Dresden City Museum

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The Landhaus Dresden , the seat of the city museum
Dresden: Altes Landhaus - Museum of City History

The Dresden City Museum is the central city and local history museum of the Saxon state capital Dresden . The theme of its collections and exhibitions is the city's 800-year history . It belongs to the ten museums group of museums of the city of Dresden .

The city museum is located in the country house together with the municipal gallery , which has been managing the municipal art collection as a municipal art museum since 2002 .

Buildings and surroundings

The domicile of the Dresden City Museum is the country house . It was built between 1770 and 1775 according to plans by Friedrich August Krubsacius in a mix of styles from Baroque , Rococo and Classicism . It owes its name to its function as the seat of the state estates and, from 1832 to 1907, of the Saxon state parliament until it moved to the Saxon state house . The country house is located on the eastern edge of the inner old town between Wilsdruffer and Landhausstraße. It is between Neumarkt and Pirnaischer Platz . The police headquarters with the Dresden Police Museum is directly adjacent; The Frauenkirche and the Kurländer Palais are in the vicinity . Other Dresden museums nearby are the Dresden Fortress Museum and the New Masters in the Albertinum ( Dresden State Art Collections ).

Exhibitions

Oil painting about the Dresden May Uprising , exhibited in the city museum

The permanent exhibition of the city museum deals with various aspects of Dresden's city ​​history , including cultural and economic history. The museum displays more than 1000 exhibits in four halls. The total area of ​​the exhibitions is over 1,800 square meters and extends over several floors, 20 media stations also provide information about the development of Dresden over the last eight centuries and are supplemented by a wide range of educational museum offers.

Exhibits include three historical city ​​models , the oldest Dresden city seal from 1309, the so-called Sophia treasure as well as documents and objects from the destruction of the city by the Anglo-American air raids on Dresden in 1945. Visitors can also see an approximately 10 x 6 meter large look at the accessible aerial photo floor of the city of Dresden and get explanations of a 2 meter × 1.50 meter relief model of the Dresden Elbe valley.

In addition to the permanent exhibition on the history of Dresden , special exhibitions on cultural, economic, social and architectural history are shown. Towards the end of the year, the city museum regularly presents its special exhibition "Christmas in the country house". The representative ballroom is used for lectures and other events.

Collections

The country house , in front of it Wilsdruffer Straße

Not only the permanent exhibition of the museum is important for Dresden, but also the collection, which forms the basis for the city museum as a research facility. The collections are quite diverse and include pieces from the areas of culture, everyday life and the history of Dresden. They can be subdivided into several main stock groups.

By far the largest group are photographs and postcards with around 200,000 objects. The focus of the collection activities in this area is on city views, events in the history of the city, portraits of Dresden personalities and works by Dresden photographers, including August Kotzsch's . The collection contains daguerreotypes , ferrotypes and other evidence of old photographic processes as well as several complete estates from deceased collectors. The old holdings, comprising several 1,000 objects, with photos of the Dresden cityscape and Dresden personalities from the mid-19th century to around 1930, stand out.

The representational collections contain around 30,000 objects in 29 sub-inventory groups. They include furnishings and household items, clothing, militaria , musical instruments, toys, medals and coins, machines and equipment as well as arts and crafts objects. Significant components of this group are also special collections such as the 1951 acquired wrought iron collection Kühn Scherf with a total of 1,708 ironwork . Other main groups in the Dresden City Museum's collection are posters, documents and written material as well as maps and city plans.

The museum library has 20,000 volumes, the oldest of which are from the 16th century. It is divided into two main groups, in which works on Dresden in the broadest sense and other works are collected. The annual address books of the city and its suburbs from 1809 to 1844 make up a large proportion of Dresden's works. The primary collection of works is on the history of the state and the city, in particular legal, military and police history, club life, schools, theological literature, cultural history and much more The library's special collections include the holdings of the former Körner Museum with literature by Theodor Körner and from the circle of friends of his father Christian Gottfried Körner , including Friedrich Schiller and Ernst Moritz Arndt .

In 2011 the opera singer Clementine von Schuch , granddaughter of the important Dresden conductor Ernst von Schuch (1847–1914) and his wife, the chamber singer Clementine von Schuch-Proska (1850–1932), established the Ernst Edler von Schuch family foundation with two cousins , presented the heirlooms of their great grandparents from their creative days to the Dresden City Museum. The first 30 exhibits, including the conductor's ivory baton, who determined the musical fortunes of the Semperoper during the Schuch era from 1872 to 1914, were followed by other pieces over the next few years. In 2014, a special show was organized in the city museum to mark the 100th anniversary of Schuchs' death.

history

The New Town Hall was the seat of the City Museum until 1945.

