Marcel Krueger on the divided—and divisive—experience of Berlin’s Humboldt Forum and reconstructed City Palace…
My favourite picture of the Stadtschloss, the Berlin City Palace was taken by Willy Römer on December 24th, 1918. It shows a large Christmas tree set up in the Berlin Lustgarten park surrounded by a large crowd, on what was a very sombre Christmas Eve. World War I had just ended with a German defeat, millions had been killed, the emperor abdicated and a German republic emerged. Many went to the Lustgarten to find comfort in a band performing carols that evening; in the background looms the dark, ominous hulk of the palace.
The German emperor, Wilhelm II, had last been spotted in the building the previous October, just before fleeing to an army headquarters in Spa, in occupied Belgium, and then into exile in the Netherlands. He was never to return. Shortly after Wilhelm and his family—the Hohenzollerns—had vacated the castle, Karl Liebknecht famously declared a socialist republic from one of its most prominent balconies; the palace was then used as a barracks for the revolutionary sailors of the People’s Naval Division, who came to Berlin to protect Liebknecht’s newly-elected government—which, of course, was not to materialise.
Indeed, Liebknecht’s pronouncement had been matched almost simultaneously by another one at the Reichstag by SPD leader Friedrich Ebert at the Reichstag, and on the day the above photo was taken, over 60 people had died at the palace following armed fights between the sailors and the troops of the social democrats. This grisly event foreshadowed the further bloodshed of the Spartacist Uprising that would emerge in the new year.
In Römer’s picture, the massive structure in the background seems empty. There’s no lights in the windows and its almost spectral presence feels symbolic of the end of its role as the home of the German empire. That role had begun over 500 years earlier, when it was built as a mediaeval fortress for the counts of Brandenburg, the forerunners of kings and emperors of Prussia. It was constantly expanded and renovated, most extensively by court architect Andreas Schlüter (1659–1714) during the reign of the first king of Prussia, Frederick I.
After 1918 it became a museum and housed a number of public and private institutions. By 1933 its facade was blackened by a century of Berlin smog and scarred by revolutionary shrapnel and machine gun fire. Partially destroyed by Allied bombing in World War II and the Battle of Berlin in 1945, it was finally demolished by GDR authorities in 1951, who replaced it first with a parade ground named after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Marx-Engels-Platz) and then, in 1973, with the Palast der Republik—the modernist parliament building of the GDR. Yet whenever I make my way from Alexanderplatz towards Unter den Linden these days, the palace is there, like a Wiedergänger, a ghost or zombie in German folklore that keeps returning to the world in different manifestations to raise hell and frighten the living.
The current incarnation, of course, is a controversial reconstruction that was finished in 2020 following a design by Italian architect Franco Stella and attempts to recreate, at least in part, the Baroque palace we see in the 1918 photo. It has the same rows of windows in curved stone frames, an enormous bronze-coloured cupola with a golden cross on top, and a massive entry portal with statues and a large golden Hohenzollern seal—the Eosanderportal, named after the designer of its predecessor, Johann Friedrich Eosander von Göthe (1669–1728).
The decision to rebuilt the palace was made in the early 2000s, after the East German Palast der Republik had been renovated (at some cost) and re-opened in 2003 as a popular arts space that hosted exhibitions, live television shows and concerts, among them a show by Einstürzende Neubauten specifically created for the building, that involved the band collaborating with a 100-strong choir. The key protagonists, or lobbyists, behind the revivalist Prussian palace were the conservative Förderverein Berliner Schloss, the Berlin Palace association, which has a reputation for rubbing shoulders with extreme nationalists. The German parliament eventually approved their plans, including adapting and renaming the rebuild as the Humboldt Forum.
Besides the taxpayer-funded 400 million euros that the project eventually cost, the façade alone cost an extra 80 million euros; this was financed mostly by private donors including a number of extreme nationalists and outright neo-Nazis. These include Ehrhardt Bödecker, a private banker who repeatedly published anti-Semitic and anti-democratic writings and donated more than a million euros to the palace; AfD politician Thomas Sambuc; right-wing publisher Hans-Ulrich Kopp; and the nationalist Preußenabend München association, which has contacts to radical right-wingers. Donors who give more than 100,000 euros are honoured individually by plaques in the foyer, although the one dedicated to Bödecker was removed in 2020 after public protests.
The Baroque façade is strangely decoupled from the modernist, bright-grey concrete interior. Here, nothing reminds visitors of the long history of the structure. Rather, the Humboldt Forum—named after nineteenth-century natural scientists and explorers Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt—is home to four permanent modern exhibitions. The Ethnological Museum of Berlin and the Museum of Asian Art run by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation on the two top floors, features an exhibition of artefacts and artworks from around the globe ranging from Polynesian sailboats to 11th century statues from India. There are children’s areas too, where kids can playfully find out more about world cultures through games and interactive displays.
