen presents the history of newspapers and the topic of press history.

history

The collection was founded in 1886 by Oscar von Forckenbeck (1822–1898). He was the mayor of Rheine and also a private scholar. On one of his numerous trips he started collecting newspapers. The collection, created over decades, was presented to the public for the first time in 1889. It now comprises more than 200,000 copies.

The newspaper museum was established in 1931 in the Great House of Aachen , a patrician house from the end of the 15th century. Even then, the permanent exhibition dealt with important pieces from the collection. After the Second World War , it was mainly the director of the Aachen City Archives, Bernhard Poll , who was instrumental in maintaining the International Newspaper Museum in Aachen and who took over its management from 1952 to 1972. After extensive repair work, he was able to reopen the museum on October 19, 1962 with new presentation rooms. Five years later, Poll showed the exhibition The Jewish Press in the 19th Century , which was also on view in the USA, Argentina, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Poll dedicated it to the doctor Walter Hirsch, who fled Germany, on the occasion of the opening of the new library in Tel Aviv , in which Hirsch made his private collection accessible to a broad public.

In 1993 the facility was threatened with closure. The councilwoman and then Mayor of Aachen Meike Thüllen launched an appeal to attract volunteers and funding. To this end, she founded a corresponding association with like-minded people . Nevertheless, it took until 2008 to use the funds released after the rejection of the Bauhaus Europa and to start the actual renovation and expansion phase as part of the Route Charlemagne project , which was redesigned and came to a preliminary conclusion on July 11, 2011. Then Thüllen also advocated equipping the museum with a representative glass portal.

collection

The collection areas and criteria of the house are essentially:

• If possible, one copy from each region of the world (daily newspapers available in the reading room)
• First, last, anniversary and special editions
• Newspapers with oversized headlines about events of global political importance or natural disasters up to extra sheets and special editions, also on individual topics and people
• The Jewish press of the 19th century
• Press documents of the German Reich and the GDR
• War and camp newspapers from the First and Second World Wars
• Documentation of title, format and layout changes in newspapers
• Curiosa - weird, funny, weird newspapers of all genres.
• Historical press library with 3000 volumes
• German-language press from abroad

Permanent exhibition

The former permanent exhibition From the early days of the press to the present. A historical foray into newspaper history around the world presented historical newspapers of outstanding importance. Among other things, the first newspaper Relation from Strasbourg from 1605 was shown, plus curiosities such as the smallest newspaper in the world and temporary exhibitions on newspaper history topics.

After the renovation of the building and the opening of the new permanent exhibition in 2010, the museum will put the history of the newspaper in a larger media-historical and media-theoretical context. In addition to the collections, historical exhibits and multimedia installations on the development of modern mass media, the culture of reception, censorship and manipulation and the future of the media will be on view. There are also changing exhibitions and didactic activities. In this new form, the house is also the media station on Route Charlemagne .

Special exhibitions (selection)

• 2014: The First World War - outbreak and beginning
• 2016: Popes in the mirror of the press
• 2016: Exemplary building in NRW
• 2016/17: Süddeutsche intern - a newspaper is moving
• 2017: "We can do it " - political caricatures by Waldemar Mandzel , Thomas Plaßmann and Heiko Sakurai
• 2017: “The Wittenberger Fest” - The Reformation anniversaries in the press
• 2017/18: Alemannia 1933 to 1945. Football between sport and politics . ~
• 2019/20: The war is over! The origin of the Aachener Nachrichten and the reconstruction.

Events

There are regular events in the newspaper museum, such as paper scooping .

See also

• List of newspaper museums

Web links

Commons : Newspaper  Museum Aachen - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Official website of the International Newspaper Museum
• Review of the book Das Standesamt der Weltpresse

Individual evidence

1. ^ Appeal from Meike Thüllen - Chairwoman of the Friends of the International Newspaper Museum Aachen
2. ^ New newspaper museum encourages critical thinking ( Memento from June 26, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
3. ↑ The International Newspaper Museum is now getting its glass portal , in: Aachener Nachrichten dated February 24, 2012  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
4. ↑ As the black and yellow braum were published in FAZ of November 4, 2017, page 12

Coordinates: 50 ° 46 ′ 38.1 ″  N , 6 ° 4 ′ 58.1 ″  E