Kulturhistorisches Museum Rostock

The Kulturhistorisches Museum Rostock stands in the old town near the Steintor gate. Its main building was once a 19th-century society hall before becoming a museum in 1903. Across the yard the restored west wing of the former Holy Cross convent houses further galleries. The site links modern exhibition spaces with medieval cloister walls and a 15th-century refectory. The museum holds one of the largest collections in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. It keeps the biggest German archive on Field-Marshal Blücher and safeguards the last intact group of works seized in 1937 as ‘degenerate art’. Its pictures range from Dutch masters of the 16th to 19th centuries to Expressionist paintings by Heckel, Jawlensky and Barlach. The sacral art gallery displays medieval altarpieces rescued from vanished churches. Visitors walk through vaulted rooms where brick walls date from the 1480s. In the refectory medieval wood carvings and altars stand beside silver monstrances from the Holy Cross convent. The craft wing shows clocks, silver and ceramics in cases set against original painted ceilings. Modern galleries display confiscated modernist works alongside 20th-century sculptures. The toy room presents dolls houses and tin railways once owned by wealthy Rostock families.