Berlin: The Change In A Museum
Ian Johnson writes: ‘For the past quarter-century, the museums in Berlin’s genteel western suburb of Dahlem have been treated like a relic of the old days of the Cold War. Located on a side street near the campus of Free University in a series of modernist buildings designed by Jugenstil architect Bruno Paul, they housed masterpieces and artifacts from the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania, and Asia—a world-class collection far from the city’s once-divided center. On January 11, parts of the museum closed, with the rest scheduled to follow in a year. In 2019, a very different version of the museum is supposed to reopen in the approximately $630 million Humboldt Forum—the wildly ambitious effort to rebuild a lost Prussian palace in the center of Berlin and fill it mostly with works from the Dahlem collections.’
