Class and museum

Conference on November 17/18, 2025 at the HMF

with Alex Demirović, Francis Seeck, Dietmar Dath, Alexandra Hennig, Katharina Böttger, Ilija Matusko, Alexander Gallas, the Working Class Daughters and workshops on class and classism in museum work, among others.

Social class is one of the most influential but still underexposed categories of social inequality in the cultural sector. The conference focuses on the question of how class affiliation - understood as a social relationship and structural position - influences museums in their content, working methods and audiences. How do museums reproduce the existing class society? And what potential do they have to make this visible, to question it - or even to overcome class inequalities?
The conference offers theoretical approaches to class and classism as well as a critical reflection on cultural and museum practice. Lectures, discussions and workshops will examine the links between museums and class relations and jointly develop possible courses of action for class-conscious, anti-discriminatory museum work.

The conference is free of charge.

Unfortunately, all places are now fully booked. If you would like to be placed on a waiting list, please contact our visitor service, stating your name and institution. The visitor service will also be happy to answer any further questions you may have.
+49 69 212-35154

Organized by
Joachim Baur, TU Dortmund University
Dominik Hünniger, German Port Museum Hamburg
Doreen Mölders, Historical Museum Frankfurt

Workshops

The program of the conference as PDF.

Class - Structures & Personnel

Workshop leaders: Dominik Hünniger (Deutsches Hafenmuseum, Hamburg) & Patricia Rahemipour (Institute for Museum Research, Berlin)

Museums not only reproduce social inequality in their exhibitions or collections and their mediation work, but as places of work they are themselves part of social inequality. Different museum professions have very different entry requirements and are paid, valued and made visible differently. Similarly, people from different social backgrounds and professional biographies work in all kinds of museum professions. Rarely, however, is both the museum as a place of work characterized by class relations and the social background of museum people addressed. In the workshop, we will first look at class relations in museums and discuss how we create awareness of class issues within our museums. Finally, we want to talk about how alliances with initiatives and institutions outside the museum world can make our museums better places to work that are open to people of all backgrounds. We look forward to you sharing your experiences, creativity and knowledge with us.

Class - Mediate

Workshop leaders: Angela Jannelli & Susanne Gesser (both Historisches Museum Frankfurt)

How does classism work in museums? And what can be done from a mediation perspective to make museums (even) friendlier and more inviting places where "everyone" feels welcome and comfortable? Can a museum welcome "everyone" at all? In this workshop, we invite you to slip into different roles and embark on a fictitious visit to a museum. Where does our origin inspire or hinder us? What thresholds do we encounter? Which doors are open, ajar or closed? What role do friendly hosts who are waiting for us at the door play? And where do we encounter invisible bouncers who deny us access? What do we need in our role to feel safe and welcome? From the museum visit, we would like to derive concrete measures that we can take as museum people so that the obstacles that origin and class place in our path can be overcome, circumvented or dismantled.

Class - Collect

Workshop leaders: Nina Gorgus & Dorothee Linnemann (both Historisches Museum Frankfurt)
Speakers: Stefan Müller (Archive of Social Democracy) & Johanna Sänger (Leipzig City History Museum)

The Historisches Museum Frankfurt is typical of a museum of its time. It was founded as a universal museum; everything from paintings, ethnological and archaeological objects to arts and crafts was to be collected. Even though the focus changed over time, the focus was almost always on civic collections. In the 1980s, everyday culture was added as a new area. With the sociologically narrow concept of "class", the Historisches Museum Frankfurt has recently focused on topics ranging from workers' history to current criticism of banks (Blockupy and Occupy, for example). However, a theoretical penetration and practical guiding principle of collecting "class objects" specifically aimed at the question of social interests, affiliations and struggles has not yet taken place. The workshop therefore poses the question: Museum and class - what does that actually mean? What significance does this have for collecting practices? Why, how and why should we implement this today in particular? The input in this panel will take the form of a round table discussion. We will discuss from the perspective of the city museums: with the curator Johanna Sänger from the Stadtmuseum Leipzig with collection history and expertise from the GDR and FRG, and with Stefan Müller from archives specifically focused on class issues such as the Archive of the Social Movement. In order to emphasize the processual nature of the event and to allow for many different perspectives, we will enter into a world café after the input.

