To understand what Germany is, what Germany was and what Germany could be, you only have to look at what the Germans regard as the three most important islands: Sylt, Majorca and the Museum Island. Sylt in the North Sea is how Germany would like to be, a 1970s beauty, driving through the dunes in a retro-Porsche with tanned skin and wind-swept hair. On the Spanish Mediterranean island of Majorca, a favourite German tourist destination, the Germans have been striving for decades, season after season, to substantiate all possible clichés – from sun-burn to Germanized menus to the advance booking of sun-bathing space.
There is a third island, however, which at first (and perhaps even at second glance) you would hardly believe is situated in the heart of Germany: it is Berlin’s Museum Island in the Spree river. It tells the most exciting story of all – as it illustrates that once upon a time it was art alone that the Germans wanted to take with them to “a desert island”, and that the spirit of that Museum Island is suddenly reviving and radiating over the whole city of Berlin.
The Museum Island is a product of what was surely the happiest and most prestigious decade of Prussian and German history, the period around 1820-1830. It is no wonder that the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel regarded that Prussian heyday as evidence that the “world spirit” thrives at a certain time in a certain place with a particular fervour. Within just a few years, Berlin revolutionized, sensualized, intellectualized science, architecture, jurisprudence, literature and art as never before or since. Much of this has unfortunately been forgotten. But the Museum Island still exists – as the most beautiful memorial to that Prussian cultural revolution. It also stands for the architectural history of a whole century – for it was built between 1830 and 1930. Then, the island was full.
When you first step onto this island you cannot believe your eyes – right in the middle of the city you are surrounded on two sides by water and by five examples of monumental architecture. Sitting on a summer’s evening on the grass in front of the Altes Museum, on which the words “All art has been contemporary” in provocative neon lettering reconciles the old and the new, you can hear the bells of Berlin Cathedral behind you, see the glowing red sun set in the direction of the Brandenburg Gate, and for a few moments you are transported back in time to the Prussian Arcadia. The fact that these lawns and flower-beds in front of the Altes Museum are actually still known by the wonderful name of Lustgarten (literally, pleasure garden) says a lot about that often underestimated sensual delight of the supposedly ossified Prussianism.
The idea for the Museum Island came from the classicist master-builder Karl Friedrich Schinkel in the 1820s. Together with the scholar and cofounder of the Berlin University, Wilhelm von Humboldt, he persuaded the king that the northern island in the Spree, once marsh land, should became an island of culture, which it did from 1830. The Altes Museum was the first to be built, followed by what is today the Neues Museum in 1859, then the Alte Nationalgalerie in 1876, then the Bode Museum on the tip of the island in 1904, and finally, in 1930, the Pergamon Museum, home of the world famous Pergamon Altar. The founders’ vision was that the Museum Island would enable people to stroll through the art and cultures of world history – and now, with a great master plan, the Berlin museums are trying to actually realize this legendary and unique objective by the year 2015.
Currently, the Neues Museum, destroyed in the war, is in the process of being refurbished by star English architect and purist David Chipperfield – and in order to demonstrate the aesthetic force that still radiates from the island, directly opposite, on Kupfergraben, Chipperfield has also built a gallery-house for the Berlin art dealer Heiner Bastian, which was opened in November this year. This extends the Prussian spirit of the 19th century across the river and into the 21st century.
Whereas on the Museum Island you can see the history of art from its beginnings to the 20th century, only twenty metres away at Heiner Bastian’s, Berlin’s most important gallery for contemporary art, you can continue the path into the present. On one afternoon, you can study the changes in portraiture from Roman and Greek sculptures and the bust of the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti to the Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich and the master of pop art Andy Warhol without having to put on your coat.
The Museum Island tells not only a Prussian, but also a German-German story. After all, until German reunification it was in GDR territory, on the eastern side of the city. The collections once stored there had been taken from their war-time storerooms and distributed around museums in west and east Berlin. Reunification provided the unique opportunity to bring them together again. And because the island is actually much too small to house all the art treasures of the Berlin museums, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK) has been working on bold plans to realize Schinkel and Humboldt’s vision. It has not only been agreed that buildings in the immediate vicinity of the island are to be transformed into more exhibition space and that David Chipperfield is to create a new kind of joint entrance area for all the museums, but it has also been decided to rebuild Berlin’s Stadtschloss, the city palace of the Prussian kings, just beyond the Lustgarten, from 2009. It too was damaged in the war and then demolished in GDR times. The reconstructed palace will house other, above all non-European collections. The Museum Island will then be the world’s largest universal museum of world art and world cultures.
The whole story is almost too good to be true – that neither ignorance nor the Second Word War, nor the philistine GDR regime, nor decay, nor German bureaucracy, nor the rising costs could hinder the preservation and expansion of the Museum Island. How marvellous it would be if instead of Majorca, the Museum Island were the Germans’ favourite island. Then the Prussian Cultural Revolution would finally be complete.
Florian Illies, born in 1971, is a best-selling author (The Golf Generation) and since 2004 editor of Berlin art magazine Monopol.
