Berlin – A Walk Back in Time

The Jewish Museum is one of the most outstanding works of architecture in modern Berlin, no insignificant feat bearing in mind the city’s recent construction boom. The silver lightening bolt winding through suburban Kreuzberg is the consequence of an international competition which got architects to design a building that would home a permanent exhibition time scaling German-Jewish history. The triumphant design was by Daniel Libeskind, a Polish-born Jew whose significant hypothetical offerings to architecture had never been put to the realistic exam. His building is full of sloping walkways, black-walled voids and irregular windows designed to throw the visitor off balance. The architecture displays the many ingenious offerings made by Jews to German society and learning over the hundreds of years when Berlin was home to one of the most energetic Jewish communities in Europe. The void left by the holocaust is represented by a enormous, bare, echoing tower, and the confusion of immigration to a new land by the E. T. A. Hoffmann garden. See the museum internet site for more info and photos. You could stay close to this in Holiday apartments berlin germany

Checkpoint Charlie

Checkpoint Charlie is a amazing location for a museum about the former GDR. Regrettably the privately-owned Haus am Checkpoint Charlie celebrates the win of capitalism over communism with maudlin art, exaggerated images of escapes over the Wall, and long-winded digressions about peaceful opposition to dictatorship in Eastern Europe. The fall of the Wall was in fact an international sign of the end of the cold war, and of sovereignty in a united Europe, but the museum avoids exploring the issues of dichotomies like those the wall represented. It substitutes beautiful stories for demanding explorations of East German reality. The explanations are translated into English, French and Russian. Too bad the display contains an tiring amount of text.

German Historical Museum

The permanent home of the German Historical Museum (DHM) in the Zeughaus is being re-done and will remain closed until 2011. In the meanwhile the DHM has a temporary home across the path in the Kronprinzenpalais (Unter den Linden 3). The most important collection of the museum is not open to the general public for the period of the renovations. The DHM in the Kronprinzenpalais shows a programme of topical exhibitions. You can stay nearby to this on your Germany break by staying in apartments berlin germany and enjoy the central location to all else the city has to put forward.

German Resistance Memorial Centre

On the large scale of things there wasn’t much opposition to the Nazi dictatorship of 1933-45; sources of potential opposition were located quickly and shut down. These brave souls who did oppose are the topic of this permanent exhibition in rooms which were part of German army headquarters for the period of World war 2. The museum is stationed here because it was from this building that Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg considered his botched attempt on Hitler’s life in 20. July 1944. Guided excursions of the exhibition are free of charge and are good value as they cover the rise and fall of Nazi Germany as well as those who resisted it.