Class - Exhibit

Workshop leaders: Joachim Baur (TU Dortmund / Die Exponauten) & Doreen Mölders (Historisches Museum Frankfurt)

Speakers: Alexander Renz & Imke Volkers (Werkbundarchiv - Museum der Dinge, Berlin) and Anna-Lena Wenzel (freelance author and mediator, Berlin)

Class and classism are relevant in exhibitions in two ways: in the mediation of class structures and as the reproduction of class differences. Historically, the view of society as a class society has played a major role in exhibition practice. After decades of de-thematization, perspectives on class are currently coming to the fore again.

This is where the workshop comes in: With inputs from the exhibition projects "Klassenfragen - Kunst und ihre Produktionsbedingungen" (2022/23) and "Milieudinge - von Klasse und Geschmack" (2025/26), we will approach approaches to how exhibitions (can) represent class and classism. At the same time, we ask which class positions come together in the work on exhibitions and how they are negotiated here.

Participants are invited to bring ideas from their professional, institutional, activist and other contexts on how questions of class and classism can be addressed in the context of exhibitions. In addition to the inputs and their discussion, these ideas will be the focus of our exchange. Finally, we will ask what exhibitions would look like in a class-conscious society.

Contributors

Contributors
Enlarge

Joachim Baur
often stood in front of well-stocked bookshelves during his school days in a Stuttgart suburb, but only in the homes of his friends from lawyer, doctor or other academic households. There were few books in his family of craftsmen, but plenty of emotional support, a desire for education and the prosperity of the German economic miracle (Swabian coyly). Three sisters paved the way to grammar school and university. While studying history and political science, he ended up at the museum by chance, but never wanted to leave. After working in various German museums and studying Museum Studies in New York, he founded the exhibition office Die Exponauten in Berlin (since 2010). In addition to his dissertation on the musealization of migration, his parents now have various anthologies and exhibition catalogs on their shelves. As Professor of Empirical Cultural Studies at TU Dortmund University since 2022, he has been trying to teach students not only about material culture, museum theory and curatorial practice, but also about the fact that, as a student, it was completely unthinkable for him to write books or give lectures himself one day.
Enlarge

Katharina Böttger
Born and raised in Frankfurt am Main, she asked herself many questions about living together in the city from an early age. Topics relating to the (un)just city then became an important part of her studies (human geography in Frankfurt am Main and urban design in Hamburg) and finally of her professional practice as a freelance curator and urban researcher. She is interested in the knowledge transfer of urban processes and phenomena at the interface of architecture, urbanism, culture and art with the question: Who produces the image of the city? Most recently, she curated the exhibitions "Alle Tage Wohnungsfrage. On privatization, redevelopment and protest" (Stadtlabor, HMF), "Stadt der Fotografininnen. Frankfurt 1844-2024" (HMF) and "Nothing new. Building better with existing buildings" (DAM).
Enlarge

Dietmar Dath
Dietmar Dath, born in 1970, unsuccessfully dropped out of university, then briefly editor in charge of the pop culture magazine "Spex", editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for a quarter of a century with interruptions, numerous novels (most recently "Skyrmionen Oder A Fucking Army", 2025), dramas, radio plays, non-fiction books.
Enlarge

Alex Demirović
apl. Prof. Dr. at the Department of Social Sciences at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. After around 40 years in Frankfurt, he has lived in Berlin for several years. He studied philosophy, sociology and German studies at Goethe University, obtained his doctorate in 1979 under Alfred Schmidt and habilitated with an epistemological study on the development of critical theory after his return from exile. His research interests include right-wing extremism and racism. Other areas of work include social and democratic theory, the sociology of intellectuals and civil society. He is also extensively involved in civil society contexts and has published widely. Alex Demirović is also the host of the podcast tl;dr.
Enlarge

