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German Museum celebrates 100 years: anniversary festival with big names!
The German Museum celebrates its 100th anniversary with prominent guests on May 5 and free admission on 10/11. May.
German Museum celebrates 100 years: anniversary festival with big names!
On May 2, 2025, the German Museum in Munich is preparing for a significant event: the celebrations for the 100th anniversary of the house, which will begin on Monday, May 5th, with a solemn ceremony. The guests of honor include Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Prime Minister Markus Söder and Mayor Dieter Reiter. Wolfgang Heckl, General Director of the museum, emphasizes the essential mission of the house: "Knowledge for everyone".
The anniversary is supplemented by an extensive program, which is accompanied by the following weekend, May 10th and 11th, with free admission for visitors. These celebrations are an important milestone for the museum that faces numerous challenges.
renovation work and challenges
Currently, about 50% of the 45,000 square meter exhibition space on the museum island are in renovation. This work that started ten years ago should originally be completed in time for the anniversary. But delays and rising costs thwarted the plans. The costs from initially 445 million euros have risen to around 750 million euros. The Free State and the federal government contribute 150 million euros to these additional costs.
The full reopening of the museum is planned for 2028 to celebrate the 125th anniversary. As early as 2022, the first redesigned part of the museum could be handed over to its destination, with 19 permanent exhibitions, dealing with topics such as the aerospace and the nuclear fission. The highlights include the air and space hall and the breeding cabinet by Robert Koch.
history and meaning of the museum
The German Museum has had an eventful story. At its opening in 1925, 47,000 in need of Munich received a one -time allowance from a mark, which made the museum a symbol of social engagement. In the following years, however, it also became a place of political instrumentalization when the National Socialists influenced the institution. Adolf Hitler's passion for automobiles led to an extension for motor vehicles. Tragic fates like that of Arthur Schönberg, a co -founder of the museum, underline the dark story of time; He was deported by the National Socialists and died in 1943.
The museum was badly damaged during the Second World War, but was reopened in 1947. From the 1960s, the exhibition area again reached the pre -war level, and in the 1970s the number of visitors exceeded the million border for the first time.with the continuous expansion, most recently in 2021 with the German Museum Nuremberg, it becomes clear that the museum is not only a place of memory, but is also subject to a constant transformation. General Director Heckl sums up this: "A museum is never finished".
Together with social developments, the traditional sense of tradition loses stability, which leads to a progressive musalization of living environments. Among other things, this tendency is explained by Hermann Lübbe's compensation theory, which states that museums gain in importance as places of social representation and are increasingly integrated into leisure activities. The continuing change in structures and values in society creates a familiarity loss and leads to the need for the need to understand and classify your own time, as is described on museumswissenschaft.de