Category Archives: Object of the Month

Object of the Month 03/2023

House 9 on the North Campus once served as the equine clinic of the former Prussian Royal Veterinary School, which was one of the leading training and research centres for veterinary medicine in the young German Empire. The northern part of the building was built in 1836 by Ludwig Ferdinand Hesse, the southern part in 1874 by Julius Emmerich as an extension. A drawing from the plan archive of the Technical Department provides information on the construction of the extension.

The drawing by the architect Julius Emmerich shows the front of an elongated single-storey stable building with a high roof, framed by stair towers and transoms on a scale of 1:100. The centre is emphasised by a risalit with a wood-decorated roof gable, and three window axes each on the left and right. On the ground floor, double-wing windows form a line with the skylights and thus vertically divide the cube. In the gable of the risalite, at the level of the attic, a double-leaf slatted door through which straw and hay could be stored in the attic. The towers served as access to the work and living rooms of the animal keepers in the transverse bays. The shape of the roof, the profiled beam heads and brackets, the accentuation of the cornices by moulded stones as well as the alternating coloured brick bands are depicted in great detail in the drawing. Emmerich’s design borrows from Schinkel’s designs for Prussian country house buildings. Trees and bushes frame the planned building and refer to the park character of the site.

The plan served as an appendix to the cost estimate for the building of 17 August 1873 and was submitted by Emmerich and countersigned by master builder F. Schulze on 12 September of the same year.
At that time, Emmerich was in the Prussian civil service and was in charge of the planning. On the basis of the other autographs, the remarks on the plan and the accompanying signatures, it is possible to trace the usual approval procedure for new buildings that was customary for the city of Berlin in the young Empire. Government building officer Ludwig Giersberg, an employee of the Ministry of Construction, Military, Trade and Finance, Department of Construction, confirmed the accuracy of the plan document. From 1866 onwards, Giersberg was entrusted in the Ministry with the preparation of expert opinions and the examination of building projects of outstanding importance in public construction. His signature under the plan, dated 27 April 1875, confirmed the planning for the new stables for the veterinary school. The text “Neuer Stall der Medizin. Klinik” using a blue pen probably goes back to the planning for necessary new buildings for the veterinary school at the beginning of 1908. At that time, 10,000 horses per year were already being treated in the existing buildings.

After the equine clinic was completed in 1839, the building was used as an animal stable and warehouse until the veterinarians moved to Dahlem in 1991. In 2014, extensive renovation and conversion work took place. Today, there are laboratory and seminar rooms on the ground floor and offices of the Institute of Biology on the upper floor.

Author: Kerstin Hinrichs, Technical Department

Further links (only in German):

Bauakten- und Planarchiv der Technischen Abteilung

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Object of the month: Model of the Aletsch Glacier

23. February 2023 HZK

Object of the Month 02/2023

How a Swiss craftsman created the model of the Aletsch Glacier and it came to the university

A relief of the Swiss Alps, 14 square metres in size, was once one of the main attractions of the Kunstkammer in the Berliner Schloss (Berlin Palace). Assembled from ten sections, it provided an overview of mountain ranges and valleys in previously unseen accuracy. A section of the model was found and recognised in a database a few years ago by a doctoral student at the Institute of Geography. It is now in the Humboldt Forum and can be viewed there.

On 10 May 2017, a small group of scientists from various disciplines met in a room on the top floor of the Institute of Geography in Adlershof. They wanted to check whether the art historian Eva Dolezel was correct in her assumption about a topographical model. Dolezel had written her dissertation on the historical Kunstkammer of Berlin and in the process had come across parts of an outstanding object that drew Berliners to the former palace where the Kunstkammer was housed over two hundred years ago: a relief of the Swiss Alps. Evidence shows that Alexander von Humboldt was also very taken with the model, which consisted of ten parts and was about 14 square metres in size.

How the relief was created and came to be in the Kunstkammer

The work was created by Joachim Eugen Müller (1752-1833), a craftsman from the canton of Obwalden (Part of Switzerland), whose knowledge of the Swiss Alps was outstanding and who possessed an incredible spatial imagination to form a topographically almost exact image of the mountains in miniature without any existing map material. And he didn’t just create one. Many wanted such a work of art at the time. Among the many, and the few who could also afford it financially, was King Frederick William III of Prussia. Thus, in the course of the first quarter of the 19th century, a relief in matching individual parts came to Berlin and was placed in the Kunstkammer there and was open to the public.

The relief was made of a plaster mixture, enclosed in a wooden frame and painted on the surface with green for woods and meadows or white for snow and ice according to the natural local conditions. Towns, rivers, lakes and glaciers were visible. What remained hidden from the view of the observer were metal pins that Müller attached to the wooden panel at the point where he later shaped the higher peaks. This detail allows us today to identify the model as the “real Müller” (Fig. 1).

