The Workers' Museum in Copenhagen was formally inaugurated on April 12, 1982, at a meeting held at the historic Workers' Assembly Hall at Rømersgade in Copenhagen, the prime location near the Royal Gardens and Rosenborg Palace where the museum is located. At that time the museum had a governing board with representatives of The National Museum, The Museum of Copenhagen, The Library and Archives of the Danish Labour Movement, The University of Copenhagen, the National College of the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions (LO), the Friends of the Workers' Museum, and the General Council of the Federation of Trade Unions.
The initiative for setting up the museum was taken by residents of the Nørrebro workers' residential district in Copenhagen, teachers at the Trade Unions' Training Colleges and staff members at the National Museum and the Museum of Copenhagen City. Since 1980, they had been active in setting up a museum of workers' housing and everyday life.
The National Agency for the Protection of Monuments and Sites soon showed an interest in discussing listing and protecting the ornate Workers' Assembly Hall, with its decorative murals, built in 1879. In the spring of 1983, it became an officially protected monument—the first workers' protected monument in Europe.
The next important goal was to gain official recognition for the museum in accordance with the provisions of the Museum Act. In 1983, the Official Museum Authority had already recommended that the museum be officially recognized. However, the liberal minister in charge of the Ministry of Culture for the Conservative-Liberal government, which had replaced the Social Democrats in 1982, did not endorse the recommendation. But, with the assistance of two prominent social-democratic politicians and a radical liberal, an alternative center-left parliamentary majority was mustered—something that happened fairly frequently in the days of this liberal-conservative government—and the museum was included in the Finance Act for 1984 despite the wishes of the minister of culture. The Workers' Museum was now a reality, with a parliamentary majority behind it and its buildings officially protected.
During the years that followed, the fledgling Workers' Museum became well known, and since the late eighties the annual number of visitors has been more than 100,000. How did we achieve this success? We created exhibitions that touched people, spoke to their memories, and led them to identify with the museum.
This recreation of a typical living room is part of the Museum's first (and continuing) exhibition, “The 1950s—An Exhibition on Life in a Working-Class Family.” Courtesy of Workers' Museum of Denmark.
Exhibitions
The Workers' Museum is now known all over the country for its permanent exhibit, and, especially during the summer months, visitors come from all over Denmark to see them. By contrast, our special exhibitions are primarily visited by a Copenhagen public that is already familiar with our permanent exhibits. Mounting these exhibits was not easy, especially at first, and it was a learning experience.
When we began in 1982 we did not have so much as a pin in our collections. There were no collections! That is why in early 1983 we decided to mark the opening of the museum by having an exhibition on daily life in the 1950s. Since we had no collection, we had to locate and acquire everything. There was a good reason for us to have selected the 1950s: Many people had kept things from this decade, things that were suitable for exhibition and things we could actually get hold of. In early 1983, the museum began an intensive campaign. Initially we launched an appeal through the newspapers that were accommodatingly willing to write about the new Workers' Museum's desire to document the 1950s. But all we gained from that campaign was publicity! It was only when we wrote a detailed description of the types of objects we were looking for that collecting got under way. These detailed descriptions were transferred to lists and placed in the relevant trade-union bulletins. In the early 1980s, nearly thirty different trade-union bulletins were still in circulation, and it was fairly easy to target the grouping of objects we were looking for on the individual bulletins: that of the bricklayers, domestic servants, printers, metal workers, etc. This targeted collecting mode was very successful. In the course of a few months in the spring of 1983, the museum received about 12,000 objects—mainly dating back to the 1950s. The campaign yielded material for more than just one exhibition on everyday life in the 1950s and provided us with several years worth of cataloguing work. The exhibition “The 1950s—An Exhibition on Life in a Working-Class Family” opened on May Day 1984. The intention had been to keep it open for six months, until the autumn of 1984, but it was only in the autumn that the general public really took notice of it. For that reason we put off dismantling the exhibition; it is still open today, and over the past two decades it has been seen by almost three million visitors.
With the exhibition on the 1950s we established the display principle for which the Workers' Museum was to become known over the years. Our fundamental mode of communication is openness, closeness, straightforwardness, uncomplicated narrative structure, recognizability and richness of detail. Our public welcomed the intense mode of narration of interior workers' housing which made a great number of visitors identify with the museum as an institution. The advantage of this mode is that everybody gets it—school children, grandparents, or families going for an outing on a Sunday afternoon.
