Berlin

The former Museum for German History on Unter den Linden required another form of renovation: as the GDR’s principal historical museum, it had combined traditional displays of armor, costumes, and documents with tendentious exhibits celebrating the Socialist Fatherland, including its infamous “Anti-Fascist Protective Barrier.” The structure in which the museum was housed, the old Prussian Zeughaus (Armory), was itself of historical importance, having been built by King Friedrich I of Prussia to hold his kingdom’s arms and war booty. Accordingly, it was covered in triumphant war deities and other bellicose motifs. Fortunately, the East Germans did not “demilitarize” the building when they appropriated it for their own use. Their claimed stewardship over German history was of course a source of irritation in the West. To trump the Communists in this domain, Helmut Kohl ordained in the mid-1980s that West Berlin must have a museum of its own focusing on the history of Germany up to 1945 (a museum devoted exclusively to the history of the Federal Republic was built in Bonn). The fall of the Wall, however, brought a change of plans: now Kohl’s government decided to take over and revamp the East Germans’ museum on Unter den Linden rather than to build a brand new structure in the capital. Without consulting with officials in Berlin, Kohl commissioned the Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei to renovate the Zeughaus and to design an annex for traveling exhibits. The chancellor clearly hoped that Pei would do for Berlin’s musty old historical museum what he had done for the Louvre in Paris and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. What “worked” in Paris and Washington, however, does not seem to have worked so well in Berlin. The new facility has not yet opened, but already it is possible to see that Pei’s brand of bland modernism does not harmonize with the classical-martial style of the original building.

In the early to mid 1990s, before the German Historical Museum was closed for its renovations, a number of exhibitions were mounted there that reflected the changed political order in Bonn and Berlin. Although they were well received by the public, some professional historians found them hardly less tendentious than the old East German displays. Moreover, these historians asked, was it legitimate for the government to try to generate a common or homogenized idea of the German past through carefully arranged objects and images? One critic suggested that the new museum amounted to a Geschichtsaufbereitungsanlage—a historical processing plant.

Just as divided Berlin had had duplicate national galleries—Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery in West Berlin’s Kulturforum and F. A. Stuler’s National Gallery on Museum Island—the divided city was also home to duplicate state libraries—Hans Scharoun’s Staatsbibliothek in the Kulturforum and the old Prussian Staatsbibliothek on Unter den Linden. Like the city’s art treasures, its book collections had been scattered during the war and then (partially) reassembled in separate quarters on opposite sides of the political divide. For example, the autograph score of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony, once held in its entirety in the Unter den Linden complex, came to be split between that facility, the “Stabi” in West Berlin, and a library in Poland. German reunification allowed all three movements of Beethoven’s work to be reunited in the temperature-controlled vault of Staatsbibliothek in the Kulturforum. Once similar technical features have been added to the Unter den Linden facility, the city’s entire collection of musical scores, maps, children’s books, and pre-1956 publications will be housed there, while the more modern collections will go to the Kulturforum.