History goes on

Editors | 29. Juni 2021

For the Deutsches Historisches Museum, 27 June 2021 represents a caesura. On this day the Zeughaus and its Permanent Exhibition will close down for a number of years. The planned reopening is set for the end of 2025. The exhibition has been on display in its present form since 2006, and with some 7 million visitors in the past 15 years it has been a great hit with the public.

The reason for the shutdown is that the air conditioning technology of the Zeughaus has to be completely renovated, which requires the clearance of all areas of the exhibition. The Pei Building is not affected by these renovation measures, so that the temporary exhibitions and the newly opened exhibition “documenta. Politics and Art” will continue to be accessible to our visitors.

Before the restoration can begin, the DHM is faced with a huge logistical task: around 6,000 objects have to be removed from the Zeughaus between July and December of this year and brought to a temporary depot. Which of these objects will find their way back into the new Permanent Exhibition will be determined in the course of the work on a new exhibition concept. In any case, it is certain that the new Permanent Exhibition will show German history in its international context and should set new accents. The chronological structure, for example, will be less rigid so as to allow the theme rooms to treat basic questions of German history from a diachronic and comparative perspective.

For the President of the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Prof. Dr Raphael Gross, this will be a time of important decisions: “The new orientation of our Permanent Exhibition in the coming years is a huge, challenging task for the DHM. The key question for us in particular is how we narrate German history and how we deal with the objects in our collections. We are creating a new area which we will call ‘Arsenal’. It will deal with different methods of display and also take up questions dealing with the provenance of our collections. In our present times of constant change, the new design of the Permanent Exhibition is a huge challenge which our entire team will be addressing.”

In our DHM blogs, we will follow the removal of the objects, the construction measures in the Zeughaus, as well as the progress on the new conception and will provide a steady gaze behind the scenes of our house. We are looking forward to the exciting times to come – meanwhile, history goes on.