Karolina Dreit & Kristina Dreit: "Working Class Daughters. Talking about class"
Karolina Dreit is a working-class child and post-East migrant. She studied education and sociology and works as a cultural worker and teacher. She is interested in labor struggles, undogmatic perspectives on class and unifying political practices. Kristina Dreit is an artist and researcher. She studied Critical Studies and Performative Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and is interested in the entanglements of body, class and gender, as well as sensory and choreographic approaches to labor and tools. Since 2018, Karolina Dreit and Kristina Dreit have been working together under the title Working Class Daughters, questioning class relations at the intersection of care, structure and experience. In changing collaborations, they develop performances, installations and interventions in public space. In their book "Working Class Daughters. Talking about Class" (Mandelbaum Verlag), published in 2024, they assert a reality in which talking about class is not borne by shame and isolation, but instead seeks connections and class consciousness.
Enlarge

Alexander Gallas
Alexander Gallas is a political scientist and was born in Bonn in 1976. He began studying in the mid-1990s, first at the FU Berlin and then at Lancaster University. Even then, he was already concerned with labour struggles and class theory and was a member of an initiative that supported self-organization processes of call centre employees. From 2004, he completed his doctorate at Lancaster. His work - published by Brill in 2015 under the title The Thatcherite Offensive - focused on how the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major reorganized class relations in Britain. In 2013, he became a research assistant at the University of Kassel. He took part in the cross-status group campaign 'Uni Kassel Unbefristet', which was directed against precarious work on campus. In 2024, his two-volume book Exiting the Factory: Strikes and Class Formation beyond the Industrial Sector was published by Bristol University Press. Since April 2025, he has been Professor for the Organization and Transformation of Welfare State Security Systems at Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences.
Enlarge

Susanne Gesser
Susanne Gesser comes from an old family of craftspeople, and she was not meant to go to school or university. Nevertheless, her family supported her, even though no one could imagine how she would be able to earn a living from her studies (art education, theater, film and television studies, educational science). During her studies, Gesser did an internship at the Frankfurt Children's Museum (now the Junges Museum) and worked as a freelance cultural mediator in various museums from Hamburg to Munich. Susanne Gesser has been a curator at the Historisches Museum Frankfurt since 1992. She is head of the Young Museum Frankfurt and the Department of Education and Participation and is deputy director at the HMF. As part of the redesign of the museum, she laid the foundation for the permanent exhibition Frankfurt Jetzt! with the participatory exhibition format Stadtlabor. Susanne Gesser is a founding member of the Bundesverband Museumspädagogik e.V. and the Bundesverband der Deutschen Kinder- und Jugendmuseen e.V. (board member from 1997 to 2000 and 2015 to 2017). She is Vice President of Hands On! International Association of Children in Museums and jury member of the international Children in Museums Award.
Enlarge

Nina Gorgus
The question that Nina Gorgus often had to answer: "What do you actually want to do with your degree in Empirical Cultural Studies (French and Sociology)?" led directly to the museum very early on, as this was mentioned in the course description as a possible career field and an answer that satisfied everyone. After many (museum) positions, Nina Gorgus has been at the Historisches Museum Frankfurt since 2010, initially as coordinator and co-curator of the permanent exhibition Frankfurt Einst? Since 2012, she has been in charge of the collections Everyday Culture II and Toys, Childhood and Youth Culture and, since 2024, the Collection and Research Department. Her last exhibitions (Frankfurter Gartenlust 2021, Bewegung! 2024) at the HMF dealt with central questions of the present that link history, everyday culture and urban space. Since 2023, she has been an honorary professor at the Ludwig Uhland Institute for Empirical Cultural Studies at the University of Tübingen.
Enlarge

Ina Hartwig
Dr. Ina Hartwig, born in Hamburg in 1963, studied Romance and German studies in Avignon and Berlin. After many years as literary editor of the "Frankfurter Rundschau" (1997-2009) and editor of the "Kursbuch" (2002-2005), she worked as a freelance author, critic and presenter. In the 2015/16 academic year, she was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Since July 2016, she has been Head of the Department of Culture and Science of the City of Frankfurt am Main.
Enlarge

