The Museum Oberschönenfeld

The approximately 800 year old abbey of the Cistercian nuns in Oberschönenfeld forms the centre of a unique cultural landscape. The extensive monastery complex was rebuilt in the first half of the 18th century and houses the Museum Oberschönenfeld in three former farm buildings.

The museum is supported by the district of Swabia with funding by the district of Augsburg and is dedicated to the rural everyday culture of Swabia in Bavaria. It serves as a specialist museum for the entire region and at the same time as a local history museum for the district of Augsburg. Its permanent exhibition, redesigned in 2018, was awarded the Bavarian Museum Prize by the Versicherungskammer Bayern Kulturstiftung in 2019. Unique objects and exemplary biographies of people, companies and objects demonstrate the variety and richness of life in Swabia between about 1800 and the present day. Themes include the history of Oberschönenfeld Abbey, rural life between tradition and change, working worlds, leisure pursuits, life paths, times of crisis and images of home. The people themselves who used the objects before they came to the museum have their say at audio stations and in quotations. Interactive stations invite visitors to learn and experience more through play. At the start, the visitor centre offers an overview of Oberschönenfeld, the surrounding landscape and Bavarian Swabia.

Partially opened in 1984 as the Schwäbisches Volkskundemuseum Oberschönenfeld (Swabian Folklore Museum Oberschönenfeld), the young museum presented didactically arranged agricultural equipment and machines in the abbey’s former sheep barn under the title "From Manual Work to Machinery". Thus continuing the theme of the site’s first use as a museum: in 1976, the "Heimatverein für den Landkreis Augsburg" (local history society for the district of Augsburg) had transferred a small thatched residential stable house from neighbouring Döpshofen to the edge of the convent grounds in order to save it from planned demolition. In addition to the building’s fixtures and fittings, the society brought together an extensive collection of rural household goods as well as farming equipment and machines and quickly filled the stables and barns in Oberschönenfeld, which had not been used since 1972. These objects form the basis of the collection. During the museum’s founding phase, equipment from common rural crafts, parts of traditional costumes and objects relating to "folk art" and "folk piety" were also added to the collection to preserve them for Bavarian Swabia as testimonies to the past way of village life from the time before industrialisation. The collection grew considerably in the following years through the acquisition of extensive equipment, e.g. from a rural property in Neuburg a. d. Kammel, from a small farmer in Bobingen, a painter’s workshop in Langenhaslach and parts of several shoemakers’ workshops. In addition, smaller collections on industrial culture and on the history of Swabia were created beyond the many testimonies from the everyday life of the non-farming village and (small) urban population. Objects whose use and significance can be traced on the basis of specifically collected information such as photographs, interviews and personal documents are of exceptional value: they open up a variety of approaches to the everyday history of Swabia and offer many people, even beyond Swabia, points of reference to their own past.

Since the foundation of the museum, paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures by Swabian artists from the last 100 years have also been collected, in particular those who have been awarded the District of Swabia Art Prize. The largest collection consists of works by Hanns Weidner (1906-1981) as a representative of Expressive Realism and Lost Generation art. The Swabian gallery presents regional contemporary art in various temporary exhibitions.

• The objects of the Museum Oberschönenfeld available on bavarikon

Collections owned by the Museum Oberschönenfeld available on bavarikon

• Rural living environments in Bavarian Swabia
• Free time at last: playing, entertainment, enjoyment and travel in Bavarian Swabia
• Typical Swabian? Identity and stereotypes
• Times of crisis in Bavarian Swabia: persevere and make do
• Piety, festivals, customs in Bavarian Swabia
• Working environments in craftsmanship and industry in Bavarian Swabia
• Memories made out of hair: jewellery and pictures
• War Collection 1914-1918 by Wilhelm Beck
• Collecting „folk art“ through research: the partial estate of Gislind M. Ritz
• Arts and Crafts in Bavarian Swabia