Hamburger Bahnhof is the former terminus of the

Berlin–Hamburg Railway The Berlin–Hamburg Railway (german: Berlin-Hamburger Bahn) is a roughly long railway line for passenger, long-distance and goods trains. It was the first high-speed line upgraded in Germany to be capable of handling train speeds of over ...

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitu ...

, Germany, on Invalidenstrasse in the

Moabit Moabit () is an inner city locality in the borough of Mitte, Berlin, Germany. As of 2016, around 77,000 people lived in Moabit. First inhabited in 1685 and incorporated into Berlin in 1861, the former industrial and working-class neighbourhood ...

district opposite the

Charité The Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin (Charité – Berlin University of Medicine) is one of Europe's largest university hospitals, affiliated with Humboldt University and Free University Berlin. With numerous Collaborative Research C ...

hospital. Today it serves as a

contemporary art Contemporary art is the art of today, produced in the second half of the 20th century or in the 21st century. Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced, culturally diverse, and technologically advancing world. Their art is a dynamic ...

museum, the , part of the

Berlin National Gallery The National Gallery (german: Nationalgalerie) in Berlin, Germany, is a museum for art of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. It is part of the Berlin State Museums. From the Alte Nationalgalerie, which was built for it and opened in 1876, its exh ...

Original use as a railway station

The station was built to Friedrich Neuhaus's plans in 1846/47 as the starting point of the

. It is the only surviving terminus building in Berlin from the late neoclassical period and one of the oldest station buildings in Germany. The building has not been used as a station since 1884, when northbound long-distance trains from Berlin began leaving from Lehrter Bahnhof (now

Berlin Hauptbahnhof Berlin Hauptbahnhof () (English: Berlin Central Station) is the main railway station in Berlin, Germany. It came into full operation two days after a ceremonial opening on 26 May 2006. It is located on the site of the historic Lehrter Bahnhof, ...

), just 400 m to the southwest. The original train shed was removed during the 1880s, when the building became an office and apartment complex.

Use as a railway museum

On 14 December 1906, the former station became home to the new ''Royal Museum of Building and Transport'' (german: Königliches Bau- und Verkehrsmuseum), supervised by the

Prussian State Railways The term Prussian state railways (German: ''Preußische Staatseisenbahnen'') encompasses those railway organisations that were owned or managed by the State of Prussia. The words "state railways" are not capitalized because Prussia did not have a ...

, which was incorporated into the new all-German national railways

Deutsche Reichsbahn The ''Deutsche Reichsbahn'', also known as the German National Railway, the German State Railway, German Reich Railway, and the German Imperial Railway, was the German national railway system created after the end of World War I from the regiona ...

in 1920. The present "train shed" was constructed on the site of the old one for exhibition purposes, but also to illustrate building techniques. The term 'royal' was dropped with the end of the Prussian monarchy in 1918. The museum attracted crowds and was twice extended with additional wings to the left and right of the main building in 1909–11 and 1914–16. Hit by Allied bombing in 1944, the museum was closed; however, most of the collection survived. After the war, although located in what had become the British sector of Berlin, the museum remained under the supervision of the East German Reichsbahn, which—by agreement of all the Allies—operated the railways in all of Berlin in addition to

East Germany East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR; german: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, , DDR, ), was a country that existed from its creation on 7 October 1949 until German reunification, its dissolution on 3 October 1990. In t ...

. The Reichsbahn's East German management had no interest in reopening a museum now located in

West Berlin West Berlin (german: Berlin (West) or , ) was a political enclave which comprised the western part of Berlin during the years of the Cold War. Although West Berlin was de jure not part of West Germany, lacked any sovereignty, and was under mi ...

, but only in the exhibits, which the Western Allies did not allow to be brought to the East. In 1984 the Reichsbahn transferred both the building and the collection into Western hands. The collection included examples of industrial and technological developments of its time—many locomotives and rolling stock—and was thus a precursor of the Museum of Technology, which now displays many of the exhibits once shown in Hamburger Bahnhof. In 1987, the empty halls were used for temporary exhibitions.

