Historisches Museum Hannover

Description

In Hanover’s historic centre the Historisches Museum Hannover presents the city’s history and the history of the former Welf territories in today’s Lower Saxony. The museum is located at Am Hohen Ufer on the Leine, a site associated with the beginnings of medieval settlement and positioned directly on historic crossing and transport routes.

The museum complex integrates the fully preserved Beginenturm as the last surviving city wall tower as well as remnants of the ducal armory. During construction work in the neighbourhood, medieval finds in 2013 led to three months of urban archaeological investigations in this area. Opposite the museum stretches the reconstructed traditional island of the historic old town with the rebuilt Leibnizhaus at the Holzmarkt.

The institution was founded on 26 April 1903 as the Vaterländisches Museum in the Cumberlandsche Galerie at the initiative of the Heimatbund Niedersachsen. In 1937 it was renamed; in 1943 the museum was destroyed by air raids. From 1950 a provisional reconstruction began, leading to a reopening in the 1960s. Since then the building has undergone several modernisations and alterations; the permanent exhibition from the 1990s was revised in 2017. In 2020 the museum closed for a three-year renovation; parts of a later-closed specialist museum for energy history were incorporated during that time. As early as 1978 the museum had proposed the establishment of a farm museum in Groß-Buchholz.

The offering is divided into large-scale departments on regional and city history, including the collections “Vom Fürstentum zum Königreich”, “Vom Marktflecken zur Messestadt” and “Leben auf dem Lande”. A department in Schloss Herrenhausen was affiliated with the museum in 2013. The holdings include an extensive photographic archive with around 1,000,000 historical images available for consultation and reproduction and a total collection that, according to internal figures, comprises more than 5,000,000 photographs. The spectrum is complemented by collections of orders and decorations, historic vehicles such as a Hawa 40-volt electric microcar, and four ceremonial coaches from the 18th century, including a state coach and a phaeton with connections to Hanoverian court figures.

The museum building has a polygonal floor plan around a pentagonal inner courtyard; the façade alternates across three storeys between broad sandstone surfaces and narrow bands of windows. On the Leibnizufer side a light installation features an illuminated quotation by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.