Berlin’s Stadtschloss-Humboldtforum and the disappearing glass: The museum as diorama

ABSTRACT

In 2009, the Berlin Palace-Humboldtforum Foundation came into being, with a mandate to rebuild the façade of Berlin’s Prussian city palace and create the Humboldtforum to house the Ethnologische and Asiatische Kunst collections. I argue that the reconstruction is reminiscent of a nineteenth-century diorama, though while in the latter, the visitor can see through the falseness, in the former, the visitor becomes implicated in illusions of truthfulness. Dioramas are invented scenes – approximations of the ‘authentic’. The diorama’s claim to truth usually rests with its ability to convey a particular world view – that of the time in which they were assembled together with the time of the visitors’ gaze. But what happens if the whole museum becomes a diorama? What if the staging itself expresses a somewhat nefarious ‘authenticity’ of its own? What happens when the glass disappears and the visitor becomes complicit in the simulacrum? This paper explores some of the consequences ensuing from the attempt to raise the ghosts of Prussia as guardians over the traces of division and conflict that linger in post-reunification Berlin within a global context of mounting nationalisms.

KEYWORDS:

• Berlin
• cultural memory
• museums
• Humboldtforum
• Stadtschloss
• diorama

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.