Category: Website Review

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German History Museums

This week I asked the students to write reviews of two history museums’ web offerings. For my own contribution to the discussion, I thought I would focus on two German museums and their respective websites.

Haus der Geschichte (House of History) – Bonn, Leipzig, Berlin

The Haus der Geschichte (HdG) is one of Germany’s few federally funded history museums. Although headquartered in Bonn, it has branch museums in other cities as well (one in Leipzig and two Berlin). The main website offers information about the foundation, which oversees all of the museums, and then offers sub-domains for the offerings in each of the three cities. It is clear from the start that the Bonn museum takes center stage, but the other sites are also well represented.

The design of the site (recently updated) is quite aesthetically pleasing. The site is best characterized as a companion site or visitor information portal, rather than an attempt to digitize and extend the offerings of the museum. For each of the four museums, the visitor finds all of the necessary information for panning their visit, complete with maps and directions on how to find the museum. If you want to see some of the objects that are on display, you will be rather disappointed – there are but ten selected objects or themes that the museum has put on digital display. Those that the museum curators chose are wonderful selections and the information about each is presented very informatively. The objects given the special treatment all hail from the Bonn collection, leaving the Leipzig and Berlin collections without such in-depth treatment.

The digital visitor, however, can find a few items here that cannot be found by visiting the brick-and-mortar museums. About a decade ago, the HdG partnered with the Museum of German History in Berlin (the other federally-funded history museum) to create LeMO (the Living Museum Online). LeMO is an extensive collection of primary documents (mainly visual, but also includes text, sound, and video clips as well). LeMO draws from the extensive collections of both museums to present a very in-depth history of Germany from 1871 to the present. The HdG, however, also has a few digital exhibits of its own, which by comparison are much better than the sprawling LeMO site. The HdG offers six virtual exhibits, which range from a snazzy site dedicated to the Parliamentary Council (West Germany’s constitutional convention, which met from 1948 to 1949) to a not-so-snazzy online project that looks at how the Europe is connected through architecture, culture, religion and its ties to the rest of the world.

On the whole, the offerings here a good, but they could be presented in a much more dynamic, fun manner which seems to be the direction that the museum is heading. I do hope that the museum continues to build more digital exhibits that can extend the experience of visiting the museum and I also hope that the other museums outside of Bonn receive more attention.

The German Emigration Center (Deutsches Auswanderer Haus, Bremerhaven)

One of the best virtual museums in Germany is the online presence of the German Emigration Museum – a corollary to the Tenement Museum in New York City. The port city of Bremerhaven was the departure point for millions of Germans and other Europeans seeking a new life in the New World.

The splash page for the museum is a rather long cinematic look at the exterior and interior of the museum. I have to admit, I have never seen something like this on another site. One might think that this is overkill, but it is very effective and inviting for potential visitors. Many visitors who come to such a website are looking for glimpse of what to expect when they make their actual visit and this is exactly what the introductory film offers.

Diving deeper into the website, the content is a bit more sparse, but still offers some interesting insights into the museum and the history of German emigration (I can’t post any links here, since the whole site is written in flash and does not allow for linking to specific content). The visitor can take a virtual tour, look at information prepared for school groups, read a brief overview about the history of emigration (a very brief overview), and also learn about other practical aspects of visiting the museum.

The German Emigration Center is relatively new – it opened it’s doors in 2005. The museum has a great start here with their general website, but I remain hopeful that they will continue this tradition and begin to construct some virtual exhibits for those who cannot venture to Bremerhaven to see it for themselves.

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Virtual Museums in Germany

Today I’m going to review two museums that offer an online version of their bricks-and-mortar museum exhibit.  One is a national history museum, located in Berlin, while the other is a traveling temporary exhibit that has toured across Germany since 2003.  In many respects they are not comparable, since the scale of the two sites and the resources available to each are quite different.

LEMO: Living Virtual Museum Online  (LEMO: Lebendiges virtuelles Museum Online)

In the Federal Republic of Germany there are really only three federally funded museums at the national level – the German History Museum (DHM) in Berlin, the House of History (HdG) in Bonn (and since 2000 in Leipzig as well), and the Art Museum in Bonn.  There is also the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, which is federally funded and has no permanent exhibit (other than the building itself), but rather hosts events and temporary exhibits that can be historical in nature, but can encompass any aspect of German cultural life. This virtual museum was actually a joint project between the DHM and HdG, with the DHM curating the pieces from 1871 to 1945 and the HdG those from 1945 to the present.