The success of the exhibition on the 1950s made us suspect that we, as a new museum, could probably get away with more than most museums. So when we decided to produce our next exhibition on the Depression of the 1930s, we set up an unconventional collection campaign. This time we decided to base the exhibition on the family home of “Red,” a railway worker who was a working-class character on an extremely popular Danish television series that covered life in Denmark from 1929 to 1950. The settings used for the series were left completely intact in the studios of the producing film company, and the Workers' Museum borrowed all of them and exhibited them in 1985. The message to the public was not that we were exhibiting Red's home as a story from the 1930s. Our message was a completely different one: The museum wanted to display how workers lived through the Depression of the 1930s but did not possess the material for such documentation. And that was what we wanted people to help us with. It proved more difficult to carry out targeted collection activities for the 1930s than had been the case for the 1950s, but eventually we succeeded, and in 1986 we opened the next permanent exhibition: “Hard Times: A Working-Class Home in the 1930s.” The campaign was heavily questioned by museum professionals—but very successful with the rest of the population.
The production of our first permanent exhibitions was quite hectic, but also quite satisfying. The crucial factor was that the public supported our activities by visiting the museum on a regular basis. The interiors, the homes, everyday life, the intelligible story—the feeling of being in the middle of real life—were a great success. There is no doubt that this was why Yrsa Sørensen's family contacted us in 1990. The family offered us a complete working-class home, with the exception of the few things that 90-year-old Yrsa wanted to take with her into the nursing home to which she was moving. This apartment had been set up in 1915 when 15-year-old Yrsa and her parents moved in. Apart from a few additions, such as some new chairs, nothing had been changed over Yrsa's lifetime. The apartment was located in a Copenhagen building that had been condemned. We made it a condition that we were to have the entire interior (i.e., walls, ceilings, floorboards, etc.) so that the story of the family's life that we had already decided to exhibit would be as complete as possible. The exhibition was opened as a permanent one in 1994. Until then, our permanent exhibitions had been fictitious, but very realistic. But this time no fiction was involved; it was the story of the life of a real family in their home.
In its pioneering phase, an organization can count on incredible amounts of energy, and this certainly applied to the Workers' Museum. Concurrent with the targeted build-up of permanent exhibitions, we also mounted frequent special exhibitions. From 1986 to 1988, the museum's political commitment was reflected in a series of special exhibitions based on the concept of solidarity. We displayed peasants' paintings from Nicaragua in 1986, picture tapestries from Botswana in 1987, and Shona and Makonde sculptures from Mozambique and Zimbabwe in 1988.
In the meantime, news of the excellent interior exhibitions at the Workers' Museum had traveled to Greenland (a Danish possession). In 1987, the Greenland trade union movement asked us to produce a traveling exhibition for them. It was called, “Your History—That's how we lived in 1956.” The exhibition was arranged during the course of a week-long stay at the Qaqortoq Højskoliat. The actual layout was remote-controlled from Copenhagen over the following year. If the success of an exhibition can be judged by the percentage of a country's population that has seen it, it would be fair to say that this was the most successful one that the museum has ever produced. During the years that followed, the exhibition moved from hamlet to hamlet around the country and was seen by virtually every single Greenlander.
Following the collapse of Communism around 1990, we mounted special exhibitions to tell people about the German Democratic Republic and the Soviet Union as well as to narrate the history of Danish Communists. One such exhibition was that of the art collection of Land og Folk, the Communist daily. A part of this collection was later donated to the museum. At the same time, the photo archives of the paper, which contained the propaganda and information delivered by the Soviet TASS press agency, were given to the Labour Movement's Library and Archives that today is a part of the museum.
Good special exhibitions strongly contribute to sustaining the number of visitors to a museum. Where they embrace new media, special exhibitions can also enlarge a museum's public. In 1994, we had the opportunity to reach a new audience, the photo buffs. As early as 1984, the museum had gained some attention by showing a photo exhibition by Lewis Hine, the American who had documented working life in the United States during the time before the First World War. And ten years later we had the chance to show yet another interesting photo exhibition, Sebastião Salgado's “Workers.” Salgado, the celebrated Brazilian photographer, had travelled all over the world and photographed workers and work situations with a truly rare intensity.
