Museum at the Cathedral (Lübeck)

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Museum am Dom (around 1893)
Predecessor development of the museum: the cathedral monastery used as a hospital (Photo: Joseph Wilhelm Pero before 1847)

The Museum am Dom was a museum in Lübeck that existed from 1893 until the air raid on Lübeck in 1942.

history

The first building of a museum was decided by the Lübeck Senate on May 8, 1882. The location chosen was the old hospital at Lübeck Cathedral , which included the cloister of the Lübeck Cathedral Monastery on the south side of the cathedral . The construction was made possible due to a legacy of 150,000 Reichsmarks left by the Lübeck merchant Georg Blohm, who had made great fortunes in the Caribbean and Venezuela, to the city of Lübeck in 1878 “to promote the prosperity of patrician affairs”. After the Senate's decision was confirmed in 1887, the Lübeck museum man Theodor Hach prepared a corresponding memorandum with his concept in 1888. Lübeck's chief building director, Adolf Schwiening , a student of the rabbit , implemented the building in neo -Gothic style from 1889 and in 1893, Lübeck's first new museum building was opened by the Senate chaired by Mayor Kulenkamp . The urban gardener Metaphius Theodor August Langenbuch carried out the redesign of the green space in front of the museum and around the mill pond .

(first) Brunswick lion in the garden of the museum at the cathedral

At the instigation of Willibald Leo von Lütgendorff-Leinburg , who was director of the museum at the time, Otto Mantzel made a free copy of an artificial basalt block about ¾ the size of the original size of the Braunschweig lion. Consequently it was to be regarded as an original work piece. The pedestal was made of artificial Odenwald sandstone . The unveiling took place on October 9, 1930 at the point in the museum garden that Henry the Lion was likely to have entered first when the cathedral was founded on the wooded hill near the Trave. During the celebration, Adolf Ihde was presented with the memorial as director of the non-profit society .

The museum itself, like the other Lübeck museums in Lübeck, was privately sponsored by the Society for the Promotion of Charitable Activities in Lübeck, which also owned most of the collections on display. The director of the company at the time the museum opened was the Lübeck lawyer Adolf Brehmer . After the First World War, with the following inflation and the global economic crisis, which decimated its capital stocks, the non-profit organization had increasing problems raising salaries for its museums and was increasingly dependent on public aid since the early 1920s; a nationalization offered by the non-profit organization was rejected several times by the Lübeck citizenship and the Senate of the Hanseatic city during the Weimar period. It was only with the nationalization of the Lübeck museums by the National Socialists in 1934 that they passed to the public purse and became communal with the mediatization of the Lübeck state by the Greater Hamburg Law in 1937.

The rapid increase in the collections made the museum burst at the seams after a short time, so that expansion options were examined as early as 1905. Initially, the armory on the north side of the cathedral was considered, but the St. Anne's Monastery was selected, which was opened in 1915 under Karl Schaefer as the first full-time museum director and took over most of Lübeck's art and cultural history. This gave the remaining collections enough space to be presented in a representative way. In the mid-1930s, the prehistoric collection moved from the St. Anne's Museum to the Museum am Dom and was re-presented.

Immediately after the air raid in 1942
View of the burned out east wing (1945)

From 1934 to spring 1942, when it was destroyed in the air raid on Lübeck at Palmarum , the museum only consisted of the departments of natural history, ethnology and the newly added archaeological preservation and archeology with exhibits from prehistory to the Middle Ages . The remnants of the museum building, which could be rebuilt, were removed after the war, with the exception of the east wall of the west wing facing the inner courtyard; from 1959 to 1961 the reconstruction took place in simple forms. Today the archive of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck is located in the west wing and the Museum for Nature and Environment Lübeck, which is based on the tradition of the museum location, in the south wing. Between the two there is a hall which is used for lectures and special exhibitions and which continued the name Museum am Dom . The entrance to the museum used to be at Domkirchhof 2, today model lane 8.

