Review: The Nature Museum

The Augustiner Museum, Freiburg's gem, contains works by Hans Baldung Grien, Matthias Grünewald, and Lucas Cranach the Elder, among other significant artists. We have not visited the museum because it has been closed for renovations our entire time here. It will reopen in February 2010.

Freiburg's Naturmuseum similarly has been closed for renovations, but following 20 months of work, it reopened on Friday. We walked to the Altstadt this afternoon to enjoy the results.

It was probably worth the couple of Euros admission price to experience one of the most puzzlingly nonsensically designed exhibits ever. The best parts of the museum were a small room on mineralogy and a larger room with fossils on the Erdgeschoss (ground floor), and the front doorknob. The erste Stock (second floor) houses a temporary exhibit on Evolution, comprised mostly of a couple hundred clear plastic boxes representing multiple evolutionary timelines. The boxes contain occasional fossils and pieces of wood. Every once in a while, to represent periods of mass extinction, an entire column of boxes is filled to capacity with small pink plush-toy hippopotamuses. In one hands-on area, you get to lift the lids of the boxes to gaze through a second protective plastic lid at the items displayed underneath (e.g. a cotton ball, a stalk of wheat, a shirt).

When we got home, I looked up the Badische Zeitung's review online and learned the museum is a significantly pared down revision of an earlier natural history and ethnography museum. It is still very much a work in progress: while the ground floor exhibits are permanent, the upper floors are awaiting additional funding. Thankfully, the plastic boxes will be moving on.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the BZ review was the readers' comments section, as it proved that Germans can pontificate just as annoyingly, illogically, and self-righteously as Americans. Nobody mentioned the plastic boxes, or criticized an educational system that had produced such curatorial mediocrity. Indeed, no one mentioned the museum at all. Instead, the polarized debate was over Evolution ("That's why they call it a THEORY!") and Creationism ("You religious fanatics always ignore science!!"). Why I expected a higher level of discourse just because the language is German rather than English is beyond me.

After our museum visit, we walked through the Weihnachtsmarkt, along with the entire populations of Switzerland, France, and Italy, who arrived by bus this afternoon.