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DÜSSELDORF, Germany: Ever wondered what war smells like? Or ponder the odor of love, or the stench of medieval Paris, or the sacred fragrance of religion?
A new exhibition in Germany allows visitors to discover unknown worlds of smells by sniffing their way through 81 different fragrances across 37 different galleries.
The show “The Secret Power of Scents,” which opens to the public on Wednesday at the Kunstpalast museum, in the western city of Düsseldorf, combines fragrances with art, taking visitors on a journey of more than 1,000 years of cultural history.
“This exhibition is an experiment — and an invitation for our audience to discover the history of scents with their noses,” said Felix Krämer, the museum’s director general.
The exhibition follows a chronological order, from religious artifacts of the Middle Ages through to contemporary art of the 21st century. The various galleries are equipped with scent steles, atomizers and diffusers to create a connection between the art and the smell of a specific time period or cultural context.
Waves of myrrh waft through a darkened gallery of Christian wood carvings depicting various scenes from the Bible. Christianity, but also Judaism and Islam used myrrh as a symbol for prayer and purification, the show explains.
Scents evoke direct emotional reactions more strongly than any other sense. So it comes as no surprise that visitors almost retreat in fear when they press a button in a gallery about World War I. The scent released from the diffuser was created by mixing the pungent smell of gunpowder with the metallic odor of blood and sulfur.
“Anyone who has ever experienced war, conventional war, will hate it, because you can actually smell the brutality of war here,” said Robert Müller-Grünow, the show’s curator and a leading expert in the field of scent and scent technology.
“It’s the first exhibition worldwide to bring scents into a museum in this form, format and scale,” he said.
On the other side of the fragrance spectrum, there’s the Venus and Adonis painting from 1610 by Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens showing two lovers.
“This room is all about passion and emotions,” said Müller-Grünow, adding that the smells diffused here are dominated by roses and the scent of the civet — a cat whose scent was considered erotic in the 17th century, but made today’s visitors turn up their noses in disgust.
Certain smells also connect to different eras of history — pressing the button to release the stench of medieval Paris made some visitors choke when they inhaled a mix of sewage, mold and unwashed bodies.
On the other hand, in a gallery dedicated to the Roaring 20s, there’s an oil painting by Gert Wollheim from 1924, called Farewell from Düsseldorf, which celebrates the liberation of women, who at the time began wearing bold lipstick, bobbed their hair and smoked cigarettes in public. The room is filled with the uplifting scent of tobacco, vanilla and leather — a mixture that’s a nod to famous early fragrances such as the historic Tabac Blond which was launched by the fragrance house Caron in 1919.
Moving on to modern art, the museum presents more contemporary smells between works of Andy Warhol, Yves Klein or Günther Uecker, that remind visitors of world-famous brands such as Coca-Cola or German airline carrier Eurowings — which diffuses a pleasant and relaxing scent on the plane when passengers board.
In addition to the application of scents in marketing, the museum also shows the role of very modern scents such as the fragrance molecule “Iso E Super,” which is not a type of gasoline, but rather a dazzling scent that supposedly makes its wearers more attractive.
“It’s a fragrance that smells like cedarwood, but it also has something very velvety and skin-like about it,” said the curator. “It smells very human, warm, and flatteringly approachable.”
For visitors strolling and sniffing their way through the show, which runs through March 8, the 81 different scents opened up a whole new world, visitor Kirsten Gnoth said.
“I’ve been to the collection here before, but now it’s completely new with scents that match the pictures and eras,” she said. “It’s exciting to combine art with scents.”

MAASAI MARA, Kenya: At dawn in a village in Kenya’s Maasai Mara wilderness, zebras rouse themselves and head away from the huts where they like to sleep as protection from lions.
Bernard Kirokor, 21, recounts watching an elephant give birth across from his village a few days earlier, showing a video of the mother protecting the newborn, its trunk poking up like a periscope to sniff for danger.
“The wildlife are our neighbors and we love them,” he said, as the villagers milked the herd of cattle gathered around their huts.
The village lies in the Nashulai conservancy, which prides itself on how the local Maasai community and their cattle continuing to live alongside the lions, elephants and giraffes for which the region is world-famous.
Community conservancies emerged in the 2000s to protect wildlife corridors, with locals pooling their individual plots and pulling down fences so animals could roam freely.
To make it pay, locals often leased their land to tourist companies and moved away.
Nashulai, which means “co-existence” in the local Maa language, was founded in 2016 with a determination to keep its 6,000 people in the conservancy.
It prides itself on being the first that was formed, owned and managed by local Maasai without help from an outside tourism company.
“We don’t want to create conservation refugees. The Maasai have lived with the wildlife for the longest time possible. Why do we have to move them because of conservation?” Evelyn Aiko, Nashulai’s conservation manager, said.
Nashulai earns money through a college in the conservancy, training locals to become rangers and tour guides, and study programs with universities.
Its model has earned international recognition, including the United Nations Development Programme’s Equator Prize in 2020 and a Collective Action Award from the Rights and Resources Initiative this year.
Connectedness
The system of conservancies has changed radically over the past decade, with almost all now embracing the idea that people should stay living in them, albeit with limits on development.
“A lot has changed in how they are governed,” said Eric Ole Reson, chief programs officer at the Maasai Mara Wildlife Conservancies Association.
“As we extended into more areas, with more settlements, we could not keep moving people,” he said.
This was important in Nashulai from the start.
“There was a present and clear danger of losing the cultural connectedness to the land... which contains all our stories for living, this land where the bones of our ancestors are buried,” said founder Nelson Ole Reiyia.
Nashulai is run by a council of elders who decide on grazing and conservation areas.
“It revives their old tradition of stewardship and their connectedness to the land and the wildlife,” said Ole Reiyia. “It has really given them a lot of pride.”
Lacking commercial tourism investors, Nashulai relies on donors for more than half its funding and faces many pressures.
One is climate change, as unpredictable rains make it hard to plan cattle-grazing and keep the area habitable for wildlife. The team is responding with regenerative programs like tree-planting.
The other threat is wealthy tourism operators next door. Last year, a fifth of Nashulai’s landowners were enticed into leasing their plots to tourist camps and moving away.
‘Not one-way’
But Maasai landowners across the region now play a very active role in managing conservancies across the region, sitting on joint boards with the tourism companies.
“It’s not a one-way system where someone dictates the payments,” said an expert who has helped negotiate the deals, but requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject.
“These negotiations go on for years and then they get renegotiated,” he said. “If people aren’t happy they’ll tell you about it.”
Many Maasai landowners have signed new leases in the last couple of years as the original deals expired, he said, so “clearly many people feel they have benefitted.”