The garden is new too.
During construction it had to be abandoned, dug up and redesigned.
Because it has a purpose to serve.
When the Romantic Museum, which Anne Bohnenkamp has been planning for ten years, opens its doors to all visitors on September 14th, it will serve as a path for visitors to take a new path from the museum to the Goethehaus on the right.
The two parts of the garden, separated by an old stone wall, are beautifully designed with numerous plantings, young trees, trellises, fountains and a sculpture of Faust and Gretchen.
Florian Balke
Culture editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.
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But everything is still very fresh.
Such as the newly established permanent exhibition on the three floors of the museum designed by Christoph Mäckler.
Bohnenkamp is looking forward to hearing from visitors how they like the garden, the house and the exhibition: "We are excited to see whether what we have come up with over many years will work."
The ceremony will follow on September 13th
On August 26, the director of the Free German Hochstift presented the museum together with Mäckler on a press tour, before the members of the Hochstift association, which carries the Goethehaus and Romantic Museum, on August 28 and 29 during the traditional celebrations for Goethe's birthday as First be allowed to take a look at everything. On September 13th there will be a ceremony with representatives from the federal government, the state and the city, each of whom will finance a third of the monastery and who have also participated in the museum construction on a roughly similar scale. On September 14th, a blue ribbon was cut in front of the entrance to the Großer Hirschgraben and the museum was finally here.
"It could only be done because there was this enormous wave of support from the citizens," says Bohnenkamp, who briefly thinks back to the moment when one of the porters was afraid and gave less money than planned. In 2011, the literary scholar, who was born in 1960 and has held a professorship at Goethe University since 2012, set out to convince the city, state and federal government to expand the Goethehaus with a museum. The Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels had previously decided to leave the neighboring property that was occupied after the war and move to Braubachstrasse. At that time, the city approached Bohnenkamp and asked her which neighbors she could imagine. But she thought of the old plans of her predecessor Ernst Beutler to build a romantic museum and understood:"It was a historic opportunity."
Donation target clearly exceeded
The museum building was supposed to cost 12 million, which the municipal housing association ABG complied with, although at one of the low points after the demolition of the neighboring building, the vaults in the cellar of the Goethehaus had to be propped up.
Everyone had relied on the fact that the Goethehaus, which was the first to be rebuilt after the war in a destroyed environment, could stand upright even without its neighbors.
“I've learned an incredible amount when it comes to building,” says Bohnenkamp.
And soliciting donations.
She and her colleagues have exceeded the initially set four million euros for interior design and exhibition by around half, which has benefited the German-English signage, the translations into several Asian languages that will soon be available and various screens, tablets and apps.
And it proved its worth in 2018 when Robert Schumann's “Faust” sketches were suddenly up for sale in Paris.
Within three weeks, Bohnenkamp managed to raise half a million euros.
Now the handwriting is doing its part to illustrate the artistic and intellectual range of Romanticism: "That was downright magical."
A walk through the time of Goethe
The museum is intended as a walk through the Goethe era and a walkable turn of the epoch. On the first floor, the Goethe Gallery guides you through the poet's life with paintings and sculptures; it ends with his trip to Italy shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution. On the second floor, shortly after the overthrow in the neighboring country, the early German romanticism sets in. What was written, thought and poetry up until the Wars of Liberation can be seen in numerous stations on this floor. "We do what we planned from the beginning, get the romance out of the cellar and show the treasures from the magazine," says Bohnenkamp.
Manuscripts from Novalis to the Schlegels and Brentanos to Eichendorff: “Wonderful, exemplary pieces.” The light-sensitive manuscripts and graphics must be protected and separated from the audiovisual and multimedia-based environment. The solution is simple: "We put them in showcases that have to be opened by the visitor." Search, find, light and dark - all romantic motifs. Bohnenkamp and her colleagues also see the museum as a “sequence of fragments” that are put together to form a “kaleidoscope” of varied and changeable romanticism.
When the largest showcase opens, the museum itself, visitors should quickly understand the order of the exhibition along the main staircase created by Mäckler behind the facade, up to the third floor, which tells of the late Romantic era. The museum should say something to both connoisseurs and those who, when it comes to romance, would rather think of an evening stroll for two, says Bohnenkamp. And adds what is important to her: “It has been an incredible teamwork. That is also very romantic. ”Soon the visitors will take over.