From the database via the doctoral thesis to the Humboldt Forum

With the dissolution of the Kunstkammer, the trace of the relief was lost. In 2010, a project was launched at the HU to record material models in university collections nationwide. In the process, a mountain relief called “Model of the Upper Rhone Valley with Aletsch Glacier” was added to the publicly accessible database. Eva Dolezel discovered it there and put one and one together. Her conclusion: the model in the Geographical Institute must very probably be part of the historical Alpine relief in the Berlin Kunstkammer. And this assumption was ultimately confirmed.

The subsequent attention led to a second career for the relief. Today it is on display in the Humboldt Laboratory, but it is also part of the exhibition “Traces. History of Place” exhibition at the Humboldt Forum. It can be visited during the usual opening hours. The relief can serve as a good example of the limitless potential of many previously undiscovered objects in university collections. And the group of researchers mentioned at the beginning has not yet given up hope that perhaps more pieces of the former Swiss Alpine relief will be discovered.

Text and Photos: Oliver Zauzig

Further links (only in German):

Artikel: Ein wiederentdeckter Königsschatz

Teilstück des Alpenmodells im Humboldtforum

Teilstück des Alpenmodells in der Datenbank

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Object of the Month: Lise Meitner Monument by Anna Franziska Schwarzbach

23. January 2023 HZK

Object of the Month 01/2023

Since 2014, Lise Meitner faces Unter den Linden; on the other side of the cour d'honneur of the main building, Theodor Mommsen and Max Planck face her. The monument to Hermann von Helmholtz completes the historical series, which is broken up and continued both in terms of contemporary history and aesthetics by Lise Meitner's representation - no longer larger than life and in a space-consuming pose, but set back and asymmetrically on the plinth. The bronze monument to Lise Meitner (1878-1968) is the youngest in the university's cour d'honneur and the only one to date to honour a female scientist. Lise Meitner (1878-1968) combines many special features in her scientific biography: she was the second woman to receive a doctorate in physics from the University of Vienna in 1906; in 1913 she was the first woman to become a scientific member of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society; she was the first woman to work as an assistant to Max Planck; in 1922 she became the first female physicist in Prussia to habilitate at the University of Berlin; and finally, in 1926, she was appointed as the first associate professor for experimental nuclear physics. In retrospect, she herself describes the fact that she took her work with the students very seriously as "a great human responsibility for our young colleagues, with whom we are together all day and for whose overall human development everything we do and say can have an influence".

Lise Meitner Monument

Nuclear power for peaceful use

Even before her theoretical interpretation of nuclear fission in 1939, she received the first of a total of four nominations for the Nobel Prize in 1919 – but she did not receive the Nobel Prize itself. This honour was bestowed on Otto Hahn in 1945, with whom Lise Meitner worked and researched together for decades – and whom she sometimes referred to, self-confidently teasingly, as “chicken”. She became known to the scientific community early on and met Marie Curie and Albert Einstein personally. As a Jew, she was forced to give up her scientific work by the Nazi Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which was passed in 1933. In 1938, she was able to emigrate to Sweden. There, from 1947 to 1960, she held a research professorship and was head of the nuclear physics department at the Stockholm Institute of Technology. From then on, she devoted herself not to the construction of the atomic bomb, but to the peaceful use of nuclear energy. After her retirement in 1960, she moved to Cambridge, where she died eight years later, having received many international honours and awards.

Monument with signature, nuclear reaction and calculation

The Berlin sculptor Anna Franziska Schwarzbach won the European art competition with her design for the Lise Meitner Monument. The site also almost occupies the place where the monument to Heinrich von Treitschke once stood – the historian who triggered the Berlin anti-Semitism controversy with his sentence “The Jews are our misfortune” and whose monument was finally removed after being moved by the National Socialists in 1951.

Schwarzbach contrasts the relationship between the figure and the plinth: on the base plate lies a plinth with various cuts and cracks that are associatively linked to the fractures in Meitner’s biography. The portrait-like figure itself stands somewhat apart, at once delicate and small and prominent, representing marginalisation as much as merit. On the front of the plinth is Lise Meitner’s signature, on the smooth left side surface a drawing of the nuclear reaction and fragments of a calculation. Thus the attributes have also migrated to the plinth and are not attached to the figure. Criticised as decorative, following female stereotypes and lacking the potential for irritation as an impulse to reflection, the monument is subordinate to the coherent appearance of the Court of Honour. On the everyday walk into the main building of the university, the Lise Meitner Monument nevertheless evokes German history, university and scientific history as well as questions of equal rights – whether it is an anachronism should be decided by each:r.

Author: Christina Kuhli, Custodian of the HU
Art Collection / Custody of the Humboldt University

Photos: Matthias Heyde

Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik

Zentralinstitut der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin