The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Two worlds collide at Berlin’s new attraction
Adrian Bridge explores the palatial – and controversial – Humboldt Forum, built on a site where East and West once battled for cultural supremacy
The rooftop terrace of Berlin’s extraordinary new palace is a great place to take stock of what is going on in the city of permanent reinvention. For a start it offers a wonderful 360-degree view: almost within touching distance are the Berlin Cathedral, the cultural powerhouses of Museum Island and the top of Unter den Linden, the city’s showcase boulevard leading to the Brandenburg Gate. Architecturally, the 18th-century baroque and quincecoloured statuary appears to complement perfectly the grand buildings at the classical core of Berlin.
But what lies behind the façade? For a start, the palace – at least on three sides – really is a façade. Those Italianate columns and princely flourishes conceal an interior that is 21st-century minimalist in its design and home to a series of exhibitions and cultural interactions intended to put the Humboldt Forum on a footing with the Louvre in Paris and the British Museum in London. Neil MacGregor, the former director of the latter, was heavily involved with the early stages of the Forum’s planning and believes it represents “Europe’s most important museum project”.
There is certainly lots to engage with, on many levels. And since opening to visitors for real rather than virtually this summer, there has been a steady flow: Berliners curious to see exactly what a project that has cost €700million (£600million) and been the subject of such bitter disputes is all about; foreign travellers possibly surprised to discover that in addition to a new cultural hub, Berlin now has what looks like a royal palace that would not be out of place in Paris, Rome or Vienna.
A key aspect of the displays is the history of the site: for some 500 years the palace housed the Hohenzollern family, rulers of Brandenburg, Prussia and, finally, the German Empire. The last resident was Kaiser Wilhelm II, not someone for whom many people – Germans included – feel affection. (In one corner of the Forum are some of the trunks he used when he was sent packing into exile in Holland.)
The East Germans, who ruled in this part of Berlin after the Second World War, believed the palace – badly bombed in 1945 – was irredeemably associated with imperialism and militarism. Rather than reconstruct it, they blew it up to be replaced with a glitzy new Palast der Republik, home to the communist country’s parliament and a bowling alley and dance hall designed for “Jugendtreff ” (meeting of young people).
There are flashbacks to these times in another corner of the
Forum, alongside a camera that would have been used for surveillance.
So what to do with such a controversial site when, whatever is decided, you’ll be damned if you do, damned if you don’t? The solution reached by the joint German parliament – to the consternation of those with a soft spot for the old East Germany – was to knock down the asbestos-riddled (and unspeakably garish) Palast der Republik and replace it with something that looked like the old Hohenzollern palace from the outside, but which inside would be a place of cultural stimulation and a forum for forward-looking debate.
It is certainly a forum for debate. Among the most controversial of the collections here are those moved from the Ethnological and Asian art museums previously housed in a west Berlin suburb. The artworks are undoubtedly stunning: intricate face carvings and boats from
the islands of Oceania; Buddhist cave paintings from the Silk Road; a pearlstudded throne from the Kingdom of Bamum in what is today Cameroon.
But with ever more questioning of the acquisition of cultural artefacts during colonial times, what seemed a good idea when the decision was taken in 2002 doesn’t appear quite so clever from the perspective of 2021. Displaying objects plundered from distant lands on a site so intimately connected with the kaisers has not played well. “It’s a toxic mix,”
admits Alfred Hagemann, head of history at the Humboldt Forum. “I doubt we’d take the same decision today.”
But this is an ongoing debate worldwide and, as elsewhere, the way in which such objects are labelled and contextualised is now designed to force reflection. “Colonialism and Coloniality” is a key area of exploration in the Forum and no visitor can be in any doubt that many of the objects on display were acquired illegitimately. Nor can they be in any doubt that the repercussions of that plundering are still being played out today.
Host communities have been brought into the debate. In some cases objects that were to be displayed will be returned – an agreement has been reached with Nigeria with regard to some Benin bronzes. In others, representatives from the countries of origin are having a say in the way in which artefacts are presented.
“There’s a dialogue,” Hagemann tells me. “We really do want people to see beyond the façade. This is not Florence. We are trying to put something that has been an academic discussion into the broader consciousness.”
Such an outcome would be music to the ears of the two enlightened figures after whom the museum is named, Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt – the first a linguist and philosopher; the second a naturalist, global explorer and prototype environmentalist.
There is much to ponder as I come up for air in the lovely Schlüterhof courtyard embedded in the Forum and already gaining new life as a venue for concerts, discussions and video art displays. And yet more as I head to the café/bar on the rooftop terrace with its dramatic views to north, south, east and west; to the past, present and future. “Isn’t this something?” says a friend who grew up in the eastern part of the city. She has no regrets about the demise of the old Palast der Republik and is rather proud of what has finally gone up in its place.
I order a glass of riesling. To the city of permanent reinvention has been added the Humboldt Forum. Make of it what you will.