Museum for Communication Frankfurt

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Museum for Communication Frankfurt
Museum-of-Communication-ffm006.jpg
Nam June Paik's sculpture Pre-Bell-Man in front of the Museum for Communication in Frankfurt am Main
Data
place Frankfurt am Main, Schaumainkai 53 ( Museumsufer )
Art
Post and communication museum
architect Günter Behnisch
opening January 31, 1958
Number of visitors (annually) approx. 120,000
management
Helmut Gold
Website
ISIL DE-MUS-046219

The Museum for Communication Frankfurt was opened on January 31, 1958 as the Bundespostmuseum and was one of the first museums on the Frankfurt Museumsufer .

Until 1994 it was subordinate to the Federal Ministry for the Post and Telecommunications and was thus the "company museum" of the Deutsche Bundespost (DBP). In 1990, with the opening of the new building designed by the Stuttgart architect Günter Behnisch, a new chapter in the history of the Bundespostmuseum began . With its glass, transparent architecture, the new building heralded a reorientation and modernization of the museum's content, which ultimately resulted in the renaming of the Museum for Communication. This fundamental change was directly influenced by the completion of the German postal reform and the privatization of the DBP.

Since 1995, the museum next to its sister museums belongs Berlin and Nuremberg to the Museum Foundation Post and Telecommunications . This public law foundation is supported by the two joint stock companies Deutsche Post and Deutsche Telekom as part of a public-private partnership .

history

Postage stamp from 1972 for the 100th anniversary

Prehistory (1872-1958)

The Federal Postal Museum went directly to the important collection of Reichspostmuseum s back, the war caused outsourced resources as the basis of the new museum served.

The Reichspostmuseum was founded in Berlin in 1872 by Heinrich von Stephan . Only designed as a “plan and model chamber” for the instruction of the post office officials, it quickly grew into a representative collection - with the global claim “to illustrate the development of transport from ancient times to the most recent in cultural history” . In 1898, the new museum building on Leipziger Strasse, built especially for this purpose, was opened to the public.

At the beginning of the Second World War , as during the First World War 1914–1918, the museum was closed. Due to the architecture with the high atrium and the large windows, the building was considered to be particularly at risk of fire bombs, so that from 1940 onwards, parts of the exhibition were moved to the building's basement. In the summer of 1943, particularly valuable exhibits were relocated due to severe moisture damage. Around half of the collection remained in the museum building, which, after the Allied air raids on Berlin from 1943, buried large parts of the showcases and exhibits that could not be transported due to their size or weight.

The relocated stocks reached Bavaria by the end of the war and were taken to Waltershausen Castle, among other places , which the Reichspost used as a rest home. While parts of the stamp collection that had been stored in a mine near Eisleben were secretly transferred to Hesse by the Americans when the area was handed over to the Soviet occupiers, the objects in Waltershausen remained in place. In September 1947 the collection was officially handed over to the Central Administration for Post and Telecommunications in the United Economic Area (HVPF). Shortly afterwards, the new post archive office was set up in the castle , under the direction of post office clerk Erwin Müller-Fischer. It was not until 1951 that the entire collection was transported from Waltershausen Castle to Frankfurt, where the Federal Ministry for Post and Telecommunications has been housed since 1950 .

Inauguration (1958)

Due to the political developments, the considerations to set up a separate postal museum for West Germany grew. After all, the Berlin Reichspostmuseum was closed to large parts of the German population, not just because of the severe destruction. With the establishment of the Deutsche Bundespost in 1954, the wishes for a Bundespostmuseum received a boost and the question of a suitable location was re-asked. Not only West Berlin and Bonn had great hopes of becoming the home of the new museum. Also, Heidelberg , Karlsruhe and Dusseldorf tried next to Frankfurt to this post. The choice finally fell on Frankfurt, which was not only recognized for its importance as a central transport hub and whether its post-historical past. Rather, the new museum should also offer compensation, since the move of the Federal Ministry for Post and Telecommunications to Bonn was already in progress.

