Ansbach (dpa / lby) – Bavaria’s Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) will open this year’s state exhibition in Ansbach on Tuesday (4 p.m.). The theme couldn’t be a better fit for the Franconian, because the show is titled “Typically Franconian?” the question of what characterizes the region in northern Bavaria. With 150 exhibits, it primarily shows the diversity of Franconia, but also plays with clichés and prejudices.
On around 1000 square meters, the exhibition sends visitors on a journey through time from May 25th to November 6th through nine Franconian regions, three each from the administrative districts of Lower Franconia, Upper Franconia and Middle Franconia. The focus is on the period between the Middle Ages and 1800, but there are also repeated references to the present, explained exhibition director Rainhard Riepertinger from the House of Bavarian History.
Right from the start, the exhibition confronts guests with Franconian clichés: beer, wine, bratwurst, gingerbread, half-timbered houses and dialect. In each of the nine parts of the exhibition, these are taken up, facts are shown and these are questioned. In this way, visitors learn, for example, that the bratwurst is typical for Franconia, but what is even more typical is that it comes in a variety of forms and is served in very different ways.
The outstanding exhibits include the soccer shoe with the innovative nylon screw-in studs from Herzogenaurach, with which Nuremberg center forward Max Morlock scored the first goal for the German national team in the final of the 1954 World Cup in Bern. The pistol with which an assassin fired two shots at Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in the spa town of Bad Kissingen in 1874 can also be seen.
