"Home" at last:
The Bust of Nefertiti in Berlin's New Museum
(14th century BCE)

IT TOOK ONLY A few hours to obliterate Berlin's New Museum, the brightest jewel in the capital's proud crown of cultural heritage sites. British bombs blasted holes through its roof on the night of November 22/23, 1943 and then the flames took over the job. A further bombing in February, 1945 finished off the last undamaged wing. Pitched battles by SS and Red Army forces in the last days of the war destroyed what little had been preserved from the flames, leaving only blackened walls and shattered exhibition rooms behind.

The museum itself had already closed at the oubreak of war in 1939. This means that its more mobile treasures were hidden away in mine shafts and other protected sites, preserving most of them for later  generations to view in a hodge-podge of museums scattered across Berlin. But these seventy years of improvisation are finally over, because on October 17, 2009 the New Museum finally reopened its doors, allowing visitors to admire some of the world's greatest historical art collections at their original site.

Sleeping Beauty awakes

The New Museum was commissioned by Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV in 1841 and designed by star architect Friedrich August Stüler. The king wished to add a new museum to his "Museum Island" at the heart of the city near the royal palace as an addition to the nearby Old Museum and to house his collection of Egyptian art, Greek statues, prehistoric finds, copper engravings, ethnographic items, and other rare treasures. While Friedrich Wilhelm is remembered as "a romantic on the throne of Prussia," Stüler nevertheless made revolutionary use of steel girders and also deployed a steam-driven pile-driver in the construction process, making his building one of Europe's most modern museum structures upon its opening to the public in 1855. The building's dull exterior enveloped a lavish and downright hypnotic interior decoration scheme containing murals and ornaments that represented works of art in their own right.  In the 1930s a further addition joined the New Museum to the nearby Pergamon museum, linking the five institutions on Museum Island together into one of the world's most prestigious museum complexes.

Egyptian Courtyard in the New Museum (1862)

After its destruction in World War II, the building stood as a ruin for decades. This is what the Germans called its Dornröschenschlaf - its "Sleeping Beauty slumber." By the 1980s the New Museum was the most visible reminder of the horrors of war in East Berlin. The GDR government began plans to reconstruct it in 1986, securing or demolishing what was left of the original structure, and laid the cornerstone for a complete reconstruction of the building in September of 1989. Reunification in 1990 interrupted these plans, so that the actual reconstruction did not get underway until 1999. Another ten years and over 200 million Euros later, the new New Museum stands completed.

The Modern Hall (1862)

"History leaves traces"

But it is no longer the New Museum of the pre-war era. Instead of restoring the building completely to its original appearance (as with the nearby Berlin Cathedral, which was reopened in all its imperial glory in 1993), British architect David Chipperfield decided to resist public pressure to recreate what was lost. Instead, he chose to preserve what was still there and otherwise create a new museum within the shell of the old. This meant rebuilding completely destroyed sections in a purely functional style, installing entirely modern stairways where RAF bombs had blasted away the marble originals, and otherwise leaving war damage and bare brick walls open for all to see - and to think about. Essentially all that is left of the museum's elaborate ornamentation is what either could be carried away to safety in 1939 or what the war has left us to look at. "History leaves behind traces," Chipperfield explains. While this decision has outraged many patrons, the experience of seeing the museum's world-class collections reassembled under one roof will likely render this controversy moot.

Modern entrance and stairway in the New Museum

Egyptian busts and looted gold

The centerpiece of the 27,000 square meter New Museum is once more Berlin's renowned Egyptian Museum with the glorious Bust of Nefertiti, which a German archeological expedition excavated from the Amarna site in 1912 and later smuggled back to Berlin. The bust and the collection's other spectacular objects, many of which had been squirreled away in a mine under what would later turn out to be Allied-occupied territory, had been on display at a museum in Wiesbaden and then in the Egyptian Museum in West Berlin from 1967 to 2005. Another portion could be viewed in East Berlin's Bode Museum on Museum Island after 1958. The two sections were later reunited in a temporary exhibit in the Old Museum and have finally returned to their original location.

"Green Head" in the Egyptian Museum
c. 500 BCE

Part of Berlin's Collection of Classical Antiquities will be on display, along with the Museum for Pre- and Early History, which had been housed in a wing of West Berlin's Charlottenburg Castle since 1960. The latter's remarkable collection of Bronze Age artefacts includes the twenty-nine inch tall "Berlin Gold Hat" from southern Germany, whose ritual purpose we can only guess at today.

This museum had always been best known for the Troy collection that archeologist and Troy discoverer Heinrich Schliemann donated "to the German people" in 1881. But the centerpiece of this collection, "Priam's Treasure," will only be displayed as a copy. The original had been kept in a Berlin bunker during the war. When Hitler personally ordered all of Berlin's art treasures to be shipped westward to keep them out of the hands of the Russians in the spring of 1945, the museum's director refused to part with them. Russian troops promptly seized the treasure along with breathtaking quantities of other artworks from across eastern Germany for a museum of looted art that Stalin had intended to open after the war and later thought better of. The Russian government only grudgingly revealed the treasure's existence to the world in 1994. It has been on display in Moscow's Pushkin Museum since 1996 and, like so many other looted items, it is unlikely ever to return to Berlin.

But the New Museum's directors really don't have a right to complain. After all, the Egyptian government has been demanding the return of the Nefertiti bust for decades, and the Turks probably wouldn't mind getting their hands back on the looted Priam Treasure as well. When it comes to art treasures, "ownership" is always relative.

The original "Priam's Treasure" will not be on display

The completion of the New Museum represents both the conclusion of a decades-old effort to restore Museum Island to its original status and also the closing of one of the last great wounds slashed into the city's fabric by World War II.  And yet, Chipperfield's reconstruction ensures that the memory of that horrific event will be preserved right along with all the other memories that are housed beneath its roof. After all, the nightmare of the World Wars is just as much a part of our collective cultural heritage as the Bust of Nefertiti - even though it is a lot less beautiful.

You can take a virtual tour of the reconstructed New Museum by clicking on the image below.