On the first floor sit the Humboldt Laboratory scientific exhibition space of the Berlin Humboldt University and the exhibition of the City Museum Berlin, “Berlin Global”, which puts Berlin history and culture into a global context with exhibits ranging from revolutionary banners from 1918 to the door of legendary Tresor techno club. There is also a free roof terrace on top of the building with a great view over central Berlin, and a pleasant restaurant.
This aspect of the reconstruction is clearly popular with Berliners and visitors alike: 1.7 million visitors in 2023 made it the country’s most visited art museum that year. Yet, it is also not free of controversy. Like the British Museum, the Humboldt Forum has a number of stolen artefacts and human remains acquired during Germany’s colonial era in its collections. Among them are some of the so-called “Benin Bronzes,” stolen by a British military “expedition” in 1887, of which Berlin now has the second-largest number in Europe.
In 2022 the German government decided to return these to Nigeria; some remain in the exhibition as loans and are clearly marked as such. In addition, historical exhibits are framed with contemporary art by BIPoC artists that engage with colonialism and oppression, including a permanent installation titled “Ansichtssache(n)/Matter(s) of Perspective,” which traces the colonial history of Germany in Cameroon, Namibia and Oceania, and shows how artefacts from these regions were violently plundered.
The curious thing is that nothing on the outside signals that these impressive, and mostly free, museums are inside. And nothing on the inside, save for a few seemingly random artefacts dotted throughout the exhibitions, tell the visitor anything about the broader history of the palace. Certainly nothing links these aspects together, which makes for a somewhat schizophrenic experience and the feeling that although the Humboldt Forum as a concept and visitor attraction is fine, the preposterous Prussian façade is at best a spectacular waste of money.
At worst, and if it remains decontextualised, it’s a projection screen for the far right. There are ongoing efforts to provide the missing context, however. The “Schlossaneignung” (Palace Appropriation) initiative, a group of architects and journalists, is asking for the history to be visualised again on-site using artistic means, as well as inscribed into the façades. After all, the history of the palace can teach us valuable lessons about power, nationalism, and megalomania.
It might include the fun fact that for over a hundred years the Hohenzollerns refused to use a staircase in the palace that Napoleon had walked up when he conquered Berlin (and Prussia) in 1806. Or a note about the resident “White Lady” that sometimes appeared as a ball of energy and symbolised doom whenever it appeared (the last time it was sighted was in 1940). Or maybe a recreation of the desk carved from the wood of Nelson’s “victory,” where Wilhelm II signed the mobilisation order of the German armies—a present from his royal British relatives. Then there’s the nickname Berliners gave to Wilhelm II, Gondelwilli or Gondola Willi, since the only palace “expansion” he commissioned was to build some steps down to the Spree so he could use his pleasure boats there.
There is one other picture of the palace I like: a painting by Eduard Gaertner (1801–1877). It shows the Schlüterhof, the main ornamental courtyard of the palace, three sides of which have been replicated by Stella. What’s striking about this picture is not its monumentalism, which seems warped—too tall, too wide—and almost like the fantasy of a castle in a Caspar David Friedrich painting. What’s most interesting to me about the painting are the people, tiny in comparison, that gather in the courtyard: aristocrats arriving in coaches at the two entrances; a boy chasing a dog; a group of men chatting with two soldiers; maids at the water fountains and a line of waiters carrying plates with silver covers.
It suggests how the palace replica could have been a symbol of modern democracy rather than one of Prussian pomp. During the Weimar Republic it was, albeit briefly, truly a place for the people of Berlin—perhaps more so than when it was transformed into the Palast der Republik—housing the Welfare Office for Civil Servants from the border region, the Trade Union of German Civil Servants, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science, the Museum of Physical Exercise, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Helene Lange Day Centre for Female Students, the Japan Institute and the Mexico Library. In 1932, there was even a little cottage on the roof of the palace where an elderly couple, Herr and Frau Schönfelder, lived.
In the meantime, interested parties can always head out to Berlin’s Tierpark. The former Friedrichsfelde Palace Park, it’s to the rubble mountain here that the stones, bricks, marble fragments, headless statue torsos and scraps of wallpaper were brought after the palace was demolished in 1951. Curious that the real remains of that dark hulk in Willy Römer’s picture lies under the mountain animal enclosure with its white horned sheep, giant eagles, and Altai lynx in East Berlin—but that’s history for you.