Today we went on a Communication Department fieldtrip. Each semester our new BYU intern is taken here, and this time we missionaries went along. We took the train to downtown Frankfurt and had a nice lunch together at the Jewish Museum café.
These political signs along the way made me smile:
The others are even worse than us! and No world war without Germany!
This is the artwork outside the Jewish Museum. To me it represents the upending of roots and branches, lives changed for ever, ended.
Then we crossed the bridge to the “museum row” on the other side where so many of Frankfurt’s museums are located.
Museum for Communication Frankfurt
OK, these telephone cord sheep were cracking me up!
The Museum für Kommunikation is a museum of the history of communication in Frankfurt, Germany. It opened on 31 January 1958 under the name Bundespostmuseum and is on Frankfurt’s Museumsufer. The museum was owned by Deutsche Bundespost until 1994. Wikipedia
The museum showcases the evolution of human ways of communicating, tracing its development from cuneiform tablets to data glasses by way of groundbreaking inventions, curious occurrences and unusual fortunes.
It was fun to wander through the displays, seeing many modes of communication from my own lifetime.
Remember when we used to pull into a gas station with a phone booth and hanging phone book so we could look up an address in the yellow pages, then find the maps to figure out where to go??
This display showed all the different kinds of (coins) used to get away with making calls without spending real money.
Old post boxes:
This TV display was our favorite! The museum folks picked a random section of the Berlin Wall to replicate here to give context to the period of this 1959/1960 TV. Do you see what I see?
It’s the Plan of Salvation, probably painted by missionaries serving in Berlin at the time.
The back side of the display:
Communicating in the 1500s:
These pieces of WWII history were also interesting.
Now we live in the days of free online information, but how free is it really?
Remember reel-to-reel tape recorders? We had one when I was young.
Oh my, my fingers LOVED using this old phone, the kind we had when I was in high school. Our phone number then: 638-1154. Dialing our number took me right back. The feel, the sound–ahh, the memories.
Our intern’s husband had no idea how to use a phone like this. It made no sense to him. We had to show him how it was done.
This was also interesting:
Along the walk back to catch the train:
Our Frankfurt Germany Mission 