The Jewish Museum is one of the most prominent works of architecture in modern Berlin, no small achievement bearing in mind the city’s latest building increase. The silver lightning bolt cutting through suburban Kreuzberg is the end result of an worldwide competition which challenged architects to design a building that would accommodate a unending exhibition time scaling German-Jewish history. The successful proposal was by Daniel Libeskind, a Polish-born Jew whose notable hypothetical offerings to architecture had never been put to the realistic exam. His building is full of sloping corridors, black-walled voids and irregular windows intended to throw the visitor off balance. The architecture displays the many ingenious offerings made by Jews to German society and learning over the centuries when Berlin was homeland to one of the most animated Jewish communities in Europe. The gap left by the holocaust is represented by a huge, bare, echoing tower, and the puzzlement of immigration to a new land by the E. T. A. Hoffmann garden. See the museum internet site for more information and imagery. You could stay close to this in Holiday apartments berlin germany
Checkpoint Charlie
Checkpoint Charlie is a remarkable position for a museum about the previous GDR. Unluckily the privately-owned Haus am Checkpoint Charlie glorifies the victory of capitalism over communism with overemotional art, theatrical images of escapes over the Wall, and long-winded digressions about peaceful opposition to tyranny in Eastern Europe. The fall of the Wall was certainly an global representation of the end of the cold war, and of liberty in a united Europe, but the museum neglects to explore the issues of dichotomies such as those the wall represented. It substitutes romantic stories for difficult explorations of East German reality. The descriptions are translated into English, French and Russian. Too bad the display contains an tiring amount of text.
German Historical Museum
The everlasting home of the German Historical Museum (DHM) in the Zeughaus is being renovated and will remain closed until 2011. In the mean time the DHM has a interim home accross the path in the Kronprinzenpalais (Unter den Linden 3). The main collection of the museum isn’t open to the public for the period of the renovations. The DHM in the Kronprinzenpalais shows a programme of topical exhibitions. You can stay nearby to this on your Berlin trip by staying in apartments berlin germany and enjoy the central location to everything else the city has to put forward.
German Resistance Memorial Centre
On the main scale of things there wasn’t much opposition to the Nazi dictatorship of 1933-45; sources of potential rebellion were found early and closed down. These hardy souls who did try to resist are the focus of this permanent exhibition in rooms which were part of German army headquarters for the period of The second world war. The museum is located here for the reason that it was from this building that Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg designed his failed attempt to kill Hitler in 20. July 1944. Guided excursions of the exhibition are free of charge and are good value as they cover the rise and fall of Nazi Germany as well as those who opposed it.