The Kulturhistorische Museum Magdeburg (KHM) is a museum in Magdeburg for Cultural History. It was originally founded in 1906 as an art-historically oriented Kaiser-Friedrich Museum. The museum focuses on the history of the city in permanent and special exhibitions. Art-historical pieces are also presented. The Museum für Naturkunde Magdeburg is also located in the same building.
After various predecessor institutions, the Magdeburg Museum of Cultural History was opened on 17 December 1906 as the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum. The first director of the museum was the art historian Theodor Volbehr. After numerous private gifts and acquisitions from Europe, the National Socialists endeavoured to remove unwelcome objects from 1933 onwards. During the Second World War, the museum building was severely destroyed. In addition, an extensive part of the outsourced collections, including the famous painting by Vincent van Gogh The Painter on the Way to Tarascon, was lost.[1] Subsequently, the building was largely rebuilt, extensively restored and the collections expanded. In addition, the Museum für Naturkunde Magdeburg moved into the building of the former Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum.
From the 1990s onwards, the highlights of the exhibitions in the Museum of Cultural History included the Council of Europe exhibitions Otto the Great – Magdeburg and Europe (2001) and Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (2006). Other important recent exhibitions were Magdeburg 1200 – Medieval Metropolis, Prussian Fortress, State Capital (2005), Dawn of the Gothic (2009), Otto the Great and the Roman Empire. Kaisertum von der Antike zum Mittelalter (2012), Against Emperor and Pope – Magdeburg and the Reformation (2018), Reformstadt der Moderne – Magdeburg in den Zwanzigern (2019), Faszination Stadt – Die Urbanisierung Europas im Mittelalter und das Magdeburger Recht (2019).[2]
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The museum building is located at Otto-von-Guericke-Straße 68–73, only a few metres from Magdeburg Cathedral. It was built from 1901 to 1906 as a municipal museum for art and arts and crafts and was given the name Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum. The executed design had emerged indirectly from an architectural competition held in 1897 and came from the Viennese architects Friedrich Ohmann and August Kirstein.[3] It was built in the agglomerated building type.
In addition to the period rooms, the building includes the Great Hall. This was created in the style of the buildings of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg in the form of a church room with a crypt and was originally titled the Hall of Magdeburg Antiquities.[4] After the destruction in the Second World War and the subsequent renovations, the character of the room was considerably changed by, among other things, inserting a false ceiling. It was only after the Peaceful Revolution and in the context of the first Otto der Grosse exhibition that extensive renovations could take place from 1997. In 2001, the room was reopened and renamed the Kaiser-Otto-Saal. Nowadays it is mainly used as a lecture, meeting and exhibition room.[5]
Since the end of the 2010s, the original statue of the Magdeburger Reiter and a baroque Nativity scene have been on display in the Emperor Otto Hall. The three-part mural Scenes from the Life of Otto the Great by Arthur Kampf in 1905/06 illustrates the hall.
The Museum of Cultural History employs 27 people. It is managed by Gabriele Köster. A special feature of the offer is the Magdeburger Reiter by Playmobil, with which the toy manufacturer recreated a work of art for the first time and thus also advertises a city.
Since 1995, the Megedeborch has been staged in the museum's inner courtyard from spring to autumn. The project is a historical play in which schoolchildren can experience medieval Magdeburg for themselves in a reconstructed setting. For this, they slip into the role of various professions, practise the trades and thus populate the city.[6]
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