The Märkisches Museum is located in the Mitte district of Berlin in the district of the same name. It is the main museum of the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin with a focus on culture and history.
The history of the museum began with the accelerated development of
Berlin from a somewhat sleepy residential city to an industrial and
large city. Between 1850 and 1870 the population doubled to over
800,000. The city needed a professional administration and a new town
hall. In 1861 the cornerstone for a sufficiently spacious building was
laid on what was then Königstraße, which later became the Red Town Hall.
Its tower towered over the Berlin Palace, an expression of the new
bourgeois self-confidence. At the same time, with the rapid change in
the cityscape, the bourgeoisie developed an increased interest in the
history of the city, in what had been lost or had just been lost through
reconstruction. This interest soon became an integral part of civic
socializing and was also reflected in the founding of the Association
for the History of Berlin. It also included Berlin's first
photographers, who documented the city's rapid transformation with the
new medium. They made prints of their recordings available to the
association and later to the museum. This resulted in one of the first
systematic photographic collections aimed at the physiognomy of the city
itself and its architecture. Reproductions of some of the photographs by
the photographer F. Albert Schwartz can now be seen in the Spittelmarkt
underground station.
Before the administration moved to the new
town hall, an inventory had to be made in the old offices, cellars and
attics. Much was destroyed, others, if they looked particularly old or
valuable, were first handed over to the archive and then to the newly
established Collections department. City councilor Ernst Friedel was
appointed head of the department. He brought his own historical finds
from the province of Brandenburg to the municipal collection and founded
the Märkisches Provincialmuseum in the Palais Podewils on October 9,
1874, the first purely bourgeois museum in Berlin that was independent
of the royal family. It had a budget of only 2,000 marks and was
therefore dependent on foundations and donations from the start. The
Emperor later approved a separate budget item for the purchase of
photographs of the cityscape.
Provisional
The collection was extremely cramped in the town hall. The first visitor
regulation of 1875 stated under point one opening hours of two or three
hours three days a week, under point two it stipulated: “The visit is
free of charge, the wardens are forbidden to accept gifts” and under
point five: “Only clean dressed persons have access”. In a letter of
request to the public, the management asked for the museum to be
supported "with voluntary donations of objects [...] provided they are
of cultural and historical interest". The call was surprisingly
successful. Numerous objects of natural history and cultural history
were donated. In Berlin during the Wilhelminian period, excavations were
carried out in many places, and useful finds kept coming to light and
expanding the collections. Due to a lack of space, the museum moved from
one temporary structure to the next. Because of the cramped, seemingly
chaotic accommodation of the exhibits, the museum was seen by many
observers as a mere lumber room, but not just with useless inventory: in
1878 the plumber journeyman and Emperor's assassin Max Hödel was
executed with an executioner's ax borrowed from the museum.
Friedel also used the demonstrative lack of space to convince the public
and the city administration of the need for a separate building for his
museum. In 1892 a nationwide competition for a new building was
announced. It was also hoped that this would be a signal for a “New
Building” in the imperial capital; in the boom of the founding years,
classic Berlin, shaped by Carl Gotthard Langhans and Karl Friedrich
Schinkel, had largely disappeared, and there was no new architectural
quality to be seen in the cityscape. The competition didn't deliver
either, and the result was generally rated as disappointing. 79 designs
were received, a first prize was awarded, but it soon became apparent
that this building would be far too expensive, the architect died
shortly afterwards, and the whole project was initially sidelined.
Museum building
The building project
was the first major order for Ludwig Hoffmann, who was newly appointed
to the office in 1896. He had earned his good reputation by designing
the monumental building of the Imperial Court of Justice in Leipzig and
completing it in a short time, much to the satisfaction of Kaiser
Wilhelm II.
The first sketches were made in the autumn of 1896, a
year later the plans were approved and construction work began in 1899
and was completed in 1904. It was not until 1908 that the fully
furnished building could be handed over. It was the first building in
the world specifically designed as a city museum. Hoffmann's concept was
to already indicate in the architecture of the building what was to be
shown inside; the collections documented the development of the Mark
Brandenburg over the centuries, so the architect created a complex of
very different parts of the building, which referred to specific models
from different historical periods.
Hoffmann had studied and
sketched these prototypes on many study trips and quoted them in varying
degrees of detail in his construction. In most cases, selected,
historically correct details have been combined in such a way that a new
whole has emerged, the sources of which are not so easily ascertained.
Hoffmann was not necessarily interested in showing exact copies, he
wanted to convey the respective moods of bygone times. Its buildings are
grouped around two courtyards. These are surmounted and optically held
together by a tower with a hipped roof, which is modeled on the keep of
the Wittstock bishop's castle.
Inside the building, too, Hoffmann
tried to make the atmosphere of different historical situations tangible
through different stagings. The ground floor, for example, suggested
great antiquity with its low vaults and roughly plastered walls and
housed the prehistoric department; Urns and hand axes were housed in
roughly designed showcases. The collection of medieval altars and
sculptures was housed in a "chapel" whose vault was modeled on medieval
models. Rococo porcelain and the collection of snuff boxes were on
display in elegant glass cabinets in a bright hall on the second floor.
A total of around 50 showrooms could be visited.
