(In)Visible Places

Siegfried Hirschmann was the founder of Deutsche Kabelwerke, the inventor of the ‘Cyklonette’ – one of the first motorised tricycles – and the creator of the DEKA tyre brand. As a Jewish entrepreneur, he played a decisive role in shaping German industrial history in the early 20th century. And yet: no Wikipedia entry, hardly any public memory of him.

State-of-the-art technology brings historical engineering to life

Using the very latest technical means, the exhibition brings an almost forgotten industrial empire back to life: with the help of holograms, models, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), it offers an immersive insight into Hirschmann’s life and work.

The project was developed by the Kulturerben e. V. association in cooperation with the Fürstenwalde Museum and implemented by young people from schools in Berlin and Brandenburg. Working alongside a team of artists and experts in VR and AR, a project group of young people was shown how to use digital technologies to bring history to life and make it accessible.

• Admission to the exhibition is free.

Curatorial team

Pupils from the Ulrich-von-Hutten-Gymnasium in Berlin, the Catholic School Centre in Fürstenwalde and the Europaschule OSZ Oder-Spree, in collaboration with the artists Johann Winkelmann and Aron Rauschhardt, as well as the AR/VR team of experts from the company i-mmersive.

Why at the Dahlem Research Campus?

The exhibition ‘(In)visible Places. Siegfried Hirschmann – a forgotten industrial pioneer’ is more than a commemoration – it marks a starting point for a critical examination of suppressed biographies at the Dahlem research hub. In a place where eminent researchers such as Lise Meitner and Fritz Haber once worked, the focus is deliberately on figures whose contributions have vanished from the collective memory due to political marginalisation, anti-Semitism or discrimination.

The exhibition links forgotten biographies with the stories of research subjects, thereby revealing the mechanisms of suppression. It invites visitors to question their own culture of remembrance and to open up new narrative approaches to science and history.

The participatory project on Siegfried Hirschmann exemplifies how, through commitment and digital technologies, a biography that had almost been erased can be restored to the collective memory.

The project was supported by the Museum Fürstenwalde and the State Museums of Berlin – Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. It was funded by the Ministry of Science, Research and Culture, the Brandenburg State Agency for Political Education, the EWE Foundation, the Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the Großes Waisenhaus zu Potsdam Foundation, Bauwert AG and Ethikbank.

• A special exhibition by the Dahlem Research Campus of the State Museums of Berlin