Collection of the Pomeranian State Museum

The University of Greifswald and the Senate of the Hanseatic City of Greifswald took up the vision of bringing a state museum to the Bay of Greifswald with élan and collaborated to create the conditions necessary for its realization.

The city provided real estate and municipal collections, while the university contributed its most valuable art treasures. The federal government and the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania also came on board, providing strong support for the project.
 
But it quickly became obvious to those involved that, given Pomerania's eventful history, a "Pomeranian State Museum" could only operate in close cooperation with Polish and Scandinavian institutions. For this reason, a scientific advisory board including representatives from , Sweden and Denmark was appointed for consultation around the content of the future state museum. In addition to presenting the history of Pomerania and its culture, the new museum will also serve as a meeting place – a forum in the Baltic Sea region – for cross-border projects, especially for youth work.

The first section to open was the painting gallery in 2000. On June 4, 2005, the entire facility, consisting of 6 indoor spaces and 4 outdoor facilities, was then opened to the public. At that time, the first section of the permanent exhibition on regional history was opened, including an exhibition on the history of the earth, from prehistory and early history to the Renaissance. The second section, from the Thirty Years' War to the eve of the First World War, followed on June 9, 2010. The permanent exhibition on regional history was finally completed with the opening of the exhibition section on 20th-century Pomerania on April 1, 2021.  

The most important collections of the Pomeranian State Museum are the Szczecin collection of paintings and graphics (Pomerania Kiel Foundation) and the holdings of the Greifswald City Museum, supplemented by loans from various partners.

After the train journey, which took several days, Eggebrecht arrived in Coburg with his treasures, completely exhausted. Shortly afterwards, the school where the paintings had been temporarily housed, was bombed, endangering the paintings. 

Eggebrecht reports: "Fueled by worry and fear, I rushed the short distance to the scene of the disaster: a great hole had been torn through the wall just behind which my paintings were lined up ... My first glance into the classroom revealed mountains of mortar and lime – the pictures were covered with it ..." 

The Szczecin museum property was moved by the American military administration to Tambach Castle near Coburg for security reasons. After the end of the war, the pictures made their way to Munich via a "collection point" in Wiesbaden  In 1956, the city of Coburg took over the care of the gradually reunited paintings, which were presented in the rooms of the art collections of the Veste Coburg from 1962.

In 1966, the Schleswig-Holstein state parliament passed a law establishing the Pomerania Foundation (Schleswig-Holstein had been Pomerania's sponsor state since 1954), whose task was to preserve Pomeranian cultural assets. Since the 1970s, the foundation has built up a collection on Pomeranian art and cultural history. In this context, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation entrusted it with the care of the Szczecin art collection in 1969. This decision triggered protests in Coburg, some of them fierce, followed by lengthy negotiations.

At the end of 1970, the paintings and the graphic collection were relocated to Kiel. Six months later, the picture gallery was opened in the Rantzau Building at Kiel Castle.  

The president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, Hans Georg Wormit, said at the opening on June 6, 1971: "Believe me –  deciding on the location of such an ensemble is one of the most difficult decisions that responsible people ... ever faced. Who wants the job of foreseeing the future development of such a stock? ... So we should wish this collection in particular, which has long been homeless ... a beautiful future – a future that lies not only in preservation, but in further development."

Nobody at that time could foresee that the collection was to change its location once again. 
 
With the support of the Federal Republic, the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the Hanseatic City of Greifswald, the Ernst Moritz Arndt University, the Pomeranian Foundation and the Pommersche Landsmannschaft - Zentralverband e.V., the Pomeranian State Museum was established, the first part of which was the opening of the painting gallery in the Quistorp building.

In December 1999, the paintings were transferred from Kiel to Greifswald and united with holdings of the Museum of the Hanseatic City of Greifswald and the University. Thus, the paintings returned to Pomerania and, for the second time in their odyssey, to Greifswald, which they had already passed once during the daring rail journey from Szczecin to Coburg.

Since the turn of the century, circles at the University of Greifswald and the Verein zur Beförderung von Kunst und Technik (Association for the Promotion of Art and Technology), which had been founded in connection with Stralsund, had been considering the idea of founding a museum. On November 19, 1910, at a meeting of the board of directors of the Greifswald Art Association, senior lecturer Adolf Kreutzfeldt again proposed the foundation of a museum. One year later, the Kunstverein, under the direction of Professor Max Semrau, proved with an exhibition entitled "Alt-Greifswald" (Old Greifswald) that numerous cultural assets suitable for a museum could be found within the city limits. In October 1918, during renovation work in the town hall, three maps dating from the 17th and 18th centuries were found, among them the Lubin map of Pomerania commissioned by Duke Philipp II in 1617. They formed the basis of the future museum and led to the creation of a town file. In 1922, the chairmen of the Society for Art and Literature, which had emerged from the Art Society, Professor Wiegand and Adolf Kreutzfeldt, organized the exhibition "Kunstwerke aus Greifswalder Privatbesitz" (Works of Art from Private Ownership in Greifswald), which once again drew attention to the lack of a museum.

In 1934, the city succeeded in establishing a collection of international importance with the purchase of the painting "Ruin Eldena in the Giant Mountains" by Caspar David Friedrich. It was expanded in 1951 with the purchase of the watercolor "Der Greifswalder Marktplatz" and through the acquisitions of the directors Sigrid Hinz (1955-1956) and Ursula Meyer (1959-1969), despite modest means, to the present day. The collection of paintings (including works by Wilhelm Titel, Johann Friedrich Boeck and Christian Johann Gottlieb Giese), which extended to Friedrich's contemporaries, was presented as a permanent exhibition in 1961 under the title "Greifswald Painters of the 18th and Early 19th Centuries". In addition to works by Caspar David Friedrich and artists of his time, contemporary art was also presented. Among the highlights were undoubtedly exhibitions of Max Pechstein (February 1932) and Emil Nolde (November 1932). From the 1960s onwards, exhibitions of works by Otto Niemeyer-Holstein and Herbert Wegehaupt, as well as other artists from the region, were among those from which works entered the collection. In 1937, as part of the "Degenerate Art" campaign, the two watercolors "Pomeranian Coast with Pines" by Max Pechstein and "Revival of Jairus's Daughter" by the Anklam painter Karl August Lattner were confiscated. Kreutzfeldt tried to continue exhibition activities during this difficult time by concentrating on handicrafts (1936 "Home Folk Art on the Baltic Sea") and Pomeranian landscape painting.

As early as September 1941, parts of the coin and graphic collection as well as works by C.D. Friedrich were moved to the Greifswald Savings Bank, where they were protected from splinters and fire. In August and September 1942, in view of the destruction of Lübeck, further removals followed to Quitzin Castle west of Grimmen and in January/February 1943 to Schmoldow Manor south of Greifswald. Large parts of the collection were irretrievably lost as a result. In the winter of 1944/45, the museum was closed and partly confiscated for school purposes.

Favored by the surrender of the city without a fight, the museum could be reopened after the end of the war already on October 7, 1945, on the occasion of the founding of the Cultural League for the Democratic Renewal of Germany, with the exhibition "German Artists Suppressed by Fascism". In 1974, extensive reconstruction work was begun. In 1981, the main building could once again be used as a museum.

Since 1991, the range of exhibitions has been significantly expanded through new partners such as the Pomeranian Foundation in Kiel, the Ostdeutsche Galerie Regensburg, the Institut Nordostdeutsches Kulturwerk in Lüneburg and the Kulturamt, the Kulturgeschichtliches Museum and the Galerie Neunte Kunst in Osnabrück, as well as through contacts with the Swedish and Polish neighbors. Among the numerous exhibitions that could be shown with the help of the Pomerania Foundation, special mention should be made of the presentation "Old Graphic Art from the Museum of the City of Szczecin 1440-1940" (1998). This first "reunion" of the collection, which had been torn apart since the end of the war in 1945, gave a foretaste of the expected dimensions of future exhibitions of the Landesmuseum with graphic sheets from Albrecht Dürer to Rembrandt to Runge. With the retrospective "70 Years of the Greifswald Museum", the Museum of the Hanseatic City of Greifswald said goodbye to its exhibition activities in order to merge with its collection into the Pomeranian State Museum from the year 2000 and to enrich it for a future audience.