The purpose of the virtual museum, beyond preparing individuals and groups for their visits, is to provide access to its resources to an international audience, who might not have the ability to travel to Berlin to visit the museum personally. To this end, the “virtual” museum allows visitors to walk  through a wide range of topics – both chronologically and thematically.  A few years ago, you were also able to attempt a virtual walk through of the museum in 3-D.  This was an interactive (and high-bandwidth) production that allowed the virtual tourist to experience the physical placement of items in the museum, push buttons to display more information, and zoom in to see digital versions of paintings and photographs on display at the “real” museum.For those who would like to see what that was like, they did preserve this function as a “guided tour” – but the visitor is no longer in charge of how one “walks” through the museum and all interactivity has been taken away.

Nonetheless, what we do have is a highly functional virtual museum.  The epochs chosen are quite standard to the study of German history. Once you click on an era, say the Weimar Republic, the visitor is presented with a well-written overview of the period and its importance to understanding how the Weimar Republic fit within the larger history of Germany.  The visitor is then given the ability to “drill-down” thematically – they could explore the revolution of 1918/1919, domestic politics, foreign policy, and other related topics.  Once the visitor clicks on the theme, she is again provided with an overview and select primary documents (usually images) on the left that provide additional information.

Throughout each article, there are hyperlinks to primary texts and specialized essays that further enhance the ability of the visitor to learn about the topic they have chosen.  The primary documents range from texts (digitized and viewable as a picture as well), sound clips, and videos.  Often times, there are further “drill-down” options within the themes. Overall, the site is very accessible. Despite the fact that it isn’t as “flashy” as say the Digital Vaults project of the US National Archives, but it provides a massive amount of information on German history – much more than one could ever expect to gather in a traditional history museum – even among the largest national museums.

One very nice aspect of the site is a section called “Collective Memory” or Kollectives Gedächnis.  Here, the website has solicited visitors (both real and virtual) to submit their memories about the time periods and events covered by the museum(s).  Again, not as interactive as the Huricane Digital Memory Bank or even the new project by Der Spiegel called One Day or Eines Tages.  But, since these memories are solicited by email and regular mail and then verified by museum curators, the authenticity of these oral histories take on a greater meaning for professional historians .

Against Dictatorship  (Gegen Diktatur)

Another virtual museum site that is of note here is one that has been traveling around Germany since 2003 on the topic of the two dictatorships on German soil – the Nazi period and East Germany.  This temporary exhibit was funded through federal monies and had a crew of professional museum curators who assembled the exhibit – including several academics who also work at major museums throughout Germany who served in an advisory capacity.

The emphasis in this exhibit is to highlight those Germans who resisted against dictatorship, many of whom fell victim to the regimes they opposed. Within the virtual museum portion of the website, the curators have provided thirty themes or sections, fifteen for each period. The site is not set up to allow direct comparisons between the two dictatorships – the themes chosen in each half of the exhibit do not parallel one another, but there are a few themes that do cross-over into both periods, such as youth opposition.

The texts that accompany each theme are short – assuming they are the same text that a visitor would have found had they seen the “real” exhibit in person – are well-chosen as representative of the topic that is being discussed and thus are paired very well.   For those who want to learn more there are also “drill-down” elements that provide biographies of those involved and there are also primary texts and pictures provided for further reading and browsing. One potential problem is that some of the scanned images are too small to actually read some of the text, especially when handwriting is included. The ability to see the text as well as the original would have been a nice feature here.

An overall critique that needs to be voiced is that the virtual visitor is left without a guided tour of any kind. Visitors are free to pick and choose from what is offered. While there might be an advantage to this approach, the lack of any pedagogical guidance seems like a lost opportunity.  Here we have a great example of a wonderful resource that could reach out to a much larger audience than the real exhibit, but the idea of guiding one through the evidence has been entirely removed from the “museum” experience.