DEUTSCHES MUSEUM

Description

Essentials about the Deutsches Museum in brief

Anyone who is enthusiastic about natural sciences and technology should have seen the Deutsches Museum (German Museum) in Munich at least once in their life. It is, after all, a museum of superlatives. In terms of exhibition space, the Deutsches Museum is the largest science and technology museum in the world. Every year, about 1.5 million people visit the museum to discover 28,000 objects from about 50 scientific fields. From astronomy and physics to aeronautics and astronautics to biology and chemistry – hardly any other technology museum can compete with the Deutsches Museum when it comes to the breadth of its exhibits.

The history of the Deutsches Museum

The Deutsches Museum was founded by the Munich civil engineer Oskar von Miller. Von Miller began organizing electrical engineering exhibitions at an early age and developed considerable organizational talent in the process. In addition, von Miller was a talented networker who was adept at winning over personalities from politics, science and business for his purposes.

The year 1903 can be regarded as the founding date of the Deutsches Museum. At that time, Oskar von Miller sent out a circular letter to renowned personalities from science and industry throughout the German Reich concerning the founding of a museum association. Von Miller was personally acquainted with many of the prominent addressees, such as Wilhlem Conrad Röntgen, Carl von Linde, Georg Krauß, Hugo von Maffei and Rudolf Diesel. The founding appeal was followed by other very well-known personalities such as Max Planck and Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach. Even Prince Ludwig and Emperor Wilhelm II were won over as patrons for the project.

The Munich City Council provided part of the Old Coal Island in the Isar River as the building site for a new museum building. Foundations from industry and, in particular, the transfer of the collection of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences provided the basis for the collections.

The tender for the museum extension on the coal island was won in 1906 by the architect Gabriel von Seidl. Until the new building was completed, the exhibitions of the Deutsches Museum temporarily occupied rooms in the old Bavarian National Museum on Maximilianstrasse (today it houses the Museum Fünf Kontinente), where the opening ceremony took place on November 12, 1906, in the presence of the German Emperor. One day later, the foundation stone for the new building was laid on the coal island. The public’s response to the new museum was overwhelming. In its first full year of operation in 1907, the Deutsches Museum already recorded over 200,000 visitors.

The start of construction on the coal island was delayed until 1909 due to the difficult subsoil. Several thousand concrete piles had to be driven into the ground to stabilize the foundation. The opening, planned for 1915, had to be postponed due to the outbreak of World War I. With the political upheavals at the end of the war, the Deutsches Museum was deprived of a substantial part of its financial resources. Inflation wiped out the foundation’s cash assets, while government and business support also dwindled and visitor numbers declined. Due to the desolate capital situation, the continuation of the museum’s new building was at times severely jeopardized.

Despite these adversities, the new Deutsches Museum building was opened on May 7, 1925 – on Oskar von Miller’s 70th birthday – with a pompous celebration. At the time, the Deutsches Museum was one of the first major buildings to be constructed of reinforced concrete. The use of this building material, which was still new and progressive at the time, was deliberately chosen to demonstrate the state of the art and thus also to make the building itself virtually part of the exhibition.

From 1925 onwards, the Deutsches Museum developed into a real crowd-puller. The number of visitors increased abruptly to almost 800,000 people with the opening of the new building. The museum also quickly gained worldwide fame and became a model for other technology museums in other countries.

At the end of World War II, the building and the exhibits of the Deutsches Museum were severely damaged by air raids. By the end of the war, a good 80 percent of the building fabric had been destroyed. Although particularly valuable and mobile exhibits were stored in air-raid shelters or outside Munich, some especially large and immobile exhibits were lost.

After the heavy destruction during the war, the museum was reopened in 1948 and expanded several times in the following years. In 1992, the Flugwerft Schleissheim was opened as a branch museum on Germany’s oldest surviving airfield. In 1995, the Deutsches Museum Bonn was founded as a branch museum to show the development of science and technology in Germany after 1945. And in 2003, the first hall of the Verkehrszentrum des Deutschen Museums (Transport Center of the Deutsches Museum) was occupied on the Theresienhöhe (the former trade fair grounds) in Munich.

The Deutsches Museum as museum of hands-on experience

Unlike many other science and technology museums, where visitors tend to passively walk through the exhibition rooms, the Deutsches Museum is a huge playground. Visitors are allowed to actively turn knobs, flip levers and touch exhibits. Even the museum’s founding father, Oskar von Miller, was a proponent of this education-oriented participatory principle, in which exhibits are meant to invite visitors to engage in small experiments. Von Miller’s aphorism “In this house, everyone may do what I want” can still be read today in the museum’s entrance area.

The exhibitions in the Deutsches Museum

Agricultural and food technology, astronomy, mining, bridge building, chemistry, DNA, printing technology, energy technology, petroleum and natural gas, photography and film, glass technology, computer science, power machines, aerospace, mathematics, metals, microelectronics, pharmacy, physics, shipping, telecommunications, environment, hydraulic engineering – the list of departments at the Deutsches Museum is almost endless. A detailed description of the main topics of the museum would go completely beyond the scope of this page – one could write a separate travel guide about the Deutsches Museum. As a visitor, it is therefore best to pick out a few of the areas that particularly interest you and spend a little more time there than getting bogged down in the gigantic exhibition.

However, a few extraordinary highlights of the Deutsches Museum should be briefly presented at this point: Particularly popular is the almost one-kilometer-long Stollenwelt, a dark mining complex that leads deep under the museum. Things get even tighter in the 42-meter-long U1 submarine of the Imperial Navy from 1906. Those who prefer to experience a proper bang should visit the Power Engineering Department. There, museum employees demonstrate several times a day, using a one-million-volt lightning strike, why a Faraday cage protects you from even the most violent electric shocks.

For its 100th birthday in 2025, the Deutsches Museum is to shine in new splendor. Since 2015, the museum building has therefore been undergoing fundamental renovation and entire departments have been rebuilt. Some of the departments are currently closed or not fully accessible due to the modernization work. Information on the current opening status of the individual departments can be found on the museum’s website.