City Museum Gütersloh

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City Museum Gütersloh
Stadtmuseum-schild3.jpg
At the entrance to the city museum: The museum logo shows the two main buildings.
Data
place Gutersloh
Art
City history of Gütersloh, medical history, industrial history
architect historic buildings from the 18th and 19th centuries
opening June 12, 1988
Number of visitors (annually) 9,000
operator
Heimatverein Gütersloh
management
Franz Jungbluth
Website
ISIL DE-MUS-170718

The City Museum Gütersloh is a city history museum in the East Westphalian district town of Gütersloh . The museum is sponsored by the Heimatverein Gütersloh and, in addition to exhibits on the city history of Gütersloh, shows two exhibitions on medical and industrial history . These three permanent exhibitions are accompanied by around five to seven special exhibitions on local topics or by traveling exhibitions each year. The museum's flagship is the medical history collection, which was awarded a special prize for the European Museum Prize in 1990. The most important exhibits include a desk by Nobel Prize winner Robert Koch and an iron lung from the 1950s.

History of the museum

There was a first local museum in Gütersloh from 1935, after the desire for such a museum had arisen in the 1920s for prehistoric and early historical finds in the Gütersloh area. Both the building and the exhibits were damaged and partially destroyed in the Second World War. In 1974 the remains of the previous exhibition were shown in a new home, but this did not offer enough space. On June 24, 1982, the Gütersloh doctor Dr. Wilhelm Angenete (1890–1984) and his sister Else gave the Heimatverein Gütersloh two properties with the buildings in downtown Gütersloh on condition that a museum be set up there. The Gütersloh City Museum was opened in 1988 in the so-called brick house. The homeland association Gütersloh became the sponsor, with the city of Gütersloh contributing to the costs to this day. In 1997, a neighboring half-timbered house was refurbished in a second construction phase. The museum café opened in 2000.

building

The museum area consists of several historical buildings. The exhibition on the city's history is shown in a half-timbered house that was built around 1750 and which housed the first Prussian elementary school in Gütersloh between 1819 and 1868, before the grain store Angenete & Wulfhorst opened there. In 1874 they built the brick house as a grain store, in which the exhibitions on medical and industrial history can be seen today. The houses have been connected to one another by a passage on the first floor since 1930, which now enables a museum tour. Both buildings were entered in the list of architectural monuments in Gütersloh in 1984 with the monument numbers A 081 and A 082 .

The museum management and administration as well as the museum café are housed in other half-timbered houses. The latter was translocated in a complex process . Its original location was not far from today's Gütersloh town hall. In contrast to most half-timbered constructions, it could not be dismantled, as otherwise the load-bearing inner wall decorated with murals would have been destroyed. The 20-ton building was gutted, stiffened with diagonal struts, “packed” in a transport cage and driven to its new location on a low-loader.

The museum magazine is located outside the actual museum premises.

  • The half-timbered house from around 1750 and the brick house from 1874 are listed.

  • A bridge connects the two buildings.

  • Rear view: that in a piece in the middle of the museum café translocated was. The Utlucht is easy to see .

  • The café is only 64 m² in size, so the museum courtyard is used accordingly when the weather is nice.

Collections and exhibitions

An important chapter in the history of Gütersloh: the military airfield

In principle, the Gütersloh City Museum collects everything related to the city of Gütersloh. The collection also focuses on medicine, hygiene and health, business and industry, media and media technology (which is related to the Bertelsmann media group based in Gütersloh ) as well as toys and leisure activities. Its extensive collections, of which only the smallest part can be shown due to the limited exhibition space available, make the museum one of the larger museums in the region.

City history of Gütersloh

The exhibition on the history of the city of Gütersloh includes artefacts from the Bronze Age to modern evidence of the digital revolution. In addition to original prehistoric finds, you can see a replica of the approximately 3,500 year old, 41 cm high " Pavenstädter Riesenbecher ", one of the oldest evidence of human settlement in the Gütersloh urban area. A teacher's apartment from the Vormärz period reminds of the earlier use of the half-timbered house .

