Q&A: Johannes-Geert Hagmann, Deutsches Museum curator

In June Johannes-Geert Hagmann showed me around the Deutsches Museum, the renowned science and technology institution located on an island in the Isar River in Munich. Hagmann heads the curatorial department for technology. In addition to the galleries, he guided me through a labyrinth of hallways, offices, and workshops.

In one workshop, the artisan Thomas Rebényi showed us antique clocks in various stages of restoration. His goal: to restore the clocks to the best condition their original parts allowed without replacing any pieces. Rebényi was also working on an Enigma, the German encryption machine used by the Nazis during World War II, and on metal typesetting letters from Korea dating to 1795; both are being prepared for an upcoming exhibition on images, scripts, and codes. The artisan also demonstrated a recently restored automaton—a metal trumpet player made in Dresden in 1810 by Friedrich Kaufmann—and the impressively realistic sounds it produces.

In a separate set of workrooms, model makers demonstrated a prosthetic hand with a single movable finger that they had created from drawings more than 100 years old. They showed us the dioramas they were working on for the new optics gallery that Hagmann is overseeing. The gallery is part of a complete museum overhaul. Motivated by requirements to upgrade to current-day safety standards, the museum is taking the opportunity to modernize its exhibits as well (see Physics Today, August 2019, page 27 ).

Hagmann joined the museum in 2009 as curator for physics, geophysics, and geodesy. He assumed his current post in 2016. Before moving into the museum world, he studied physics in Germany, France, and Japan. He earned his PhD in Lyon, France, for statistical simulations on the dynamics of coarse-grained protein models. As he progressed in his education, he says, he chafed at the increasing narrowness of his experience. “The community I was talking to became smaller and more specialized,” he says. “I realized during my PhD that I would not continue in academic research.”

PT: When did you first visit the Deutsches Museum?

HAGMANN: As a young child, probably when I was about 11 years old. I still remember some of the exhibits I saw. One was the Foucault pendulum. It was explained to me that rotation of the pendulum proved that Earth is rotating. I didn’t understand this, but the notion intrigued me. Another was the Faraday cage. Seeing the person inside the cage, and wondering why nothing happened to him during the electric discharge, impressed me very much.

PT: How did you become a curator?

HAGMANN: I decided not to go for a postdoc after graduating with my PhD, and I looked for alternatives. One that sounded interesting was finance. But that was in 2008, and with the global financial crash, I realized it was not the right time to switch to that area. I had a real interest in teaching, too.

It was pure luck that a position was available at the museum when I was searching for a job. I had an idea about what a scientist might do in a museum. But it turned out that what I thought was going to be my job was only the tip of the iceberg. The job is much wider than what I expected.

PT: Which responsibilities surprised you?

HAGMANN: I thought that I would take care of collections in physics and maybe plan new exhibitions. But I had no idea about the degree of public visibility the museum takes in its activities beyond exhibitions. We host conferences, workshops, and public lectures. There is a tremendous amount of public activity, which gives us the privilege to meet interesting people who come to the museum. The museum is a meeting place for many stakeholders within society.

PT: How do you use your physics background and knowledge in your work?

HAGMANN: Having a physics background is a good tool for analyzing historical work, conceptualizing new exhibits, and making choices about what to present. It’s helpful to know how the field has evolved in the past and what’s happening now.

PT: Have you always been interested in history?

HAGMANN: Yes, though not in a professional sense. I was interested in historical texts; as a student I collected early physics works from the 19th and 20th centuries. That’s harder now, because specialized antiquarian internet platforms have been developed and prices can be globally compared. You can’t find good deals anymore.

PT: What do you do as head technology curator?

HAGMANN: I am responsible for one of the four curatorial departments we have on Museum Island. [The Deutsches Museum has several specialized branches at other locations.] My area comprises the departments for power machines, telecommunications, high electrical power, photography and film, textile technology, and more. I am the group leader for several curators who take care of the specialized collections within the technology purview. I still oversee part of the physics exhibitions and collections—optics and the collection of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. For these areas I am planning the new galleries as part of the overall renovation of the museum.

