Permanent Exhibition
On some 40 hectares’ grounds, 60 historic buildings from the 16th to the 20th century from Schleswig-Holstein as well as the Danish border region are presented by the Open-Air Museum Molfsee. It presents and documents the daily life and cultural history of rural Schleswig-Holstein as an ethnographic museum.
The farmhouses, cottages, barns and workshops from the village handcrafts are equipped with furnishings, household effects and work tools. It also incorporates three windmills and a water mill, a historic pharmacy, a steam engine powered dairy farm, two paupers’ houses and the gatehouse from an aristocratic estate. Rurally cultivated free areas and animal husbandry round-off the exhibition in the open-air museum.
60 historic buildings from the 16th to the 20th century
The historic buildings which were broken down at their original location and reconstructed on the open-air grounds have been grouped as units according to their origins. Thus, ensembles of buildings from North Friesland and Eiderstedt, Dithmarschen and the Elbe Marshes, Angeln and Stapelholm, Holstein and the Probstei, Fehmarn and Lauenburg reference regionally different architectural, cultural living, farming and rural crafts characteristics.
These partially marked cultural historical differences are special to Schleswig-Holstein. They are the result of the special location of our state between Central Europe and Scandinavia on the one hand and between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea on the other hand. Therefore, you can discover diverse influences from various neighbouring European regions at the open-air museum.
Permanent exhibitions for special themes are displayed in some of the buildings. Thus, for example, one of the houses from the Hallig Langeness treats the topic of exceptional “Living at the waterside”. The integration of refugees during the period after World War 2 is thematised in a pauper’s cottage.
