German History Museums is a travel guide for tourists and armchair travellers, aimed particularly at those with an interest in exploring Germany’s twentieth-century past. While the guide is written with the British visitor in mind, we hope any traveller will find it useful.
While we develop the site, we are using a simple navigation system. Clicking on the menu icon at top right takes you to a list of our museum travel guides. Click on each one for the guide. The arrow to the right of each museum folds down a sub-menu. This offers ‘an object to look out for’ in the museum and a research blog on the museum written by Professor Chloe Paver.
Why should you take our advice?
- We know German history museums inside out.
- We can explain aspects of German culture that museums don’t know you don’t know.
- We can help when information is not translated into English or is poorly translated.
- We can tell you what kind of experience you’ll have at the museum and what else there is to see and do nearby.
- We understand that different kinds of history enthusiast want different things out of a museum.
Who are we?
Chloe Paver is Associate Professor of German at the University of Exeter. Her research considers how German and Austrian history museums are shaping public memory of the Third Reich and the Cold War era.
Charlotte Drohan is a graduate of German and English from the University of Exeter. She is particularly interested in museum education and museum ethics and has experience working at museums in Oxford.
Rick Lawrence is Digital Manager at RAMM, Exeter, a leading museum in the South West with international collections including many objects relating to World War Two.
What does the guide cover?
The guide introduces a selection of history museums in Germany which are well worth visiting or, if you are unable to travel there, just worth knowing about.
The guide doesn’t try to cover all German history museums. Rather than run teams of travel writers like the Rough Guide and its competitors, we offer personal recommendations from experts in German culture. A fuller list of German museums with short introductions is available from the German National Tourist Board (http://www.germany.travel/en/towns-cities-culture/museums/museums.html).
The museums we recommend mostly show exhibitions about Germany’s twentieth-century history, particularly the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and the Cold War. This reflects our research expertise. We welcome suggestions on what to cover next.
We have left out some of the ‘big’ tourist museums because they are well covered in existing guides, but have included some quirky ones that you are unlikely to find out about elsewhere.
We haven’t duplicated information that is given at the museums’ own websites (such as opening times) as this could quickly become out of date. But of course we provide the URL for their homepage.
How to use the guide
Our guide to each museum answers the questions: ‘Why go there?’, which gives you an idea of what sort of visit it will be and what else there is to do nearby, and ‘What’s inside?’ which gives a flavour of the exhibition narrative and display.
From each museum we have picked out ‘An object to look out for’. This gives a taster of what there is to see and suggests how objects can be interpreted in the German context.
For a longer read, we provide the ‘Research Background’. Here, Professor Chloe Paver blogs about some of the issues that make modern German history museums worth spending time in and time on. History museums present themselves as self-assured, professional institutions but often their existence and their shape is the result of years of debate and uncertainty about how to address Germany’s troubled past. If museums don’t explain these issues to their visitors they are not necessarily trying to hide anything. As one museum director told us, visitors want a clear narrative written in an authoritative voice, not tortured self-reflection. Yet German history museums make a lot more sense if you understand why they are there and where they fit into Germany’s culture of memory and history.
Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to the following who kindly contributed ideas for the format of the guide: Renate Helmsley, Trudi Learmouth, Veronica Brockington, Bertram Brockington, Gerard Owen, Christine Morley, and Sheila Morris.
Image Copyright
All images are copyright C. Paver, except two which are in the public domain. Any rights holders concerned about image rights are asked to contact us.
German History Museums 