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The Märkisches Museum ( Marcher Museum; originally Märkisches Provinzial-Museum, i.e. Museum of the Province of the March f Brandenburg is a museum in Mitte,
Berlin Berlin is Capital of Germany, the capital and largest city of Germany, both by area and List of cities in Germany by population, by population. Its more than 3.85 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European U ...
. Founded in 1874 as the museum of the city of Berlin and its political region, the March of Brandenburg, it occupies a building on the northern edge of
Köllnischer Park Köllnischer Park is a public park located near the River Spree in Mitte, Berlin. It is named after Cölln, one of the two cities which came together to form Berlin; the park location was originally just outside it. Approximately in area, the p ...
, facing the Spree, which was designed by
Ludwig Hoffmann Ludwig Hoffmann or Hofmann may refer to: * Ludwig Hoffmann (architect) (1852–1932), German architect * Ludwig Hoffmann (Waffen-SS) (1908–1945), Hauptsturmführer (Captain) in the Waffen-SS * Ludwig Hofmann (footballer) (1900–1935), German ...
and completed in 1908. It is now the main facility of the ''Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, Landesmuseum für Kultur und Geschichte Berlins'', the City of Berlin museum foundation, which also operates four other sites.


Background

In the second half of the 19th century, Berlin grew very rapidly. The foundation stone of a new, much larger town hall, the Rotes Rathaus, was laid in 1861. The changes provoked interest amongst the bourgeoisie in the city's past and in preserving what had not already been lost. The ''Verein für die Geschichte Berlins'' (Association for the history of Berlin) was founded. It included early photographers such as Friedrich Albert Schwartz who began to document the changes to the city, assembling one of the first systematic photographic portraits of a city and its architecture. Beginning in the 1860s, they urged the foundation of a regional history museum. Ernst Friedel, a judge and antiquarian who had personally collected prehistoric and historic objects and paintings from Brandenburg for this purpose, persuaded the ''Magistrat'', the executive council of Berlin, to form a new department of "Collections" and Friedel was appointed to head it together with the existing library and archive. On 9 October 1874 with the city's official acceptance of his plan, the ''Märkisches Provinzialmuseum'' (Provincial museum of the March) was founded.Michael S. Cullen
"Das Gedächtnishaus der Urenkel"
in: ''
Der Tagesspiegel ''Der Tagesspiegel'' (meaning ''The Daily Mirror'') is a German daily newspaper. It has regional correspondent offices in Washington D.C. and Potsdam. It is the only major newspaper in the capital to have increased its circulation, now 148,000, ...
'', 14 October 1998
This was the first museum in Berlin to be completely independent of the Prussian crown. It had a budget of only 2,000 Goldmarks a year for purchases, and was therefore dependent from the start on donations from foundations and individuals. The
Emperor An emperor (from la, imperator, via fro, empereor) is a monarch, and usually the sovereign ruler of an empire or another type of imperial realm. Empress, the female equivalent, may indicate an emperor's wife ( empress consort), mother ( e ...
later contributed a small fund for the purchase of photographs of the city.


Early history

In March 1875, Friedel put out a call for the donation or loan of objects of historical or scientific interest, which was so successful that the collection had to move late that year from the old town hall to the Palais Podewils, a Baroque residence in Klosterstraße, and in 1880 to the former town hall of Cölln. At that time it had over 29,500 objects. In addition, Berlin in the "
Gründerzeit (; "founders' period") was the economic phase in 19th-century Germany and Austria before the great stock market crash of 1873. In Central Europe, the age of industrialisation had been taking place since the 1840s. That period is not precisely ...
" was full of demolitions and excavations, which yielded both fragments of old buildings and prehistoric and medieval finds. The collection was crowded and in particular the large pieces taken from churches could not be properly displayed. However, the inventory was not without its uses: an executioner's axe from the collection was used on 16 August 1878 to behead Max Hödel after his attempted assassination of Emperor Wilhelm I. At the urging of Friedel, a competition was held in 1892 for a building to house the collection, but the results were disappointing. 76 entries were received, but the winning design, by Wilhelm Möller, proved on examination to be both unsuitable and too expensive, and the architect had died, so the project was shelved.Albrecht
p. 33


