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Deutsches Hygiene-Museum – history
The Deutsches Hygiene-Museum by the Großer Garten in Dresden goes back to the entrepreneur Karl August Lingner, who had made his fortune with the mouthwash “Odol”. He initiated the First International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden in 1911 – more than five million people came. Out of it, in 1912, grew the museum, intended as a “place of popular education in health care”. Today it sees itself as a “Museum of Man”: about the body, health and how we live together.
Wilhelm Kreis's building
Today's building on the Lingnerplatz was designed by the architect Wilhelm Kreis and opened in 1930 for the Second International Hygiene Exhibition. It combines the clean functionalism of the Bauhaus with monumental classical forms. Lingner himself did not live to see it – he had died back in 1916.
The Transparent Man
For the 1930 exhibition the museum unveiled its greatest sensation: the Gläserner Mensch, the “Glass Man”, by the preparator Franz Tschackert. He isn't made of glass at all – the transparent skin is made of the plastic Cellon and the skeleton of aluminium, plus more than 40 tiny light bulbs and over 12 kilometres of fine wire for the blood vessels and nerves; a single figure took around 1,800 working hours. The Gläserne Frau, the Glass Woman, followed in 1935 – and to this day she is the museum's most famous exhibit.
An export hit from Dresden
The transparent figures went all over the world: after 1949, according to Wikipedia, the workshop built 56 glass men and 68 glass women, as well as animals – a Glass Cow was seen by more than a million people at a trade fair in India in 1959. In the GDR the museum was also the central body for health education and made films, for example about smoking and – in 1989 – the GDR's only educational film about AIDS.
The dark chapter
The museum's history also has a dark chapter: as early as 1911 there was a department of “racial hygiene”, and after 1933 the museum became a tool of Nazi racial ideology – with exhibitions such as “Volk und Rasse” (“People and Race”, 1934) and “Ewiges Volk” (“Eternal People”, 1937). In February 1945 the air raids destroyed large parts of the building. Today the museum confronts this history openly, for example with the exhibition “Tödliche Medizin” (“Deadly Medicine”) in 2006/07 and in its permanent exhibition.
Lingnerschloss and mausoleum
From 1906 Karl August Lingner lived in the Villa Stockhausen high above the Elbe, which Wilhelm Kreis remodelled for him – today the Lingnerschloss. He left it to the city on condition that an affordable restaurant be run there, “not an establishment just for rich people”. In the park lies his mausoleum, built around 1920 to plans by Hans Poelzig, with reliefs by Georg Kolbe.
Links to other places
The Großer Garten begins right behind the museum. The Lingnerschloss with Lingner's grave lies on the Elbe slopes in Loschwitz, between the Blaues Wunder bridge and the Elbe palaces. And Wilhelm Kreis, the museum's architect, had already remodelled Lingner's villa.
As of: 10/2026
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