Bayreuth teachers and students develop museum project

The conference room of the Stadtmuseum Fürth was filled to capacity on 25 May for the opening of the exhibition "Dieweil das Land verheeret - Kriegserleben in Franken und Syrien vor 400 Jahren und heute". The exhibition organisers, Dr. Marcus Mühlnikel from the Institute for Franconian Regional History in Thurnau and Prof. Dr. Stefan Benz, head of the History Didactics teaching unit at the University of Bayreuth, and the host Dr. Martin Schramm, head of the museums and archives of the city of Fürth and also a graduate of the University of Bayreuth, had already welcomed the press beforehand. The Fürther Nachrichte reported as well as the Bayerischer Rundfunk.

The first thing that attracted the visitors was probably the unusual conception of the exhibition, which does without instruction and instead focuses on the visualisation of basic human experiences, in this case that of war and violence. Today's military conflicts are present and close at hand. Cameras broadcast current images around the world. Foreign and distant, on the other hand, is the Thirty Years' War, which also ravaged Franconia 400 years ago. The outbreak of violence at that time remains without images for us today. Only documents, often harrowing and vivid testimonies of human experience, tell of the Thirty Years' War. The exhibition contrasts these reports and factual testimonies, some of which have been newly discovered in the archives, with current photographs from the ongoing Syrian civil war. These often come from those directly affected: old horror and modern horror, expressed mostly in mobile phone photos of Syrian refugees who helped to design the exhibition.

The graphic concept of the exhibition is based on the ambience of the refugee camps around 2015, which inspired the graphic designers of the Koop design group. The successful correspondence between the design and the content also convinced the International Institute of Information Design (IIID) in Vienna, which awarded the exhibition a prize at the triennial design competition.

The exhibition was already on show in a similar form at the Bayreuth City Museum in 2019/20. Now it has been tailored to the Fürth region. The then market town of Fürth experienced its almost complete destruction in 1634 - dimensions reminiscent of the destruction of Aleppo, to which exhibition photos bear witness. Two years earlier, the town had already seen "Wallenstein's Camp", which marked the end of the Swedish victory march through Germany and ushered in the second, longer and crueller half of the war. Nor is there any end in sight to the war in Syria in 2023. But the latest events in Eastern Europe also underline the sad topicality of horror and death through war.