Hanf Museum Berlin

Special Exhibition at the Hemp Museum – Millions of People Freed from Fear!

On April 1, 2024, the Consumption/Medicinal Cannabis Act came into force. This law initiated a turnaround in cannabis policy almost a year ago. Instead of increasingly tightening the ban and increasing the pressure of prosecution, as in previous decades, the focus was shifted to the realities of life for the people affected.

For the first time, cannabis legislation steered toward real-life circumstances, rather than reinforcing the apparent ideal of absolute abstinence with criminal prosecution.

From March 30 to May 31, the Hemp Museum is presenting a special exhibition marking one year of the Cannabis Act and answering the questions:

What made the situation so unbearable?

What was the law supposed to change?

What happened in the first year?

These questions are clearly answered in short texts and moving images.

Opening Event: Sunday, March 30
Start: 1:00 PM
Speeches begin at 2:00 PM, followed by a discussion

Three decades of commitment to cannabis as a raw material, medicine, and recreational drug would be reason enough to celebrate. But 2024 offers the Hemp Museum even more reasons for a proper party. It will take place next Friday (December 6th).

The year 2024 will go down as a special one in the history of the German legalization movement. Disputes over final amendments to the emerging cannabis law in the Bundestag, the intense fight against the Bundesrat’s referral to the Mediation Committee, the euphoria of the new realities in April, sobering decisions by the Federal Court of Justice, legally blooming hemp plants on many balconies, the continuation of discriminatory low THC limits in road traffic, the first permits for cannabis clubs, the CDU/CSU’s announcement to reverse everything next year…

“Emotional rollercoaster” is a very cautious description of the past hemp year. And it’s not over yet.

Hemp enthusiasts are eagerly awaiting one last highlight of the year – the 30th anniversary of the Hemp Museum on Friday, December 6th. The museum spaces in Berlin’s Nikolaiviertel are not only the scene’s oldest infrastructure, they are the secret heart of the legalization movement. Nowhere else in Germany are the pulse and sentiment surrounding cannabis so immediately palpable. Nowhere else have the possibilities of legal cannabis been and are dreaming so intensely.
The Hemp Museum is a meeting place for activists and those hungry for information, the birthplace of countless campaigns and initiatives. Cannabis culture has been lived here for three decades. And “incidentally,” the country has been transformed.
Museums have rarely been so colorful.

The 30th anniversary of the Hemp Museum is therefore not just the museum’s anniversary, but a celebration of the entire legalization scene. For the unofficial conclusion of the 2024 hemp year, the museum team has planned a colorful potpourri of information, politics, and culture.

12 p.m. Press tour and hemp brunch
2 p.m. Birthday cake
4 p.m. Discussion: No fight, no hemp
6 p.m. Discussion: Quo vadis cannabis?
8 p.m. Live music: Groß & Artig
10 p.m. Live music: Götz Widmann

In addition to the special events, the Hemp Museum offers a number of special activities for birthday guests. There will be three “special exhibitions for one day”:

The Berlin-based industrial hemp processor “Hanfwerk” will cater to the guests’ culinary needs with its hemp seed spreads and pestos, soy-free Hanfu (hemp tofu), and regionally produced cannabis-infused beverages.

The Industrial Hemp Network e.V. will offer workshops on “Building with Hemp” throughout the day. Dr. Norbert Höpfer, an expert in hemp lime and hemp construction, will literally demonstrate how hemp-clay bricks are made. The mineralogist, renovation consultant, and restorer will also be available to answer visitors’ questions about hemp building materials.

The recreational hemp community will also get their money’s worth at the Hemp Museum’s birthday celebrations. Thanks to a collaboration between the Berlin specialty store Verdamftnochmal and the CSC HighGround Berlin e.V., visitors to the museum’s anniversary celebration have the chance to experience the lowest-risk way to enjoy intoxicating cannabis. Various vaporizers will be presented, and the advantages and disadvantages of each device will be explained. Cannabis enthusiasts are invited to immerse themselves in the exciting world of terpenes.

Rockmanna for body and mind

Once all guests have a hemp-infused slice of birthday cake in their stomachs, the museum feeds their minds. It also hosts two afternoon expert discussions in which activists will review 30 years of legalization and anticipate developments in the coming decades.

The evening program will then focus on hemp culture, or more specifically, cannabis-inspired music.

First, at 8 p.m., Groß&Artig will take to the museum’s birthday stage. The Braunschweig punk-rock quartet tells the story of what makes up the everyday lives of many cannabis enthusiasts… without falling into stoner clichés.

Of course, Happy, Lasse, Rico, and Peter dream of one day being “King of the Weeds,” with fields stretching to the horizon. But Groß&Artig are aware of the dangers of the green magic from the “Little Box.”

