Culture – Senator of the Interior Takes on Responsibility for the Berlin Sports Museum

From the December 15, 2009 Senate session:  From now on, the responsibility for 

Sports Museum located on the Olympic grounds and the Water Sports Museum located along the regatta course in Grünau lies in the hands of the Berlin Senate of the Interior and of Sport.

That was the decision made during today’s session at the recommendation of the mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit. Both museums have belonged to the Stiftung Stadtmuseum (City Museum Foundation) since 1995; as such they have been under the jurisdiction of the Berlin cultural administration. This transfer will provide the best circumstances for both museums to become more high profile and to gain greater public acceptance.

An attractive sports museum with new exhibition space for its artefacts on Prussian-German sports history will significantly increase the value of the entire Olympic Park venue with all of its facilities. The Stiftung Stadtmuseum will be able to concentrate more on its core topics of Berlin history at prominent mid-city locations. 

The Sports Museum developed out of the  East German Sporthistorisches Kabinett (Sports History Cabinet) and the West Berlin Forum für Sportgeschichte (Forum for Sports History).  It is the successor in tradition to the first sports museum in the world, the Museum für Leibesübungen (Museum for Physical Exercise), which was founded in 1924 and closed by the National Socialists in 1934.

The collection is housed in a structure belonging to the German Sports Forum and located next to the Olympic Stadium.  It includes an extensive collection on German and Berlin-Brandenburg sports history, a collection on the history of working-class sports and East German sports, and the “AIMS-Marathon Museum of Running”.

The library contains 35,000 volumes of sports history literature from the past two centuries, as well as a unique collection of magazines and journals, including all of the German sports association journals from 1945 to 1990.

The Water Sports Museum, which was founded in 1980 as a private collection, has a permanent exhibit with about 200 artefacts on the history of water sports, primarily from the area of Berlin-Brandenburg.




Pressemeldungen des Landes Berlin