German National Museum
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| Established | 1852 |
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| Location | Nuremberg, Germany |
| Visitors | 405,799 (2010) |
| Director | Prof. Dr. G. Ulrich Großmann |
| Public transit access | U2 (Nuremberg U-Bahn)/U3 (Nuremberg U-Bahn): Opernhaus; U1 (Nuremberg U-Bahn): Lorenzkirche |
| Website | http://www.gnm.de |
The Germanisches Nationalmuseum is a museum in Nuremberg, Germany. Founded in 1852, it houses a large collection of items relating to German culture and art extending from prehistoric times through to the present day. The Germanisches Nationalmuseum is Germany's largest museum of cultural history. Out of its total holding of some 1.3 million objects (including the holdings of the library and the Department of Prints and Drawings), approximately 25,000 are exhibited.
The museum is situated in the south of the historic city center between Kornmarkt and Frauentormauer along the medieval city wall. Its entrance hall is situated on Kartäusergasse which was transformed by the Israeli sculptor Dani Karavan to the Way of Human Rights (German: Straße der Menschenrechte).
The Germanisches Museum, as it was named initially, was founded by a group of individuals led by the Franconian baron Hans von und zu Aufsess, whose goal was to assemble a "well-ordered compendium of all available source material for German history, literature and art".
The term Germanic should be understood in the historical context of the mid nineteenth century. In 1846, German linguists and historians, amongst them the Brothers Grimm, Leopold Ranke und Jacob Burckhardt, had met in Frankfurt, and decided to use "Germanistik" as a comprehensive term embracing all the fields of their academic disciplines related to the culture of German speaking regions. The German revolutions of 1848–49 had failed to achieve a liberalised and unified Germany. Thus the name of the museum maintained the idea of a close cultural relationship within a region defined by the common German language, and a shared German cultural tradition. In 1852, the museum's intention to document the cultural unity of the German-speaking areas was a progressive concept, free from any exaggerated Chauvinism. Only in 1871, when the German Empire was constituted, the museum paid tribute to it by adding national to its name.
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