German Museum

The Deutsches Museum, officially the Deutsches Museum von Meisterwerken der Naturwissenschaft und Technik, begins with an idea that looks almost administrative in its origins: a meeting that turned into a museum, and a museum that turned into a public workshop for science itself. Today it is the world’s largest museum of science and technology, with about 125,000 exhibited objects across 50 fields, and it draws roughly 1.5 million visitors per year.

An island chosen for a purpose

Your first visual cue is the museum’s setting: the main site is on a small island in the Isar river. Long before the museum existed, the island was used for rafting wood, and it was regularly flooded. As a result, there were no buildings there prior to 1772, until the Isar barracks were built. After flooding in 1899, those buildings were rebuilt with flood protection. In 1903, the city council announced it would donate the island for the newly built Deutsches Museum. The island—formerly known as Kohleninsel, the “coal island”—was renamed Museumsinsel, linking the place’s industrial past to a new kind of public education.

Oskar von Miller’s founding moment

The museum’s most important human thread is Oskar von Miller, the electrical engineer who became the initiative behind it.