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Präsentieren und Erklären 1910 – 2010 · Presenting and Explaining 1910 – 2010
‘First Instruct, then Delight’: Visit to Dahlem, 1910 – 1950
Despite what seemed to be such an ideal creation for the general
public, and the popular-seeming notion of a world tour through
a garden, the management of the Botanic Garden and Botanical
Museum in Dahlem initially treated the public with astonishing
inflexibility as far as opening times and guided tours for lay people
were concerned. Only on four afternoons could the garden be
visited free of charge, and up until 1943 the museum was in fact
only accessible on Wednesdays and Sundays.
In this garden informed by science, in which research and
teaching played such an important role, the systematic section remained
closed to the public until 1926. Visitors were not supposed
to seek recreation here, as in a public park, but rather be open to
‘instruction’ and to the serious observation of plant life. They were
aided in this by the readily comprehensible guidebooks to the garden
and the greenhouses written by Adolf Engler. Only from 1925
was the garden open every day, and popular guided tours were
offered. However, an entrance fee was now levied. Nevertheless Berliners
loved the new garden from the start. They gladly wandered
on Sunday afternoons through the artfully created Alpine regions,
reached the Himalayas ‘without a passport’ and could dream of
then inaccessible worlds. The plants’ scientific names and, where
available, also their German names, were indicated on porcelain
signs, and in the physic garden detailed labels shed light on the
plants’ active components. The tropical economic plants met with
great public interest thanks to current debates about the German
colonies, and the flowering of Victoria amazonica was a further
attraction, drawing visitors in droves.
Wartime brought with it a change in the Botanic Garden’s relationship
to its visitors. The instruction of visitors once promoted by
Engler now consisted in guided tours to the useful and medicinal
plants and in courses on the multiple applications of plants to
the pressing needs of everyday life. Advice about mushrooms had
become vital, and from 1946 to 1949, even maize, potatoes and
vegetables were grown in the grounds of the Botanic Garden as
foodstuffs for the population of Berlin. MH
BGBM, Bibliothek.
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