Rebirth as an art museum

In the mid-1980s the Berlin entrepreneur Erich Marx offered his private collection of contemporary art to the city. The

Berlin Senate The Senate of Berlin (german: Berliner Senat) is the executive body governing the city of Berlin, which at the same time is a state of Germany. According to the the Senate consists of the Governing Mayor of Berlin and up to ten senators appoint ...

decided in 1987 to establish a museum of contemporary art in the former railway station. The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation agreed to operate the museum as part of the

National Gallery The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London, England. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The current Director ...

. A competition for the renovation of the station was announced by the Senate in 1989, and was won by the architect Josef Paul Kleihues. Between 1990 and 1996, Kleihues refurbished the building, and in November 1996 the museum was opened with an exhibition of works by

Sigmar Polke Sigmar Polke (13 February 1941 – 10 June 2010) was a German painter and photographer. Polke experimented with a wide range of styles, subject matters and materials. In the 1970s, he concentrated on photography, returning to paint in the 1980s ...

. The ''Museum für Gegenwart'' exhibits modern and contemporary art. Permanent loans from the Marx collection, including works by artists such as

Joseph Beuys Joseph Heinrich Beuys ( , ; 12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and art theorist whose work reflected concepts of humanism, sociology, and anthroposophy. He was a founder of a provocative art mov ...

Anselm Kiefer Anselm Kiefer (born 8 March 1945) is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Peter Dreher and Horst Antes at the end of the 1960s. His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac. The poems of Paul Celan h ...

Robert Rauschenberg Milton Ernest "Robert" Rauschenberg (October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008) was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the Pop art movement. Rauschenberg is well known for his Combines (1954–1964), a group of artwor ...

Cy Twombly Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Jr. (; April 25, 1928July 5, 2011) was an American painter, sculptor and photographer. He belonged to the generation of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Twombly is said to have influenced younger artists such as ...

and

Andy Warhol Andy Warhol (; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationsh ...

, are on permanent display. An emphasis of the Nationalgalerie collection is art on video and film, including a collection of 1970s video art—a gift of Mike Steiner—and the Joseph Beuys media archives.

Rieckhallen

In 2004, another part of the building complex, the former Güterbahnhof, which is connected to the Hamburger Bahnhof, was rebuilt as an exhibition hall, the ''Rieckhallen'', for the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection. Between 2004 and 2010, the ''Museum für Gegenwart'' exhibited parts of the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, whose main focus is on the late 20th century. The collection contains large-format works by

Paul McCarthy Paul McCarthy (born August 4, 1945) is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Life McCarthy was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1945. He studied art at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, and later continued ...

Jason Rhoades Jason Fayette Rhoades (July 9, 1965 – August 1, 2006) was an American installation artist. Better known in Europe, where he exhibited regularly for the last twelve years of his life, Rhoades was celebrated for his combination dinner party/ ...

, Rodney Graham,

Peter Fischli and David Weiss Peter Fischli (born 8 June 1952) and David Weiss (21 June 1946 – 27 April 2012), often shortened to Fischli/Weiss, were a Swiss artist duo that collaborated beginning in 1979. Their best-known work is the film '' Der Lauf der Dinge'' (''Th ...

, and

Stan Douglas Stan Douglas (born October 11, 1960) is an artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Douglas' film and video installations, photography and work in television frequently touch on the history of literature, cinema and music, while examining ...

, including elaborate installations and complex filmic spaces. Due to its connection with the

Flick family The Flick family is a wealthy German family with an industrial empire that formerly embraced holdings in companies involved in coal, steel and a minority holding in Daimler AG. Friedrich Flick (1883–1972) was the founder of the dynasty, establish ...

, the display (which had been rejected by the city of Zurich) gave rise to protests in 2004. Flick nonetheless agreed to lend 1,500 works to the Berlin State Museums, initially for seven years. He then extended the loan for another ten years to 2021. He also invested 8 million euros into having architects Kuehn Malvezzi renovate the Rieckhallen, the former depot of the German Imperial Railway, to showcase his works. In 2020, the museum building's owner – Austrian property company CA Immo – announced plans to demolish the Rieckhallen after the rental contract expires in September 2021. The planned demolition prompted Flick to end the loan of his collection. Shortly after, the Federal Agency for Real Estate (BIMA) entered into negotiations to buy the Hamburger Bahnhof.

References

External links