Part II
Museum History since 1973
Compared to the depiction of the WALDMUSEUM FOUNDATION HISTORY that covers it´s real 5 exposition years at Emmershäuser Hütte between May 1968 and May 1973, the description of the development that took that nature science collection during the following 47 years until 2020 is incomparably more difficult. Just as the story of the founding of the first museum was the story of growing up with increasing fascination for secrets and wonders of nature of the museum patron Rosemarie Zanger, the later development of the collection remains closely linked to further education, professional interests, travel an life of Rosemarie and her family members.
First, in May 1973 the Waldmuseum exposition objects were packed, stowed in cardboard boxes and transported from Emmershausen to Weilmünster, where they were stored in the basement of the new family home, however in it´s largely empty and unfurnished rooms there was a lack of decorative objects. So a lot of representative and impressive sculptured stones found their way to the window sills made of Lahn River Valley Marble. The latter were previously especially chosen to furnish the house, because Lahn Marble is a rock, that is particularily rich in fossils, which corresponded to the family´s main interest area in natural history and mineralogy. So during the house construction year 1969, the frequent trips to Villmar, where the marble grinding shop of the Scheu family was visited to select the marble slabs for stairs, chimney and window sills, became also a study course about marble fossil inclusions and marble quarrys in the Lahn Valley, what set the starting point to dozens of excursions to these places during the following ten years in the course of which the Sea-Lily Fossil Site near the House of Nature Friends between Aumenau and Villmar was discovered later by Rosemarie and Rolf Zanger.
Meanwhile the stored and packed up specimens of the collection remained mostly in their sites over the following decades, the mobilized exhibits started to disseminate in their surroundings with the consequence, that a great part of these got lost. But not all for always. During the remodelation of the CID Institutes house Botanical Garden from 2013 until 2020 reappeared a great part of the collection from inside the gardening earth. Between these fortunately refound specimen figure most important the Costa Brava Turret Shell fossils, the Schleswig-Holstein Flintstones, a part of the Emmershausen fossil findings and a part of the seashore snail and shell houses. Nevertheless; nearly the complete precious stone and gemstone collection bought from the Limburg Lilo Hess mineral store and received as donation from the gemstone grinding shop in Bad Kreuznach got lost with unknown destiny.
But inspite of these deplorable losses the collection grew and extended considerably during the following decades of the 80ies and 90ies of the past century, when the nature specimen collection activity remained intense during every trip or travel of the most of the family members. It stayed that way, especially because Rosemarie Zanger kept her enthusiasm for natural history all her life and her older son Peter, whom she had already brought up as the director of the museum exhibition in Emmershausen, finally decided for a scientific professional formation in 1982 after first professional steps towards a comercial formation training as bank clerc.
The 1970ies brougth little advance for the collection growth. The museum holder family Zanger was strictly occupied with their establishment in Weilmünster, the management of their new house and the business of their optical precision instrument company, where Rosemarie and Rolf Zanger and also their children had to fullfill tasks. The weekends were mostly used for the design of the garden as Natural Wood Garden and nature excursions often returned with wild native plants from forest areas to be replanted inside the nowadays CID Institute Botanical Garden. Since the midst of the 1970 also the family holiday travels to Catalunya and Provence became the source of some specimen of the mediterranean flora region that Rosemarie returned to the surrounding of her house in Weilmünster. The latter might have been inspired by the constant search of Rosemary for her ancestors, who´s earlier provenance she supposed at least partially to have been immigrants from Southern France respectively the Luberon or Roussillion Region, expelled from there as a consequence of the religiously motivated persecutions of the Huguenots and Waldensians during the 1660-1700 epoque and that resetteled later as refugees in several german regions and not at least in the former Nassau County region that hold in this ancient time the regency over the County of Orange situated near Avignon.
