<Czech-German Museum> will open in spring 2012

Ústí nad Labem - The Museum of Coexistence of Czechs and Germans Collegium Bohemicum is slowly starting to become a reality. The floors are already being laid in the upper floors of the Ústí museum, and starting in February, only finishing work will be carried out. At the same time, the final form of the exhibition is being resolved; the first architects have signed up for the architectural competition. The museum will open in spring 2012, and one of the first events will be an exhibition called Memory Places by Ústí students, Milan Rudík from Collegium Bohemicum said today to ČTK.
    The reconstruction of the entire Ústí museum building will cost about 365 million crowns, but this phase will soon come to an end. "The flooring and parquet are being laid, and the building is almost finished on the outside. The rough work will be completed in February or March, then the furniture will be installed and finishing work will continue until June," Rudík described.
    Then the installation of the exhibition itself will begin. Architects have already begun applying for the architectural competition for its design. "The number is currently between five and ten, including interested parties from Germany, but there are no particularly famous names yet. Others have already expressed interest in participating in the January deadline," Rudík said, who is now weaving through the maze of corridors under the museum's roof with the architects. "I went through it with one of the architects just today, and he liked it very much. He sees solid potential in them," he added. The author of the winning proposal will receive 250,000 crowns.
    Concurrently, a program is also being developed for the first months of the museum's operation. One of the exhibitions that will appear among the first should be the high school project Memory Places. "It's still under negotiation, but it should indeed be among the first," Rudík confirmed.
    Memory Places is organized by Collegium Bohemicum in collaboration with the Antikomplex association and focuses primarily on places where the coexistence of both nations on Czech territory has turned into hatred - among them are the towns of Postoloprty, Žatec, or Ústí nad Labem, where mass murders of hundreds of Sudeten Germans occurred after World War II.
    Collegium Bohemicum is a non-profit cultural-educational and scientific society that deals with Czech-German relations and the cultural heritage of the German-speaking inhabitants of the Czech lands. This spring, it announced that its museum will be based in Ústí; however, the exhibition should not focus on Czech-German relations in general, but rather on the history of coexistence of Czech and German-speaking populations in the territory of today's Czech Republic.