The man behind the Museum of Diversity and Inclusion

As previously reported, there are ambitious plans for a very different type of museum, the Museum of Diversity and Inclusion, or Modi, to be housed in buildings previously occupied the Landis+Gyr company.

The man behind the project, Andreas Heinicke, is regarded as Germany’s most successful social entrepreneur. Born in Baden Baden, the now 62-year-old read literature and history and went on to gain a doctorate in philosophy. He has worked tirelessly to bring the problems of those born blind or deaf to the attention of the public, his efforts leading him to have been appointed a Global Fellow of the Schwab Foundation of Social Entrepreneurship of the World Economic Forum (WEF), not to mention his holding an honorary professorship in social business at the European Business School.

Prior to being interviewed by a journalist of the Zuger Zeitung, Heinicke had just returned from Cairo, where a “Dialogue in the Dark “exhibition is to open in 2019, and where people can experience what it is like for blind people to be in a park, a busy market or bar, for example. Indeed, the sighted public are to be led round the exhibition by blind people, super-heroes, as Heinicke refers to them.

Having been initially asked how it came to be that, in all the exhibitions he had organised over the years, some 10,000, blind, deaf or elderly people had found work through them, Heinicke replied this went back to when he was13, when his mother explained to him that, while one part of his family had been made up of Jews, others had been Nazis. He had spent many ears wondering how normal people could become mobilised to commit mass murder. Hence, he had decided to study history, talk with survivors of the Holocaust and visited former concentration camps to find answers.

Later, when employed by the German SWF radio station, he had been asked to help train a former newspaper journalist who had become blind as the result of an accident. He said he could just not imagine how anyone who had suffered such a fate could begin to cope with “normal” life again and recalled how he did not want to offend him by coming out with such phrases as “Nice to see you”. As Heinicke got to know him, he realised what a happy and optimistic person the blind man was and was shocked at his own preconceptions. “I realised that just because this person was blind was no reason to think his life was any less value than anyone else’s. It really made me think.”

Indeed, it not only made him think. It made him act, going on to set up a “Dialogue in the Dark” exhibition in Frankfurt in 1988, and having subsequently met a deaf woman, going on to set up a “Dialogue in Silence” exhibition. The permanent exhibition he set up in Hamburg has been running for 18 years now, attracting as many as 800,000 visitors a year, the aim being to promote diversity and inclusion in society.

As to how the museum in Zug might look, Heinicke said it would not be unlike an Apple store, where customers were asked about precisely what they were looking for and guided around accordingly. Visitors to the “Age” section might be asked, “Are you wearing Levi jeans?” or “Do you live in a patchwork family?” and be steered round accordingly, soon able to realise “where they belong, and where they do not,” and how arbitrary it all is and how easy it is to be made to feel excluded.

As to how Zug was chosen as a location for this project, Heinicke said various locations in German-speaking Switzerland had been considered, but the city was chosen after a chance meeting with a representative of Zug who showed much excitement about it. Hence this interim use of the former L+G premises for the Modi museum where as many as 70 people will be doing the equivalent of 40 full-time jobs.

As to how they might lure more visitors to the museum, talks would be given at schools and places of work all over the country to encourage them to visit it, with courses offered, too, in diversity management, for example. It is thought those who visit the food hall in the adjacent Shedhalle will surely want to visit the museum, too.

And what about finance?
Some CHF 2.8 million is needed to launch the project, some of which has already been raised, further foundations being targeted to see if they might like to contribute, too. One drawback, of course is that the museum is to be temporary only, “but we hope to remain there at least until 2012,” concluded Heinicke.