Kraszewski Museum

The Kraszewski Museum in Dresden is a literary museum dedicated to the Polish writer, painter, historian, and composer Józef Ignacy Kraszewski. It is housed in a villa built around 1855 in the Swiss chalet style on the edge of the Radeberger Vorstadt, right on the Prießnitz stream. Kraszewski spent more than twenty years in exile in Dresden, beginning after the January Uprising of 1863, and lived in this building from 1873 to 1879. Here he pursued an active literary and political life and wrote, among other works, his famous Saxon Trilogy. The museum, which opened in 1960, is now a vibrant place for German-Polish encounters. What makes it special is its binational character: the exhibitions are bilingual, and the museum maintains close ties with Polish associations in Saxony and Thuringia.

In the permanent exhibition, which has been on view since 2013, you can explore Kraszewski's life and work. The display includes about sixty exhibits spread across three rooms, among them his former study. The rooms are done in the Polish national colors of red and white, and information panels explain the content in German, Polish, and English. In addition to the permanent exhibition, the museum offers temporary exhibitions on Polish figures, historical events, and current cultural life. Literary readings, lectures, book presentations, and chamber music evenings are also a regular part of the program, and in good weather they take place in the garden as well.

The museum also has a small library with a reading café, which holds more than five hundred Polish-language volumes. The collection includes works by major authors such as Mickiewicz, Chopin, and Sienkiewicz, as well as numerous writings by Kraszewski himself, including prints from his own Dresden printing house. The library has not been expanded since 1978. The museum has had an eventful history, shaped in part by political and legal circumstances. After almost all of the loaned items were returned to Poland at the end of 2011 under a Polish cultural property law, the old exhibition was closed. But as early as the beginning of 2013, a new permanent exhibition opened, further cementing the museum's role as a cultural bridge between Germany and Poland.