City, museums for the people, and new media (1900-1933/1934)

The article deals with the educational intentions of and the discourses on popularization of museums by the new media. The use of radio by museums as a means of attracting more people will be reconstructed from the turn of the century to the Nationalist Socialist period. Looking at the Hamburg, the article demonstrates how the city Heimat museum, the Museum of Hamburg History, and its director, Professor Otto Lauffer, cooperated with the Hamburg radio station Norag and one of its program directors, Dr. Kurt Stapelfeldt. The cooperation of the two men was based on similar ideas of Volk, Stamm, and Heimat and demonstrates the use of the most modern media at the time for the popularization of a conservative, attractively prepared concept. Although there was a bias for the rural past, their Heimat concept was not anti-urban per se. Instead, they wanted the cities to search their identities in the peculiarities of the old rural culture of their region. Lauffer and Stapelfeldt considered their work apolitical; in fact, their concept was directed against the modern republican and democratic political culture of the Weimer Republic, and therefore it belonged to the pre-story of the Third Reich. © 2005 Sage Publications