The Dresden City Museum was founded in 1891 on the initiative of the council archivist Otto Richter . It was an expression of a conscious bourgeois demarcation from the royal art collections . The basis of his collection was made up of local historical objects from the holdings of the council archives, the Association for the History and Topography of Dresden founded in 1869 and the city ​​library founded in 1879 . Until 1919 it was under the same management and administration as the council archives and the city library.

Shortly after the First World War , the City Museum was combined with the Körner and Schilling Museum to form the City Collections . In the 1920s the establishment of a modern art department began. In addition, a small local history museum in Leuben was part of the city museum at that time . Until the end of the Second World War , the city museum was housed in the New Town Hall. In the course of the air raids on Dresden in 1945, this domicile and with it the museum were destroyed, the paintings in the city museum had previously been rescued by relocation, and 80 percent of the present collection was lost to subsequent looting.

After the end of the war, the Bienertsche Villa at Würzburger Strasse 46 served as an interim solution, but was in poor condition. In 1950 the municipal collections moved into some rooms in what was then the city ​​hall in Albertstadt . On January 16, 1951, Franz Zapf was appointed museum director and initiated the continuous reconstruction of his holdings. As early as May 10, 1951, the exhibition "The City of Dresden" could be shown. At the end of 1951, the exhibition “Christmas Mood in the Municipal Collections” established the traditional special exhibition “Christmas in the Country House”, which has continued to this day. Further exhibitions during this time were the "Dresden Documents on the Labor Movement" in the atrium of the town hall in 1952, "From Village to City" in the former town hall in 1953 and exhibitions in memory of Ludwig Richter in 1953 and Martin Andersen Nexö in 1955.

The city ​​museum has been housed in the country house since 1966.
Dresden: Altes Landhaus - Museum of City History

The newly founded "Museum for the History of the Dresden Workers' Movement" became a department of the municipal collections in 1957, which means that political and economic historical objects were increasingly included in their holdings. The city museum was re-established in January 1966 under the name “Institute and Museum for the History of the City of Dresden”. In August 1966 it moved into its current domicile, the Landhaus, with its first exhibition . From 1968 on, a special exhibition on the history of the fire brigade developed , which is now part of the technical collections . In 1977 the so-called Sophia treasure was stolen from the museum, which resulted in one of the largest manhunt operations in the GDR. The first trailer was found in 1986, a further 38 objects appeared in Oslo in 1999 and were repurchased in 2005. Another pendant on a chain was identified in Hanover in 2002 and returned to the museum in 2006. In 2017 another trailer returned from Munich. 16 objects are still missing.

Since 1990 the museum has been called "Dresden City Museum" again. After the fall of the Wall, Matthias Griebel was appointed director of the Dresden City Museum on September 1, 1990. He held this position until March 5, 2002. In the 12 years of his tenure, Griebel was able to expand the city museum's holdings considerably. The Dresden City Gallery was also founded in 2002 and took over the art inventory of the City Museum with around 1,900 paintings, 800 sculptural works and more than 20,000 graphics, which date from the 16th century to the present day.

The city museum was then closed for a long time as the country house was being modernized. It has been open again since the 800th anniversary of Dresden's first mentioning in 2006 and has since shown its large permanent exhibition on the history of Dresden as well as several special exhibitions each year.

From March 1, 2010 to March 31, 2020, Erika Eschebach was the director of the museum. Christina Ludwig has been the head of the museum since April 1, 2020.

literature

  • City Museum Dresden (Hrsg.): The City Museum Dresden in the country house . Dresden 1996. ( museum guide )
  • Museum for the History of the City of Dresden. In: Manfred Bachmann , Hans Prescher (Ed.): Museums in Dresden. Leipzig 1991, pp. 174-180.

Web links

Commons : Stadtmuseum Dresden  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

swell

  1. ^ Website of the city museum , accessed on August 9, 2018.
  2. ↑ An ivory baton for the city museum. With the estate of court conductor Ernst Edel von Schuch, the city museum is writing a new chapter in music history. , accessed July 11, 2012.
  3. ↑ Holger Starke: Canonized Left? The Museum for the History of the Dresden Labor Movement . In: The "left" Dresden. A search for traces over 100 years (= Dresdner Hefte 35th vol. 130 2/2017). Dresden History Association V., Dresden 2017, pp. 82–91.
  4. ^ Library of the City Museum. In: Handbook of historical book collections in Germany, Austria and Europe (Fabian Handbook)
  5. ↑ ZDF
  6. ↑ www.sz-online.de
  7. ↑ Information according to information on display boards in the Dresden City Museum.

Coordinates: 51 ° 3 ′ 0.5 "  N , 13 ° 44 ′ 34.8"  E