Exhibit Review: Die Kaisermacher. Frankfurt Am Main Und Die Goldene Bulle 1356–1806 (January 2007)
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H-German Exhibit Review: Die Kaisermacher. Frankfurt am Main und die Goldene Bulle 1356–1806 (January 2007) Discussion published by Leta Knupfer on Sunday, February 21, 2016 "Die Kaisermacher. Frankfurt am Main und die Goldene Bulle 1356–1806." Combined exhibition of the Institut für Stadtgeschichte, Historisches Museum, Dommuseum and Museum Judengasse, Frankfurt, 30. September 2006--14. Januar 2007. Reviewed for H-German by Susan R. Boettcher, Department of History, University of Texas at Austin Four museums in one day? No way! The trend for a single German city to sponsor a large exhibit spread out over a number of museums or cultural institutions seems to be well-established and growing, exploited this year not only in Frankfurt but in Paderborn and Halle as well. The advantages of this strategy as a way to draw tourists are clear: a single museum may not be worthy a long trip, but three or four can be, and visitors spend more time and money in the community. It also allows a number of institutions to raise their public profile simultaneously. Whether they should do so is the question: in every city there's at least one museum or historical site that probably shouldn't be viewed under direct lighting. While that was not the case here, all of the multi-museum exhibits I saw this year suggested that, despite serious efforts at coordination, results do vary. Newspapers reported that the four museums involved in "Der Kaisermacher" spent two years coordinating. [1] The result is four strongly contrasting exhibits of varied effectiveness, all of which are worth the visit for people interested in the history of the local encounter with the Holy Roman Emperor and the ways in which imperial events played out in a particular context. In order to limit a hopelessly unbounded theme, all of the exhibits focus very closely on Frankfurt without limiting the value of a visit for those with more general interests in the history of the Holy Roman Empire. The incredibly detailed presentation of the city's history will, however, make it difficult for the average viewer to put the objects in the context of the larger themes in Reichsgeschichte that have been so predominant in the scholarship of the last few years. The exhibition is a cooperation between the Institut für Stadtgeschichte, the Historisches Museum, the Dommuseum, and the Jüdisches Museum - Museum Judengasse. The brochure makes no suggestions about which museum to visit first, so the course of my trip was naturally determined by the least meaningful factor: the proximity of the different museums to Frankfurt main station. Institut für Stadtgeschichte: "Das Frankfurter Exemplar der 'Goldenen Bulle'" Of all the museums, the first stop left me with the most mixed impression. First, some tourist grumbling: the entrance to the museum--indeed to each museum--was augmented with a large portal that left no doubt that I was in the right place, but entry proved difficult, beginning with staff unfamiliar with how to make my EC card work and my discovery that the audio guide only cost €2, but would require a e €10 deposit, which seemed excessive. I was going to get it back--as the staff Citation: Leta Knupfer. Exhibit Review: Die Kaisermacher. Frankfurt am Main und die Goldene Bulle 1356–1806 (January 2007). H- German. 02-21-2016. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/discussions/112828/exhibit-review-die-kaisermacher-frankfurt-am-main-und-die-goldene Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-German kept telling me--but in several of the venues I encountered difficulties with not being able to change a €20 bill and in one case I had to surrender my driver's license. I repeatedly had the feeling that the museum staff were simply not prepared for the stream of visitors they encountered. Once equipped with admission ticket and audio guide, I listened to the introductory media presentation at the door-- which explains the political circumstances that led to the creation of the Golden Bull--and entered the exhibit. I know from a decade of flipping through museum guest books that captioning is one of the most frequent visitor complaints. But in Frankfurt it was particularly bad, in almost every respect. The captions were often too small; for some reason the adhesive letters were not sticking to their surfaces, so that letters or parts of letters were often missing; and the English translations were so literal, down to reproducing the length of the German sentences, that they were always hard to read, even when there were no errors. While as an expert I loved the detail of many descriptions, I often had difficulties reading them--and given the sparse quantity of audioguide entries, it seems they could have been used more effectively in this regard. On to historical critique: This portion of the exhibit was devoted to the Golden Bull itself, and the entire exhibit in this location was put into one large room divided with banks of cabinets and other furniture. The first two banks of cabinets with an opening in the middle introduced the viewer to the diplomacy that led up to it, relating to the difficult succession after Ludwig of Bavarian (1314-47) and the city's attempt to maintain parity between the anti-kings Günther von Schwarzburg and Karl IV. One of the diplomats involved was Siegfried von Marburg zum Paradies (d. 1386) whose activities in the city are illustrated in one of the banks with a series of Urkunde and his impressive holy cross reliquary. Another important object here is a seventeenth-century transcription of a record of the city's preparation of its own translation of the Bull into German--something that my own epic struggles with the Latin language made immensely sympathetic--but there are also no clear indications as to the relationship of this material to the central object of this museum's exhibit. The connection becomes a bit clearer in the left-hand bank, which provides information about the historical factors that influenced the selection of the electors. One then walks between the banks and as a historian is immediately drawn into a strong professional conflict. The late medievalist Hartmut Boockmann was wont to remark that museum exhibits live from the objects, so replicas should not be displayed. But one is sorely tempted when one sees the Frankfurt exhibitors' choice of a replica: a computer animation of the Golden Bull, first on an accessible computer screen with a mouse, which is then projected in a huge surface on the adjoining wall, programmed with QuickTime, so the visitor can page in the text with the mouse and view the results on the wall. This is spectacular, no doubt, and you can also buy it when you leave the exhibit, either singly or in a discount package with a limited edition reproduction of the Bull itself. [2] I got one, I had a lot of fun playing with it at home, and I'll no doubt use it as a visual element in a lecture (the CD includes a critical edition of the text in Latin, the original German translation of 1371, and a modern Hig h German translation). It was especially neat to get a close look at the seal. In the exhibit, the computer animation was surrounded with a series of signs with terms on them that related to medieval constitutionalism, probably intended for visiting school classes. But two problems nag here: first, despite the increased visibility of the text, I did not see anyone actually reading it. Is it that something about the stability of a manuscript demands attention, but a visual display allows us to relax our concentration? Second, animations are inherently more interesting than old books, and although the actual document was also exhibited--a truly precious object set off to the side under special lighting, the pages of which had to be turned every two weeks throughout the exhibit in order Citation: Leta Knupfer. Exhibit Review: Die Kaisermacher. Frankfurt am Main und die Goldene Bulle 1356–1806 (January 2007). H- German. 02-21-2016. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/discussions/112828/exhibit-review-die-kaisermacher-frankfurt-am-main-und-die-goldene Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-German to preserve them--no one other than me was looking at it when I was there. The seal is gorgeous, although in the next wall of the exhibit, which treats the history and significance of the seals typically attached to medieval Urkunden, we learn that these items are not solid gold, but rather thin layers of gold impressed with the emperor's seal (which typically did not survive, as the seals were intentionally destroyed upon the sovereign's death) and then filled with wax or other materials and threaded together with a cord. A final portion of the exhibit here was devoted to the afterlife of the Bull. Only seven copies survive, and keeping track of this copy, long assumed to be the "imperial" copy (in fact it was only the city of Frankfurt's version), created a number of problems over the years. It was exhibited to visitors at least as early as the seventeenth century, at least to those willing to pay to see it; when the French occupied the city in the 1790s it was transported to France "for safekeeping," though eventually returned. In 1938 the Oberbürgermeister gave a second, fifteenth-century translation of the bull to Adolf Hitler as a representative gift that has completely disappeared, but the first, fourteenth-century translation was displayed in the Römer, where it burned during the bombing of 1944 along with numerous other early city documents.