A day at the museum

Picked up a three day museum pass for €19. I didn’t want three days of museums but using a pass means you can skip the queues and waltz straight into any of the participating museums. The New Museum always has queues for tickets and you need to book an allocated time slot. No such fear with a Museum Pass. You can pick one up from any of the participating museums. If you don’t buy one, the Welcome Card gives you 25% discount for entry to most museums.

In order of attack:

Bauhaus Museum (Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin)I'd heard mixed reviews on this but I was keen to pay a visit. Some complain that it’s just a small room full of chairs while others bang on about it not truly supporting the movement. I really enjoyed it. It’s small, but really not too small. You can take in the permanent exhibition, the annual awards display and the shop in less than an hour. Which is exactly how it should be. There was some genius stuff there. I love the efficiency of it all. The chessboard and the charcoal life drawings were highlights for me. If you haven’t seen the chessboard, the pieces are about as simple as you can make them but each one is carved to suggest the moves it can make. I really liked that. There were some ingenious winners from the annual awards on display. The mobile hospitality unit was brilliant, as was the fridge sized food storage unit (no, it wasn’t a fridge!). The video showing the manufacturing process for the gravity stool was beautiful (do a search online) but the actual stool itself, although interesting, was more novelty than practical. Finally, pop into the shop and pick up some cool tat.

New Museum (Neues Museum)This is the mother ship and the queues outside reflect that. Skip straight past them with your Museum Pass. The Egyptian exhibition is amazing. The highlight is the bust of Nefertiti. A limestone and plaster bust created some 3,500 years ago but still looking startling despite receiving no restoration.

There are some early Egyptian displays, including a natty little 5,500 year old carving.

Pop upstairs to see the Berlin Gold Hat – a beautiful, yet not entirely understood Bronze Age astronomical device. It's not been completely deciphered yet. In fact, it's not quite understood how such a complex item was manufactured some 3,000 years ago.

Pick up a free audio guide before you enter the museum to get the best out of it.

Pergamon Museum (Pergamonmuseum)If I want a quick fix in a museum, I want things that are really old or really big. Those ancient builders certainly listened at school. Go here to see the enormous Pergamon Altar, Market Gate of Miletus and the Ishtar Gate.

The Pergamon Museum also contains the Museum for Islamic Art. Take a wander upstairs to see the astrolabe - a beautiful and amazingly intricate astronomical device.

Again, a free audio guide is included.

Jewish Museum (Judisches Museum Berlin)In all honesty, the building itself is far more engaging than most of the exhibition. Its floor plan is a broken Star of David. The building is designed to disorientate, which is very impressive but doesn’t necessarily lend itself to an engaging display. A lot of personal effects and stories are viewed through little glass windows which means you are constantly waiting for other visitors to move out of the way. The Memory Void contains big empty spaces to highlight the void left by the absence of Jews in Germany. This also contains the Fallen Leaves installation - a huge erie tower with 10,000 heavy metal faces on the floor that you can walk across.

The Garden is worth a visit – it contains the only parallel vertical lines in the entire structure. As you walk out from the uneven floors and walls of the main building, you’re immediately thrown off balance by the vertical columns and level floor outside. The effect was excellent and surprising. The Holocaust Tower is chilling and thought provoking – possibly the highlight for me. A huge angled tower with no light except for that shining through a small slit down one wall. Dark, cold and silent. I really liked the idea of the pomegranate wish tree upstairs, but the rest of the exhibition about early Jewish history and culture really didn’t do it for me. It did handle the history of Jewish persecution in the early 20th century very well though, although this section was too brief.


I also popped into the Bode Museum as I was walking past but the collections and sculptures just weren’t for me. This is one of the five museums on Museum Island (Museuminsel), along with the New Museum and Pergamon Museum. Berlin Cathedral (Berliner Dom) is also here. All are housed in amazing buildings in a beautiful area of Berlin. Rather than visit the Bode museum, I’d recommend you go to the park opposite the side of the Cathedral. There is (or certainly there was) a bar and deck chairs set up. You can grab a bottle of cold beer and relax in the sun and people watch for a while. I didn’t, but plenty of others did.

There’s a little bit of duplication with the museums too. You’ve got to remember that a lot of Berlin was annihilated during the war. Before it was completely rebuilt, the wall went up and the two halves remained divided for several decades. The two sides grew independently of each other and still feel a little disconnected.