The use of art to convey workers' lives to broader publics was another of our innovations. From the late 1980s, the Workers' Museum had had a close relationship with the Workers' Art Association. Over the years, the museum has exhibited many of the works owned by the association and we have taken part in disseminating art to many workplaces. Around the turn of the millennium it became increasingly clear that the conditions under which the activities of the Workers' Art Association had been meaningful were in the process of disappearing. Around the same time, the idea was aired that the Workers' Museum might take over the association's collection. It consisted of approximately six hundred oil paintings, mostly from the postwar years, and in the main only Danish artists were represented. There were also approximately three thousand prints by Danish and other Nordic artists. In 2002 an agreement was reached with the Workers' Art Association to take over the collection. That meant that the official recognized status of the museum changed to that of a cultural historical museum and an art museum. Ever since, temporary art exhibitions have been an important vehicle for our outreach program. The graphics of the world-famous (especially in the former Communist countries) cartoonist Herluf Bidstrup were on display in 2004. With the art exhibition “Images of Industry,” shown in 2007, the museum launched an extensive research effort into an area that art museums in Denmark had never covered before. The exhibition catalogue is one of the most successful in our long list of museum publications.
Over the years the profile of our special exhibitions has also changed and their scholarly basis has been strengthened. Our cultural history exhibitions are now based on extensive scholarly research. This is true, for instance, of the documentation concerning an estate of one-family row houses in a Copenhagen suburb, and with the collection and documentation related to the mail-order and department store Daells in Copenhagen, as well as an exhibition on the decline of the northwest workers' district called Copenhagen NV. As regards the art history profile, things have changed even more radically: from a few tentative small shows in the early days of the museum to the multiple art shows based on our extensive collection and scholarly documentation. Since 2004 these shows have taken place in our new underground extension, with its state-of-the-art facilities designed specifically to house such special exhibitions.
Building Public Support
Ever since the opening of the exhibition on the 1950s, the Workers' Museum has had a strong appeal for schools. It is very much in keeping with the ideals of the museum that school children should be given an opportunity to study the history of workers and of the labor movement. Over the years, the museum has been so popular with schools that as early as 1985 it became necessary to create a special booking system for school visits—to accomodate around twenty thousand pupils a year.
From the very beginning, the museum has followed an exhibition policy which placed our visitors at the center. Without an extensive and interested public there is not much point in a museum displaying workers' history. Consequently, we began systematic advertising in the press, while at the same time attaching a great deal of importance to thorough targeted publicity. Visitors' surveys have provided us with interesting data. One piece of information we are proud of is that the percentage of visitors who came to see us from all parts of Denmark is higher than that of the National Museum. Another is that women and their families are our largest audience.
Constructing our Collection
Building up the museum's collections has been a gradual process and a learning process. In the museum world, the Workers' Museum was perceived as quite innovative in focusing on everyday life. Lots of people all over the country were made aware of the things we wanted for the museum, and during 1983 and 1984 our collection grew very large. By pursuing this collection campaign concurrently with the exhibition on everyday life, the museum made it possible for the people who used the museum and who donated objects to the museum to identify with our way of communicating and presenting things. A very large number of individuals appreciate the way the museum narrates down-to-earth history, personalized history, the little history embedded in the big history. As a consequence, many people have spontaneously donated objects to the museum relating to their own lives. In a collection campaign on workers' experiences and everyday life, it is, of course, of tremendous benefit to the museum and its overall profile that so many people have been able to identify with the way of narrating history promoted by the museum. However, not every item is a personal donation. In 1986, the small hall at the nearby Royal Rosenborg Palace that housed King Frederik IV's glass collection—which originally came from Murano near Venice, and which he had collected during a European jaunt in the late 18th century—was restored. Behind the glass panels, conservators found three packed lunches. They were wrapped in newspaper, and as luck would have it, one of the newspapers had the date printed on it. It was the Social-Demokraten for April 24, 1886. At that time the paper had its offices at 22, Rømersgade, which is where the museum is situated today. The Rosenborg director asked the Workers' Museum if we would like to have the packed lunches. For a museum dedicated to telling the story of everyday life it is, of course, a scoop to get hold of an original packed lunch from 1886 consisting of two rounds of black bread wrapped in the country's first social-democratic newspaper, so we readily agreed. It remains one of our most prized possessions.
By 1987, the number of items in our collections had passed the 25,000 mark, and by 2008, it had reached 52,000 objects. These include photographs, paintings and prints, as well as everyday objects from the daily lives of workers. In the years to come, these collections will have to be reviewed in order to sift out mistakes as well as the high number of duplicates.
