HAMBURG: Back to the Future: The Centrum für Naturkunde on Its Way Toward Reestablishing a Natural History Museum in Hamburg

Abstract

Comprising today approximately ten million specimens, Hamburg’s zoological collection at the newly established Centrum für Naturkunde (CeNak) goes back to the Naturhistorisches Museum, founded in 1843. It includes several historical collections that originate from the initiative and interest in natural history of civilians, merchandisers, traders, and owners of seagoing vessels. Only in 1891 that these collections were adequately stored and put on display in a then most innovative museum building in the city’s center that soon became one of the largest and most important natural history museums, second only to that in Berlin; it was also the one of its kind with most visitors for five decades. The museum and parts of its dry collections—mostly in entomology, malacology and mammalogy, and those in the exhibition—were destroyed during the “Operation Gomorrha” bombing of Hamburg and the subsequent “Feuersturm” in the morning of 30 July 1943, with the ruins being knocked down in 1951. Other parts, essentially the large alcohol collections and those of birds, have been stored elsewhere during WWII. Since then only provisionally housed the museum and its staff became part of the Universität Hamburg in 1969 and moved into a new building in the early to mid-1970s at its current location. As part of a growing mass university, these collections were long neglected and without substantial means to accomplish this goals, with a small display room opening on 2000 qm in 1984 only. With the founding of the CeNak in 2014 plans are underway for establishing again a modern natural history museum in Hamburg.