Qualla: Stones Fan Museum

Stones Fan Museum: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ymnes, CC BY-SA 4.0. Ulrich Schröder had to put his own face on the front of the building. That was the deal. A delegation from Universal Records travelled to Lüchow — a small town out in the flat, boggy Wendland of Lower Saxony, nearer the old East German frontier than to any city — for the specific purpose of stopping a retired bank employee from calling his collection The Rolling Stones Museum. Terms were reached. The name became Rolling-Stones-Fan-Museum, later trimmed to Stones Fan Museum, and Schröder mounted a portrait of himself at the entrance so that nobody could mistake the place for an official enterprise. What sits behind that portrait is a thousand square metres of Mick and Keith in a converted grocery store, and it exists because a fifteen-year-old went to three concerts in 1965 and never entirely came home.

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Image: Ymnes | CC BY-SA 4.0

Stones Fan Museum: Fifteen, and Never Recovered

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ymnes, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1965 the Rolling Stones played Germany, and Ulli Schröder — fifteen years old, and already a fan from the very beginning — went to all three shows. He then did what most fifteen-year-olds do, which is grow up and get a job at a bank. The difference is that the collecting never...

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Image: Ymnes | CC BY-SA 4.0

Stones Fan Museum: The Aisle Where the Cornflakes Were

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ymnes, CC BY-SA 4.0. The building had been a supermarket. That is roughly the right shape for the job — one thousand square metres of open floor, high ceilings, loading access, the architecture of bulk retail repurposed for the architecture of obsession. The museum is a member of the Museumsverbund L...

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Image: Ymnes | CC BY-SA 4.0

Stones Fan Museum: Forty Metres of Rock History

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ymnes, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2012 Schröder and the artist Heino Jacobsen designed a mural forty metres long. Jacobsen then painted it onto ten garage boxes in Lüchow, working six weeks at twelve hours a day. It is not graffiti — no spray cans, no stencils, all of it applied by hand — and it depicts a trai...

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Image: Ymnes | CC BY-SA 4.0

Stones Fan Museum: The Lips Problem

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ymnes, CC BY-SA 4.0. Early in 2012 the museum acquired an international reputation, briefly, for its plumbing. Schröder had installed urinals modelled on the tongue-and-lips logo John Pasche designed for the band at the start of the 1970s. Local campaigners objected that they encouraged discriminatio...

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Image: Ymnes | CC BY-SA 4.0

Stones Fan Museum: Why Lüchow

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ymnes, CC BY-SA 4.0. There is no commercial logic to any of this. Lüchow is not on the way to anywhere; for forty years it sat in the dead-end pocket of West Germany pressed up against the inner German border, a place people left rather than arrived at. A museum here is not a business plan, it is a s...

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Image: Ymnes | CC BY-SA 4.0