Spread over three floors, the Chemnitz State Museum of Archaeology (smac for short) presents 300,000 years of Saxony’s cultural history through more than 6,000 exhibits.

In a modern, innovative and multimedia-rich way, the smac shows its visitors the transformation from a natural to a cultural landscape and the development of humankind from the Stone Age through the Middle Ages to the early industrial era. Among the smac’s most outstanding attractions are the 5,200-year-old Neolithic wells, a display case wall over 45 metres long featuring artefacts from excavations, the funeral crowns from the cemetery of the Dresden Frauenkirche, and much more.

In 2014, the smac found a home in the former Schocken department store – a building that could well be exhibited in a museum in its own right. The museum building, which is now a listed building, looks back on an eventful history. This is reason enough for the smac to dedicate three of its own exhibition areas to the archaeology of the department store.

From a shopping centre to a cultural landmark

Built in 1930 by the renowned architect Erich Mendelsohn as a department store for the brothers Simon and Salman Schocken, the building not only boasted the city’s first escalator but was already regarded, thanks to its curved window front, as an icon of the ‘Neues Bauen’ movement. Eight years later, in the wake of the wave of Nazi expropriations that swept across Germany, the Schocken department store was ‘Aryanised’ and turned into a Merkur retail outlet. After 1945, it was nationalised by the GDR’s trade organisation and became the ‘Centrum Warenhaus’; following the upheavals of 1990, it eventually returned to private ownership as a Kaufhof. However, this too was not to last, and from 2001 the building stood empty until 2010, when its regeneration process began; it finally welcomed its first visitors in 2014 as the home of the Chemnitz State Museum of Archaeology.

smac – A museum for everyone in Chemnitz

Having weathered ‘Aryanisation’, ‘socialisation’ and ‘re-privatisation’, it is only fitting that the building has now become a museum for everyone. A museum that takes particular pride in its commitment to accessibility, inclusion and participation, and which invites visitors to discover and understand cultural diversity across the breadth of time. In this way, the smac aims to promote cultural education and foster a broader social understanding of cultural diversity.

The smac is a host that takes the well-being of its visitors to heart. This commitment is particularly reflected in its wide range of different audio guides, which cater to the specific needs of its visitors, as museum director Sabine Wolfram emphasises: “Thanks to funding from the Saxon Ministry of Social Affairs, our permanent archaeological exhibition is now open to another, often neglected section of society with an interest in culture. Although making the museum accessible to everyone is an ongoing process, we have already taken an important step in the right direction.”

This is a vision shared by Hearonymus Audio Guides, as confirmed by Peter Grundmann, founder and managing director of Hearonymus: “Accessibility and design for all are key principles. The smartphone is a close ally in this regard; thanks to good programming, it enables us to open numerous doors and ensure unrestricted accessibility. We offer a wide range of options for our audio guides, which make it very easy to make content accessible to anyone who is interested.” Hearonymus is thus actively committed to “culture for all” and offers the production of audio guides in plain or simple language, sign language, as well as guided tours for blind and visually impaired people. (Read on here to find out more about Hearonymus’s accessible services.)

For this reason, the smac guides – in sign language, plain language and for people with visual impairments – are freely available to everyone on the Hearonymus platform.

Accessible access to the smac on your smartphone with Hearonymus

The Hearonymus app and the guides can be downloaded to your smartphone in just a few clicks. The guides can then be used as often as you like, even without an internet connection – whether at home or on site. The Hearonymus app can be downloaded free of charge from the App Store or Google Play. The smac guides are available free of charge via Hearonymus in sign language, easy-to-read language and as audio guides for the visually impaired.