The Ehrensaal (Hall of Honour) originally distilled to its strongest form the DM‘s message about science and technology. The museum founders intended it to perform an ideological yet apolitical function, a contra-diction that the present study examines through archival material from the museum’s first half-century. Initially the Ehrensaal was meant to parallel and strengthen the museum’s argument that scientists and engineers were just as creative and worthy of veneration as artists. Attempts to make the Ehrensaal a neutral and artistically stunning space ended with the First World War, and developments outside the museum continually enmeshed the room, changing its contents and meaning. Political turmoil and economic devastation after the war, the rise and collapse of the Nazi state, damage during the Second World War, and Germany’s division into two enemy states on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain – all helped shape the Ehrensaal and its presentation of history. As is so often the case with public monuments, the past as presented in the Ehrensaal has in actuality always been about the present. Case studies of particular portraits and the processes by which they entered the Ehrensaal highlight that reality.