For Berlin Museum, a Modern Makeover That Doesn’t Deny the Wounds of War
A preview: the Neues Museum in Berlin, whose modern restoration includes elements of the war-damaged original building. More Photos
BERLIN — The Neues Museum briefly reopened here last weekend (was reborn, seems more like it), and local newspapers reported that more than 35,000 Berliners, many of them waiting hours in the cold in lines stretching nearly half a mile, filed into the still empty building over three days to see it.
The art that will go inside (Egyptian and pre- and early history, as in the prewar years) won’t be installed until the fall. This little preview was cooked up as a kind of civic ceremony. There was a ritual turning over of keys to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, an occasion when the building could speak for itself.
And it does, poetically, and not just for itself. It’s at the heart of the so-called Museum Island, a complex at the center of the city, which the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV in the 19th century conceived as a public sanctuary of culture and learning, a modern Acropolis. The Neues Museum opened in 1855 as the island’s “focal point,” in the words of the building’s architect, Friedrich August Stüler; and with its displays of art and archeology, it was meant to cultivate, as he put it, “the most elevated interests of the people.”
But, typical of Berlin, a city forever on the verge of greatness but never quite becoming the glorious megalopolis it dreams of being, only in 1930 did the last of the Museum Island buildings, the current Pergamon Museum, finally open. Then nine years later the whole complex had to be shut down with the onset of the war. Nine years and out.
The Neues Museum suffered more than any other structure there from Allied bombs dropped in 1943 and 1945. (This is not to mention the destruction to the art in it that was too large to be moved out for safekeeping.) For decades afterward the museum simply lay in shambles, exposed to the elements, neglected by the former Communist East Berlin to which Museum Island belonged.
Its revival now, at a cost of some $255 million, testifies among other things to the civic virtues of dogged perseverance, and as such the building is something of a cautionary tale too. In its tortured and conflicted efforts at urban renewal, Berlin these days often seems to wish both that the worst parts of its past could be erased and that better ones could be magically summoned back to life: as if the city might be returned to what it was in, say, 1928.
But the past persists, as a burden or opportunity, depending on one’s perspective, more so here than perhaps anywhere else in Europe. David Chipperfield, the London architect in charge of resuscitating the Neues Museum, recognized this truism and turned burden into opportunity. His renovation, an 11-year effort (ordeal is perhaps the more apt word at this point), began from the unobvious and instantly disputed proposition that a “Piranesian pile,” as he called the vivid jumble of remains, could yet be put back together. The undertaking would be the world’s biggest-ever Humpty Dumpty project.
All usable scraps and remnants of the original, countless thousands of pieces, big and small, including even bullet holes (if they weren’t too big), were to be incorporated into the building, as Mr. Chipperfield and his team saw fit. Every wall, floor, lintel, column, frieze, mosaic and ceiling was treated as part of this vast jigsaw puzzle. The process, Mr. Chipperfield has repeatedly said, entailed “millions of decisions,” technical, aesthetic and political.
Where no pieces of the original survived, new spaces were invented along the lines of Stüler’s original. The whole northwest wing of the building, for example, had been destroyed by the air raids; much of the southern end, including one magnificent gallery with a soaring cupola, now reinvented in ingeniously modern terms by Mr. Chipperfield, was demolished by the East Germans when they undertook an aborted renovation not long before the Wall fell. And the colossal stairwell, the centerpiece of the building, modeled after a plan by Stüler’s great teacher, the neo-Classicist Karl Friedrich Schinkel, was left an empty shell by the bombardments.
Reconceiving these and other gaps, Mr. Chipperfield copied the original proportions of Stüler’s rooms, which are beautiful, and also stuck with Stüler’s idiosyncratic but elegant layout, which appears symmetrical but isn’t. The goal was to come up with a satisfying visual whole that would remain everywhere legible and honest. Honest in that the new parts should look clearly new, the old, old, while the two go together gracefully. Concrete, wood, metal and recycled bricks, often covered with slurry so the original fragments blend more seamlessly in with what’s new, provide a subtle, muted palette for the modern interventions.
What results isn’t a Peter Brook-like Bouffes du Nord, the Paris theater: it isn’t shabby chic, or what German critics of this project have taken to calling “ruin nostalgia.”
It’s not the Gedächtniskirche, either, the so-called “hollow tooth” Memorial Church in West Berlin, bombed during the war, now preserved as an immense admonitory ruin, towering over one end of the city, laying entirely bare the evidence of its history.
Mr. Chipperfield’s museum is instead a modern building that inhabits the ghost of an old one. It’s a patchwork of vestigial shards, whose organization is the consequence of all those millions of decisions — decisions that in one respect should never have been the responsibility of any architect, since in this city historic preservation, especially with such freighted monuments, is always a matter of German responsibility and national identity, no less than a matter of esthetics.
But Mr. Chipperfield’s museum looks so beautiful and is so eloquent that it short-circuits doubt and criticism. Germans who complained over the years about “ruin nostalgia” (they were the real nostalgists) said that the country, by association with such a symbolic site, shouldn’t continue to be held hostage to the worst episode in German history. Better, they argued, rebuild the Neues Museum as it originally looked, from scratch, without all the bullet holes and rotting columns, along the lines of the fake 18th-century Hohenzollern Stadtschloss on Unter den Linden, the city’s central boulevard not far away, which, if Germany ever comes up with the nearly $1 billion the building will cost, is now on the drawing board.
Maybe with the success of the Neues Museum, which will open officially on Oct. 16, the Schloss supporters will reconsider that misguided plan. Meanwhile, from the slender bow-string iron trusses, lovingly restored in the upper-story galleries, to the marbled floor in the octagonal room where the famous head of Nefertiti (now on view in Schinkel’s Altes museum next door) will be installed, and even to the new concrete galleries whose simplicity is itself a revelation, the new Neues Museum offers a variety of small technological and visual marvels that speak, as Stüler intended, to the benefits of keeping an open mind.
As for the grand central stairway, now under a basilica roof, it rises between bare brick walls toward towering windows, toward the light, then doubles back to lead upward again to more windows, more light. The concrete and dark-beam design reinvents Stüler’s original concept, which becomes a kind of chrysalis out of which now emerges a new, modern grandeur. The space is a metaphor, you might say, for Germany today, which surely Stüler would also have appreciated.
Even the 19th-century frescoes by Wilhelm von Kaulbach, which once traced the progress of man from the Tower of Babel to the glory of Prussia, persist as small fragments embedded high up in the brick, like half-recalled dreams come to life. In such ways the Neues Museum isn’t Lazarus exactly, but it’s almost a miracle. And with it Berlin has one of the finest public buildings in Europe.
Again.
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