Ostfriesisches Landesmuseum Emden

The Ostfriesisches Landesmuseum Emden stands in the port city of Emden in Lower Saxony. It is the regional museum for art, culture and local history of East Frisia. The building houses about four per cent of its total collection of more than fifty thousand objects. Regular special exhibitions on art and cultural history accompany the permanent displays. The museum is run jointly by the city of Emden and the society founded in 1820 that still preserves the city’s artistic and historical legacy. The museum traces its origins to a group of six citizens who set up a society to save local art and artefacts from leaving the region. In 1869 they moved into a former town house to show their holdings for the first time. After the Second World War almost the entire collection survived thanks to wartime evacuations. In 2005 the museum reopened under its present name after a major rebuilding that cost more than eight million euros. Today it sees itself as a European regional museum strengthening local identity through interdisciplinary study of art and cultural history. Visitors find ten themed sections spread over five floors and 2880 square metres. The ground floor shows early maps of the North Sea coast and the work of sixteenth-century cartographers such as Ubbo Emmius and David Fabricius. The first floor presents archaeological finds from the Stone Age to the early modern period, including a life-size diorama that follows the changing relationship between people and the sea. A separate room is devoted to the 1200-year-old Bernuthsfeld Moor Body, discovered in 1907 and now displayed with its original finds.