Building

Creating a new building for the museum was the first large task for Ludwig Hoffmann after his appointment in 1896 as Stadtbaurat (chief of construction) for the city of Berlin. His first sketches date to that year; the plans were accepted the following year, and construction began in 1899 and was completed in 1907. It was not ready for occupation until 1908, 12 years after the start of the project. Meanwhile, in 1899, in advance of the demolition of the Cölln town hall, some of the collection had been placed in storage and some shown in temporary quarters on the first floor of one of the city's covered markets, until 1904. Hoffmann designed the museum as a complex of six differing buildings which echo Brandenburg brick architecture of periods from the
Gothic Gothic or Gothics may refer to: People and languages *Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes **Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths **Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...
to the
Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by an effort to revive and surpass id ...
in a "historical collage", in order to reflect the contents of the museum and evoke the "atmosphere" of various times and types of building.Märkisches Museum
Denkmale in Berlin, Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung und Umwelt
Part of his reasoning was that Berlin no longer had much of an old centre. The buildings are grouped around two courtyards and based on historic details which he had studied and sketched throughout the region; his "quotations" are accurate copies, but there is disagreement as to the originals, as in a façade which has been said to be based on the town hall at Tangermünde or on St. Catherine's Church in
Brandenburg an der Havel Brandenburg an der Havel () is a town in Brandenburg, Germany, which served as the capital of the Margraviate of Brandenburg until it was replaced by Berlin in 1417. With a population of 72,040 (as of 2020), it is located on the banks of the ...
,Lothar Heinke
"Trutzburg am Köllnischen Park feiert Geburtstag: Ein Speicher unterschiedlichster Exponate: Das Märkische Museum in Mitte wird hundert Jahre alt und zeigt in der Jubiläumsausstellung 'Gefühlte Geschichte' seine Schätze"
''Der Tagesspiegel'', 9 April 2008
and the
hip-roofed A hip roof, hip-roof or hipped roof, is a type of roof where all sides slope downwards to the walls, usually with a fairly gentle slope (although a tented roof by definition is a hipped roof with steeply pitched slopes rising to a peak). Thu ...
tower, high, based on the bergfried (keep) of the Bishop's Castle in Wittstock or on the cathedral of Ratzeburg.Märkisches Museum
Stadtmuseum.de, retrieved 6 August 2012
Hoffmann also modified the layout of
Köllnischer Park Köllnischer Park is a public park located near the River Spree in Mitte, Berlin. It is named after Cölln, one of the two cities which came together to form Berlin; the park location was originally just outside it. Approximately in area, the p ...
to make an attractive setting for the museum. The interior of the museum also seeks to evoke the atmosphere of different historical settings (as was then the fashion in provincial museums in Germany). For example, the low vaulted ceilings and roughly plastered walls on the ground floor were intended to suggest great age and housed the displays on prehistory, where the display cases for funerary urns and flint axes were rough in form; the setting for the
medieval In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire a ...
altars and sculptures was a vaulted Gothic chapel echoing medieval church interiors; weapons were shown in a room with thick columns, recalling a monastery; and
rococo Rococo (, also ), less commonly Roccoco or Late Baroque, is an exceptionally ornamental and theatrical style of architecture, art and decoration which combines asymmetry, scrolling curves, gilding, white and pastel colours, sculpted moulding, ...
porcelain Porcelain () is a ceramic material made by heating substances, generally including materials such as kaolinite, in a kiln to temperatures between . The strength and translucence of porcelain, relative to other types of pottery, arises main ...
and snuffboxes were displayed in elegant vitrines in a light and airy room on the second floor. There were a total of about 50 exhibition galleries. The visitor was led repeatedly back to the central vaulted Great Hall."Märkisches Museum: Wandeln unter Kreuzrippen"
''Der Tagesspiegel'', 24 June 2001
A week before the opening on 10 June 1908, Emperor Wilhelm II and Empress Auguste Viktoria toured the exhibits for two hours.Michael Zajonz
"Zeit, wo ist dein Geist?: Das Märkische Museum gibt es seit 100 Jahren. Doch es zählt zu den Stiefkindern der kommunalen Berliner Museumslandschaft. Eine neue Ausstellung sucht Wege zur 'gefühlten Geschichte'"
''Der Tagesspiegel'', 11 April 2008
The museum is now judged to be amongst Hoffmann's most important works, and also one of the most outstanding German museum buildings.Winkler, "Alt-Berlin"
pp. 492–93


