Museum für Haustierkunde "Julius Kühn"
Ferkel aus der Kreuzung Wildschwein mit Hausschwein (Bündener)
Aquarell von Karl Wagner (1894)

A city's collections and archives are parts of the collective memory and self-image. Frequently, they do not reflect concrete history or science as much as they do the state of the society in which they originated. In a city like Halle, which through the centuries and especially in the past one was involved in several such collective, societal states, this ought to be readable in its collections of materials and pictures. This is the basic assumption behind this combined view of the museums and libraries in Halle.

Common Property of the People means to say that these collections are supported in various ways by the communal public, also in material terms, like the provision of a house for the Beatles Museum. At the same time, the city administration is attempting to strengthen the location Halle as a cultural city with the help of its museum potentials. So attention is drawn more to some of these collections than to others. Several collections are hardly accessible for the public anymore, like the Marienbibliothek or the Robertinum, others are planning new buildings or extensions, while still others have long been closed and broken up, like the Museum der revolutionären Arbeiterschaft or the Traditionskabinett in the Volkspark.

Is the assertion that all these collections belong to everyone cynical? It refers more to the position that scientific work has in relation to so-called intellectual common property. The production of this intellectual property is to a large extent financed and supported by everyone, either through the maintenance of universities and their employees, or through money for R&D that is given directly to companies in the form of state subsidies. Does this return in the form of social progress? Certainly not through highly financed committees supported by ageing managers so that they can expand their commercial concepts to the state.

Moreover, this research, when it leads to product, e.g., in the form of a book or an industrial patent, is oddly enough perceived by most people in its commodity form and no longer as part of a process. For this reason, the museums, too, appear as an accumulation of material goods and not as the results of social collecting and storing.

Are these collections that which we all want to have, i.e. do they create signs that belong to everyone – like it was once expressed by the Situationist International as a revolutionary goal?

What this section of the exhibition perhaps also points out is the museum-inherent social tendency to grant amnesty to oneself in a sentimental way by deliberately removing something from oneself. As a result, history appears as if one were merely at its mercy, subjected to its object-like nature, and not as if it was made by one. A.M.

Participating museums:

• Beatles Museum
• Botanical Garden
• Christian-Wolf-Haus
• Franckesche Stiftungen (Cabinet of Wonders)
• Geiseltalmuseum
• Halloren Schokoladenmuseum
• Händel-Haus
• Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie - Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte – Sachsen-Anhalt
• Kupferstichkabinett
• Marienbibliothek
• Domestic-Animal Museum "Julius Kühn"
• Phonetic Collection
• Robertinum
• Schützenhaus Glaucha
• Stiftung Moritzburg – Kunstmuseum des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt

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