Haniel Museum

Description

In the Duisburg district of Ruhrort, the Haniel Museum is housed in a historic commercial and residential building of the Haniel family. The building, now part of the Franz Haniel & Cie. GmbH site, was erected in 1756 by the then-mayor of Ruhrort, Jan Willem Noot, and was known as the "Ruhrorter Packhaus". In 1772 Jacob Wilhelm Haniel opened the family's first trading house there; it lay outside the town walls at that time.

After the Second World War the house served as emergency accommodation for employees and their families; for a time the Landeszentralbank used the ground floor until its new building was completed. The residential rooms were long intended for representative purposes and housed servants or employed family members; from 1980 the company used parts of them as casino rooms for executive bodies.

At the end of the 1960s the idea arose to use parts of the office wing as a museum; gradually offices were converted into exhibition rooms. In the late 1970s the storehouse was also redesigned as an event space: the roof was enclosed, partition walls removed and the beams refurbished, resulting in a representative hall around 1980.

The exhibition began with an emphasis on inland shipping and the Haniel shipping line and has expanded thematically since the mid-1990s. Today rooms are devoted to inland shipping, maritime shipping, the history of Ruhrort, domestic music, the art of the Haniel family, pharmacy, mining, the ironworks industry (Gutehoffnungshütte), as well as office and domestic life in the 19th and 20th centuries. Many exhibits are displayed openly and are therefore accessible only to pre-booked visitor groups.

In 1993 the establishment of a casino in a new catering building at Franz-Haniel-Platz enabled the museum to use former residential rooms; since 1995 the exhibition has occupied almost the entire house, with the exception of the salon rooms on the ground floor, which the company continues to use for entertaining guests. At the beginning of 2003 the museum was closed for about a quarter of a year in order to open up the floors, reinforce load-bearing beams and renovate the roof with new slate tiles.