In the nearer surroundings the aims of the family weekend excursions mostly were situated in the old regional mining areas. Rosemary, who had opened up her habitat in the Upper Weil Valley by intense study of the topographical maps, also acquired in the early 1970ies at her new living sites local bookstore Hirschhäuser exemplars of the Topographical Map Weilmünster 1 : 25000 and also the adjacent areas and discovered first, that the Weilmünster map didin´t register most of the former mining tunnel entrances, what contributed to the awakening of her growing interest in that topic. The second discovery remained the unwaited existence of medieval hillgrave sites not far away from her new residence and the cluster accumulation of hillgraves mapped on both sides of the Lahn River Valley between Weilburg and Limburg, coincident to the combat areas of the World War II ending german V 2 rocket weapon program. By that way the weekend programs for the following decades became set.
Meanwhile her oldest son Peter, who identified himself in his surrounding mostly with his museal collection, run his school education towards his high school graduation at the Usingen „Christian Wirth Schule“ in 1977 and started parallel his political engagement in the local Weilmünster JUNGE UNION, the youth organization of the german conservative party CDU, followed by the obligatory military service until end of 1978, what limited his nature discovery possibilities from own initiatives. School class excursions from Usingen brought him to Nuremberg, Munich, the Berchtesgaden area, London, the Scotish Lake District at Lake Windermere and Marburg. A self organized language course furthermore drove him to Torquay and Cornwall. But from all this travels except from the visit of the Bavarian Koenigssee area Peter only returned with photographic specimens collected. The trip to Koenigssee included visits to the austrian border town Salzburg, to the Berchtesgaden Salt Mine, to St. Bartholomäe and the Obersee as well as the climbing of the Jenner Mountain, a program that proactive and gratefully excluded the otherwise usual visit of Hitler´s Tea House on the Obersalzberg. From the impressing Salt Mine visit a sample box of different coloured salt cubes was brought return to the museum collection. But by the decades this vivid exhibition object dissolved due to the high air humidity inside the Weilmünster house, that in that time still lacked a rain-water-impermeable roof cover.
But a certain something must have been touched by the Zanger family´s impetus and dedication to nature science studies, excursions to the vaste regional woodlands and their collectionist´s spirit, that rose the steadily growing museum specimen stock. And that something started to follow the families removal from Emmershausen to Weilmünster and never stopped to focus on their activities.
So the first visible echoe on the resettlement of the Nature Museum in Weilmünster without appropriate rooms for the exposition of their findings was to find in the emerging of the public rumor-tale, that the 3 historic family owned firearm weapons stem from a robbery burglary into the Weilburg Palace Museum, where several pistol guns allegedly were stolen during the 1970ies. A public story that built up itself on the first initiative of an public employee from conservation authority of Usingen district that in 1969 had already tried to claim the posession of these museum exposition pieces, mentioned in chapter I of the museum history description.
Had the Johannes Bückler crew´s progeny meanwhile abandoned their traditional working areas along the woodland roadsides and successfully claimed better endowed jobs inside the regional authorities offices, so that they dared to appear with the audacity to regather their once upon a time hidden and long ago lost weapons ? A topic that from then on started to examinate Rosemaries younger son Mark who decided early for a technical career and lost by that way his interest in nature objects.
And again, 30 years later in 2010, the historic weapons hold by Rosemarie Zanger´s Museum should arise to be a topic of public intromissions. The 3 pistols became consfiscated during an unexplainable Weilburg police raid into the CID Institute house at 2nd July of 2010, but some weeks later were returned to their owners. An episode that was already depicted in an earlier CID Institute Report chapter from 2017.
But external intromissions also hit the fossil collecting activity of the museum holder family. Had the Emmershausen Museum during 1968 until 1973 already generated broader interest in the Weil Valley fossils also inside scientific circles in Frankfurt and Wiesbaden and drove the discovery of the fossil collection site at the village margin of Emmershausen greater attention and interest to that place adjacent to the villages gasoline station, so was this sudden attention thrown on that forgotten Taunus village not necessarily welcome by all of it´s habitants. The existence of the fossil bearing rocks was put in doubt, the theory that the finding place must have been a prehistoric ocean reef was considered as phantasy and when more and more interested collectors appeared to search fossils, the decision was taken to dredge away the worthful rocks and to fence the new constructed empty place. So the museum lost it´s most rich and always available finding place for nature objects around 1980.