Collections

In line with its conception, the Museum am Dom took on six independent departments:

  • The Museum of Lübeck Art and Cultural History (conservators and directors Theodor Hach (–1910) and Karl Schaefer (1910–); outsourced to the St. Annen Museum in 1915) and the next department, the
  • Collection of paintings, copperplate engravings and hand drawings (first curator from 1902: Willibald Leo von Lütgendorff-Leinburg ; artistically valuable parts of the collection outsourced to the Museum Behnhaus under Carl Georg Heise in 1922 , the copper engravings and hand drawings not until 1934 in the course of the nationalization of the Lübeck museums.) this department was a sub-department:
    • The collection of plaster casts of ancient sculptures (created on the initiative of Adolf Holm ; forming a department of the house with the collection of paintings; it consisted of 116 exhibits in 1893, was housed in the attic of the museum at the cathedral and, when it was dissolved in the course of the nationalization of the Lübeck museums distributed among the Lübeck schools in 1934 as illustrative material for teaching.)
  • The trade museum (conservator trade teacher Julius Hoch; collection holdings were transferred to the St. Anne's Museum in 1915, insofar as they were useful).
  • The Trade Museum (Conservators Konsul Grupe (–1895), Theodor Wetzke (1895–1915) and Karl Steyer, the curator of the Natural History Museum (1916–1934); discontinued in 1934 after nationalization).
  • The Museum of Ethnology . At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, this museum had grown extremely through donations from Lübeck citizens under Richard Karutz as director. It was strongly promoted by the Geographical Society of Lübeck . Ethnology was initially housed on the upper floor of the eastern section of the Museum am Dom and benefited most from the outsourcing of art and cultural history from 1913 to the St. Annen Museum; Ethnology now occupied half of the ground floor and the entire first floor of the Museum am Dom. A further expansion of the area on the ground floor made it possible in 1923, under Karutz's successor, Theodor Hansen , to outsource the painting collection to the Behnhaus in 1922. When it became state property in 1934, the ethnographic collection had increased fivefold compared to 1892 and comprised 20,000 catalog numbers, of which around a third were destroyed in 1942 . Today the remains form the ethnographic collection of the Hanseatic city of Lübeck .
  • The Natural History Museum . It was based on the collection of its co-founder Johann Julius Walbaum bequeathed to the non-profit in 1800 , which was further increased in the course of the 19th century and was thus the oldest part of the museum's collection. The citizens who supported the expansion of the natural history collection included u. a. the entomologist Carl Julius Milde, who is actually more known as a restorer, and his pupil Jakob Behrens . The curator of the collection in the 19th century was the pharmacist and botanist Gottfried Renatus Häcker , who bequeathed his herbarium to the museum . In the 20th century, the Lübeck city ​​original Ernst Albert, as an entomologist, was one of the patrons of Lübeck's natural history. From 1920 until its destruction in 1942, the teacher and entomologist Ludwig Benick was curator of the collections. With a foreign exchange donation from Clara Lagerlöf from New York City , the daughter of the custodian Heinrich Lenz , who died in 1913 , Benick was able to reorganize Lübeck's natural history during the inflationary period .
  • In the 1930s, Ludwig Benick set up his own prehistoric department.

Loss of cultural property

Today: Museum for Nature and Environment Lübeck (2009)

In addition to the lamentable losses of the Lübeck ethnological collection, the greatest damage was probably suffered by the Lübeck monument preservation, which had been returned from the St. Anne's Museum to the Museum am Dom. As the Lübeck city archaeologist from the immediate post-war period Werner Neugebauer noted, the 1942 air raid with the cathedral museum destroyed most of the archaeological monument preservation finds, but also the entire written legacy of earlier generations of researchers, so that a reconnection with the state of the pre-war period seemed hopeless.

In comparison, the painting collection got away with it relatively harmlessly, since almost all of its valuable holdings had previously gone to the St. Annenmuseum or the Behnhaus. Georg Behrens, however, considers the collection of 27 panoramas from the first half of the 19th century, acquired for the museum in 1891 with the help of the Senate, as a culturally and historically significant loss. These 180 ° representations of European cities and landscapes by the travel painter Karl Georg Enslen , also known as round pictures, had dimensions of around 5 × 1 m.

After the loss of its natural history cabinets from the 18th century and its international collections in the 1950s, the natural history museum was largely completely redesigned with the profile of a natural history museum by Gotthilft von Studnitz .

