Museum Koenig - History

History

The museum was founded by the private scholar Alexander Koenig (1858-1940) as a private institute for zoological research and public education. Alexander Koenig, who was born in 1858 as the son of the wealthy merchant Leopold Koenig, began to collect birds and mammals as a boy. He later studied zoology and received a doctorate in natural history in 1884. In the following years he organized and funded several expeditions to the Arctic and Africa and greatly expanded his private collection of specimens.

After his father died in 1903, Alexander Koenig planned a natural history museum to present his private collection to the public. On September 3, 1912, the foundation stone to the new Museum Alexander Koenig was laid. After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the uncompleted building was confiscated and used as a military hospital and later, until 1923, as barracks by the French occupying forces. Alexander Koenig, who had lost most of his fortune in the aftermath of the war, donated the museum and his private collection to the German government in 1929. The museum finally opened its doors to the public on May 13, 1934.

After World War II the museum building, which was left largely intact by the war, was the only representative and large assembly hall available in Bonn, now capital of West Germany. This was the reason why the museum was used by the Parlamentarischer Rat (English: parliamentary council), the predecessor to the West German Parliament, for its opening session on September 1, 1948. At this time plans were made to use the museum building as the Chancellor's Office (German: Bundeskanzleramt), but it was eventually only used for two months by the new chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1949.