History since 1908


Before and after World War I

The museum was widely praised and popular, attracting approximately 70,000 visitors a year and supported by the ''Verein für das Märkische Museum'', which included some wealthy and prominent Berliners. Especially after the creation of Greater Berlin in 1920, it focussed more on the city than on the Mark Brandenburg. However, it was affected by the First World War and the
revolution In political science, a revolution (Latin: ''revolutio'', "a turn around") is a fundamental and relatively sudden change in political power and political organization which occurs when the population revolts against the government, typically due ...
and out of control inflation which followed it. In 1925, Walter Stengel became Director of the museum, the first in that position with professional training and experience in art history and museum science. He left Hoffmann's gallery displays largely untouched, but did introduce electric lighting in 1932, over the objections of the now retired architect. He also experimented with recorded commentary in the galleries, using gramophones. He used the museum extension, the 18th-century Ermeler House, to display the
Alfred Cassirer Alfred Cassirer (29 July 1875 – 11 July 1932) was a German engineer, entrepreneur and art collector. Life Born in Görlitz, Cassirer came from the entrepreneurial Cassirer family and was the youngest son of Louis Cassirer and a brother of ...
collection of artworks, including several works of French
Impressionism Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passa ...
, as a unified whole, and to draw visitors back to the museum, held spectacular special exhibitions, some of them offsite. The exhibition celebrating the 70th birthday of the popular illustrator Heinrich Zille in 1928, the first extensive exhibition of his work, was especially popular.


Under the Third Reich

After Hitler's seizure of power in 1933, the Märkisches Museum was like other cultural facilities in Germany incorporated into the Nazi system. Stengel collaborated with the Nazis, in the interest of the museum as he saw it, acquiring art objects from Jews in forced sales and securing valuable antiques in 1938 when the regime seized all gold and silver items from Jews.''Raub und Restitution: Kulturgut aus jüdischem Besitz von 1933 bis heute'', ed. Inka Bertz and Michael Dorrmann, Exhibition catalogue,
Jewish Museum, Berlin The Jewish Museum Berlin (''Jüdisches Museum Berlin'') was opened in 2001 and is the largest Jewish museum in Europe. On of floor space, the museum presents the history of Jews in Germany from the Middle Ages to the present day, with new focuses ...
, Jewish Museum, Frankfurt, Göttingen/Niedersachs: Wallstein, 2008,
p. 190
After the war, he stated that these items were held in
escrow An escrow is a contractual arrangement in which a third party (the stakeholder or escrow agent) receives and disburses money or property for the primary transacting parties, with the disbursement dependent on conditions agreed to by the transacti ...
and not simply merged into the museum's holdings. The museum remained popular until the outbreak of the
Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...
in 1939, when it was closed and its collection placed in storage. Much was lost, and the building itself was severely damaged.


Under Soviet occupation and in the German Democratic Republic

When the war ended, the museum was located in the Soviet sector of Berlin which became the capital of the
German Democratic Republic German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ger ...
(East Germany). The first few galleries were reopened in 1946. Some items were rescued from buildings destroyed in the war, but the need for repairs to the building restricted available space and most of the natural history collection had been lost, so the decision was made to focus on cultural history. In a restoration which took place from 1953 to 1958, the interior was subdivided by partitions and lowered ceilings, increasingly destroying Hoffmann's gallery scheme, and museum staff were required to present history on a Marxist–Leninist basis. After the Berlin Wall divided the city in 1961, the decision was eventually made to establish a separate Berlin Museum 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 m ...
. Founded in 1962, this was housed in the baroque ''Collegienhaus'' of the former
Kammergericht The Kammergericht (KG) is the '' Oberlandesgericht'', the highest state court, for the city-state of Berlin, Germany. As an ordinary court according to the German Courts Constitution Act (''Gerichtsverfassungsgesetz''), it deals with crimina ...
in the Lindenstraße in
Kreuzberg Kreuzberg () is a district of Berlin, Germany. It is part of the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg borough located south of Mitte. During the Cold War era, it was one of the poorest areas of West Berlin, but since German reunification in 1990 it ha ...
, and the collection was limited to cultural history so that the two museums could be eventually reunited with as few problems as possible.


