Schulze-Delitzsch-Haus - German Cooperative Museum
The Schulze-Delitzsch-Haus German Cooperative Museum is a museum facility in Delitzsch . The sponsor is the German Hermann Schulze Delitzsch Society. V.
History and present
The museum is dedicated to the founder of the modern cooperative system, Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch (1808–1883), and contains what is probably the only personal exhibition on this German politician.
In 1849, Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch and 57 Delitzsch shoemakers founded a shoemaker's association in the house of the master shoemaker Wilhelm Brendecke and now the museum building at Delitzscher Kreuzgasse 10 . With the joiner's association launched at the same time , this was the hour of birth of the first commercial cooperative in Germany. Other cooperative associations soon followed.
Since the middle of the 20th century, the building in Kreuzgasse had been falling into disrepair and could only be structurally secured after German reunification. With the help of subsidies and the support of the German Cooperative and Raiffeisen Association , the house was extensively renovated in 1991/92 and made available for use as a museum.
When the museum was supposed to be closed in 1998 due to a lack of funding by the large district town of Delitzsch, the Association for the Promotion of Hermann-Schulze-Delitzsch and Memorial of the German Cooperative System was founded on January 21, 1998; the initiator was the then Cooperative Association of Saxony (Raiffeisen / Schulze-Delitzsch) eV, based in Chemnitz, has been operating as the German Herrmann-Schulze-Delitzsch Society since 2011.
The Hermann Schulze Delitzsch Society e. V. had an exhibition concept drawn up by its board of trustees in 2010 that corresponds to current scientific and museological findings. In November 2010, a redesigned exhibition with a wide variety of media was opened to the public. On November 30, 2016, UNESCO included Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch and Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen's idea of a cooperative as the first German contribution to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
The permanent exhibition was renovated in 2019 and 2020, initially on the lower floor of the museum. A "world map of the cooperatives" is presented on a wall in the newly designed and multimedia-equipped assembly room on the ground floor. It illustrates the international dissemination of the cooperative idea, which originated in Delitzsch, among others, using selected country examples. The successful UNESCO application by the Schulze-Delitzsch Society is also presented. The room also offers the opportunity to hold special events on topics related to the cooperative. On request, it can be used by members of the cooperative and other interested audiences, including groups of pupils and students, for their own workshops or meetings.
The current chief curator (since 2018) is the historian and media scientist Dr. Thomas Keiderling (Leipzig).
Web links
Coordinates: 51 ° 31 ′ 19.5 ″ N , 12 ° 20 ′ 4.2 ″ E