Culture and City History Museum Duisburg

Culture and City History Museum Duisburg, entrance in 2007

The only surviving original copy of a Corputius plan from 1566 is in the museum's collection

The Museum of Culture and City History is a municipal institute in the old town of Duisburg . Until 1990 it was called the Niederrheinisches Museum .

It deals with the city history of Duisburg and shows an important collection on the life's work of the mathematician and cartographer Gerhard Mercator. The house exhibits the last surviving facsimile of a Corputius plan from 1566, which shows Duisburg, precisely measured, from a bird's eye view . The facsimile belongs to the Duisburg City Archives , which is housed in the neighboring building. The collection also includes the Köhler-Osbahr collection with coins and antiquities from numerous cultures and epochs of world history.

history

The first beginnings of building up a collection of archaeological finds in the Duisburg grammar school began around the middle of the 19th century at the latest.

Finds in the second half of the 18th century were reported as early as 1820. Individual objects were collected in the grammar school from around 1840 and excavations were carried out by teachers and students as early as the 1850s and 1860s.

In the 1890s there was also a private donation from a Duisburg citizen to the city on the condition that the transferred private collection of prehistoric finds be made publicly accessible to the citizens in suitable rooms.

On the initiative of Heinrich Averdunk - supported by numerous citizens and the local representative body at the time (city council) - an antiquities commission was founded in 1896.

With the establishment of the first museum in the attic rooms of the new town hall in 1902, the commission considered its work to be completed to a certain extent and in the same year transformed into an (antiquities and) museum association.

Since 1907, the museum association has expanded its collecting activities to include works of contemporary art.

The museum association donated its collection to the city of Duisburg in 1913, which in that year also approved 100,000 gold marks for the construction of its own museum building. However, due to the war, this new museum building project was no longer carried out.

Averdunk was the museum director until 1919, after which a narrow museum committee led the facility under the leadership of the Lord Mayor, from 1926 to 1930 Eduard Wildschrey , followed by the Hamborner museum director Rudolf Stampfuß .

In 1924 , the museum association hired August Hoff as managing director, who became the founding director of an independent art museum that still exists today as the Lehmbruck Museum .

This developed in a few years from the part of the collection that was branched off in 1924 and exhibited in Tonhallenstrasse 11a. There art and craft exhibitions and the now enlarged Lehmbruck collection were shown.

In 1927 the part of the museum that remained in the new town hall was renamed the Averdunk Museum .

After the merger of the cities of Duisburg and Hamborn , the prehistoric holdings of the Averdunk Museum were merged in 1931 in the Hamborn City Museum, founded in 1925 , which was initially called the City Museum of Local History .

Further renaming followed: Niederrheinisches Heimatmuseum in 1935 and Niederrheinisches Museum in 1942.

In 1935 the museum moved to a villa in Duisburg's Kant-Park . An air raid destroyed the building in 1945.

The museum holdings were relocated in 1942, but suffered some war losses in the Second World War.

Museum of Culture and City History (left) and City Archives (right) seen from the opposite side of the harbor.

After the war, the museum was reopened in 1952 on the top floor of the rebuilt Duisburg City Theater, but only five years later it was moved to an old villa belonging to the Böninger family of manufacturers.

Further moves were made in 1961 to the Königsberg building and in 1969 to the building of the former Duisburg city library in Kant-Park, where it was able to work compactly in one building with all its holdings for the first time after the end of the war, to develop reasonably well and to present its holdings more comprehensively. At that time, Fritz Tischler, Stampfuss' successor, was the head of the company .

In 1991 the museum changed its name to "Kultur- und Stadthistorisches Museum" and was given its new domicile in the converted former Rosiny flour mill at the inner harbor , which until 2016 also housed the Museum City of Königsberg .

The building left by the Niederrheinisches Museum from the reconstruction phase after the Second World War in the Kant-Park was temporarily still "used to prepare the Duisburg excavations" and was ultimately to be demolished in the course of the expansion of the Lehmbruck Museum. However, it was then able to be taken over by the cubus kunsthalle , which guaranteed work that was cost-neutral for the city of Duisburg, and has been preserved to this day.

In 2002 the Museum of Culture and City History celebrated its 100th anniversary. In June 2007 the completely redesigned permanent exhibition on the city's history was opened. Since then, the main themes of the museum have been Gerhard Mercator , the history of the city of Duisburg and - made possible by the extensive, international holdings of antiquities in the Köhler-Osbahr Collection - cultural history.

The focus on urban history includes both archaeological and historical or more or less current topics. In this way, the archaeological tradition of the house is taken up and continued.

The cultural-historical focus already laid out in the name of the house enables the museum to deal with topics that do not or only marginally affect the history of the city and thus address a public not necessarily connected to Duisburg in addition to the locally based visitors. In recent years, for example, exhibitions on science in the Golden Age of Islam, on Greek drinking bouts or on travelers 500 years ago have been shown.

Another focus of the Museum of Culture and City History, which is reflected both in the exhibition program and in numerous events, is " cultural diversity ".

In addition to the supporting programs for the special exhibitions and regular guided tours, the event program also includes various fixed formats such as the “Mercator Matinéen” lecture series or the “Narrative Café”.

The Museum of Culture and City History offers accompanying books ("slow motion") for most exhibitions. It is also possible to explore the permanent exhibitions on the city's history and the Köhler-Osbahr Collection with an app-based digital tour.

In 2014, the center for culture of remembrance, human rights and democracy was added as a new pillar, which has since been established together with the neighboring Duisburg City Archives . "Jewish life in Duisburg from 1918 to 1945" and "Political resistance in Duisburg from 1933 to 1945" have already been the subject of special exhibitions designed by the ZfE. A traveling exhibition dealt with the "Deportations from the Rhineland in autumn 1941 to the Litzmannstadt ghetto (Łódź)". A permanent exhibition is in preparation.

location

The museum is centrally located in the immediate vicinity of the historic city center at the inner harbor. Not far from there are parts of the historic city wall and the archaeological zone on the Old Market. A model on the forecourt of the museum allows a good reference to the historical city center with the town hall, Salvatorkirche and Burgplatz in the former Palatinate district.

literature

Susanne Sommer, Peter Dunas (Ed.): 100 Years of the Museum of Culture and City History. Culture and City History Museum Duisburg 1902–2002. Festschrift for the 100th anniversary . Mercator-Verlag, Duisburg 2002, ISBN 3-87463-335-7 , ( Duisburger Forschungen 48).