A focus of the city history exhibition is on the everyday life of Gütersloh families around 1868. On display are furnishings and utensils of a Protestant and a Catholic family. Historical weather data reminds of the establishment of the first weather station in Gütersloh by the honorary citizen of the city Friedrich Wilhelm Stohlmann .

In the former horse stable of the half-timbered house, the entire equipment of the Gütersloh coppersmith Thiro from 1900 is housed: three generations of the Thiro family worked with the devices exhibited there until 1977; they produced, for example, pots, pans and stills for the local distilleries.

One area of ​​the exhibition is dedicated to the topic of “Gütersloh - City of Donors and Donors”. Not least because the city museum owes its existence to a donation, personalities are presented who have worked for the common good of the city through foundation activities. A prominent example is Reinhard Mohn , who set up Germany's oldest community foundation in Gütersloh in 1996 . A bronze sculpture by Mohn, a work by the Wiedenbrück sculptor Hubert Hartmann (1915–2006) from 1986, is exhibited in this area .

Medical history

In the medical history exhibition: an iron lung from the 1950s

The museum is the only city history museum in northern Germany with a focus on medical history. This exhibition of the history of medicine is considered a "nationally significant" and was awarded the special prize for the 1990 European Museum Prize awarded (European Museum of the Year Award). It combines general developments in medical history ("Medicine in antiquity, the Middle Ages and modern times", "From the healing god to the demigod in white") with local references (practice facility Dr. Angenete, well-known Gütersloh doctors such as Friedrich Daniel von Recklinghausen , Theodor Rumpel or the honorary citizen Wilhelm Schlüter , Friedrich Wilhelm Stohlmann and Carl Zumwinkel ). Since there are relatively few medical history museums in Germany , this permanent exhibition is a figurehead and the unique selling point of the museum, at least in the regional museum landscape.

The collection goes to the Gütersloh doctor Dr. Wilhelm Angenete, who bequeathed not only the building of the museum but also the inventory of his practice to the Heimatverein, including numerous medical instruments, furniture, a skeleton as well as teaching and visual materials, some from the 1920s and 1930s. In addition, the Heimatverein was able to secure essential parts of a drugstore originally set up as a pharmacy from 1890.

These exhibits formed the basis for a collection, which today also includes the desk of the Nobel laureate in medicine Robert Koch (1843–1910) from his time as director of the Institute for Hygiene in Berlin (1885–1891). The desk came through the mediation of the medical historian from Gütersloh, Prof. Dr. Dr. Axel Hinrich Murken in the city museum.

Other noteworthy exhibits include two dental facilities from 1925 and 1955, an X-ray machine , a midwife's birthing chair (a collapsible bench that can be transported by bicycle with a hole in the middle through which the newborn could fit), a cystoscope from the 1920s and an iron lung , a steel pressure chamber tube in which a lung patient lived permanently. Today, hardly a dozen of these ventilators can be viewed publicly in Germany.

In 1998 the city museum also took over the practice of the Gütersloh ophthalmologist Dr. Kurt Heinrich (1908-1998).

In addition to the permanent exhibition, the city museum shows special and traveling exhibitions related to medical history. Examples of this can be found in the section " Special exhibitions ".

From its medical history collection, the Gütersloh City Museum repeatedly makes exhibits available for special exhibitions in other museums. So came in the exhibition “Sun, Moon and Stars. Culture and nature of energy ”in Essen's Zeche Zollverein nine of fourteen medical radiation lamps from the inventory of the city museum. Numerous companies, associations, health insurances, practices, clinics and other health institutions are also taking advantage of history marketing for exhibitions, e.g. B. return to the collection on the occasion of anniversaries. The city museum lends its exhibits, including professional and practical exhibition advice, as a "historical service" in order to generate additional income.

