Two centuries of Berlin’s Museum Island: ‘somewhere your imagination can roam free’

In June 1840, Friedrich Wilhelm IV acceded to the Prussian throne, following the death of his father. The new king was full of ideas, one of which — according to an Order of Cabinet he swiftly issued — was to create a ‘sanctuary of the arts and sciences’ at the heart of his capital, Berlin.

This was to take the form of a small district where the royal art holdings could be publicly presented — on an island nestled between two arms of the River Spree (in what is now the borough of Mitte). The king’s long-term aim was to see Berlin become ‘Athens on the Spree’.

The island already housed the Royal Museum (today called the Altes Museum), which the king’s father, Friedrich Wilhelm III, had opened a decade earlier, putting on public view standout examples of classical statuary and painting from recent centuries.

A total of five museums would eventually be built in a 21-acre cluster. This area of land has come to be known as Museumsinsel (Museum Island). A few years ago, it was given its own station on Berlin’s U-Bahn network — testament to its status as one of the city’s most popular attractions. It welcomes more than 2.5 million visitors each year.

There’s a certain complexity as to what is on show where. However, broadly speaking, the island comprises: the Altes Museum (art of classical antiquity); the Neues Museum (Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age objects, plus a panoply of items from ancient Egypt); the Alte Nationalgalerie (European painting and sculpture from the 19th and early 20th centuries); the Bode Museum (European sculpture from earlier periods, plus Byzantine art and a huge coins collection); and the Pergamon Museum (Islamic art and reconstructions of architectural ensembles of yore).

‘More than a physical location, Museumsinsel has become a global brand,’ says Marion Ackermann, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK), which manages Museum Island. ‘Each venue is unique, yet what’s really special is the unit they form together. A huge amount of knowledge and history is concentrated in one place. It’s also somewhere your imagination can roam free.’

The influence of Museum Island is marked. Clusters of different museums have subsequently been built in many other locations, including London in the second half of the 19th century (where institutions such as the V&A and the Science Museum emerged in the South Kensington area) and Abu Dhabi today (where the Zayed National Museum has just opened, and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will soon follow, in Saadiyat Cultural District).

The Altes Museum’s foundation stone was laid in 1825, with the finished building — designed in Neoclassical style by the eminent architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel — opening its doors in 1830. In light of those dates, five years’ worth of bicentennial celebrations for Museum Island are now under way. They range from open-air concerts in the Kolonnadenhof (a colonnaded courtyard outside the Alte Nationalgalerie) to the staging of special exhibitions, and the reopening of the Pergamon Museum after refurbishment — more on which below.

‘The celebrations will be extensive, but that’s because there’s a lot to celebrate,’ Ackermann says.

The origins of Museum Island date back to the Napoleonic Wars, when French forces entered Berlin after victory over Prussia in the battles of Jena and Auerstedt in 1806. These forces selected hundreds of works from the Prussian royal art collection and dispatched them to Paris.

The wars would ultimately end in defeat for France at the Battle of Waterloo. To mark the return of the confiscated art to Berlin, a triumphant — and hugely popular — public exhibition was held in October 1815. In many cases, this was the first time that locals had seen the works in question.

It was in such a context that Friedrich Wilhelm III decided to establish the Royal Museum, which became the first large-scale purpose-built museum in Europe. The intellectual climate of the age is also worth noting. The king, like his son, was influenced by Enlightenment ideas — specifically those of the Prussian educational pioneer Wilhelm von Humboldt, who advocated that, for the good of society, all citizens should receive a basic, rounded education.

The story behind the museum’s opening is currently being told in Founded on Antiquity, an exhibition at the Altes Museum. Visitors learn of the complaints of the ageing philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who lived nearby and said that construction work was so noisy he couldn’t think properly.

Also explored is the prominent site chosen for the Royal Museum: on the north side of the Lustgarten square, opposite the Royal Palace. Warehouses occupied the land north of the museum, and it was there — with the warehouses’ ultimate removal — that the rest of Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s ‘sanctuary’ was constructed: the Neues Museum in 1859, the Alte Nationalgalerie (originally named the Nationalgalerie) in 1876, the Bode Museum (originally named the Kaiser Friedrich Museum) in 1904, and the Pergamon Museum in 1930. (For the record, what we today call Museum Island is actually just the northern tip of a naturally occurring island known as Spreeinsel.)

Museums kept being built, and the Hohenzollerns avidly kept collecting — the latter being the ruling house of Prussia and, after Germany’s unification in 1871, of the German Empire, too. Scholarly expeditions to Egypt, for example, resulted in the excavation of works such as the bust of Queen Nefertiti (one of Museum Island’s best-known treasures) at Tell el-Amarna.