The
Museum´s 1980ies
The start of the second decade of the Rosemarie Zanger Family´s Museum at Weilmuenster markered first changes in the houshold, who´s members since 1957 had lived together under one roof. Both son´s left to start their professional formations outside the village and the remaining parents began to project their longed-for living place in Southern France Provence Region, where meanwhile they had established their summer residence inside their camping caravan at Saint Martin d´Ardeche, a pintoresque small town at the river banks at the exit of the wild-water Ardeche Canyon, situated at the feet of the Moorish Eagle-Nest town Aigüeze, where they spent their yearly summer holidays on Camping Site „La Cerisaie“.
Transitted by thousands of canoe travellers yearly, the Ardeche Canyon Valley during the 1970ies started to be one of the most famous french meeting places for International Rafters. But the ethnobiological history of this inaccessible lime-rock gorge at that time still was out of focus, probably because it gained last importance only two and a half decades ago during the Second World war time as retrieval site for Resistance Fighters, which used the same rock-caves to hide from persecution as some centuries before the Huguenots and Waldensians and probably many other precursors.
Near those important survival sites of her ancestors, Rosemary couldn´t sit calm like most other tourists at the river bank, staring at the bypassing canoes, leaving comments about the swimsuits or driving errors of their crews. Probably driven by intuition she started to climb inside the canyons rock walls and soon discovered several natural cavern entrances, where her attention first was attracted by the eye-catching stalactites. But later dwelling in the caverns soil sand brought to the daylight also bones and stone objects that suggested a former presence of humans inside that natural hide. Most amazing remained between these findings a monumental vertebrae bone that later was identified by conossoirs of archeology as Mammouth bone, a fact that estimulated the theory, that Mammouths inside Ardeche Valley probably must have had survived their prehistoric extinction until more recent centuries – until the hungry refugees from Luberon had to eat them during the 16th century persecutions.
With a certain probability nowadays – 40 years later – the Ardeche Valley cave entrances discovered by Rosemary and her husband Rolf during the beginning of the 1980ies remain still unexplored or their existence even has been forgotten again. Soon after having communicated the prehistoric finding site to local french friends, the cave´s hidden entrances where fenced with wire mesh, but a later research in 1995-98 brought the result, that the exact knowledge about the caverns entrance must have got lost. A new localization failed, meanwhile other parallel discoveries like the Chauvet Cavern at Vallon Pont d´Arc conquered the headlines of international publications on prehistoric sites in the Ardeche Valley. So the small number of prehistoric specimen brought by Rosemarie to her Weilmünster Museum shelfs never became identified and historically exactly assigned.
The following two decades until the end of the 1990ies Rosemary and Rolf Zanger directed their nature history discovery voyages uniquely to Southern France where they spent last 2 until 3 month a year. Their focus interest moved more and more onto the social-historic background of the regional emigrations towards the North, but their initial impetus, the searching of minerals and fossils, never terminated during their discovery trips towards many places in Ardeche, Gard, Drome, Vaucluse and Languedoc-Roussillion Departments, where latter the cultural-historic sites of the Cathar People Culture where studied by them, and sometimes a new collection specimen for the unexposed Museum shelfs was brought from those journeys to Weilmünster.
