Alsace Museum

Brief Information

The Alsatian Museum is arranged not as a display case of rare objects, but as an attempt to assemble the everyday life of Alsace in the 18th and 19th centuries from objects, rooms, and domestic interiors. It occupies several buildings on Quai Saint-Nicolas along the Ill River, so the very form of the museum already matters: it is not a single hall, but a sequence of spaces where daily life is shown through different types of objects and rooms.

The main value here lies in the scale of the ordinary. Clothing, furniture, kitchen utensils, children’s toys, and works by folk craftsmen function together with reconstructions of residential and farm buildings: through them it is easier to understand what the non-ceremonial, everyday side of the region looked like. A separate turn is provided by the collection of objects from the everyday life of Alsatian Jews: it shows that local domestic culture was not one unified picture, but several neighboring ways of life.

What to Notice First

It makes sense to compare three levels of the exhibition. The first is the buildings themselves on the embankment along the Ill: the museum occupies not an isolated box, but several houses, and this supports the feeling of an assembled living space. The second is the reconstructions of the interiors of residential and farm buildings. They are important not for the number of details, but for the connection between objects and the purpose of the room or work: here, an object is explained by the place where it was used.

The third level consists of individual everyday objects: clothing, furniture, kitchen utensils, children’s toys, and works by folk craftsmen. They can be seen as clues to age, labor, food, and domestic habits. Against this background, the objects from the everyday life of Alsatian Jews change the view of the whole museum: the same theme of daily life is revealed through different communities, rather than through an averaged image of a “traditional region.”