Berlin Aiming to Be Europe’s Cultural Jewel

Now this is an island to get marooned on.

Five major museums spanning the history of art, each linked by subterranean passageways offering hints of the treasures above. A colonnaded walkway enclosing a grassy courtyard, all lapped by the lazy flow of Berlin’s Spree River.

Finally on the mend after six decades that witnessed bombings, lootings and division, the once-glorious Museum Island is proving that art does triumph over adversity.

An ambitious 15-year project to restore all the museums on the tiny island will transform this German capital into the cultural heart of Europe, proponents insist. Once completed, the insular gem will dwarf Paris’ vaunted Louvre in both the size and scope of its exhibits and offer visitors a more convenient art experience than the widely scattered museums of Rome and London, they say.

In politics, economics, foreign relations and social welfare, Germany already sets the pace in Europe. Now Berlin has set its sights on the cultural crown, and its art stewards are furiously tunneling and hammering their way toward that title--and hoping that funding glitches in the $1.3-billion project don’t slow them down.

“We are creating a whole new Germany with these museums,” boasts Peter-Klaus Schuster, director of the Prussian Cultural Foundation, which administers most of the country’s art collections. “The idea is to tell the whole story of art, from the antiquities to the present, in one great cultural center.”

He likens the emerging art complex to the Roman Forum, “where you move from temple to temple and see how civilization developed.”

Museum Island in its heyday existed for only 15 years, although the first construction, the Altes Museum designed and built by Berlin’s renowned architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, opened in 1830. It was another century before the fifth structure, the Pergamon Museum housing classical antiquities, was completed in 1930. By then, Germany was in the grip of a depression so severe that it gave Adolf Hitler a path to power three years later.

Allied bombing at the end of World War II destroyed 70% of the structures on Museum Island, and the postwar division of the city left the looted and ruined buildings in the Communist eastern sector, where there was never the money to rebuild.

The Pergamon Museum was the cultural jewel of the East German capital, with its namesake altar and other purloined treasures, such as the Babylonian Processional Way, the market gate from Miletus in Asia Minor and the Ishtar Gate. But the Neues Museum, completed by Schinkel student Friedrich August Stueler in 1859, was left in ruins after the war and will reopen only in 2008 after a $250-million reconstruction.

The challenge and opportunity to restore Berlin’s short-lived legacy as the aspiring cultural capital of the continent emerged less than a dozen years ago with the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification. Now that the Reichstag parliament building has been refurbished and a new chancellery completed, the Museum Island works have risen to the top of the priority list in the city, whose skyline remains dominated by cranes and scaffolding.

The first fruits of the project are already visible on the horizon. Restoration of the Alte Nationalgalerie has just been completed, and curators are eagerly awaiting return of the paintings and sculptures that will be displayed there once the museum reopens Dec. 2. The artworks have been touring while the painters and plasterers were at work and were most recently on display at the National Gallery in Washington.

Next to reopen will be the Bode Museum in 2005, the 100th anniversary of its debut. Some of its collection of late antiquities and Byzantine art is now displayed at the neighboring Pergamon but will be returned to the Bode after a face lift by Viennese architect Heinz Tesar.

Once the Neues Museum opens three years later, the Egyptian Collection and the Museum for Pre- and Early History will be housed there. Among the museum’s belongings now in foster care is the famous bust of Queen Nefertiti from 1340 B.C. A new glass-paneled entrance designed by British architect David Chipperfield will augment the original structure.

The Altes Museum and the Pergamon--the only two Museum Island venues now open--will be the last to be spruced up, with reconstruction to begin respectively in 2006 and 2007. The U-shaped Pergamon will get a new connecting tract between its north and south wings to create an inner courtyard and provide access to the underground passageways.

As with most construction works in Berlin, a city built on sand and ubiquitously challenged by rising ground water, the museum projects have encountered numerous problems with rotten foundations and flooded cellars.

“Everything is completely corroded,” says Alice Stroever, deputy chief of Berlin’s science and culture ministry. “There’s so much construction going on all over the city that the water keeps rising and presenting new problems that add to the costs and complications.”

The daunting reconstruction mission has all the political and moral support any impresario of artistic make-over could dream of, with the city-state of Berlin, the federal government and the Prussian Cultural Foundation steadfastly united. But recent financial woes besetting Berlin have threatened the project.

Berlin leaders disclosed this spring that the city is virtually bankrupt because of loans made by a city-owned bank to construction firms that have gone under. That made it impossible for the city to come up with its share of the Museum Island funding this year even though the project has the highest priority among the plethora of cultural reconstruction works underway.

The federal government made up a sizable chunk of Berlin’s shortfall by creating the “Capital Profile” project, for which it will pay about $20 million a year through 2010 to support facilities that bestow prestige on the new national center.

Combined with the original federal share, an unexpected $11-million tax rebate to the city and $23 million the city has borrowed from a delayed hospital project, the funds have allowed work to proceed uninterrupted despite the financial crisis.

The federal government took up the slack--despite cries of favoritism toward Berlin from some of the other 15 German states--because it was the only realistic way to keep the Museum Island plans on track, federal Culture Minister Julian Nida-Ruemelin says.

“There was a risk of a halt to construction,” he says, “and that could have led to the collapse of architectural firms that have come together specifically for this project.”

Because German tax laws provide no incentive to corporations to donate to the cultural treasury of the country, there is almost no private-sector sponsorship in projects such as the Museum Island. That places the burden solely on taxpayers, who shoulder varying costs according to where they live and to what degree they will benefit from the cultural expansion.

What is known here as Museum Island is actually less than a third of a 100-acre enclave shaped by the Spree and the Kupfergraben canal. In addition to the museums, it hosts a colonnade-encircled park in front of the Alte Nationalgalerie used for outdoor concerts and theater and another broad expanse of green, the Lustgarten, between the Altes Museum and the Berlin Cathedral.

To maintain as much of that leafy atmosphere as possible, all offices and storage space will be housed in a former military barracks across the canal, says Schuster, the cultural foundation director.

The busy Unter den Linden thoroughfare bisects the island, forming a perceptual boundary for the museum enclave. But an even more ambitious extension of the cultural village beckons from across the street: Palace Square, where an ugly relic of the East German era stands on the site of the Prussian royal house that Communist leader Walter Ulbricht blew up in 1950.

Palace Square is the subject of intense debate, with nearly one-third of Berliners wanting to keep the 1970s Palace of the Republic built on the palace grounds as a historical monument--despite its oxidized bronze window coating and shabby construction.

But a drive is underway to rebuild the Berlin Palace, whose foundations can still be seen in an excavated site on its namesake square.

Advocates of palace reconstruction outnumber the nostalgic eastern Germans, but only slightly, and those steering Berlin’s cultural development caution against running roughshod over the easterners’ feelings.

“There’s a significant minority within the Berlin population that doesn’t feel better off today, and they want the Palace of the Republic preserved because they have a lot of positive remembrances associated with it,” Nida-Ruemelin says of the Communist-era cultural center that was the scene of concerts and festivals. “They are saying to us, ‘Don’t make everything from that life kaput--let us keep one positive thing from that time.’ ”

Time will probably sway opinions away from preserving the asbestos-laden eyesore, as older easterners with memories of the Communist era become outnumbered by young people who will see the building for what it is, says Wilhelm von Boddien, one of those urging reconstruction of the Prussian palace.