As summer begins in Germany most establishments have reopened in some capacity, including museums. All are still operating under restrictions, with limits on numbers of visitors and mask requirements being ubiquitous. All museums, municipal and private, are required to adhere to national and local government regulations. This series so far has covered municipal and state-funded museums, but not a privately-run museum. This article will investigate the International Maritime Museum in Hamburg, one of the largest private museums in Germany, and how it is handling COVID-19. 

The International Maritime Museum is located in a circa-1879 harbor warehouse in Hamburg’s Speicherstadt (“City of Warehouses”) near the city’s port. The museum’s collection was gathered by Hamburg journalist and maritime enthusiast Peter Tamm, who began collecting after receiving a toy boat from his mother at the age of six in 1934.¹ The museum opened in 2008, featuring a collection of around 40,000 model ships (including Tamm’s toy boat) and a plethora of shipping and naval artifacts. The museum has eight floors total, each dedicated to a specific theme of maritime history or technology.

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Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/1825

During the current COVID crisis, people around the world have felt more physically isolated than ever. Yet, digital media have offered an exciting range of experiences to explore history in a virtual environment. For example, the German National Library currently offers seven virtual exhibitions in German and English accessible from anywhere around the world. From the exhibition “5000 years of media history online,” in which you can learn about the importance of Egyptian hieroglyphs as one of the first written systems of humanity, to the exhibition “Arts in Exile,” online visitors have the opportunity to still engage with history as COVID-19 has forced cultural institutions to close their doors this spring temporarily. The German National Library (DNB) has been collecting and archiving over 30 million media items in the German language since 1913.[1] While education and culture are the responsibility of the individual German states, there exists one national library is decentralized in its structure, with two branches, one in Frankfurt am Main and one in Leipzig. This is a result of the postwar German division and reunification.

I took a closer look at two of the seven virtual exhibitions, both of which have been permanent exhibitions at the German National Library before.

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Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/1816

Almost two years ago, the Library of Congress launched the crowdsourcing platform By the People, which invites volunteers to transcribe, review, and tag digitized images of manuscripts and typescripts from the collections of the Library of Congress. The project runs on the open source software Concordia, developed by the Library of Congress to support crowdsourced transcription projects.

Among the manuscripts made available for transcriptions are documents in German script. In a fascinating recent blog post, David B. Morris, the German Area Specialist, European Division, at the Library of Congress, discusses the art of Unlocking the Secrets of German Handwritten Documents.

The blog post will be particularly interesting for contributors to GHI’s German Heritage in Letters Project, which uses Scripto as the platform to crowdsource transcriptions of German letters, including letters written in Kurrentschrift.

Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/1813

On April 30, 2020, the German government began to lift some of the lockdown restrictions put in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic as the number of new infections per day in the country decreased. Museums, along with public parks and churches, have been allowed to reopen, as long as they follow federal social distancing guidelines.¹ German museums will now be able to draw in visitors once again, but the visiting experience will be very different from what it was before. The opening procedure of the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig, with social distancing guidelines in place, provides a demonstration of how life will continue in Germany amid the pandemic.

The Stadtgeschichtliches Museum is the municipal museum of the city of Leipzig. It consists of eight exhibition buildings spread out around the city, each containing galleries pertaining to a topic of local history or culture. The museum’s main building at the sixteenth-century Old Town Hall contains a permanent exhibit of the city of Leipzig’s cultural history from the Middle Ages to the present. The nearby Haus Böttchergäßchen, a modern building, features space for rotating exhibitions about further topics of city art and culture. This building also houses an interactive children’s museum aimed at museumgoers ten and under.

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Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/1799

Editorial note: Betty Schaumburg is an intern at the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C. She is about to graduate with a B.A. in American Studies from the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Her High School exchange in 2012 in Wisconsin sparked her curiosity in US history. During the course of her undergraduate studies, she also participated in the exchange program of Heidelberg University and spent her junior year at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. There, she narrowed her historical interest to the post-Civil War era, Reconstruction and the New South, which contributed to the topic of her Bachelor Thesis.

When I registered my Bachelor Thesis in the beginning of March, I had little idea how my research would be impacted by the looming threat of Covid-19.

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Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/1766

Every museum’s intention is to attract visitors: A museum wants people to experience the stories and objects it has on display, with the hope that they learn something new or understand something greater. Unique exhibitions and significant artifacts are what convince people to visit a specific museum location. The experience of being in the physical location, being able to see images or objects, hear, sounds, and sometimes even smell smells associated with a particular idea or period, is what drives people to visit a museum location. Information today is more accessible than ever, be it in books, on television, or on the internet. Yet people still visit museums, and million-dollar museum projects keep opening, because there is something so unique about the museum experience that cannot be conveyed through any other medium. It is a full immersion in a topic, in a time, and in a place. The COVID-19 crisis has presented a great problem for museums, as stay-at-home orders have made it impossible for them to perform this necessary function of attracting and educating visitors at their specialized locations. To stay in touch with their visitors and present their collections without opening museum buildings, museums have turned to the internet. New technology has allowed for innovative ways to bring a museum to one’s home.

Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/1717

Many graduate history students will be familiar with the moment (or phase) in their studies when they have to make a decision about the topic of their final thesis. Some students may already know the topic early on. Others may take a few productive detours on their way to developing their final thesis topic. I am a history student from Germany who is working on the final thesis and in the latter category. With this blog contribution, I would like to share insights into the perspective of me as a historian at the end of my graduate academic education, whose final thesis research also marked my first foray into the field of digital history.

At the beginning of my Master’s degree program at Bielefeld University, Germany, I was sure that I wanted to do research on a different topic than my Bachelor thesis. World War I, albeit an exceptionally cruel war, has always been fascinating to me. I was especially interested in researching the fate of soldiers with neurotic/ psychiatric symptoms during or after their military service (today it would be called PTSD) Therefore, my general topic was clear. What was less clear was my exact research question and, related to this, the accessibility of sources.

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Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/1709

As a German high school or college student, you will be familiar with the scenario: A homework assignment requires you to locate reliable information about William II, theEmperor of the German Empire, and the deadline is tomorrow.  It’s late in the evening, every library is closed, and the only tool left is the World Wide Web.  If this sounds familiar to you, don’t panic. Take a moment and let me take you on a digital journey to Berlin, Germany!

The Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM), physically located in Berlin, Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (HdG) and the German federal archives, the Bundesarchiv,  provide a virtual museum called LeMo, Lebendiges Museum Online. [i] It represents a historically reliable introduction in modern German History and is the biggest virtual museum in the digital landscape in German speaking countries.

LeMo addresses everyone who is interested in German History beginning in 1800 until the present day. It is a virtual museum for everyone – K-12 students, college and university students, adults, including senior citizens.

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Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/1699