On January 27, 1955, the postal archives moved into the Villa de Neufville on Schaumainkai and immediately began setting up an exhibition. The opening planned for June 11th had to be postponed, however, as the previous tenants, Suhrkamp Verlag and the Dutch Consulate General, refused to move out. After all, the preparations lasted so long that the museum could not be inaugurated until 1958 by the then Federal Post Minister Richard Stücklen .

Exhibits

View from the ground floor to the basement
First floor with children's workshop in the background. The tube is used for playful voice communication on the floors

Permanent exhibition

44 themed islands exemplarily show the development from cuneiform to data glasses based on four central phenomena: acceleration , networking , control and participation . The Museum for Communication in Frankfurt also includes:

  • In the basement, interview stations as part of the permanent exhibition "21 heads think the future" show various perspectives on digitization. In the museum's art rooms, works by Salvador Dalí , Joseph Beuys , Christo and Jeanne-Claude , Markus Lupertz and Brigitte Kowanz , among others, are on permanent display, and there are also smaller special exhibitions in the rooms.
  • The entrance with information desk and museum shop, the museum café and Jean-Luc Cornec's "telephone sheep" are on the ground floor.
  • The children's workshop and the forum room are located on the first floor. The forum room is used for smaller special exhibitions.
  • The special and changing exhibitions usually take place on the second floor.
  • Located on the roof of a VHF - and shortwave - Amateur radio station of the German Amateur Radio Club with the amateur radio call sign DL0DPM ( DL for Germany, DPM for German Post Museum).

Special exhibitions (selection)

  • elektro + mobil, 2019
  • Networks , 2018
  • no pain no game , 2016/2017
  • Networks of war. Communication 14/18 , 2015
  • Instigated. Anti-Semitism in miniature , 2014.
  • Out of control ? Living in a monitored world , 2013/2014
  • Pop meets pop . Andy Warhol and the Beatles , until July 31, 2011
  • Play with! 100 years of children's mail , November 11, 2010 to January 30, 2011
  • Dialogue in silence - communication without words , October 7, 2010 to February 27, 2011
  • The sandman is here! December 4, 2008 to February 22, 2009
  • Motif designs by James Rizzi for the postage stamps issued by Deutsche Post in 2008 until 2008
  • Pong , pong. myth , November 16, 2006 to January 21, 2007
  • The network. Sense and Sensibility of Networked Systems, February 28 to September 1, 2002
  • Traveling exhibition: X for U - pictures that lie , from August 17, 2000 to October 15, 2000
  • Postal codes around the world , from February 9 to May 1, 1977
Historic DAAG post bus from 1925
Two electrically powered Bergmann parcel delivery vehicles in the museum depot in Heusenstamm
Glance into the telephone collection of the depot

Post bus

A completely restored and roadworthy DAAG - Postbus type ACO from 1925 is part of the museum's holdings. The bus was the only vehicle of its type to survive.

Heusenstamm collection depot

All exhibits that cannot be shown in one of the museums for communication are well archived in Heusenstamm (focus: telecommunications history and vehicles) or in Berlin (focus: postal history). The Heusenstamm depot, on the street named after Philipp Reis , can also be visited on the first Friday of each month. In addition, the depot is open on International Museum Day. There are over 375,000 different exhibits on 15,000 square meters, including stagecoaches , historic motor vehicles , telephones, paintings , radios and many other objects from the history of communications technology .

In addition, the collection depot has a true-to-original copy of the Voyager Golden Record as an example of a communication that has so far only been sent but not yet received by the intended recipient, a potential extraterrestrial intelligence, and possibly never or not estimated within the shelf life of the medium 500 million years ago.

building

Old building: Villa de Neufville

The neo-renaissance building was erected in 1891/1893 as Villa de Neufville based on a design by Franz von Hoven , with a two-tone facade in ashlar. After the Second World War, changes were made to the roof landscape due to war destruction. It has served as the seat of the museum administration and the foundation since 1955.