Cultivating the Media
From its opening in 1983 the museum has made diligent use of the media to inform the public of its activities—both the printed press and the electronic media. It did not take long for the museum to become known by the public, not just in the Copenhagen area, but all over the country and, indeed, outside Denmark. This was the result of a targeted publicity campaign. We organized our public relations activities in a highly systematic way, and this had the desired effect. Consequently, since the mid-1980s, the museum has enjoyed good media coverage, although the reasons for it have varied a great deal over the years. It was even possible to maintain media attention when the museum was closed in 2003 and 2004 for work on its subterranean extension. This high degree of media interest in the museum and its activities has, at times, led to crisis-like situations which, at the end of the day, have benefited the museum by making more people aware of its existence. This was the case in 2000 when the television channel Denmark 2 broadcast a series on the history of the labor movement that is now produced by the museum. The series achieved high viewer ratings because of right-wing political attempts to get it stopped by a court injunction, which only led to even greater press coverage of the series.
The previous year, the museum had caught the attention of the media when the right-wing Populist Party, “The Danish People's Party,” wanted to exploit the museum's aura of belonging to “the good old days”—the 1950s—for publicizing its new senior citizens policy. The party had rented the historic bar in our basement for its press conference, and this generated intense media interest. In a situation in which the museum was up against expert communicators, the only safe thing to do was to close down the communication flow completely and only release the things we could control. The day before the press conference, virtually all Danish media wanted an interview with the museum director and the head of the party about this event. They were all turned down except for the DR1 news program. However, this channel was only given three quotations with which to work and picked one for its broadcast, which was, of course, recorded in the exhibition on everyday life in the 1950s: “In the coffee bar accompanying the exhibition about everyday life in the 50s we sell around 20,000 cups of coffee with chicory—so why wouldn't we allow surrogate politics to be served up in our basement bar?” It did not do the party chairman much good that she declared that this was a public place and that they certainly had a right to be there. But there were no hard feelings. Ten years later, the same politician was part of the majority in Parliament that supported the extra appropriation needed for the restoration of the museums' buildings. The minister revealed that she liked to bring her daughter to the museum, underscoring that the identification with and support for the Danish Workers' Museum is not confined to workers or to the political Left.
Our second large-scale media controversy extended over several years and was far more difficult to handle because so many different interests affected the course of events. Placing a statue of Lenin—originally a Soviet gift to the Communist Sailors Union—in the museum yard in 1997 provoked a reaction from right-wing extremists who wanted it removed. This message came across in a series of letters to the editor and small articles in conservative national papers. A quarterly published by the rightist Ministry of Culture, Kulturkontakten (Cultural Contact) included an article about the statue with an extremely right-wing slant in its assessment of Lenin's political actions, and this made a politician from the Danish People's Party demand that the ministry order the museum to remove the statue. The minister did no such thing because the Danish Museum Act contains no provisions for such action. However, he said that he had a great deal of sympathy for the notion, a sentiment that certainly did not put a lid on the matter, which was kept simmering in the media by interventions pro and con. The whole thing went from bad to worse when, in an open letter to the press, a number of prominent Social-Democrats also demanded the removal of the statue. This coincided with the opening of the underground extension in August 2004 and made us discontinue our marketing activities for the newly reopened museum. The demands to remove the statue rested on the argument that the museum only existed to tell the history of democratic socialism and that no one could reasonably accuse Lenin of being a champion of democracy in the history of international labor. Our response throughout was very simple and easy to comprehend: Our visitors are able to think for themselves. The outcome was that the media gave the whole thing their full attention, so visitors came to the museum in fantastic numbers, and, as a result, the museum became a household name in every part of the country. The press published nearly six hundred articles on the museum, and television and radio were also keenly interested. Presumably the opposite effect had been intended, but the museum gained a great deal of sympathy by refusing to accept political interference in its exhibition policy—and by maintaining its integrity and fundamental principles of professionalism—although the quarrel did at times call for a good deal of sang froid.
Regional Cooperation Expands Our Possibilities
Throughout its existence, the labor movement has been internationalist in its outlook, although not all workers are internationalists. The same is true for workers' museums. The exhibition of working-class homes in Armuri in Tampere was a decisive source of inspiration for me in the early days of the Danish museum's history. Cooperation among Workers' Educational Associations in the Nordic countries and among the various workers' museums and museum initiatives in the Nordic region continued during the eighties and nineties. The Workers' Museum in Copenhagen was the first to open its doors to the public. Only in 1990 did the Norwegian Industrial Workers' Museum at Rjukan open, as well as the Museum of Work in Norrköping, Sweden. A few years later, the Finnish Workers' Museum Waapriki (factory) in Tampere, a former cotton mill, opened. The biggest result, so far, of cooperation among the Nordic museums was the art exhibition of Edvard Munch's paintings depicting work and workers in 1996.
