Historisches Museum Hannover

1907: "Vaterländisches Museum der Stadt Hannover. collection of the Altertümern guild."
Postcard 1, Series B; Georg Alpers jun.

The museum, run by the city of Hanover, was opened on 26 April 1903 as Vaterländisches Museum in the Cumberlandsche Galerie.[1] The foundation took place on the initiative of the Heimatbund Niedersachsen.[2] In 1937 the museum was renamed as Niedersächsisches Volkstumsmuseum. It was destroyed in 1943 by the Bombing of Hanover in World War II. From 1950 the provisional reconstruction began under the temporary name of Niedersächsisches Heimatmuseum. In 1966 the museum was opened under its present name in a new building designed by the architect Dieter Oesterlen. The "Verein der Freunde des Historischen Museums" supports the work of the museum financially and ideally.

In 2017, the museum's permanent exhibition, conceived in 1993, was redesigned.[3] In 2020 the museum closes for three years for renovation work.[4]

The museum from the city

The headquarters of the museum is located Am Hohen Ufer on the Leine river, where the beginning of the medieval settlement of Hanover in the 11th century is assumed, near a Leine crossing of the road between Hildesheim and Bremen, which was secured here by a fiefdom. Even if the derivation of the city's name "Hanovere" or "Honovere" from the "high bank" should not be correct according to the latest scientific findings, the museum has a unique location in the area of the city's origin.

The Beginenturm integrated into the museum is the last completely preserved tower of the medieval fortifications of Hannover. The museum building also incorporates a high stone wall of the ducal Zeughaus am Hohen Ufer, built between 1643 and 1649. The wall facing the Hohes Ufer is a section of the city wall. In 2013, when significant medieval finds were discovered in the area during construction work on a neighbouring plot, it led to a three-months archaeological investigation. Opposite of the museum is the historic old town of Hanover which was completely destroyed in World War II, with Burgstraße featuring numerous half-timbered houses reconstructed in the 1960s, as well as the restored Leibniz House on Holzmarkt.

Illuminated museum at night

The museum building was constructed as a new building from 1964 to 1967 according to the plans of the architect Dieter Oesterlen. The Beginenturm and the rest of the ducal arsenal were included on the site of a block of flats in the old town development destroyed in the war. The museum has a polygonal ground plan around a pentagonal inner courtyard. The striking façade has three storeys with alternating broad sandstone surfaces and narrow bands of windows and a staggered view from the northern Burgstrasse. In 1991 it was rebuilt and in 2002 the individual departments were redesigned. This concerned the department of regional history on the ground floor and a part of the city history on the first floor.

The text of the illuminated quotation by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz on the Leibnizufer - a light installation by the American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth[5] – reads:

There is no desert, nothing infertile, nothing dead in the world, no chaos, no confusion, except an apparent one, something like what you would see in a pond if you saw a confused movement and a swarm of fish from some distance, without distinguishing the fish themselves

— Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Director Thomas Schwark with the plates of the BDA-Preis Niedersachsen and the Museumsregistrierung

From 1928 to 1945, Wilhelm Peßler was director of the Vaterländisches Museum in Hanover. Waldemar R. Röhrbein was director from 1976 to 1997, succeeded by Thomas Schwark.

• Historisches Museum Hannover. In Dieter Oesterlen: Bauten und Texte 1946-1991. Tübingen: Wasmuth 1992, pp. 138–147. ISBN 3-8030-0153-6.
• Waldemar R. Röhrbein: Historisches Museum am Hohen Ufer 1903 – 1978.[10] In Hannoversche Geschichtsblätter, Neue Folge 32 (1978), pp. 3–60
• Franz Rudolf Zankl: Ausstellung der Gildealtertümer im Vaterländischen Museum. Fotografie um 1910. In Hannover Archiv, Blatt K 12
• Helmuth Plath: Stadtgeschichtliche Abteilung.[11] (Abteilungskataloge des Historischen Museums am Hohen Ufer, Hannover. 1). Hanover 1970.
• Mit Geschichte in die Zukunft, Festschrift zum 25-jährigen Bestehen der Freunde des Historischen Museums, Hannover 2005
• Helmut Knocke, Hugo Thielen: Pferdestraße 6. In Hannover Kunst- und Kultur-Lexikon, pp. 178–180
• Thomas Schwark, Waldemar R. Röhrbein: Historisches Museum In Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein (ed.) among others: Stadtlexikon Hannover. Von den Anfängen bis in die Gegenwart. Schlütersche, Hanover 2009, ISBN 978-3-89993-662-9, p. 299.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Historisches Museum Hannover.

• Literature by and about Historisches Museum Hannover in the German National Library catalogue
• Official website
• Stadttafel Historisches Museum