Alexandra Hennig
Alexandra Hennig (she/ihr), born 1989 in East Berlin, is a white, non-disabled, hearing person. Alex has been working as a dramaturge in the Program and Encounter team at Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt am Main and for Tanzplattform Rhein-Main since the 2022/23 season. She previously worked as a freelance dramaturge, curator and journalist in Berlin's independent theater scene. As a journalist, she has written for the magazine Tanz, tanzraumberlin Magazin and the Berliner Zeitung, among others. As a dramaturge she works on topics such as asthetics of access, embodiment, (post)colonial heritage, archive and humor. She led the Artist Lab "Witzigkeit kennt seine Grenzen - Klassismus und Humor in den Darstellenden Künsten" together with Hendrik Quast as part of the nationwide Artist Labs, funded by the Fonds Darstellende Künste. Since 2023, Alex has co-curated the Rhine-Main Dance Festival together with Anna Wagner and Bruno Heynderickx.
Enlarge

Dominik Hünniger
He grew up in the last years of the GDR as the child of a worker and a farmer on a collectivized four-generation farm in a small village in Thuringia. The "peaceful revolution" enabled him to graduate from high school and do his civilian service. In the mid-1990s, he began studying history and English language and literature in Kiel and northern England, initially with the aim of becoming a teacher. After completing his doctorate, he worked in science management at the University of Göttingen, including in Uppsala and Glasgow. There he discovered museums as a field of work for himself. Today he is a research assistant at the German Port Museum in Hamburg. He is also involved with ArbeiterKind.de
Enlarge

Angela Jannelli
Angela Jannelli grew up in an Italian-German family. Important spaces in her childhood were a high-rise building on the edge of the Swabian Alb, a car dealership, granny's parlor and grammar school, a detached house with a lawn that was soon turned into a field, and many guest worker apartments. Her world expanded significantly through books, visits to the theater and museums, and studies in the arts and humanities. With the discovery of Empirical Cultural Studies, she found a home for her curious mind and a way to explore the puzzling behavior of people. The museum was literally on her way: one evening on her way home, she stopped in front of the Altona Museum and said to herself: "This could actually be a place for me to work! Since then, Angela has been working in and for museums and has specialized in participatory museum work. In 2010, she came to the HMF to redesign the permanent exhibitions (Schneekugel and Frankfurt Jetzt! with the Stadtlabor). She has been the curator of the Library of Generations since 2012.
Enlarge

Ilija Matusko
Ilija Matusko (*1980 in Munich) is a writer and sociologist - and probably one of the few authors who claim to be better at tapping beer than writing. Matusko grew up with chips and Ćevapčići, his parents ran a pub in Bavaria. The question of whether the smell of frying fat reveals one's social background became the starting point for his essays. He now lives in Berlin and his work deals with social origin, class issues and identity.
Enlarge

Doreen Mölders
Her already planned future changed on November 9, 1989. Contrary to her plans, in 1991 she transferred from the GDR unified school POS to grammar school. She then became the first in her working-class family to study archaeology and history at the universities of Leipzig and Freiburg i. Br. Over time, she acquired specialist expertise, cultural and political education and thought a lot about the system change and social theories. Most of her career steps after graduation happened without prior knowledge or planning: research assistant at the Department of Archaeology, then a doctorate - because it was said that you needed one. Then she became a curator at the State Museum of Archaeology in Chemnitz, which gave her the feeling for the first time that she had made the right choice. So it had to be a museum. That's why she completed further training in museum management and has been a museum director since 2019, first at the Westphalian State Museum of Archaeology and Culture and since 2025 at the Historical Museum Frankfurt.
Enlarge

Stefan Müller
After training and working as a printer, he studied political science at the Free University of Berlin. After completing his doctorate, he turned to history. His work and interests focus on labor history and oral history. Since 2013 he has been working at the Archive of Social Democracy at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, where he has headed the Public History Department since 2022.
Enlarge

