FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum

Description

In the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district, the FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum functions as a public site of remembrance; it combines exhibitions, events, and collection, archive and educational work into a forum for district history and contemporary debates. The institution is administered by the Department of Culture and History of the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district office; the museum is located at Adalbertstraße 95a in Kreuzberg, near Kottbusser Tor.

The house emerged from the merger of two local museums in 2004: the Kreuzberg Museum, whose origins lie in a local research initiative founded in 1978 and which was established in 1990 as the Museum for Urban Development and Social History, and the Heimatmuseum Friedrichshain, which was placed within the cultural office in the late 1980s and remained until 2004 in premises of the Alte Feuerwache on Marchlewskistraße. After the administrative reorganisation of the districts, the collections were brought together and the institution was later renamed in April 2013 as the FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum. The original founding leadership shaped the institution until 2017; since early 2018 the museum has been led by a specialist in migration research.

The museum focuses thematically on social movements as well as urban development, industrial and migration history, and assumes professional responsibility for commemorative work and the culture of remembrance in the district’s diverse context. A central concern is making previously underrepresented perspectives visible and strengthening people who have experienced discrimination. For decades the museum has contributed to debates on representation, migration and postcolonial museology, works continuously with residents and with local, municipal and supraregional partners, and develops new methods and formats for this work.

Since 1990 the museum has been housed in a former factory dating from the early 1920s on Adalbertstraße. Multi-storey brick buildings were erected in the courtyard of a residential property for furniture and wire-fence production; the furniture manufacture specialised in upholstered furniture until around 1930, and the wire-fence production continued until the end of the Second World War. Prior to its use as a museum the building was comprehensively renovated and modernised; open spaces where residential houses still stood until 1970 were landscaped, and a glass stair tower with an elevator was added, creating barrier-free access.