Interview with PD Dr. Hans-Konrad Schmutz by Konstanze Weltersbach

The last museum we have visited during our grand tour has been the Museum of Nature in Winterthur. In the last 15 years the director, Hans-Konrad Schmutz, has developed an innovative museological concept. The Winterthur museum wants to illustrate to the visitor the coming into being of modern museums and the changes that museum objects had to undergo in the course of this process. Display cases show, for instance, concepts of nature from early periods of collecting.
Sometimes old presentation settings are kept, to show the conditionality of the image of nature on display in the museum. One example is this diorama. It has been commissioned by the director of the Winterthur museum in the second half of the 19th century. By those means he hoped to propagate the much-disputed Darwinism and the concept of the survival of the fittest.