The way to the prefabricated house could not be more picturesque. Cold-blooded horses munch on the pasture in front of the farmstead, one farm rises next to the other as it once did in the Westerwald or in the Bergisches Land, apiary and wine press house provide bucolic insights. If Cinderella turned around the corner and the fairy tale film was shut down, that wouldn’t be surprising. The open-air museum in Kommern takes you back to other centuries with its true-to-original farms and lovingly landscaped gardens. There are two windmills and lots of creaking floorboards, a flock of sheep under pear trees and a factory mansion. But also a diaspora chapel and two Nissen huts that tell of flight and expulsion. A total of 79 historic original buildings, divided into building groups, can be admired 365 days a year.
Ursula Kals
Editor in business, responsible for “Youth writes”.
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Up on the so-called Rhineland market square, which documents the period from 1945 to the present day, there is a bungalow built in 1958 that was already there. Gradually, the museum has other buildings erected there true to the original, such as a 1950s milk bar, a restaurant from the district of Düren with a dark-paneled taproom and toilet with floral tiles – a kind of luxury, because before that the toilets were outside in the courtyard, like it was common in many village pubs in 1974. In front of this Watteler restaurant there is an “Iron Policeman”, a turquoise-green emergency telephone where the fire brigade and police could be called for help. In the 1960s, there were 3,000 of these pillars in the most populous federal state, because not even 15 percent of all households had their own telephone.