MacGregor reveals details of Humboldt Forum
‘A new museum for Berlin’ to connect the past and future
By Cinatra Fernandes
KUWAIT CITY, April 4: Neil MacGregor gave a fascinating lecture titled ‘A new museum for Berlin’ revealing details of the highly anticipated Humboldt Forum in Berlin, scheduled to open around the end of 2019. The talk was held at the Yarmouk Cultural Center as part of the Dar Al Athar Al Islamiyyah’s 22nd cultural season.
MacGregor is advisor to the German Minister of Culture on the planning of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. Previously, he was Director of the National Gallery and of the British Museum, both in London. He has broadcast frequently with the BBC, and the book accompanying his radio series in 2010, A History of the World in 100 Objects, has been translated into many languages. It attempts to show, by the close study of individual objects, the many connections that link different cultures and civilizations.
At the beginning of the 18th century, the Berlin Palace, designed by Andreas Schlüter was an important secular Baroque building. This old town palace of the Kings and the Kaisers in the heart of Berlin, is today being rebuilt with a very different purpose: to house the great collections of the cultures of East Asia, Africa, America and Oceania.
The story of this new museum begins with the fall of the Berlin Wall, a moment that changed the world. The politics of Europe and the world have never been the same since and it was also a moment that changed Germany profoundly. The reunification of Germany changed Berlin profoundly.
Opened
Berlin was a 19th century city conceived and built as one, linked by the Boulevard Unter den Linden running up to the Brandenburg Gate. A city divided in 1945 and brutally divided after 1961, the Brandenburg Gate stood as a frontier not only between West and East Berlin, but also between the socialist-communist world and the capitalist world, MacGregor remarked. “It was at this frontier that the tensions of the Cold War were played out and this gate that was opened after 1991 and that became the link between the East and the West of the city and it is the gate that leads us down the avenue.”
With an engraving of the 19th
Neil MacGregor delivers a lecture at the Yarmouk Cultural Center on Monday evening.
century, MacGregor illustrated how carefully planned the city was and how it was led and shaped by the royal baroque city palace. The city grew from the east to the west and all the buildings, avenues and new streets were designed around the palace. With the Berlin Palace as the Humboldt Forum, all of the surrounding historic buildings will re-gain their urban orientation.
In 1820, the King of Prussia decided that he would build opposite his royal palace, a great new museum that would house royal collections and be open to everybody. In time, this expanded to become the extraordinary ensemble of five world-renowned museums on an island in River Spree on which the cultures of the whole world were put together.
“There was nothing like it anywhere in the world. In London or Paris, the collections were split up. This was one of the great cultural achievements of the 19th century and hugely admired by everybody”, MacGregor stated.
The Berlin Palace, from the beginning was not like other palaces as it always had a museum that housed a collection of antiquities and coins and sculptures that was open to all. MacGregor shared that it carries many historic and contradictory moments that include some bitter memories of failed revolutions, to becoming the seat of the Kaiser, the venue where wars were proclaimed and the socialist revolution began, a site of violence, destruction in the world wars and the final demolition in 1950 as an imperial and military aggression which it never was. It was replaced by the Parliament building of the East German State. The Building had a great deal of asbestos and in bad condition and so after huge protests from East Germans, it was demolished. The valuable steel that remained was supplied to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, that was coming up at the same time.
The Humboldt Forum is going to be built in a reconstruction of the old 18th century baroque palace. “You will have here now, not the seat of power or the government, but the collections of the world. It is as an intellectual project without compare anywhere in the world and is symbolically a very powerful statement. Where once was European power at its most concentrated, here will now be the cultures of the world beyond Europe”, he remarked.
Allow
The purpose of this, he pointed out, is to allow a new understanding and a new discussion of the relationship between Europe and the rest of the world, and also the different cultures of the world and how they relate to each other. The Humboldt Forum is named in honour of the two Berlin brothers, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, who in the early nineteenth century pioneered a new way of thinking globally about human cultures and the natural environment.
The new museum will include a pedestrian passage that passes through the building, and a repurposed structure and courtyards to serve as new public places for the city. On the side facing the Spree, the building will feature a modern facade. Along with the museum galleries, there will also be exhibition spaces, where, drawing on all the collections of Berlin, themes of universal interest may be explored.
MacGregor presented a few objects that would be part of the Museum’s collection and stated that an apt symbol of the Forum was best scene in an object from the Congo, a double headed dog that has within it nails and blades. It was used in traditional societies as a place where the promises citizens made to each other were recorded, every blade and nail serving as a mark of promise. “The two heads look towards the past and the future, and represent the continuity of a society that has to live with its past however difficult and look to its future. That is what we hope the Humboldt Forum will be.”