The 1906 Wildlife Dioramas at Darmstadt's Landesmuseum

Over a hundred years ago, Darmstadt’s largest museum made an international splash with the debut of ten large-scale dioramas, portraying the beasts of land and air from the world’s various ecosystems. The dioramas are impressive today, and it’s not hard to imagine the sensation they must have caused at the turn of the 20th century.

The Darmstädter Dioramen premiered in 1906, and were immediately hailed as a revolutionary new way to appreciate the natural world. The ten scenes take visitors on a whirlwind tour of the earth — there are a few dedicated to Germany and Europe, but viewers are also transported to further-flung locales like South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. There’s even a diorama which takes you to the Arctic.

Diorama Video

The Darmstadt Dioramas at the Hessisches Landesmuseum

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The dioramas focus equally on birds and mammals, faithfully recreating some of the world’s most iconic species, and are far more engrossing than I had expected. Jürgen is from Darmstadt, and had told me a lot about the dioramas which had so impressed him as a child. It’s fair to say that, before stepping into the museum, my enthusiasm was at 3 out of 10. But once I was standing in front of the African diorama, I got it — there’s just so much to see and discover in each of the scenes. As a kid, it must have been exhilarating.

Arctic Diorama

The Hessisches Landesmuseum itself is incredible, and could easily eat up an entire day. A slogan placed over the skeleton of an American mastodon declares that the museum brings “The whole world under one roof”, and it’s not an empty boast. Apart from its massive Natural History collection, the Landesmuseum is renowned for its art collection, which spans the centuries and features works by names like Rembrandt, Dürer, and Beuys.

Buoyed by my positive reception of the dioramas, Jürgen also wanted to show me some of the work of Joseph Beuys, who I was unfamiliar with. So, we took a winding route to the museum’s so-called “Beuys Block”, where some of his most well-known pieces are found. Jürgen stood in front of a couple of dirty planks nailed together and pointed at them, beaming brightly and awaiting my approbation.

This was the Fetteck (fat corner), one of Beuys’ most lauded installations. Literally, it’s a corner in which the artist splopped a load of fat. And that was it. Now it was art. What we were looking at wasn’t even the original Fetteck, but a reproduction. The original had just been a corner in the Beuys’ studio. And it was about now, as Jürgen was so proudly explaining these smeary wood planks to me, that I realized I still don’t understand Germans, even after having been married to one for twenty years.