In various European countries, initiatives were under way to show workers' history in museums. In the early 1980s, a comprehensive working-class culture exhibition was opened in Hamburg, and in the 1990s, the Museum of Work, Museum der Arbeit, opened. A similar event took place in Steyr in Austria. In the late 1980s a so-called Landesausstellung (Regional Exhibition) was shown in Steyr on working-class life, and subsequently the Museum Arbeitswelt (World of Work) was opened. In Britain, Manchester set up a workers' museum called the People's History Museum at about that time; in Barcelona, Spain, what had originally been a technical museum developed into a combination of technical and workers' history museum. It consists of a number of small museums in old industrial enterprises along the Llobregat river valley towards the Pyrenees, the industrial cradle of the Spanish manufacturing industry and a place where the protective tariffs introduced by Franco left a pocket of industrial history of quite an anachronistic nature.
In 1993 we gathered the best ideas associated with work that we had encountered all over Europe in the exhibition “Work in Europe.” The point of the exhibition was to inform the public of the many different traditions, perceptions, methods, and practices in the field of work and working life that were to be found in Europe. By way of examples we chose a Catalan cotton mill, British coal mining, Finnish timber work, and the German motor industry. The exhibition opened in Copenhagen, was shown in Norway, and finally in Moscow.
Around 1990 the workers' museums in all European countries were in their infancy, and sharing information and activities seemed only sensible. There really was no reason why we should all make the same mistakes. Furthermore, it was obvious that we could profitably pick each others' brains, provide inspiration, and get interesting exhibitions from each other. Therefore, it was only natural that in 1997 the Workers' Museum invited representatives of the European workers' museums to come to Copenhagen to set up the organization WORKLAB—The International Organisation of Labour Museums (www.worklab.dk).
From its early days, with seven founding members, the organization has grown to forty-five members all around the world. Over the years, WORKLAB has arranged a number of joint conferences and international projects. The most successful, “Migration, Work, and Identity” opened in 2001 and was an exhibition project on worker migration produced by seven museums in Sweden, Germany, Austria, Spain, Britain, and Denmark. The project was managed by the Workers' Museum and was financed under the European Commission's Culture 2000 program. This exhibition ended in 2005. In 2007, the Workers' Museum initiated another joint project financed by the European Union. “The Dream Factory—Industry and Modernism” is about the content and physical expression of work on both sides of the Iron Curtain as seen down through the Baltic Sea. This time, the Baltic countries—Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark—are partners. The exhibition, which was shown in Denmark in 2007, will tour until 2010. For the first time, moreover, our exhibition can be viewed online at www.arbejdermuseet.dk.
The Workers' Museum and the Archive and Library of the Labour Movement Today
In 2004, the history of the working class and the labor movement was brought under a single foundation when two institutions, the Workers' Museum and the Archive and Library of the Labour Movement, merged. In this merger, the museum was the newcomer, but in its relatively short life it had pushed its way into people's awareness as a result of its considerable popular appeal. The Archive and Library, on the other hand, represented the long haul. In this institution, documents from almost one hundred years of labor movement activities were kept. It also had one of the country's most distinguished photo collections and a specialized library on Danish and international labor and trade union history. Researchers, scholars, authors, and students come to the archive and library and work their way further and further into workers' history.
The many visitors to the Workers' Museum, on the other hand, experience workers' history through our exhibitions, but more than anything, they view their own lives from the perspective of history. Yet, no matter what their reasons for coming, they are welcomed by the red flags in the street, and they share the attractions of the Workers' Assembly Hall and restaurant. History emanates from the Assembly Hall, from the workers' bar, and from the entire historic building, which we have been restoring since the opening of the museum. Everything rests on the material foundation of the collections—objects, artifacts, works of art, documents, photos, and books—and on the way in which we narrate history to the public and make our resources available to scholars.
Today the Workers' Museum is well situated among Danish public attractions, with up to 120,000 visitors a year, with permanent exhibitions not only about workers' housing but also about work and labor politics, with temporary exhibitions about history and about art, and with other activities such as conferences and meetings in the former workers' meeting hall. It has a good reputation all over the country. What started as a controversial cultural initiative is now in a solid position in the Danish cultural picture—and also an international tourist attraction, as around 10 percent of the visitors are foreigners. Workers' history can be interesting and many people are very interested in it—if it is presented in ways that appeal to them. This is the secret of the success of the Workers' Museum of Copenhagen.
