Humboldt Forum

Wikipedia knows: The Humboldt Forum is a museum dedicated to human history, art, and culture, located in the Berlin Palace on the Museum Island in the historic center of Berlin. It is in honor of the Prussian scholars Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt.

Berlin Castle and the Monument of the Great Elector around 1900

The Berlin City Palace (Berliner Stadtschloss), formally the Royal Palace, was the principal residence of the House of Hohenzollern from 1443 to 1918. Expanded by order of King Frederick I of Prussia according to plans by Andreas Schlüter from 1689 to 1713, it was thereafter considered a major work of Prussian Baroque architecture.

Palace of the Republic, popularly derisively called Erichs Lampenladen
(Erich's Lamp Shop). Erich Honecker was an East German leader.

The Stadtschloss was damaged during Allied bombings and the Battle of Berlin in World War II and was demolished by the East German authorities in 1950. In the 1970s, it became the location of the modernist East German Palace of the Republic (the parliament building of East Germany).

After German reunification and several years of debate and discussion, particularly regarding the fraught historical legacy of both buildings, the Palace of the Republic was demolished in 2009. The reconstruction of the Berlin Palace started in 2013 and lasted until 2020.


Whenever Red Baron was in Berlin, he observed the building progress at the Humboldt Forum. The "museum" is now finished, and nearly all, mostly ethnological, exhibitions have moved in. So I decided to spend my birthday at the Forum.

From my hotel near the Hauptbahnhof, I took the new subway number five that runs below Unter den Linden to Alexanderplatz. Stepping off the train at Museumsinsel,  you have a surprise.

The barrel vault of the station presents a starry sky, a homage to Schinkel's stage design for the opera The Magic Flute in 1816.

View of the Altes Museum and the Berliner Dom

The Humboldt Forum is the natural extension of a chain of museums flanked by the Berlin Cathedral on the right.

A bronze model of the Humboldt Forum clearly shows how the Stadtschloss rose again from scratch.

The entrance to the Forum, the side portal 3, faces the left arm of the Spree River. The original facade was meticulously reconstructed.

On the left side of the portal, a plaque and a relief commemorate the first king in (!) Prussia, Frederick I. Architect Andreas Schlüter presents the model of the new palace to the king. In the background, master builder Johann Friedrich Eosander explains the plan of the palace extension to Queen Sophie Charlotte. The Latin inscription reads, "Frederick I King of Prussia, Elector of Brandenburg 1688-1713. I will conduct my royal office in such a way that I know it is a public matter and not my private affair."

On the right side, it is not Frederick the Great who is commemorated, but Elector Frederick II of Brandenburg at laying the foundation stone for the first castle in 1443. The accompanying inscription in Low German reads, "It is well known to everyone that we have never insisted on strife or war throughout our lives and still today desire nothing but my honor and right."

In the morning, I booked an architectural tour, "All a facade?" in English because all guided tours in German were overbooked. So we were only nine people, and our guide took it friendly and easy.

Above is the original facade of the Stadtschloss, and, yes, the replica, built from scratch according to old photographs, is a concrete construction with a "new" but familiar face. The front of the building is so long that the wide-angle lens of my iPhone only embraced half of it.

LHS

RHS

The courtyard (Schlüterhof) is faithfully rebuilt with all its statues and decorations. 

Mercury looking at Hercules.

Some salvaged originals are on display at the Sculpture Hall. 

We were on historical grounds. At the Hohenzollern Stadtschloss:

HMS Victory

The legend reads: Kaiser Wilhelm II and his wife, Auguste Viktoria, received twelve silver models of ships for their silver wedding anniversary in 1906. Among them was the Victory, Nelson's flagship in the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar. In leading the British to victory, the admiral was also establishing the pre-eminence of Great Britain at sea. 

Wilhelm II had the ships exhibited in his apartment at the palace. His enthusiasm for all things maritime was affiliated with German imperial politics. The empire was on a quest for global influence and expanded its fleet considerably. This posed a challenge for Great Britain in particular.

And the East German Palace of the Republic once stood here:

The Volkskammer (East German parliament) votes on German unification.
Martin Kirchner, CDU deputy, at the ballot box. (©ullstein bild)

The legend: This is the place where the Volkskammer, nominally the country's highest constitutional organ, met from 1976 onwards. Until the peaceful revolution in the autumn of 1989, however, the Volkskammer was a rubber-stamp parliament that simply ratified documents presented to it by the East German party leadership.

The deputies used the above glass ballot box to vote in the first freely elected Volkskammer in March 1990. It symbolized the new transparency of parliamentary decision-making in a democracy. On 23 August 1990, it was used to vote on East Germany's accession to the territory governed by the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The eastern concrete facade of the Humboldt Forum opening on a vast terrace remained undecorated.

The Western sun is reflected in the sphere of the TV tower, forming
the shape of a cross. This optical phenomenon was
a stake in the flesh of the communist rulers in East Berlin.

From the terrace facing the right arm of the Spree, you may admire the excursion boats and the Berlin TV tower.

At the end of the guided tour and being my birthday, I invited the participants to an aperitif at the Schlüterhof.

In the afternoon, I started with the following:

This is an exhibition on the historically and currently globally networked city of Berlin. Various "information islands" named Revolution, Boundaries, Fashion, Dictatorship, Emigration, etc., are each accessible through two gates asking the visitor to decide: conservative, liberal, left-leaning, progressive, religious, nationalist, cosmopolitical, you name it. Red Baron was equipped with a sensor and went through the exhibition. The decisions he took at the gates were recorded.

You can spend hours in "Berlin Global." Here are some objects that caught my attention:

And when the wall came tumbling down ...

... behind the Potsdamer Platz was barren and empty.

Emigration. The legend tells us: When the Nazis established their dictatorship, many artists - Jews, communists, liberals, and others - were sacked as "undesirable elements." They were banned from working and persecuted. Thousands of artists were forced into exile. This is vividly illustrated here by the signatures of 43 theatre and film workers from Berlin. They all had links to Max Reinhardt. 

Most of them had to face immigration rules and restrictive labor laws that made it difficult to get settled in their new countries. Actors were specifically affected by language problems. Many of them had to find alternative work. 

Other exiles were able to use their professional experience to win influence in film production in Hollywood.

Here is the result of my evaluation based on my choice of gates: Equality is not too bad, but I had hoped for more Freedom.

I needed a coffee break, and for a moderate fee of 3 euros, I found my way to the Dachterassencafé (rooftop café) Baret. As a bonus, I enjoyed a fantastic view.

View of the Museum Island. On the left side is the German Historical Museum,
and on the right is the Berlin Cathedral.
The high building in the back on the left is the hospital Charité.

The castle cupola

The Prussian King Frederick William IV chose the script surrounding the dome in 1844. He took these words from the Bible: "Salvation is not found in no one else, (...) but in the name of Jesus. That at the name of Jesus, all the knees of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth should bow." (Acts IV, 12 and Philippians II, 10). The inscription, characterized by the rule of divine grace and therefore highly controversial, was re-engraved true to the original.

 

View toward the east. From the left: St. Mary Church, Berlin's TV tower,
the steeple of the Red Town Hall, Nikolei Church, and don't know

After the break, I visited Nach der Natur im Humboldt Labor (After Nature at the Humboldt Laboratory.

Here I learned about "interaction."

What a deception. The exposed items were poorly illuminated, the inscriptions were hard to read, and experiments didn't work. An exhibition conceived by physicists of the Humboldt University without professional help?

I was tired and had dinner with a family member at an outdoor restaurant.

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