Besides this focus on Southern France, the migrational trajectory of the Weilmünster Zanger families oldest son Peter since 1979 opened rather distinct spheres and contributed by that way with museum exposition elements from other World regions. In 1982, having finished his initial professional formation as bank clerc and working in the foreign exchange department of the Cooperative Bank´s Central Money Institute in Frankfurt, the named family museum director (out of function), decided to start an academic career studying medicine at the Frankfurt Goethe University, but, due to the administratively reduced students admission (Numerus Clausus) during this decade, had to start his inscription in the Faculty of Biology, with the perspective of a later change from that subject to the more human-applied nature science career. A life path that didn´t lead him inside the aulas and lecture halls of medicine but opened his singular interdisciplinary view on the parallel life science fields of nature and human life studies.
The first years in Frankfurt until 1984 led Peter Zanger travelling to the Jugoslav Dalmatian coasts of Croatia, Montenegro and inside Kosovo, to the Spanish Costa Brava rock coasts between Cadaques and Tarragona, and to Greece and some Aegaeian Islands, namely Paros, Ios and Santorin. Some museum exposition nature samples have been brougth from these travels. Between theses figure most important the Costa Brava Turret Shell fossils.
The ultimate impetus for changing his professional carreer from office tasks to nature items probably was not only driven by the wish and intent to return from daily arid cipher management of account amounts as bank clerc to the amazing emotion of discovering sparkling cristals and fossils in the mountains rocks. Parallel to the step of changing his profession a new life-partnership began to interfere in the decision taking of the then 25 year old hobby naturalist, who met at Independence Day of 1982 in Frankfurt the daughter of a colombian marine biologist from Cali and a lawyer from Medellin, engaged strongly in left-wing political activities in Colombia. Sol Montoya, a former student of economy that had to leave her country during the Turbay-Ayala dictatorship, than started her career as academic ethnologist in Frankfurt and should occupy the place as life partner of Peter Zanger during less the next 40 years, influencing with her interests, knowledge, experience, views and not al least with her amazing shining personality strongly the development of Peters own character, setting the centers of his later activities as nature scientist and parallel photographer of nature and human life aspects.
During his studies at Siesmayer Street Faculty of Biology of Frankfurt Goethe University, Peter decided to engage himself in the zoology branch and found in Prof. Ulrich Maschwitz and Prof. Guenther Fleissner two tutors that introduced him to the mysteries of Ethoecology of Ants and Neurobiology of Circadian Rhythms in Arthropods, but a more profound study of insect systematic he started only after having obtained his diploma title in 1990, when he took a first employment as biologist in the Senckenberg Nature Museums Forest Reserve Project of Drs. Wolfgang Dorow and Guenther Flechtner. Subsequently his collectionist work as entomologist covered only the years between 1988 and 1998, so that all entomologic sample specimen of the Zanger family Nature Museum collection date exclusively in these years. The entomological collection of the Nature Museum includes arthropods from Colombia and Nicaragua, from study excursions to Rovinj, own professional field studies in the Vogelsberg, Spessart and Rodgau Area, an excursion to the Gardon River Valley in France and several collection sites in the surroundings of Frankfurt. Only the specimen from Colombia, Nicaragua and France have been partially dissected, mounted, classified and stored in showcases. Mostly own ethical reasons and the critical reflection of his work as entomologist, that included the active mortification of wonderful life beings for their later scientific examination and exposition, by his familiar surrounding persuaded him since 1995 more and more to abandon the scientific insect trapping and killing and inspired him towards the development of alternative species presentation and determination techniques, what made successively possible the new developed high resolution image capturing techniques of modern digital photography.
Parallel to his nature science studies and formation Peter Zanger transitted also a politicization process that furtheron influenced him strongly and that was mostly initiated by his new life contacts to Colombia and experiences related to his later Latin America travels – and not at least because the Faculty of Biology housed during the 1980ies an rather active student support group for the reconstruction efforts of the Revolutionary Sandinista Government in Nicaragua. Since 1986 the natural scientist in formation engaged in these circles (VFLU/SOFAMA) that worked for the development of biological pest control technologies to reduce the need of importation of expensive and most toxic pesticides to Nicaragua and to save so the scarce foreign exchange reserves of the Nicaraguan State. This step moved him in contact with the political area of conflict between the U.S. Reagan administration and the Nicaraguan Sandinista Govrnment, that also was reflected and accompanied in Germany by a strong Solidarity Movement with revolutionary efforts in Central and South America. That latter aspect attributed a greater importance to the biological Siesmayer Faculty location, situated exactly between the former U.S. Consulate and the former Headquarter of the U.S. Army in Europe at the Gral. Creighton W. Abrams Building (I. G. Farben Building).
