Ritterhaus Museum

The Museum im Ritterhaus stands in Offenburg, a town in Baden-Württemberg. It occupies a two-storey classical building constructed in 1784 for the local Reichsschultheiß Franz Georg von Rienecker. The house has seventeen window axes and a three-storey central projection topped by a pediment. A sandstone tower with a spiral stair leads from the courtyard to the attic without a central spindle. The museum began in 1900 as a natural-history and ethnographic collection founded by Carl Frowin Mayer. Ernst Batzer later shifted the focus toward local history, and in 1959 the holdings moved into the Ritterhaus. Today the displays cover city archaeology, geology, nature, world cultures, hunting trophies and religious folk art, with more than ten thousand objects. Visitors find archaeological finds in the exhibition ‘Verdammt lang her! Archäologie in der Ortenau’. The first floor shows Offenburg’s path from the 1848 revolution to the 1950s economic miracle. Upstairs, the colonial ethnology collection and large-game trophies are displayed in ‘Ein Fenster zur Welt’. Outside, the Salmen commemorates the 1848 revolution and Jewish history, while the Lapidarium holds stone carvings in its garden.