EN
The marketing campaign launched by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic ahead of the upcoming centenaries of the national geographic museums in Prague, Brno and Opava (1814–1818) is a most suitable starting point for a long overdue critical discussion of the current approach to the history of museums in the Czech Land in particular and Central Europe in general. The concept of a museum‘s foundation, establishment or first opening must be viewed historically because of the difference in its content in a society divided into estates (pre-1860) and in a civil society (post-1860). This paper is a call for a more fine grained analysis of the history of museums as institutions and a detailed comparative treatment of this concept with the aim of achieving a more objective phenomenology of the museum in 1800-1945 Central Europe.