So, during the 1980ies the greater travels to Colombia and later to Cuba, Nicaragua - where the designed family museum director advanced his studies and field experiments about the application of Neem Tree extracts against pests in soybean and stored beans – and than again to Colombia raised considerably the stock of nature exhibits of the Museum. But without ever being shown to an interested public, because most objects had to remain stored in boxes, like for example the lava rocks brought from Santiago Volcanoe between Managua and Masaya.
See also : CID Museum Mineral Catalogue - Volcanic Stones
Far more extensive as the growth of the number of collected nature exhibits however remains the increase of the collected photography stock, that includes not only nature species and landscape photographies but also gathered together a much more greater number of visual ethnological and contemporary society history testimonies on non-digital image carriers.
Other European nature excursion during the 1980ies led Peter Zanger and his life partner Sol Montoya to Costa Brava between Cadaques and Tarragona, the Andalucian Costa del Sol between Almerimar, Granada and Nerja, the Anso-Valley in spanish Navarra Pyrenees, the Vasquez Country between Vitoria and San Sebastian, Galicia between Sanabria and Ponteverdra, Northern Portugal between Geres National Park and Afife, the National Park Aigüestortes and Saint Maurici Lakes in spanish Lleida Province Pyrenees, the Cathar Country between Montsegur and Queribus in southwestern french Pyrenees Occidentales, the Baltic Coast at Frombork (Frauenburg) and the Ardeche and Gardon Canyons in Southern France.
As nature relevant sites visited in Nicaragua (Central America) during 1987 and 1988 figure The Ometepe Island with Altagracia, Balgue and the Maderas Volcanoe, San Juan del Sur, San Juan del Oriente, Apoyo Laguna Volcanoe Crater Lake, Mombacho Volcanoe, Granada and Isleta Islands, Masaya and Masaya Volcanoe Park with active Santiago Crater, Xiloa Volcanoe Lake, Leon, Poneloya Beach, Posoltega Experimental Agricultral Area, San Jacinto Telica Volcanoe Nature Reserve and Hot Springs, Pochomil, La Boquita and Casares Beaches, Sebaco, Matagalpa, Esteli and Tisey - La Estanzuela Nature Reserve, Ocotal Region, Puerto Cabezas and Bluefields.
In Cuba (Caribbean) excursions to La Havanna and Tarara where made.
Colombian (South America) nature relevant sites visited during 1985 and 1990 remain Bogotá and Montserrate, Guatavita, Tunja, Villa de Leyva, Ecce Homo and Raquira, Guaduas, Honda, Medellin, Envigado, Tamesis, Jardin, Santa Fe de Antioquia, Popayan, Silvia Guambiano Indigenous Reserve, Purace Volcanoe National Parque Paramo and Coconuco Hot Springs, San Agustin, San Andres de Pisimbala Tierradentro Indigenous Reserve, Santa Marta, Taganga, Tayrona National Park and Minca Sierra Nevada National Park, Cali, Palmira, Buenaventura and Gorgona Island National Park.
All excursion filled the photographic museum collection, today managed by the Foto CID Independent Internet Image Agency, with numerous nature and culture photographies and also brought some nature specimen to the museum shelfs.
The serpent is called native Nahui-Yacatl, Mahuaquite, Talla X or Terciopelo.
Peter Zanger / Foto CID Nature Studies January 1989
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Weilmünster, 18th November 2020 - 18:16 p.m. Last Actualization
