From the Natural History Museum to the Evolutioneum
The Natural History Museum in the center of Hamburg was once the second largest natural history museum in Germany - and the most visited. It was an impressive Wilhelminian building with a spacious inner courtyard, several floors, surrounding galleries and cantilevered bridges. A passion for collecting was the basis of this exhibition, which was brought together by captains under the Hamburg flag from all over the world. The building was destroyed during the Second World War and the museum was never rebuilt.
Popular museum
The Natural History Museum was founded in May 1843 by Hamburg citizens and found new, suitable premises in the new building on Steintorwall near the main railway station on September 17, 1891.
Objects from all over the world
A passion for collecting was the basis of this exhibition, which was brought together by captains under the Hamburg flag from all over the world. Among them was what the Hamburg shipowner Johan Cesar VI Godeffroy (1813-1885) had brought back from South Sea voyages and what the merchant and naturalist Peter Friedrich Röding (1767-1846) displayed in his "Museum for Objects of Nature and Art". Fin and humpback whales, the skeleton of a blue whale and a Steller's giant manatee, which had already become extinct in the 18th century, as well as elephants, monkeys and rhinoceroses were among the main attractions.
Destruction during the war
In 1943, a firestorm put an end to this great exhibition of animals from all over the world. Allied bombing raids on Hamburg's city center - during the so-called Operation Gomorrah - reduced the house and with it a large part of the important natural history treasures to rubble.
Fortunately, parts of the collection were saved. The extensive alcohol collection survived the firestorm in empty subway shafts, the bird collection in a castle in Saxony. Hamburg's Mona Lisa, a unique narwhal skull with two teeth from 1684, was saved by a taxidermist and walled up in a cellar room in the middle of the museum. Today, the narwhal in the zoological exhibition of the Museum der Natur Hamburg is a reminder of the great past times of a Hamburg temple of knowledge in the natural sciences.
It was not until 1951 that the ruins of the old natural history museum were demolished. Today, an electronics store stands in its place. The city of Hamburg transferred the surviving collections to the university in 1969. They slowly grew again and are now among the most important scientific collections in Germany. However, there is no adequate building to house the many millions of objects with a contemporary exhibition.
The path to the Evolutioneum
Further information on the most important milestones on the way to Hamburg's new natural history museum - such as the founding of the Center for Natural History (CeNak) in 2014 and the merger with the Museum Koenig in Bonn to form the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change (LIB) in 2021 - can be found in the milestones section.
More about the history of the Museum der Natur Hamburg:
175 years of the Natural History Museum Hamburg
Interview with Prof. Dr. Matthias Glaubrecht in Newsroom of the University of Hamburg
Susanne Köstering (2018). Ein Museum für Weltnatur: Die Geschichte des Naturhistorischen Museums in Hamburg (Abhandlungen des Naturwissenschaftlichen Vereins in Hamburg). Herausgeber: Dölling u. Galitz; 1. Edition (18. Mai 2018), Taschenbuch: 344 Seiten.
Matthias Glaubrecht (2024). Vom Naturhistorischen Museum zum Evolutioneum - Odyssee der naturkundlichen Sammlungen der Universität Hamburg. - In: Nicolaysen, R., Krause, E. & Zimmermann, G. B. (Hrsg.), 100 Jahre Universität Hamburg. Bd. 4. Naturwissenschaften, pp. 245-280. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen.
Matthias Glaubrecht (2018). Back to the future: The Centrum für Naturkunde on its way toward reestablishing a Natural History Museum in Hamburg. - In: Beck, L. A. (ed.), Zoological Collections of Germany - The Animal Kingdom in its Amazing Plenty at Museums and Universities, pp. 435-461. Springer International, Cham.