Museum Diary

“Currywurst is more than just a sausage: it’s one of life’s experiences…” The humble Currywurst is not only Germany’s favourite fast food snack, it’s become a piece of German cultural history, immortalised in literature, music and film. No surprise then, that it should also have its very own museum. I’ve actually visited the Deutsches Currywurst Museum a couple of times, but for some reason never done a proper review of it here on Museum Diary. Well, we were just there again this past weekend, so […]

This past week I’ve been experimenting with baking flavoured bread. And you know me, I immediately had to look whether there are any bread museums around the world. I was surprised to discover what a popular topic it seems to be! Germany alone apparently has at least four bread museums, including the Europäisches Brotmuseum (European Bread Museum) in Ebergötzen and the Museum der Brotkultur (Museum of Bread Culture) in Ulm, which claims to be the world’s oldest bread museum. I also found information on bread […]

We’ve only been in Berlin a couple of months (well, coming up for 9 months actually, how time flies!), but already I’ve had at least half a dozen requests from international friends and colleagues for must see museum recommendations. So I don’t need to compile them anew every time someone asks, I thought I’d write a blog post about them and then I can just point people to that! (why didn’t I think of this before?) Please note that I’m only recommending museums I have […]

So, last weekend saw the winter edition of Berlin’s Lange Nacht der Museen (Long Night of Museums). As I mentioned in August, Berlin is the mother of all long museum nights, since they were the first to get the ball rolling. In fact, they are so keen here, that they hold the event twice a year, on the last Saturday in January and August. This time around was a particularly special occasion, celebrating the 30th Lange Nacht and the 300th birthday of Frederick the Great. I […]

Best Temporary Exhibitions I’ve counted 20 temporary exhibitions I visited in 2011, including ones on bathrooms, war photography, movie storyboards, Alice in Wonderland, fire and The Queen, so it’s difficult to choose, but taking into account the overall impact and interest in the subject matter, I think my three favourites are: Mammuts: Giganten der Eiszeit at the Neanderthal Museum The Hokusai Retrospektive at the Martin Gropius Bau Banished Books at the National Library of Scotland Honourable mention to Fashion Talks at the Museum für Kommunikation, which made me laugh because I travelled […]

After visiting all those museums last year, I thought I would do a kind of ‘Museum Awards’ to pick out some of the highlights. Best Food No question, the award for best food experience has to go to the National Library of Scotland, simply for their selection of gluten free cakes! No, they’re not made fresh in house, they are pre-packaged from a gluten free range, but at least they recognise that they have customers with a need for this and they have three or […]