The exhibition "Celts in Hessen?", which has just opened in the Archaeological Museum in Frankfurt, is staged like an open-ended question-and-answer game.
But what sounds so challenging in the title has already been decided in a certain way.
Because the show is Frankfurt's contribution to the state's "first major year of archaeology", and that is under the motto "Celtic State of Hesse", so it requires a certain connection, even if one apparently shied away from a "Celtic State of Hesse " to speak.
Because of course it would be arrogant if the federal state in the middle of Germany, which is more associated with the Germanic Chatti, with the Franks or Staufer, suddenly tried to wrest the Celts from Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg.
Uwe Ebbinghaus
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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There is no shortage of finds in Hesse – even beyond the famous ceremonial tombs from Glauberg – that are able to establish a connection to Celtic culture and that can now be presented in several museums in the state with different focal points over the course of the year.
In this joint project, in which Fulda, Wiesbaden, Gießen and, of course, the Glauberg are also involved, Frankfurt has a kind of propaedeutic role, which lends the exhibition in the former Carmelite monastery on the Main something theoretical and academic from the outset.
While the showcases are used in a rather reserved manner, the partitions are quite text-heavy.
With emphasized honesty, the term Celts is defined very narrowly right from the start.
There is no ancient written evidence that shows that the "Celts" - sometimes also referred to as Gauls or Galatians - called themselves that.
These are foreign terms that only appear in Herodotus and other historians from the fifth century onwards, i.e. more towards the middle of the Iron Age.
In the sources, it can be read that the Celts are mostly referred to the area of the Danube and the Alpine region, but never to today's Hesse.
The Glauberg remains Celtic
According to the accompanying book, the people whose legacies can be viewed in the Celtic exhibitions of the year did not first immigrate to what is now Hesse in the Iron Age.
They had settled there for a long time, and the degree of cultural overlap with the Celts of the core area fluctuated greatly over the course of the Iron Age.
However, the many maps of Europe that characterize the exhibition walls in Frankfurt make at least one thing very clear: in the Iron Age, Hesse was firmly part of a communication network - which can be proven by material finds of similar shape such as fibulae, urns or neck rings - with the greatest profiteers from salt mining and ironwork, the one usually referred to as Celts, bound.