New building

The neighboring new museum building was designed by Behnisch & Partner and opened in 1990. In addition to the museum exhibits, it also houses the museum café and the museum shop.

The exhibition was redesigned around 2000 and 2017, primarily to document recent developments (e.g. Internet). However, the art exhibition was significantly reduced in size and reduced to a few walls.

literature

  • Bodo Michael Baumunk: "Overview of the design of the traffic system of all times and peoples". The history of the Reichspostmuseum and its collections from 1872–1945 . In: Sigrid Randa-Campani u. a. (Ed.): “… Simply worthy style!” From the Reichspostmuseum to the Museum for Communication Berlin . Umschau / Braus, Heidelberg 2000, ISBN 3-8295-7026-0 , pp. 124–173 (publication on the occasion of the museum opening and the exhibition "Simply worthy style! On the biography of the museum" in the Museum for Communication, Berlin)
  • Frank Gnegel (Ed.): Museum for Communication Frankfurt. History, collections, architecture . Frankfurt 2008, ISBN 978-3-9808448-8-8
  • Helmut Gold (Ed.): Welcome. A tour of the Museum for Communication Frankfurt . Edition Braus, Heidelberg undated (2004?), ISBN 3-89904-244-1
  • Archive for German Postal History . Ed. And publisher: Society for German Postal History:
    • Issue: 1/1973
      • Gottfried North: 1872–1972. From the plan and model chamber to the Federal Postal Museum
      • Herbert Leclerc: The postal department of the Federal Postal Museum
      • Wolfgang Klein: The telecommunications department of the Bundespostmuseum
      • Helmut Jockel: The archive of the Bundespostmuseum
      • Helmut Jockel: The library of the Bundespostmuseum
      • Wilhelm Stössel: The postage stamp archive of the Deutsche Bundespost

Web links

Commons : Museum for Communication Frankfurt  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

Machine stamp with special cancellation from the museum
  1. ↑ Catalog of the Reichspostmuseum , Berlin 1897. Quoted from: Frank Gnegel: On the prehistory of the Bundespostmuseum 1939–1958 . In: Museum for Communication Frankfurt. History, Collections, Architecture , Frankfurt 2008, ISBN 978-3-9808448-8-8 , p. 14
  2. ^ The permanent exhibition of the Museum for Communication Frankfurt. In: Museum for Communication Frankfurt. August 31, 2017, accessed on August 12, 2019 (German).
  3. ↑ Art spaces. In: Museum for Communication Frankfurt. August 27, 2017, accessed on February 11, 2020 (German).
  4. ↑ DL0DPM The amateur radio station on the roof of the Museum for Communication Frankfurt / Main .
  5. ↑ electro ± mobile. In: Museum for Communication Frankfurt. December 25, 2018, accessed on August 12, 2019 (German).
  6. ↑ NETWORKS. In: Museum for Communication Frankfurt. November 19, 2018, accessed on August 12, 2019 (German).
  7. ↑ no pain no game. In: Museum for Communication Frankfurt. January 8, 2017, accessed on August 12, 2019 (German).
  8. ↑ Nets of War. Communication 14/18. In: Museum for Communication Frankfurt. March 5, 2015, accessed on August 12, 2019 (German).
  9. ↑ Initiated. Anti-Semitism in miniature. In: Museum for Communication Frankfurt. June 6, 2014, accessed on August 12, 2019 (German).
  10. ↑ Out of control? Living in a monitored world. In: Museum for Communication Frankfurt. October 2, 2013, accessed on August 12, 2019 (German).
  11. ^ Deutsche Bundespost, press release no. 2/1977, sheet 3
  12. ↑ Guided tour in the depot

Coordinates: 50 ° 6 ′ 16 ″  N , 8 ° 40 ′ 31 ″  E