In July 2013, the city museum hosted the 23rd symposium “Medical-historical museology”. The symposium brings together representatives of medical history collections and museums from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Industrial history

Coppersmith around 1900
Metal processing companies, including Miele, are presented in the industrial history exhibition .
Exhibition “Obstetrics through the ages” in the Gütersloh Clinic with exhibits from the city museum

The second permanent exhibition deals with industrial development in Germany using the example of Gütersloh companies and thus focuses on the textile and metal goods industry. In addition to workbenches and machines, a still functional mechanical loom can be seen . The topic of “washing and washing machines” is also addressed with regard to the domestic appliance manufacturer Miele .

Special exhibitions

Local topics are dealt with in special exhibitions or traveling exhibitions are shown. When it comes to local topics, the focus is on the city's history with the development of industry, trade and transport, of culture, leisure and education.

In keeping with the focus of its collection on the history of medicine, the city museum regularly shows its own or external exhibitions from this area. Examples of this were “Bloody Crafts - Clinical Surgery. On the development of surgery 1750–1920 ”,“ The art of childbirth. Obstetrical Medicine Collection Göttingen 1750 to 1860 ”, a special exhibition on the Gütersloh pathologist Friedrich Daniel von Recklinghausen ,“ Prostheses from head to toe ”,“ It's not that bad. Children's books and toys on medicine, illness and healing ”,“ Au Backe. From tooth tearing to tooth preservation ”or“ The discovery of mobility - old age, illness and disability in history ”.

With the exhibition "Indoor elevators and manual bicycles - from the history of the wheelchair " in 2013, the museum is making a contribution to a still relatively unexplored chapter in medical history. Heinrich Wilhelm Voltmann, who founded what is probably the first German wheelchair factory in Bad Oeynhausen in 1871 , was born on June 4, 1843 in Gütersloh.

Traditionally, an exhibition is shown in the winter months that deals with toys in a broader sense . Experience shows that these exhibitions are the most popular. The most successful exhibitions in the museum included “Nothing to swear for the engineer” (with replicated inventions by Daniel Düsentrieb ), “Busy girl - Barbie makes a career”, “Texas-Wackel-Express - The Gütersloh railway region in a model” (an allusion to die TWE ), "100 Years of Märklin - Metal Construction Kits " and a Käthe Kruse exhibition. The two most popular exhibitions at the museum were in 2009 “Everyone builds with Lego ” and in 2015 “Manege free for Playmobil ”, each with almost 5,000 visitors.

One of the most successful special exhibitions was the “The Great War?” Exhibition in 2014, which was visited by almost 4,000 people. The joint project of the twin cities of Gütersloh and Châteauroux prepared the topic of " First World War " in local comparison and was then shown in Graudenz and Danzig.

Museum education

The “Kulturstrolche” project developed in Münster has been disseminated in its member cities by the Kultursekretariat NRW Gütersloh since 2008 . In the Gütersloh City Museum, primary school children have the opportunity to get to know the exhibitions in a playful and child-friendly manner and to look behind the scenes of a museum. Museum rallies, guessing games, disguise campaigns and courses in textile production and woodworking are offered. There are special children's tours and offers for children's birthdays. A “museum doctor” and his assistant guide you through the medical history collection. In addition, the city museum has transportable exhibition boxes made of wood, which are equipped with material (e.g. for making paper and learning historical writing and printing techniques) and loaned to schools for project work. An educational partnership has existed between the museum and the municipal Anne Frank Comprehensive School since September 19, 2018. Pupils in the ninth grade plan to prepare and hold six city tours on the subject of “Gütersloh under the swastika”.

