Sammlungsdepot Heusenstamm

Sammlungsdepot Heusenstamm is the storage facility of the Museum für Kommunikation Frankfurt, housing extensive collections on communication history, including telegraphy, telephony, radio, and more.

Planning your visit

This is a storage depot rather than a museum, and that is the point. The Museum für Kommunikation in Frankfurt keeps the bulk of its collection at Heusenstamm — the material it cannot display, which vastly exceeds what is on show — covering the history of communication from telegraphy and pneumatic post through telephony, radio, television and computing.

Depot tours let visitors into that reserve: racked equipment, switchboards, transmitters, postal vehicles, uniforms, philatelic holdings and the accumulated apparatus of German communication across two centuries, stored on shelving rather than staged.

Seeing a collection in storage is a different experience from seeing it curated. The quantity is the message, and it makes visible the ordinary reality of museum work, which is that display is the small visible fraction of a much larger holding.

Tours are scheduled and require booking. Heusenstamm is near Offenbach, south of Frankfurt. Allow ninety minutes. Current availability is listed below.