Museums in Hamburg

There are lots of museums in Hamburg. Here are some of the ones we passed on:

• Speicherstadtmuseum – spices and trade – the Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte has a large section on this, plus a lot more

• Prototyp car museum - while it’s an interesting collection of cars there weren’t many cars from the F1 era, 1950 onwards

• The Bucerius Kunst Forum near the Rathaus, the Deichtorhalle and the Kunstverein are all dedicated to contemporary art, which is two too many - you have to wade through too much rubbish to see the gems.

• Beatlesmania – overpriced and inauthentic. Do what we did, walk down the Reeperbahn to the Beatles-Platz and up Große Freiheit to see the Kaiserkeller and the Indra Club. Sure, the Reeperbahn’s full of skinheads and creepy pervs, but it’s the echt stench that the Beatles breathed back in ’62.

• Museum für Künst und Gewerbe – the arts and crafts museum – only because we didn’t have time.

What we did visit:

The Kunsthalle, to the north of the Hauptbahnhof, has four sections – old masters, new masters, twentieth-century, and contemporary. The old masters include Cranach, Holbein, Canaletto, Rubens, Goya, Van Dyck, Tiepolo, Rembrandt – old masters, basically. It also has some beautiful altarpieces by Meister Bertram from the fourteenth century. The new masters include Schorr von Carolsfeld, Böchlein, Bonnard, Rossetti, Redon, Delacroix, Corot, Degas, Van Gogh, Monet – new masters basically. Plus a room of Friedrichs – thirteen of ’em, including ‘Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer’, a Romantic icon. His coat is green – I’d always thought it was black.

The Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte (Hamburg History Museum) is set in Planten un Blomen, a park of flower beds and lakes, among ruins of the large houses destroyed in the Great Fire of 1842 (which started incidentally a few doors up from us in Deichstraße – probably a tourist with a cigarette after a late night). It records the social and mercantile history of Hamburg from the Middle Ages through to the twenty-first century. The ‘Hamburg in the 20th century’ covers two floors and looks at everything from the empire, the first world war, inflation, life and persecution under the swastika, the fire storm, recovery and reconstruction, the rise of consumer society and the ‘economic miracle’, the sixties and the Beatles, alternative politics, and life after reunification. In one word, comprehensive, and with some great reconstructions of a bomb shelter, a 1950s middle class living room and ‘communal accommodation’ of the 1960s. All of which are well-labelled; I found myself by habit translating the German out loud for Megan until she said ‘English underneath, honey.’

Two other floors deal with previous centuries. They are a bit light on artefacts but tell the story. There isn’t much on music in Hamburg (some trumpets and keyboards), but the musical history of Hamburg can be seen and heard in the statues and theatres and churches.

They have a huge collection of (huge) model ships plus models of the port and town in various eras. But the piece de resistance is what must be the world’s largest model railway, based on elements of the Hamburg-Harburg line. Passenger trains, goods trains, taking up a whole wing of the museum. It wasn’t running when we were there, as it was a quiet day, and you would need at least two Fat Controllers to keep it operating. But very, very impressive.

The staff are officious, in the customary German ‘these are the rules’ way which is usually well-intended but here was a little arrogant. (I like to think we got them on a bad day.)