Away from Oktoberfest, Munich's museums also serve science on tap

Because sometimes you need a V2 rocket with your schnitzel

Geek's Guide It's September and the German city of Munich is celebrating Oktoberfest. But away from the beer tents, schnitzel, and lederhosen lies a set of museums worth visiting for the price of a few beers.

The Deutsches Museum is celebrating 100 years since its opening on May 7, 1925. One of the museum's press officers, Sabine Pelgjer, showed us around and discussed the challenges faced as the museum undergoes substantial renovations.

While the sections under renovation remain closed, the completed portions are light and airy. Naturally, we started with a wander through the aviation gallery, featuring multiple aircraft on display, some of which allowed for a closer look. Pelgjer explained that during the renovations, many of the exhibits had to be carefully dismantled and removed. Some, however, stayed in place.

Exterior of Deutsches Museum (pic: Alexander Goettert / Deutsches Museum)

There is, for example, a V2 rocket in the gallery that was too big to move, so teams had to work around it. Another is a submarine that remains in the museum's cellar. "It was brought into the museum in 1921 when the museum was just built," Pelgjer said, and now it cannot be moved again.

Then again, there is a certain logic to having a submarine in the basement of a museum on an island in a river.

Pelgjer told us that the renovation project began in 2011, and moving the exhibits started in 2015. "It took us over a year," she said. Some exhibits were sent to other museums, while others were carefully stored until they could be retrieved. "It took us until 2022 to renovate this part and the new exhibitions with new concepts and new… everything."

Visitors can get a very close look at the exhibits, which feature descriptions in multiple languages, as well as some impressive dioramas built by the museum's staff to tell their stories. Each gallery also has employees wandering around who are more than happy to answer questions about what is on show.

Pelgjer explained that one of the goals of the museum was interaction "to make it like a kind of a mixture between science and Oktoberfest." She said the concept of the museum's founder, Oskar von Miller, was that people should enjoy science and learn by interaction, a theme that is threaded through the exhibits.

Sometimes, visitors get a little too interactive. Pelgjer pointed out some bone screws in the medical gallery that some visitors had managed to wrench off and take away as souvenirs, and a life-size exhibit of US astronaut Ed White mid-spacewalk, which some teens had jumped into for the purpose of taking a selfie.

"Disrespectful!" Pelgjer said. "I had to take out two teenage girls from here!"

The spacewalking exhibit leads into the astronautics gallery, which opens with artifacts from the early days of rocketry, including a truly terrifying-looking rocket sled, and progresses through to more familiar exhibits from the space age, such as satellites and a Spacelab mock-up with European Space Agency markings. As with all parts of the museum, there are nods to interactivity everywhere, including small 3D prints of some exhibits to allow the blind or partially sighted to get a better understanding of the displays.

Historic Aviation at the Deutsches Museum with ESA module in the background (pic: Deutsches Museum, München | Hubert Czech)

Other galleries include an area for natural sciences, with exhibits ranging from musical instruments to atomic physics on show, including a decades-old playset aimed at introducing children to the wonderful world of uranium. Meanwhile, the communications gallery includes artifacts – like a Walkman – guaranteed to make a person of a certain vintage feel old, and there's a section on cryptography and mathematics too.

A full day could easily be spent in the Deutsches Museum itself, but Pelgjer pointed out that other branches had been opened over the years – one in Bonn, an aviation museum, and, to further distract from the serious business of Oktoberfest, a transport museum located next to the Theresienwiese where the festival is held.

We postponed a visit to the beer tents to walk around the Verkehrszentrum transport museum, which features three halls containing a variety of exhibits, including bicycles, automobiles, trams, and trains.

Verkehrszentrum transport museum (pic: Richard Speed)

Many have an aggressively unrestored look to them, as though they had been given a wash and then rolled through the doors, rather than being subjected to a nut-and-bolt restoration. This lends a real-world, used feel to the exhibits (some of them, at least; perhaps not the stainless steel Porsche). When we went, the museum was nearly deserted, thanks, no doubt, to the beer festival next door. This allowed for a leisurely stroll through the halls and a nose through exhibits, such as a train carriage, where permitted.

As an antidote to the admittedly excellent beer of the Oktoberfest, Munich's museums are certainly worth a visit. Tickets cost around €15 for the Deutsches Museum and €8 for the Verkehrszentrum (Transport Museum). Considering a beer at the 2025 Oktoberfest was anywhere from €14.50 to €15.80, this is excellent value for money. ®