A museum dedicated to Hans Christian Andersen is preparing for the storyteller’s bicentenary. In Odense, the city where Andersen was born on April 2, 1805, $4.4 million has been spent on the museum, one of the Scandinavian country’s best-known tourist destinations. Last year, some 112,000 people — half of them from abroad — visited the museum.
THE MUSEUM’S upgrading — part of an effort to prepare for the 200th anniversary of Andersen’s birth in 2005 — includes the installation of several touch screens and computers featuring works by Andersen, author of “The Ugly Duckling” and “The Little Mermaid.”
“Had he been around today, I’m sure he would have written his fairy tales on a computer,” museum spokesman Claus Koch said recently. “He was fond of then-modern technology and was fascinated by photography.”
Many of Andersen’s 175 fairy tales, 14 novels, 800 poems and dozens of travel diaries have been scanned and stored digitally. His works have been translated into more than 140 languages.
The museum was built in 1908 around the one-story, low-slung yellow half-timbered corner house where Andersen was born.
The museum’s modernization began in 2001 and is expected to be done in 2004. Koch said part of the renovation includes restoring the house to the way it looked in 1805. Besides moving the entrance and changing the layout of the halls, the museum will focus on what life was like in Denmark during Andersen’s lifetime. He died in 1875.
“We want to put him back in his time element,” Koch said.
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