Rechnermuseum Furtwangen

Description

In Furtwangen im Schwarzwald the Deutsches Uhrenmuseum presents the history of timekeeping and, as an institute of Hochschule Furtwangen (HFU), is embedded in the regional educational landscape. Its focus is on artisanal and industrial clock production in the Schwarzwald; the collection includes early 18th-century cuckoo clocks as well as the prototype of today’s Black Forest souvenir.

Around one third of visitors take part in personal guided tours in which clocks and musical instruments are demonstrated. During the holidays, children build their own clocks in the "Uhrenwerkstatt", and there are modular themed workshops for school classes, some aligned with the curriculum. The collection comprises 8,000 objects in total; about 1,300 clocks are on permanent display. Complementary holdings include a company archive and a specialist library of German-language literature.

The history of the collection goes back to 1852, when the management of the local watchmaking school began assembling historic clocks as testimony to the craft tradition. The first public presentations took place in 1858; from 1874 the holdings were permanently exhibited in a newly erected trade hall. A printed catalogue from 1925 already listed more than 1,000 clocks. After several rebuilds and extensions, the Historical Clock Collection became the Deutsches Uhrenmuseum in 1978; a significant acquisition of a factory collection in 1975 notably expanded the holdings in pocket and Renaissance clocks. The present museum building was inaugurated in 1992; the institution is organised as an in-house enterprise of the university. Since 1 August 2024 the museum has been closed due to a comprehensive renovation; the exhibition collection is expected to reopen in 2027. In the meantime the museum is active with the project "Das Deutsche Uhrenmuseum unterwegs", among other things offering a cuckoo-clock workshop for events and programmes for kindergartens.

The permanent exhibition (since 2010 occupying 1,400 m²) examines the development of clocks and concepts of time in Western culture. On display are wooden clocks of the 18th and 19th centuries, the mass-exported, inexpensive Black Forest large clocks, the industrialisation of clock manufacture, pocket and wristwatches, and the "Modern Times" section on the technical and social change in understandings of time. Historical astronomical clocks and planetary models in the collection document the close relationship between time measurement and celestial observation in pre-modern eras. In 2006 the museum was recognised as one of the "365 Orte im Land der Ideen"; in 2008 it received the designation as an anchor point of the European Route of Industrial Heritage. In 2010 the institution recorded around 60,000 visitors.