John K. Peck takes a trip through Berlin’s Museum of Things…
If you’ve never visited Berlin’s Museum der Dinge—in English, “Museum of Things”—its dryly reductive name serves as a perfect introduction.
The collection consists of endless rows of, yes, things: ashtrays, coffee mugs, radios, vases, toy cars, bike seats, toilet plungers, engine parts, buttons and knobs, Rubik’s cubes, sex toys, weapons, calculators, communist, religious and Third Reich kitsch, the endless ephemera of capitalism; just about anything small enough to fit into a glass display case.
Founded in the 1970s, the museum was for a long time set inside a former factory building on Kreuzberg’s Oranienstrasse. There was a collective holding of breath back in 2023 when the news dropped that the factory’s new owners were forcing the museum (and everyone else) out of the building—followed by a sigh of relief that the museum found a new space.
Since 2024, it has been located on the ground floor of a concrete-heavy GDR-era complex on Leipziger Straße 54, in Berlin-Mitte. Although less than half of the museum’s permanent collection can fit into this new space, it’s still big enough to showcase some 15,000 objects that were all invented and designed, produced and traded, bought and used, repaired and disposed of from the twentieth century to the present day. In other words, there are still plenty of things to look at.
The core concept of the exhibition is a wild, pluralistic examination of the ideas of the German Werkbund, which was established in 1907 as a lobbying group made up of craftsmen, designers, artists, architects, and businessmen. The Werkbund sought to “both valorise good design principles within Germany and promote the soundness of German goods abroad”. In stylistic terms, this means an array of styles from historicism and Art Nouveau to functionalism and 1950s design.
Hindsight nearly always favours the legacy of the Werkbund’s shorter-lived academic sibling/offspring, the Bauhaus, which closed down in 1933 but is often remembered as a heroic bastion of artistic freedom crushed by Nazi fascism. The Werkbund, on the other hand, was a larger and more fluid organization, and had a longer—and thus more uncomfortable—history of collaboration with the Nazis, who found the Werkbund’s tenets to be, at least until the late 1930s, mostly in line with their own aesthetics of tribute and geometric severity.
The dissolution of the Bauhaus saw its members, and thus its message, spread worldwide; the Werkbund, on the other hand, restarted in the early 1950s and remained a distinctly German institution. While a museum…