Open-air museums: where historical and current culture meet

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Nothing is going on at the gas station.

No car is parked at the pump waiting to be filled with petrol.

Far and wide, neither a gas station attendant nor young people loitering around can be seen.

And yet this place is an attraction, because the exhibit from 1951 with the tongue-shaped curved protective roof marks a crossroads in the cultural-political orientation of the Detmold open-air museum.

Until a few years ago, open-air museums were still considered to be places where pre-industrial life and work were preserved using typical regional farms and workshops.

But that has changed fundamentally.

Jan Carstensen, director of the Detmold open-air museum, developed the concept for a museum of historical and, above all, current everyday culture.

How can this new claim be met?

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There are 146 open-air museums in Germany.

In North Rhine-Westphalia there are twelve, including larger facilities such as the state museums in Lindlar in the Rhineland, in Kommern in the Eifel and in Hagen.

The open-air museum in Detmold is one of the largest in Germany.

Founded in 1960 and opened 50 years ago, it shows 120 buildings, mainly from rural areas, on 90 hectares.

Here you can see whole villages from the Sauerland, the Siegerland and the Osnabrücker Land.

The fact that open-air museums have committed themselves to the worlds of farmers and craftsmen is due to the political prerequisites that led to the establishment of this type of museum.

The background to this was the first industrial revolution that had turned an agricultural society into an industrial society in Europe since the 19th century.

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As a reaction to this, the home movement emerged with numerous local, traditional and historical associations.

Its aim was to strengthen regional and national identity.

First, an open-air museum was founded in Skansen, Sweden in 1891.

Like Skansen, the following European museum foundations had the main aim of preserving the declining rural and pre-industrial culture by means of original buildings.

“This movement was not about an analytical illumination of everyday life, but rather a transfiguration of the supposedly unspoilt country life,” says Jan Carstensen.

In Detmold, the Westphalian Heimatbund proposed the establishment of such a museum in 1928.

His idea initially found no response.

Even during the Nazi era, the idea was not taken up in Westphalia.

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Although the Nazis glorified rural life, Adolf Hitler posed in folk costume in his early days, but they were more interested in the ideologization of the Teutons.

And so pre-historic and early historical Nazi open-air museums were preferably founded, such as the German homestead in Oerlinghausen near Bielefeld.

It was not until 1960 that a wave of open-air museums was founded in Germany with a focus on rural culture.

This is also the case in Detmold.

Courtyards, stables and workshops were moved from their original location to the museum grounds.

Actually, more innovative concepts could have been used in those years, for example in the Netherlands.

The Openluchtmuseum in Arnhem had already looked at the everyday life of larger sections of the population at the end of the 1950s when it added accommodation for workers to its inventory.

Influence of ethnic ideologies

The fact that the German open-air museums remained loyal to the conservative approach for a long time was also due to the university education of the museum staff, who mostly studied folklore, a designation that is now used by cultural anthropology

is replaced.

"After the war, this subject was still under the influence of ethnic ideologies," says Jan Carstensen.

"The technical participation of the National Socialists in the study of ethnology was a problem."

In Münster, for example, Bruno Schier taught, "a staunch partisan" of the NSDAP, as Carstensen says.

And the "brown Bruno", as students called him, was chairman of the Folklore Commission for Westphalia until 1971.

That the founding director of the Detmold open-air museum Josef Schepers decided to set up his museum in a landscape according to criteria typical of the region was a novelty at the time.

And the renouncement of the representation of "tribal landscapes" was downright resistant, explains Carstensen.

Superstition and toilet culture

It then took almost two decades before the next generation of museum people should take a look at cultural and social life, the everyday culture of all strata of the population.

Jan Carstensen, who has been working at the museum since 1993 and has been director since 2005, made a clear statement twenty years ago with the exhibition "ZimmerWelten".

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The question of how young people live today catapulted the museum into the present.

A look at the program of the past few years shows the open-mindedness with which Carstensen turned topics to relevance to the present.

There were exhibitions about forced labor, superstition, the culture of the toilet.

“This paradigm shift was not easy.

We were under surveillance, ”says the museum director.

Not just from colleagues, but also from politics.

But she played along.

From then on, the museum collection, which today numbers over 250,000 objects, was rejuvenated with everyday items such as cell phones, Barbies and Tamagochis.

The Kommern open-air museum also set a new course in those years.

A prefabricated house from the Quelle catalog or a temporary residence for refugees familiarize visitors with their time there.

Carstensen was particularly interested in integrating Jewish history in Westphalia on his site.

In Ovenhausen in the Höxter district, he found the Uhlmann family's residential and commercial building and moved it to the museum.

The members of the family were murdered in Riga and Auschwitz.

“With this topic we became a history museum,” says Carstensen.

The mediation was also gradually changed.

There are now trained cultural mediators who bring the stories closer to around 200,000 visitors a year.

“A visit to the open-air museum is more than just a fun event,” says Carstensen.

"For us, the educational mission is in the foreground." That doesn't mean that you can't still have fun.

With so much willingness to change, it was a matter of time before the small exhibition barn with 150 square meters no longer met the requirements of cultural-historical exhibitions.

A building ensemble with an exhibition hall with 900 square meters is now being planned.

It should be ready in 2024. And if Jan Carstensen has his way, the petrol station should no longer be isolated on the edge of the site. We are looking for a Siegerland bungalow from the 1960s.