Web links

Commons : Stadtmuseum Gütersloh  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Stephan Rechlin: Miracles on the Museum Island. In: Westfalen-Blatt. Newspaper for Gütersloh, December 3, 2014.
  2. ^ Heinrich Lakämper-Lührs: The City Museum Gütersloh. A modern, association-sponsored museum. In: Joachim Meynert, Volker Rodekamp (ed.): Heimatmuseum 2000. Starting points and perspectives. Bielefeld, 1993, ISBN 3-89534-103-7 .
  3. ^ Matthias E. Borner, Detlef Güthenke: City Guide Gütersloh . A guide through a young city with a long history . tpk-Regionalverlag, Bielefeld 2010, ISBN 978-3-936359-43-5 .
  4. ↑ Thomas Spooren, Collin Klostermeier, Vera Brinkmeier: A house is moving - chronology of a relocation . Video book publisher Thomas Spooren, Gütersloh 2001, ISBN 3-00-008111-9 .
  5. ↑ Carsten Vorwig: The cultural memory of the city. On the need for an extensive material goods magazine in the city museum (=  Gütersloh contributions to local history and regional studies . No. 76/77 ). Gütersloh 2003.
  6. ↑ A bronze memorial for Gütersloh - bust of Reinhard Mohn has a permanent place in the city museum. In: New Westphalian . (Gütersloher Zeitung). February 9, 2010, accessed December 21, 2011.
  7. ^ NRW Foundation (ed.): Our NRW. Guide to cultural and natural monuments. Ostwestfalen-Lippe . Klartext, Essen 2011, ISBN 978-3-8375-0622-8 .
  8. ^ A b Martin Wedeking, Norbert Ellermann: The medical collection of the Stadtmuseum Gütersloh: history - positions - perspectives. In: Rainer Alsheimer, Roland Weibezahn (eds.): Physicality and Culture 2005 - History, Norms, Methods. University of Bremen, Bremen 2005, ISBN 3-88722-659-3 .
  9. ↑ Eckart Roloff , Karin Henke-Wendt: A rare unique selling point of a city museum: medicine. (Das Stadtmuseum Gütersloh) In: Visit your doctor or pharmacist. A tour through Germany's museums for medicine and pharmacy. Volume 1: Northern Germany. Verlag S. Hirzel, Stuttgart 2015, ISBN 978-3-7776-2510-2 , pp. 136-138.
  10. ↑ Axel Hinrich Murken : The career of a famous writing desk. Robert Koch and his Berlin desk (=  Gütersloh contributions to local and regional studies . No. 78 ). Gütersloh 2005.
  11. ^ Matthias Borner: By crane on the island - The city museum. GT-INFO, December 2011 edition, accessed on December 22, 2011.
  12. ^ Friedhelm Heinrich: Dr. Kurt Heinrich. Biography of a Gütersloh ophthalmologist (=  Gütersloh contributions to local and regional studies . No. 66/67 ). Gütersloh 2000.
  13. ↑ Ulrich Borsdorf (Ed.): Sun, Moon and Stars. Culture and nature of energy. Catalog for the exhibition at the Zollverein coking plant in Essen as part of the finale of the Emscher Park International Building Exhibition . Bottrop / Essen 1999.
  14. ^ Rolf Westheider: The Gütersloh City Museum as a provider of historical services . Gütersloh 2005 ( memorandum , typescript ).
  15. ↑ stadtmuseum-guetersloh.de: special exhibition category “Health and Medicine” , accessed on May 12, 2015.
  16. ↑ stadtmuseum-guetersloh.de: Special exhibition category “Toys and children's books” , accessed on May 12, 2015.
  17. ↑ stadtmuseum-guetersloh.de: The great war? Châteauroux and Gütersloh in the First World War , accessed on May 12, 2015.
  18. ^ Norbert Ellermann: Museum Education in the City Museum Gütersloh. History to join in (=  Gütersloh contributions to local and regional studies . No. 76/77 ). Gütersloh 1993.
  19. ↑ From city discoverer to city explorer [1]

Coordinates: 51 ° 54 ′ 23.2 "  N , 8 ° 22 ′ 48.3"  E