The new house was praised from all sides, and it was well received by
the public, with around 70,000 visitors a year. The museum - supported
by the association for the Märkisches Museum, to which wealthy and
prominent citizens belonged - became a fixture in the city's cultural
life. World War I, revolution and inflation interrupted this
development.
In 1925, Walter Stengel was appointed director, the
first studied art history and museum man with professional experience at
the head of the house. He changed very little in Hoffmann's productions;
so he finally had the showrooms illuminated electrically - also against
the resistance of the architect, who was concerned about his carefully
designed "moods", but as a pensioner could no longer intervene. Stengel
drew the public's attention back to the museum, primarily through
spectacular special exhibitions, some of which were also outside of his
home. In 1928, the exhibition marking the 70th birthday of the popular
draftsman Heinrich Zille caused an unexpected mass rush from the
backyard quarters of northern Berlin, where Zille's preferred models
lived - not exactly the typical museum visitors.
During the
National Socialist era, the Märkisches Museum also became part of the
cultural establishment that was brought into line. Stengel made an
agreement with the new rulers - in the interest of the museum, as he saw
it. He had Jewish-owned art objects acquired at foreclosure auctions.
When the state confiscated precious metal objects from Jewish citizens
in 1938, Stengel secured valuable antiquities for his museum. These
objects were treated in trust and not simply incorporated into the
holdings, as was customary in various other museums at the time. At the
beginning of the Second World War, the Märkisches Museum was closed and
its collections were outsourced - much was lost in the process. The
building itself was badly damaged in the final days of the war.
Development after 1945
After the end of the war, the museum was in
the Soviet-occupied sector of the four-power city of Berlin, on the
territory of what later became the “capital of the GDR”. War damage had
to be repaired and important finds had to be salvaged from the rubble of
the big city. In 1946, some rooms were reopened to visitors. Since there
was a lack of space due to war damage and important parts of the natural
history department were no longer available anyway, it was decided to
concentrate on the cultural history collections in the future.
Inside the house, the original spatial experience was largely lost in
the years that followed due to the constant flow of new partitions and
suspended ceilings. There were also changes in the content of the work:
the museum employees were to provide a new perspective on history. A
programmatic text demanded: "On the basis of the Marxist-Leninist
worldview, the Märkisches Museum should serve the construction of
socialism."
After the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, after
lengthy discussions, a separate Berlin Museum was set up in West Berlin,
based in the baroque collegiate building of the former Superior Court on
Lindenstrasse in Kreuzberg. The collections were limited to
cultural-historical objects in order to be able to merge the two
regional museums in Berlin as easily as possible after the hoped-for
reunification.
Development since German reunification
Five
years passed between the first ideas and concepts in 1990 and the
founding of the Stadtmuseum Foundation in 1995. 16 museum institutions
were united under the umbrella of the foundation, with the Märkisches
Museum as the focal point. Extensive refurbishment and reconstruction
work began there after 1990, the spacious attics could be expanded,
partition walls that were installed later were removed, so that
essentially the old spatial structure conceived by Ludwig Hoffmann can
be experienced again.
In order to give the city museum of the federal capital its rightful place in the Berlin museum landscape, the Berlin Senate intends to concentrate the various locations in the Mitte district around the Märkisches Museum. This requires a structural extension, for which the former naval house opposite was planned in the meantime. Following a decision by the Senate in September 2008, the London office Stanton Williams won the architectural competition for the conversion measures. In 2011, the funding for the extension building was initially deferred by the Senate. After the final failure of the plans for the Marinehaus, the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin is in favor of developing the previous district of the Berlin City Library on Breite Straße into the Museumsquartier for a New Berlin Museum, as soon as the planned new building of the Central and State Library on the Tempelhofer Feld the site has become vacant. Since the development of the Tempelhofer Feld cannot be carried out due to the referendum, it was decided that the Märkisches Museum and the Marinehaus will form a unit in the future and will be the heart of a new museum and creative quarter at the Köllnischer Park. Since January 1, 2023, the museum has been closed for several years due to extensive construction work and renovations. The reopening is planned for 2026, possibly not until 2028.
The history of the city of Berlin is told in the Märkisches Museum.
In the associated museum laboratory, which opened in 2009, the
Stadtmuseum Berlin offered interested groups a selected program of
guided tours and workshops. One-hour guided tours conveyed various
insights into the history of the city of Berlin. Thematic workshops
deepened the exhibition content in the museum laboratory.
Since
autumn 2016, the museum, which has been extensively reconstructed after
war damage, has been made fit for the 21st century (but this did not
last long; see previous paragraph). In addition to newly created space
for changing special exhibitions, this included a new concept for the
permanent exhibition on Berlin's history, which was to be presented on
the occasion of its 110th anniversary. The opening exhibition for this
was Berlin 1937. Since June 2018, the permanent exhibition “BerlinZEIT –
History compact” has led through Berlin’s history from the Ice Age to
the present. An audio guide in German or English could be borrowed by
the visitors, in which the city itself spoke to the visitors.
New
paths were also taken with (rehearsal) rooms, which offered insights
into the work of the museum as a new mediation offer.
In the
inner courtyard of the Märkisches Museum is the figure of the Rhine,
which belongs to the equestrian statue of Friedrich Wilhelm III.
belonged in the pleasure garden.