Qualla: Kulturhistorisches Museum Magdeburg

Kulturhistorisches Museum Magdeburg: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roy Zuo, CC BY-SA 4.0. There is exactly one work of art that Playmobil has ever reproduced as a toy, and it is a sandstone horseman carved in Magdeburg around 1240. The Magdeburger Reiter is an odd thing to hand a six-year-old: a life-size medieval equestrian statue, generally taken to be Otto the Great though the identification has never been settled, flanked by two young women who carry his shield and once his banner. The original no longer stands out in the weather. It sits indoors in the Kaiser-Otto-Saal of the Kulturhistorisches Museum, a few metres from the cathedral, while a copy holds the Alter Markt in its place. That is the museum's essential habit — it keeps the things this city cannot afford to lose a second time.

Image: Roy Zuo | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kulturhistorisches Museum Magdeburg: The Rider in the Hall

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dguendel, CC BY 3.0. The Reiter is not one piece of stone but roughly a hundred, mostly fine-grained sandstone quarried near Bernburg and fitted together into rider, horse and attendants. Restoration work found what modern eyes never expect on medieval sculpture: original colour, azure blue and green...

Image: Dguendel | CC BY 3.0

Kulturhistorisches Museum Magdeburg: An 1897 Competition and Two Viennese Architects

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Olaf2, CC BY-SA 3.0. The building came out of an architectural competition held in 1897, though only indirectly; the design that got built was the work of the Viennese architects Friedrich Ohmann and August Kirstein. It went up between 1901 and 1906 on Otto-von-Guericke-Straße, a few metres from the ...

Image: Olaf2 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kulturhistorisches Museum Magdeburg: What the War Took

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hadhuey at German Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. From 1933 the National Socialists set about clearing objects they found unwelcome out of the collection. Then the building itself was severely damaged in the war, and the collections that had been evacuated for safekeeping fared no better — much of the material was stored in a sa...

Image: Hadhuey at German Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kulturhistorisches Museum Magdeburg: Four Hundred Thousand Objects

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roy Zuo, CC BY-SA 4.0. What survived, and what has been gathered since, is enormous for a museum run by twenty-seven people. The archaeology holdings alone come to 400,000 finds covering some 200,000 years, the oldest of them a hand axe from Hundisburg of about that age. There are 11,000 coins and 2,40...

Image: Roy Zuo | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kulturhistorisches Museum Magdeburg: Megedeborch

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Driessel (first uploaded by de:Benutzer:Driessel on de.wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0. Since 1995 the inner courtyard has been given over each year, spring to autumn, to something called Megedeborch: a reconstructed medieval town where schoolchildren take on trades, practise them, and populate the place themselves rather than filing past it. It is a good instinct f...

Image: Driessel (first uploaded by de:Benutzer:Driessel on de.wikipedia) | CC BY-SA 3.0