Publications of the Museum am Dom

  • Annual report of the Natural History Museum in Lübeck, HG Rahtgens, Lübeck [periodical]
  • Yearbook of the Museum of Art and Cultural History in Lübeck , Lübeck

literature

  • Volume 1: The collection of plaster casts of classical sculptures in an art-historical arrangement Lübeck: Borchers (around 1908)
  • Volume 2: Descriptive Directory of the Painting Collection. Lübeck: Borchers 1908.
  • Volume 3: The Overbeck room in the Museum am Dom zu Lübeck: a descriptive directory. Lübeck: Borchers 1915.
  • Otto Grautoff : Lübeck. Series Ststätten der Kultur , Volume 9 (with illustrations by Fidus ), Leipzig 1908.
  • Richard Karutz : Guide to the Museum of Ethnology in Lübeck , Lübeck 1921 (with R. Karutz's list of publications)
  • Richard Karutz: On the purpose and aim of the Museum of Ethnology in Lübeck , Lübeck 1921.
  • Carl Georg Heise : Lübeck Art Care 1920–1933. On behalf of the head of the Museum für Kunst- u. Cultural history published. Lübeck 1934. (with a foreword by Rudolf Keibel )
  • Georg Behrens, 175 years of charitable work , Lübeck 1964.
  • Abram B. Enns : Art and Bourgeoisie. The controversial twenties in Lübeck. Christians / Weiland, Hamburg / Lübeck 1978, ISBN 3-7672-0571-8 .
  • Gotthilft von Studnitz : 200 years of museum natural history in Lübeck , Hanseatic City of Lübeck, Lübeck 1980.

Web links

Commons : Dommuseum Lübeck  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Theodor Hach: Memorandum concerning the transformation of the cultural history museum into a museum for Lübeck art and cultural history. 1888
  2. ↑ Monument to Heinrich the Lion, the second founder of Lübeck. In: Lübeckische advertisements , year 1930, no.237, issue of October 10, 1930.
  3. ↑ Gerhard Schneider : Endangerment and Loss of Statehood of the Free and Hanseatic City of Lübeck and its Consequences (= publications on the history of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck. Series B, Vol. 14). Schmidt-Römhild, Lübeck 1986, p. 125 ISBN 3-7950-0452-7
  4. ^ Werner Neugebauer : First report of the Office for Prehistory and Early History (soil monument preservation) of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck. IN: ZVLGA 43 (1963), p. 73
  5. ^ Karl Schaefer: Guide to the Museum for Art and Cultural History in Lübeck , 1915.
  6. ↑ Lütgendorff was already massively attacked in 1908 in his capacity as curator of the Lübeck painting collection by Otto Grautoff ( Lübeck . Series Ststätten der Kultur, Volume 9, Leipzig 1908, p. 138 ff.); the attacks spread across the empire after the First World War (evidence from Abram B. Enns: Art and Citizenship. The Controversial Twenties in Lübeck. Christians / Weiland, Hamburg / Lübeck 1978, ISBN 3-7672-0571-8 , p. 31 ff .), but Lütgendorff had strong domestic power in the Lübeck bourgeoisie as well as in local artistic circles.
  7. ↑ Conservator 1923-1938; Biographical material on Theodor Hansen is not available in Lübeck, cf. Beatrix Hoffmann: The museum object as a barter and trade item , LIT Verlag, Münster 2012, p. 143 digitized
  8. ^ Annual report of the Natural History Museum in Lübeck for the year 1897. Lübeck: Rathgens 1898, p. 3f
  9. ^ Georg Behrens: 175 years of non-profit work , Lübeck 1964, p. 54
  10. ↑ Kurt Sokolowski: Dr. hc Ludwig Benick †, in: Negotiations of the Association for Natural Science Local Research in Hamburg 31 (1954), p. XVf
  11. ↑ Werner Neugebauer: Research on prehistory and preservation of monuments in the Hanseatic City of Lübeck up to 1973 , in: 25 Years of Archeology in Lübeck , Habelt, Bonn 1988, p. 10 ff.
  12. ↑ G. von Studnitz: On the construction of our natural history museum in: Der Wagen 1964, pp. 66–74 (after the opening address of May 4, 1963).


Coordinates: 53 ° 51 ′ 37.4 "  N , 10 ° 41 ′ 6.4"  E