Barefoot through Wittenberge Exhibition with the support of students from the Institute of Road Engineering

There is hardly anything more self-evident than the ground we stand on. But what kind of surface do we have in front of our doors? Grey concrete, basalt-greywacke mosaics or clinker paving? And can the stones tell us something about the city’s history? The Wittenberge City Museum in the Prignitz region of Brandenburg is launching an interactive exhibition in September called ‘Barefoot through Wittenberge’, with the help of students from the Institute of Road Engineering at Technische Universität Braunschweig.

Museum director Marcel Steller (left) explores the city from an unusual perspective. Photo credits: Tim Finke

“No matter which street we walk down in Wittenberg, we experience the city’s most exciting history,” says museum director Marcel Steller. Together with his team, he has even built a barefoot path in the museum. All of Wittenberg’s streets are in one room – with stories, anecdotes and lots of historical views. The paths and streets of the early modern period have been faithfully recreated in a computer game. At a game station in the exhibition, visitors can experience and walk along the difficult Prignitz roads of the past.

Numerous cooperation partners and experts have contributed not only interesting and surprising facts, but also very different and new perspectives on the streets of the city on the Elbe. The expertise of the Braunschweig students has also been incorporated into the exhibition texts, which will first appear as an e-publication in early 2025. It will then be presented together with the printed version at the museum on 18 May, in the presence of the students and Professor Michael Wistuba, Head of the Institute of Road Construction.

Our soil as a transport route

“I was happy to include Marcel Steller’s initiative in my Master’s course. And the students made excellent use of it, putting it into practice with great commitment and enthusiasm. A real win-win situation,” says Professor Wistuba. In the exercise for the lecture ‘Technology of paving and slab paving’, the students dealt with the problems of our seemingly self-evident ‘ground’ as a traffic route.

Paving has a long tradition, especially in a town like Wittenberge. How do people there deal with pavements? Which functional aspects are important? What traces of the past can be seen on the streets? What can we improve? These were the questions that the students addressed.

The interactive special exhibition ‘Barefoot through Wittenberge’ opens on 8 September 2024 at 2 pm in the Alte Burg.

Read more in the press release from the city of Wittenberge (german).