With the express approval of the Office for Resistance, Groß&Artig remain true to their punk roots and, despite their love of social excess, remain political. They dream of the blessings of unemployment and, together with their audience, cheer the answer to the question “What does a man do with his axe?”
Smoking hashish makes you harmless
Götz Widmann

A punk rocker at heart and a singer-songwriter by nature, the artist who wants to end the museum’s anniversary from 10 p.m. onwards as eventful and emotionally charged as the year 2024 was.

With Götz Widmann, the “Godfather of Drug-Political Songwriting” honors the Hemp Museum. He is thus fulfilling a long-held dream for himself and his visitors, having already promised at a 1998 performance at the museum that he would return once his democracy-glorifying songs had fulfilled their purpose. No one could have guessed how long that would take.

For three decades, the Bonn native has been tirelessly promoting legal cannabis in public. No scene event or legalization demonstration goes by without a stoner anthem from his pen. Götz has played in coffee shops, at the Green Party conference, in front of the Federal Ministry of Finance, and is a regular guest at the Hemp Parade.

At the museum’s anniversary celebration, Götz Widmann will present parts of his new program “Blütenduft” (Flower Scent). Naturally, this will include classics from “Hank Starred on an Overdose of Hash” to “Magic Tax.”
Götz has also promised to fulfill spontaneous song requests, at least during the encores.

We look forward to seeing you and the 30th anniversary of the Hemp Museum Berlin – Friday, December 6, 2024, 10 a.m.–midnight.

No other celebrity committed himself so early, so intensively, so credibly to the legalization of cannabis as Wolfgang Neuss. The Hemp Museum ushered in a “New Year” on Saturday in honor of its upcoming 100th birthday.

Hans Wolfgang Otto Neuss ran away from home at the age of 15 because he wanted to be a clown. Before the journeyman butcher could become “Germany’s sharpest tongue” (Richard von Weizäcker) and an icon of the German legalization movement, the “Wolfgang caterpillar” (Neuss over Neuss) had to metamorphose multiple times.

Forced to do military service on the Eastern Front by the Hitler regime, Neuss shot off the index finger on his left hand and became a pacifist. In the young Federal Republic, he became a sought-after star in film and television. The prosperity thus acquired was soon evident in the bon vivant. But the next transformation was long overdue.
Wolfgang Neuss wrote, shot, acted and set to music his own film productions, which were completely different from the homeland ham of the 50s. With strips like “We Cellar Children” and “Comrade Münchhausen” Neuss not only reinvented himself but also a genre of West German film culture – the political comedy. In doing so, he inspired a generation of authors such as Wolfgang Menge and Helmut Dietl.

From the man with the drum to the town Indian

The friends that Neuss had found in the political joke in the 1950s together with his congenial stage partner Wolfgang Müller and at the Berlin cabaret Die Stachelschweine were not only lived out in films. In the 1960s, “The Man with the Timpani” was considered one of the best German cabaret artists. Celebrities cavorted in the audience during his solos. Neuss got to know Wolf Biermann and Rudi Dutschke, among others. By the end of the decade, the movie-goers’ darling had become a bourgeois terror and revolutionary. Acting offers and stage appearances became rarer, Neuss only made headlines with an application for social assistance and a charge of possession of 35.8g of hashish and several LSD trips.

Just when the Federal Republic of Germany threatened to forget him, Wolfgang Neuss reinvented himself. Toothless and with long hair, the “Stadtindianer” (Werner Pieper) commented on the world from the couch at home or in the cabaret. “Neuss vom Tage” brought him the German cabaret prize in 1983, a column in Stern and a comeback that hardly anyone would have believed the almost 60-year-old could do. The highlight of the year was undoubtedly an appearance on the SFB program Today on December 5th, where he met Richard Weizäcker, the mayor of Berlin at the time.
As successful as the celebrity Wolfgang Neuss was in the 80s, the person was stricken. Neuss suffered from cancer and smoked large amounts of hashish to relieve the pain. His saying so publicly led to another house search in 1984 and another conviction for drug possession.

 Today I'm not making supper. Today I'm thinking.
 Wolfgang Neuss

With a performance on his 65th birthday, Wolfgang Neuss finally said goodbye to his audience. He died six months later on May 5, 1989.

Special exhibition “100 Years Wolfgang Neuss”

“Wolfgang Neuss is dead, let’s talk about world literature” wrote Matthias Beltz in his obituary for the man with the drum. The Hemp Museum prefers to talk about him and is now devoting a series of special exhibitions to Wolfgang Neuss on the occasion of his hundredth year. At the start of the new year, the museum invites you to follow Wolfgang Neuss’ life in contemporary statements on the “Berlin abomination” (picture). In addition, it allows “Zwerg Mundwerk” (FAZ) to have their say in selected texts.