Museum für Kommunikation

Description

On the Frankfurter Museumsufer, the Museum für Kommunikation Frankfurt examines the history of message transmission and was opened on 31 January 1958 as the Bundespostmuseum; it is one of the early institutions on the Museumsufer. Until 1994 it was overseen by the Bundesministerium für das Post- und Fernmeldewesen and for a long time functioned as the corporate museum of the Deutsche Bundespost. A transparent new building completed in 1990 initiated a reorientation and modernization of the content, which, together with the postal reform and the subsequent privatization of postal services, resulted in the renaming to Museum für Kommunikation.

The holdings derive from the collection of the Reichspostmuseum, founded in Berlin in 1872, which were evacuated during the war, partly damaged and reassembled after the war. From these holdings the core of the Bundespostmuseum emerged; central parts of the collection were handed over to the responsible administration in 1947 and transported to Frankfurt in 1951. The museum’s administration has been housed since 1955 in the Villa de Neufville, a late-classical or Neo-Renaissance building that was altered after wartime damage.

Since 1995 the institution has been part of the Museumsstiftung Post und Telekommunikation and, together with its sister museums in Berlin and Nürnberg, forms a network for the preservation of communication history. The permanent exhibition is divided into 44 thematic islands and traces developments from cuneiform script to data glasses according to the guiding phenomena of acceleration, networking, control and participation. More recent topics such as Artificial Intelligence have been added recently; one element of the presentation is an interactive “Talking Painting” that builds on a historical connection to Alan Turing. The programme is complemented by interview-based formats on digitization, permanently displayed works by international artists and rotating special exhibitions.

The collection includes historical vehicles such as a restored postal bus from 1925, extensive depots with hundreds of thousands of objects on postal and telecommunications history, a substantial mail‑art collection and, among other items, a faithful replica of the Voyager Golden Record. On the roof the museum operates an amateur radio station with its own callsign. The adjacent new building was opened following an architectural competition; the exhibition presentation was reconceived around 2000 and again in 2017 to integrate more recent developments such as the Internet.