PT: What do you look for when you hire people?

HAGMANN: I feel very grateful that I got the chance to work here without having any prior personal contacts at the museum. I was given a chance, and I take the same attitude today. I believe that we need to be open about hiring new people and adding expertise that comes from outside the museum.

Because of the renovations, we have increased the staff quite significantly over the past few years. Overall the numbers have risen from about 400 to 600. In my department I started with fewer than 20 in 2016, and we are now about 40. For some projects we look for knowledge in a certain field of technology or physics; for others we look for experience working on exhibitions.

PT: How do you spend your time at work?

HAGMANN: A typical day is a mix of work on ongoing projects, such as work on galleries, writing texts, contacting academic partners, and meetings—both in-house and with external visitors. On galleries, it depends very much on the stage of the work. At the start, a lot goes into conceptualizing a new exhibit, researching themes, figuring out the target group and how to design for that group. At a more advanced stage, a lot of time goes into writing—including both the analog and digital text labels—and the production of exhibition content and materials, such as catalogs that we produce to complement our exhibitions.

PT: What challenges do you face as a museum curator?

HAGMANN: One necessity is constant adaptation to change. With the renovations, for example, we have delays in construction. And in everyday work, we have competing priorities. Some are long term, like preservation and extension of collections. Others are short-term requests that we cope with on a daily basis, like dealing with the smoke and fumes damage from a fire last October in one of our storage units. It’s a challenge, and it’s also exciting that each day is different.

PT: I’ve heard that 95% of the museum’s collection were gifts. Can you give an example?

HAGMANN: Sometimes people approach us to say they have something that belonged to their father or their family, and they believe it would be best in the museum.

One recent example is a Barkhausen–Kurz oscillation tube. During World War I, two German physicists, Heinrich Barkhausen and Karl Kurz, discovered rapid oscillations in a tube while doing war-related research. One of Barkhausen’s PhD students in Dresden was a Japanese naval engineer by the name of Yoji Ito. He later returned to Dresden during World War II to do research on radar technology. His former PhD adviser gave him a gift: a tube with which he had discovered the Barkhausen–Kurz oscillations many years before. That tube returned to Japan via northern Africa and South America and was preserved by Ito’s sons. A couple of years ago they approached us and said they would like to give the tube to the museum. We had a public ceremony at which the family presented the object to the museum, and it will be on display when we renew the telecommunications gallery.

This is one of many examples, and it exemplifies the transfer of knowledge across continents and time. An object acquires a biography. That particular object traveled around the world in 100 years.

PT: The museum recently opened a new, temporary exhibition on coffee. How did that come about?

HAGMANN: It was a bottom-up idea that made it from a lunchtime discussion in 2013 to a full-fledged exhibition. From a physics point of view, the coffee exhibition looks at the technology of the roasting process. There is a lot of chemistry and biology going into the botanics of coffee. For every exhibition we have an advisory board, and in this case one of the advisers brought up climate models at an early stage. We picked that up, and in the exhibition we explore the effects of climate change on coffee agriculture. Everyone found the subject of coffee interesting.

PT: How long will the coffee exhibition run?

HAGMANN: It will run for at least a year. We designed it such that it can travel. It’s flexible to adapt to different geometries and spaces.

PT: Where do you see yourself in 10 or 20 years?

HAGMANN: It’s hard to make predictions. But for the coming years, I am very happy to continue working on the museum renovations. For a curator, it is beyond a once-in-a-lifetime chance. In physics, for example, parts of the exhibition have not been renewed since 1960. So two or more generations of curators didn’t have the chance that we now have to transform and renew the exhibitions. It’s a unique opportunity to be able to design and reinterpret the galleries for the next generation of visitors.