Exilmuseum launches laboratory for participatory development
Sometimes it can take an agonizingly long time between an idea and its realization. In 2013, photographs by Stefan Moses appeared in the volume “Deutschlands Emigranten” (Emigrants from Germany) – portraits of people who had to leave Germany under National Socialism. Historian Christoph Stölzl, former director of the German Historical Museum, wrote the accompanying texts.
The unexpectedly large response to the volume resulted in the idea of founding a museum in Berlin to tell the stories and fates of German exiles. Soon after, Stölzl, who died last January, founded the Exilmuseum Berlin. Plans quickly took shape, thanks in part to notable donations. Former German President Joachim Gauck was soon persuaded to become a patron and was joined by Nobel Prize winner for literature Herta Müller.
Completion in 2026 at the earliest
The site at Anhalter Bahnhof, abandoned for decades, was quickly decided upon as a suitable site, and in 2020 the foundation put forward Dorte Mandrup from Denmark as the architect for the building of the museum. But, as with construction projects that need to be funded, it takes time and patience. Currently, the museum is scheduled to open in 2026.
By then, the foundation had opened the “Werkstatt Exilmuseum” (Workshop of the Exile Museum). Here, visitors can actively experience the creation of the museum and, ideally, also help develop it.
In a room called the “Laboratory”, there are tables whose tops correspond to the shapes of later exhibition rooms. With colored tape, floor plans can be designed and discarded, facilities planned and redesigned. The next room, “Studio”, features interviews with refugees then and now.
Uniting past and present
On the second floor of the old building, portraits of exiles hang on two walls facing each other.
Willy Brandt, who fled Germany for Norway in 1933 because of its political resistance to the Nazis, looks across the room at a young woman who had recently fled Afghanistan for Germany with her mother – in part because she was not allowed to go to school there.
The exile museum bridges the gap between then and now, with events from the last century reflecting the current situation, with the ongoing war in Ukraine, as well as countless people fleeing their conflict-torn countries or desperate attempts by migrants to reach Europe. crossing the Mediterranean.
From the ceiling hangs a flip-dot display – the kind of mechanical display board often seen in train stations or airports with rotating numbers to represent a day’s schedule. The individual flip-dots rotate and constantly display new quotes from people who have had to flee their homeland: “The body is now HERE” is one example. It is impossible to distinguish whether the statements are from 1933 or 2023.
Around 20 people showed up to the workshop for the first guided tour of the day on the opening weekend, March 25-26.
With members of the press attending the workshop, attendees were visibly more interested in discussing the concept of the next museum than debating the topic of exile. Among the issues discussed were funding for the museum and how it would not overlap in terms of content with the Documentation Center for Displacement, Expulsion, Reconciliation, which opened across the street in June 2021.
Source: DW
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