German Ceramics Museum (Hetjens Museum) named after its founder Laurenz Heinrich Hetjens, a wealthy Düsseldorf ceramics collector, first opened in 1909. The museum is located in the historical baroque palace of Nesselrode in Düsseldorf's old town, near to the banks of the river Rhine. Over the decades, the museum has amassed a collection spanning 8,000 years of ceramic history. The museum presents the world of ceramics universally across all cultures and epochs.

Visitors may discover antique vases, Italian majolica, Spanish and Portuguese tiles, East Asian and European porcelain and contemporary ceramics. The abundance of exhibits showcase the diversity of the world's different cultures and the different uses of ceramics, in electrical engineering, for medicine and space technology. The multifaceted and colourful history of ceramics is illustrated and made accessible to an audience under one roof.