Since reunification

After
German reunification German reunification (german: link=no, Deutsche Wiedervereinigung) was the process of re-establishing Germany as a united and fully sovereign state, which took place between 2 May 1989 and 15 March 1991. The day of 3 October 1990 when the Ge ...
, five years of discussion and planning culminated in the foundation in 1995 of the ''Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, Landesmuseum für Kultur und Geschichte Berlins'', which now unites several formerly independent museums under the City of Berlin, with the Märkisches Museum as primary location. The building itself was extensively renovated in 1996–2001, including building out of new space under roofs and the removal of added partitions so that visitors again experience the sequence of galleries much as Hoffmann intended, but a large part of the museum's holdings is in storage in
Spandau Spandau () is the westernmost of the 12 boroughs () of Berlin, situated at the confluence of the Havel and Spree rivers and extending along the western bank of the Havel. It is the smallest borough by population, but the fourth largest by la ...
for want of space. The
Senate of Berlin 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 ...
plans to unify currently scattered holdings in Mitte, in and around the Märkisches Museum, and has thus projected an extension to the building, which is to incorporate the nearby Marinehaus, designed by Otto Liesheim and built in 1908–10.Stadtmuseum erhält ein neues Zentrum
Press release, Der Regierende Bürgermeister, 17 October 2007
The existing museum is to house the coverage from prehistory to the start of the 20th century, and the extension, recent history. The Senate acquired that building in 1993, and the architectural competition to design the extension and conversion was won by the London firm of Stanton Williams in 2008. The Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin originally had 16 locations.Nicola Kuhn
"Domäne Dahlem abzugeben: Schließen, zusammenlegen, neuordnen: Was die Pläne der Stiftung Stadtmuseum für ihre 16 Standorte bedeuten, wenn das Marinehaus neu übernommen wird"
''Der Tagesspiegel'', 3 December 2004
Under the consolidation plan, the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin found other owners for the Nicolaihaus, the Domäne Dahlem, an open-air museum of agriculture on the original estate at Dahlem, and the Sport Museum in the Sportforum near the
Olympic Stadium ''Olympic Stadium'' is the name usually given to the main stadium of an Olympic Games. An Olympic stadium is the site of the opening and closing ceremonies. Many, though not all, of these venues actually contain the words ''Olympic Stadium'' as ...
, and closed the Museum of Hairdressing in Marzahn, the Sammlung Kindheit und Jugend (children's museum), the Natural History collection and its former administrative offices, and relocated them to the Märkisches Museum. the childhood section in the Märkisches Museum was showing an exhibition of model shops. Closure of the Galgenhaus is also planned. The Marinehaus is to be used for especially popular displays on the history of Berlin in the 20th century while the original building undergoes thorough restoration, and the foundation continues to operate museums in the 18th-century Knoblauchhaus, the rococo
Ephraim Palais Ephraim (; he, ''ʾEp̄rayīm'', in pausa: ''ʾEp̄rāyīm'') was, according to the Book of Genesis, the second son of Joseph ben Jacob and Asenath. Asenath was an Ancient Egyptian woman whom Pharaoh gave to Joseph as wife, and the daug ...
, and St. Nicholas' Church, all in the nearby Nikolaiviertel. It also has a museum village in the Zehlendorf district, the Museumsdorf Düppel, which is a recreation of a medieval village. Friedrichsfelde Palace, Friedrichsfelde, formerly also part of the foundation, was returned in January 2009 to Tierpark Berlin, the zoo in its former grounds. The Jewish Museum grew out of the West Berlin Berlin Museum, but in 1998 was declared autonomous and in 2001 became a federal institution, and as such is independent of the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin."Berliner Kultur: Bund und Land: Vertrag für Berlin perfekt"
''Der Tagesspiegel'', 31 May 2001


References


Further reading

* Ernst Friedel. ''Festschrift zur 50-Jahrfeier des Märkischen Museums der Stadt Berlin''. Berlin: Wüstner, 1924. * Walter Stengel. "Chronik des Märkischen Museums der Stadt Berlin". ''Jahrbuch für brandenburgische Landesgeschichte'' 30 (1979) 7–51 * Nikolaus Bernau and Kai Michel. ''Das Märkische Museum''. Berliner Ansichten 9. Berlin: Berlin Edition, 1999. * Alexis Joachimides and Sven Kuhrau, ed. ''Renaissance der Kulturgeschichte?: die Wiederentdeckung des Märkischen Museums in Berlin aus einer europäischen Pespektive''. Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 2001. * Kurt Winkler (ed.) ''Gefühlte Geschichte. 100 Jahre Märkisches Museum'' Berliner Objekte. Berlin: Märkisches Museum, Stadtmuseum Berlin, 2008.


External links


Märkisches Museum
Berlin.de
Märkisches Museum
Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin
Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin
homepage
Photographs, drawings and plans
pages from ''Neubauten der Stadt Berlin'' 8 (1909), Architecture Museum,
Technical University of Berlin The Technical University of Berlin (official name both in English and german: link=no, Technische Universität Berlin, also known as TU Berlin and Berlin Institute of Technology) is a public research university located in Berlin, Germany. It was ...
{{DEFAULTSORT:Markisches Museum Buildings and structures in Mitte Museums in Berlin City museums History museums in Germany