The newly opened Alte Nationalgalerie, in turn, boasted a core of contemporary paintings by the likes of Caspar David Friedrich, recently bequeathed by the Berlin banker Joachim Heinrich Wagener.

‘It’s now our turn to host the party,’ says Anette Hüsch, the Alte Nationalgalerie’s director. She’s alluding to the fact that, for each of the five years of bicentennial celebrations, one venue on Museum Island will be the focus. In 2025, this was the Altes Museum; in 2027, it will be the Pergamon Museum; and in 2026, coinciding with the 150th anniversary of its opening, it is the Alte Nationalgalerie.

The architecture throughout Museumsinsel is impressive, but the Alte Nationalgalerie — which resembles a Greek temple set on a high plinth — is perhaps the most striking building of all.

Highlights of its year ahead include a major exhibition devoted to the art dealer Paul Cassirer, who helped introduce Impressionism to Germany at the turn of the 20th century; and a show dedicated to the painter-poet Hermione von Preuschen.

‘There’s definitely a collegiate atmosphere between the museums, a sense of being a team,’ says Hüsch, ‘and I believe this will only grow stronger with the bicentennial events. Together, we connect people across a huge range of times and places.’

The SPK’s decision to open the Humboldt Forum in 2021 was significant in this regard: a museum displaying items of material and visual culture from Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania, and offering a non-Western alternative to most of the exhibits on Museumsinsel. (Though not considered part of Museum Island, the Humboldt Forum is located very close to it — on the spot of the erstwhile Royal Palace, which was demolished in 1950.)

The historian Alexandra Richie chose the title Faust’s Metropolis for her book about the history of Berlin, reflecting the remarkable ups and downs that the city has experienced across the ages. In the specific case of Museumsinsel, the Nazis showed ambivalence, selling off or destroying 500 works of modern art from the Alte Nationalgalerie on grounds of their being ‘degenerate’, yet admiring the perceived perfection of the sculptures from classical antiquity.

During the Second World War, museum officials evacuated most of the treasures for safekeeping in mines and bunkers outside Berlin. Allied bombing, however, caused damage to all five buildings, especially the Neues Museum, which ended up resembling a ruin.

After the war, Museum Island was in the part of the city designated East Berlin, under the control of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Four of its museums reopened, but — whether because of a lack of interest or a lack of resources — the communist authorities carried out only basic repairs rather than wholesale renovation. Germany reunited in 1990, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

‘Every city has history, but Berlin has too much,’ joked the British architect David Chipperfield, who oversaw the Neues Museum’s restoration, before its reopening in 2009. He also designed the James Simon Gallery, a kind of reception building for Museum Island, which opened in 2019 and provides it with amenities expected by the modern visitor, such as an information centre, a terrace café and an auditorium.

Chipperfield’s projects formed part of the Museumsinsel Master Plan, introduced by the SPK in 1999 (the same year that UNESCO recognised Museum Island as a World Heritage Site). This entailed long-overdue modernisation of the entire complex, and much work remains to be done.

The Pergamon Museum — named after its central exhibit, the monumental reconstruction of an altar from the ancient city of Pergamon — will only partially reopen in 2027, for example. Its complete reopening is scheduled for a decade later, after a fourth wing is added to the existing three.

Other works include an underground promenade, currently under construction, which will connect the museums at basement level from 2037 onwards. Talks are also ongoing about the return to Museum Island of the vast collection of paintings — spanning the 13th to the 18th century — which, for reasons of space, has been kept for many years elsewhere in Berlin.

A critic might say that everything is taking an awfully long time, given the speed at which cultural values in the 21st century are changing. Another concern is finance: the cost of works on the Pergamon Museum alone is estimated at €1.5 billion, at a time when Museumsinsel’s funding (which is publicly sourced, and administered by the SPK) is tight.

‘There are challenges, of course,’ says Ackermann. ‘But we always keep in mind what a beloved place Museum Island is — where the energy extends beyond the buildings into the spaces outside, which can take on a life of their own, particularly in summer, as people come together in large numbers and socialise in a pretty setting.

‘The investment of so much time and money in Museum Island is a sign of how important to the city of Berlin it is.’

Founded on Antiquity is at the Altes Museum until 3 May 2026

Cassirer and the Breakthrough of Impressionism will be on show at the Alte Nationalgalerie from 22 May to 27 September 2026

An immersive exhibition about the ancient city of Pergamon in 129 A.D., Pergamon. Masterpieces from the Ancient Metropolis with a 360° Panorama by Yadegar Asisi, is open at a temporary venue on Museum Island called Pergamonmuseum. Das Panorama

For more information on Museum Island’s bicentennial events, visit mi200.de/en