Greetings from Berlin IV
The Museum Neukölln – Small but Nice
I want to
present you another of my favorite museums in Berlin, the Museum Neukölln. “Neukölln”
is a deprived urban area in the south of the city with a high unemployment. Over
the last years a lot of small galleries and pubs have opened in the northern
part of the borough and have attracted a new clientele. Two years ago the
museum moved from the rather tough centre of Neukölln to a truly idyllic place:
a former estate. While approaching the quite impressive building where the
exhibition is situated, you can caress the back of a sheep or the beard of a
goat.
The space
of the museum is, like before, quite limited. But this has never been a
disadvantage for the curators, on the contrary, I nearly never saw such
concentrated exhibitions elsewhere. With the new permanent exhibition, called “99x Neukölln”, the team ensured its reputation.
99 objects
are presented in the purest fashion possible: they are put in the showcases
without a single text or label of any kind. Just things placed on white cubes. Well,
you think, but there MUST be more information! And right you are.
The
visitors find detailed information on monitors which they can move around and
along the showcases: in the moment they place the monitor in front of a certain
object the adequate information appear.
On the
picture you can see a friend of mine reading the story of the two puppets in
the showcase. An American soldier bought them in Neukölln after the war. He was
in love with a German girl who was too young to get married. So he waited for
her for years and finally their love story found a happy end. On the screen you
first learn more about the couple, you see a photograph of their wedding and
read one of their love letters. But then, diving deeper (and indeed the
moveable monitors remind me on look-outs of submarines), you get more
information about the end of World War II in the borough.
Every information
pack follows this principle: starting with a personal story or a concrete
example, giving then more general information, accompanied by lots of historical
photographs, documents and audio records.
On the
equal level you can find also comments and memories of visitors. Via a flyer
presented at the entrance all visitors are invited to write down their stories
and associations evoked by the 99 objects. If they want to learn more about the
things, they are invited to visit the “History Attic” above the exhibition
room, where they can find more material. It is not meant as a contact point only
for history freaks but as a vital part of the museum for which working together
with the population of the area is essential.
Do you want
to know which one was my favorite object? It was the molar tooth of a mammoth. At
first my friend and I did not know at all what this bizarre object was. Reading
on the screen that this was part of a mammoth really flashed me, I think, because
it laid there in such a modest way among the other objects mainly from the 19th
and 20th century. As if it tried hard not to boast: “Look at me! I
am circa 20,000 years old, you BABIES!”
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