The Germanic Museum

A millionaire once offered the University a large sum of money for a new building, provided only that it be in Turkish style. "It's the only kind of architecture," he explained, "you haven't got." He wasn't far from wrong. And if Lamont Library is one of the extremes of Harvard's mongrel collection, the Germanic Museum certainly qualifies for the other. The red-roofed building, adorned with Teutonic eagles and lions and a quotation from Schiller, sits on the corner of Kirkland Street and Divinity Avenue like a misplaced Valkyrie grown slightly stout.

The Museum's weird appearance, however, is partly due to its ill-assorted neighbors. Taken by itself as a work of architecture, the building is a masterpiece. Dean Hudnut of the School of Design calls it "one of the most subtle and original works in the University, a very clever fusion of three German traditions." The building, designed by a Munich architect, manages to gather under one roof a happy combination of a Baroque court, a Romanesque hall, and a Gothic chapel.

The original Germanic Museum was an abandoned gymnasium, an octagonal building which stood where the fire house is now. It was started largely through the enthusiasm of Kuno Francke, professor of German and the Museum's first curator, as a place for exhibits of specimens of Germanic art "from the first contact of Germanic tribes with the civilization of the Roman empire to the present day." Carl Schurz spoke at the opening in 1903, and Kaiser Wilhelm donated a considerable part of the original collection.

By 1914, Francke had gotten together enough money for the present building, most of it given by Adolphus Busch, of brewery fame. The work was completed just about the time the U. S. entered the war, but anti-German feeling was so strong that the building did not open until 1921. Rumors circulated in Cambridge that the Museum was a German spy center; other reports asserted that the building's concrete foundations had been especially designed as an enemy gun emplacement.

In the second world war, the Museum fared a bit better. As someone said, "the Germanic Museum was the first bit of University territory to be occupied by the United States Army and the last to be evacuated." It served first as a school for army chaplains, and later as a training base for Military Government officials, perhaps to prepare them for a Teutonic atmosphere.

The territory finally came back to the University in 1946, and the customary bustle of academic activity began again. The only parts of Museum tradition that have not been revived since the war are the Harvard Dramatic Club's Christmas passion play, and the goldfish in the courtyard pond. But the building's remaining activities and inhabitants are as diverse as its styles of architecture. Classes in German, Swedish, and Norwegian share the rambling classrooms under the eaves on the third floor with the microphones and wire recorders of Professor Packard's speech department. The second floor is inhabited by an organ, one of the few in the country whose sound approaches that of the type used by Bach. The organ got there rather fortuitously its designer, in casting about for a place with the proper acoustics, happened upon the Museum, and found that its acoustics were perfect, although the building had not been constructed with music in mind. So the organ was deposited there on permanent loan, and performances on it by E. Power Biggs, a noted Boston organist, are broadcast over CBS every Sunday morning.

Down on the ground floor, there are exhibits from the Museum's collection of German medieval and renaissance painting and sculpture. In the last two years, the Museum has developed a flair for the modern, supplementing its Gothic saints and saviours with shocking heresies like the recent exhibit from the Bauhans, which includes abstractionist chess sets and stained glass made of beer bottle bottoms. Visitors are a little surprised by the new trend, but on the whole they seem to like it. The only ones who are disappointed are the two or three a day who wander in and ask to see the glass flowers.