Technisches Museum

Lonely Planet review

The Technisches Museum (Technical Museum) has been around since 1918, but thankfully has enjoyed a well-deserved overhaul in the past few years. Covering four floors, it's a shrine to man's advances in the fields of science and technology. There are loads of hands-on displays and heavy industrial equipment, but even with all the modernizing the exhibits recently received, they still look and feel outdated.

The ground floor is devoted to Nature and Knowledge, while the second floor is given over to Heavy Industry and Energy. Nature and Knowledge is filled with interactive scientific experiments with mostly German instructions. If you're into gazing at steam engines and mining models, then Heavy Industry is for you, but the museum's saving grace is its Energy section - it's full of fun and physical displays (the human-sized mouse wheel is particularly enjoyable). The top two floors host temporary exhibitions plus permanent displays on musical instruments and transport. The latter has some wonderfully restored old-timer trams and planes, but the museum unfortunately employs a 'look but don't touch' policy. You won't be entertained for hours at the museum but your kids will; time it right and they can join in with the regular activities organised by the staff. Das Mini, on the third floor, is specifically geared toward two- to six-year-olds.