Deutsches Hygiene-Museum
The Deutsches Hygiene-Museum is a museum at Lingnerplatz 1, at the edge of the Großer Garten in Dresden, founded in 1912 on the initiative of the Dresden industrialist and Odol manufacturer Karl August Lingner.
What it is
The museum is run by the Stiftung Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, which receives annual contributions in equal parts from the Free State of Saxony and the city of Dresden. The collection includes the Gläserne Mensch and the Gläserne Frau (the Transparent Man and the Transparent Woman). The museum's English text keeps the German name.
History
Lingner was one of the people behind the First International Hygiene Exhibition of 1911 in Dresden, which drew more than five million visitors. The present building was designed by the architect Wilhelm Kreis and finished in 1930, for the Second International Hygiene Exhibition. It was opened on 16 May 1930.
After 1933 the museum put its methods at the service of National Socialist race ideology. Its exhibitions “Volk und Rasse” (1934) and the travelling exhibition “Ewiges Volk” (1937) belong to that period.
The museum building was heavily damaged in the bombing of Dresden in February 1945. In the GDR, the museum says, it had a health-education role comparable to that of the federal centre for health education in West Germany. After 1991 the museum was newly conceived as a “Museum vom Menschen”, a museum of the human being. The architect Peter Kulka later carried out a general renovation and modernisation of the building, restoring it largely to its original state.