Patricia Rahemipour
Prof. Dr. Patricia Rahemipour studied prehistory and early history, classical archaeology and philosophy. She gained her first experience as head of the teaching collection at the Department of Prehistory and Early History at the University of Leipzig. She later worked as a project manager and senior curator for the German Archaeological Institute and the Topoi Cluster of Excellence. After two years at the Roman-Germanic Commission and the Jewish Museum Frankfurt, Ms. Rahemipour moved to the Botanic Garden Berlin in 2014, where she took over the management of the Botanical Museum and the Knowledge Communication Department in 2016. Since September 2019, she has been Director of the Institute for Museum Research at the National Museums in Berlin. She is also Chairwoman of the Berlin Museum Association.
Enlarge

Alexander Renz
realized in the course of his life that the phrase "born and raised in Constance on Lake Constance" is often associated with "being wealthy". Had to disappoint some people in this respect. After studying Political and Empirical Cultural Studies in Tübingen, he spent five years researching scenographic museum exhibitions as a research assistant at the Ludwig Uhland Institute. To his own surprise, he did not regret the subsequent move to Berlin, partly because he ended up at the Werkbundarchiv - Museum der Dinge. He was active as a curator there during and especially after his traineeship, most recently with "Profitopolis oder der Zustand der Stadt" and "Milieudinge - von Klasse und Geschmack". Alexander Renz observes the investment plans and practices of his peers with interest and wonders whether it has something to do with his background or his career choice that he has a certain distance to them.
Enlarge

Johanna Sänger
Cultural historian. Since 2012 curator for city and regional history from 1800 at the Leipzig City History Museum. Trained as a chemical technician and studied chemistry for two semesters. Studied German language and literature and cultural history at the University of Jena. Doctorate on the street names of the GDR. First exhibition on GDR urban planning in Jena in 1999. Since 2005 research assistant at museums in Berlin (responsible for collections on GDR design and everyday culture) and Leipzig. Numerous exhibitions on the transformation and contemporary history of Leipzig, especially on Jewish history, National Socialism and the GDR as well as industrial culture.
Enlarge

Francis Seeck
Francis Seeck is Professor of Social Work with a focus on democracy and human rights education at Nuremberg Institute of Technology. Seeck studied Cultural Studies at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder) and European Ethnology at the Humboldt University in Berlin, where Seeck also completed his doctorate with an ethnographic study on queer care work. Francis Seeck researches and teaches classism critique, anti-discriminatory political education, gender and queer studies, as well as human rights-oriented social work. Active in anti-discrimination education for many years, Seeck combines academic research with educational practice. Recent publications include "Zugang verwehrt" (Atrium 2022), "Klassismus überwinden" (Unrast 2024) and the anthology "Klassismuskritik und Soziale Arbeit" (Beltz Juventa 2024).
Enlarge

Imke Volkers
is an art and cultural scientist. After working at the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden and as a freelance curator, she has been working at the Werkbundarchiv - Museum der Dinge in Berlin since 2005 and has been Scientific Co-Director since 2023. She is interested in concepts with which things can be understood, recorded and interpreted, in particular their role as an expression of aesthetic, economic, psychological and socio-political interests. These perspectives also shape her curatorial practice, for example in exhibitions such as Böse Dinge. Eine Enzyklopädie des Ungeschmacks (2009), Object Lessons (2016), The Story of My Life. Object Biography as Concept, Method and Genre (2023) or most recently, together with Alexander Renz, Milieudinge - von Klasse und Geschmack (2025/26). She is a permanent jury member of the RecyclingDesignpreis Deutschland.
Enlarge

Anna-Lena Wenzel
Anna-Lena Wenzel is a cultural scientist and works as a freelance author and mediator in Berlin. In 2022/23, she co-curated the exhibition Klassenfragen - Kunst und ihre Produktionsbedingungen. In her texts and interviews, she always considers the precarious working conditions and power relations in the cultural field, while as co-operator of the Kleiner Raum für aktuelles Nichts she has investigated the processes of valorization and devaluation within the art field. Having grown up in a family of educational climbers, she is familiar with the speechlessness that can accompany this rise. Because she often finds academic discourse exclusive, she prefers to focus on the everyday in her work (she has published a trilogy of relationships with volumes on love, heartbreak and friendship, among others) and is very interested in public space (she has been running the online city magazine 99% Urban since 2012).