{"id":1034,"date":"2017-06-20T14:03:25","date_gmt":"2017-06-20T12:03:25","guid":{"rendered":"\/blog\/?p=1034"},"modified":"2017-07-05T15:41:57","modified_gmt":"2017-07-05T13:41:57","slug":"multaqa-museum-as-ray-of-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/blog\/2017\/06\/20\/multaqa-museum-as-ray-of-hope\/","title":{"rendered":"Multaqa \u2013 Museum as Ray of Hope"},"content":{"rendered":"

Multaqa \u2013 Museum as Ray of Hope<\/h1>\n

This year, 20 June is World Refugee Day. On this day, events and programmes across the world draw attention to the more than 65 million people<\/a> who have recently fled their homes. For the Deutsches Historisches Museum, it is a special occasion to introduce the project \u201cMultaqa: Meeting Point Museum \u2013 Refugees as Guides in Berlin\u2019s Museums\u201d, as well as Bashar Almahfoud, one of these exceptional guides.<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the peak of the refugee crisis in 2015 many cultural institutions and museums have established projects for refugees. \u201cMultaqa: Meeting Point Museum \u2013 Refugees as Guides in Berlin\u2019s Museum\u2019s\u201d<\/a> is one of them. Initiated by the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin \/ Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz in late 2015, refugees and migrants give guided tours to other newly arrived individuals through the Deutsches Historisches Museum, the Pergamonmuseum with its collections of Islamic art and the art of ancient Near East, as well as through the Bode-Museum and its Sculpture Collection and collection of Byzantine art. The name \u201cMultaqa\u201d is Arabic and can be translated as \u201cmeeting point\u201d. The term therefore describes the project\u2019s goal \u2013 a meeting point and an opportunity for newly arrived individuals from different cultural backgrounds and historical experiences to connect.<\/p>\n

Engineer and museum guide<\/h3>\n

\u201cFor me, Multaqa is like a message \u2013 it brings people together and shows them German history or their own cultural heritage in other museums,\u201d says Bashar Almahfoud, one of the 25 guides for Multaqa. He has been a guide since the project began a year and a half ago, and guides up to 30 people through the permanent exhibition of the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Arabic, English and German several times a month. About two and a half years ago Bashar came to Berlin with a regular visa to write his PhD dissertation in architecture and energy management. He works as an engineer for an international company in Berlin during the week, and gives guided tours through the museum to people interested in history at the weekend. To work as a Multaqa guide, he first completed training in pedagogy and German history.
\nTeaching people from Syria, Iraq, but also Germany and other European countries about German history is personally important to him. While discussions about his own history are the focus of Multaqa tours through the Pergamonmuseum, Bashar\u2019s main interest is conveying the history of his new home country. \u201cWhen you live in a country, you must learn its history,\u201d he says. \u201cThat way you can not only learn something about the society, you can also reflect on your own life.\u201d<\/p>\n

The destruction of Germany after the Second World War as hope<\/h3>\n

Bashar Almahfoud is particularly impressed by the Deutsches Historisches Museum\u2019s display dedicated to the reconstruction of Germany after the Second World War<\/a>. Despite all the evidence of suffering and struggling in everyday life after the war, this part of the exhibition represents hope for Bashar Almahfoud \u2013 hope that his own home will one day be rebuilt and inhabitable again. \u201cI would like to stay focused on the positive. It may be that the visitors who take the Multaqa tour have experienced war, and so I try to concentrate on the period after the war. They must always have hope,\u201d says the Multaqa guide. He cannot say whether his hope will resonate with the refugees in the long term. During the \u201cMeeting Point\u201d tours, however, there is always conversation. Such discourse was the goal of the project, which was honoured with an award by Minister of Culture Monika Gr\u00fctters last summer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Multaqa \u2013 Museum as Ray of Hope<\/h2>\n

This year, 20 June is World Refugee Day. On this day, events and programmes across the world draw attention to the more than 65 million people who have recently fled their homes. For the Deutsches Historisches Museum, it is a special occasion to introduce the project \u201cMultaqa: Meeting Point Museum \u2013 Refugees as Guides in Berlin\u2019s Museums\u201d, as well as Bashar Almahfoud, one of these exceptional guides.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":996,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[942,940,944,91],"class_list":["post-1034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-people","tag-german-history","tag-guided-tours","tag-multaqa","tag-permanent-exhibition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1034"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1034\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1037,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1034\/revisions\/1037"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}