Urban Culture

Today’s Urban Culture collection has its roots in the 1920s when the City of Munich’s history museum began to shift its focus to ethnography. Since that time, it has concentrated on turning its spotlight onto Munich’s civic culture.

It boasts extensive and valuable holdings in a multitude of areas related to the everyday culture of Munich’s citizens from the 18th century to the present day. The collection has made a major contribution to special exhibitions and our two permanent exhibitions: “Typically Munich!” and “National Socialism in Munich”. Since 2010, the collection has focused its research on urban culture concentrating on burning social issues that have a major impact on life in Munich, such as mobility, precarity, singles and LGBTI*. The “Migration Moves the City” research is now firmly embedded in the Urban Culture collection, while the exhibition of the same name is part of “Typically Munich!”.