ABSTRACT
The Altes Museum was the first museum to be built on Museum Island in Berlin and the first purpose-built public museum in Prussia. Since its opening in 1830, it has attracted considerable interest on account of its site-specific, symbolic and functional architecture, its planned relationship to its urban setting and the museological concepts developed in its early years. It has also been seen as representing the civic foundations of a much larger museological development – Museum Island – that records Germany’s nineteenth-century journey towards unification in 1871, the rise of conservative nationalism and the outbreak of the First World War.
This chapter focuses on the historical and geographical situatedness of the Altes Museum today so as to interpret it in contemporary terms. It considers, from a contemporary perspective, the political inheritance of museums that have been associated with political, religious, military and economic power, and whether this political context – which is censored from museum interpretation – should be communicated to the public. Berlin’s Museum Island contains multiple examples of politically complex institutions, to which in 2019 will be added the highly controversial reconstruction of the former royal palace. Instead of glossing over their past and positioning themselves in the synthesising and homogenising mythology of the universal museum, for the museums on Museum Island there would be greater honesty in openly acknowledging and addressing their heterogeneous and shifting histories and their political instrumentalisation.
