Jewish Museum Berlin

Jewish Museum, Berlin - darkometer rating : 3 - One of Berlin 's most acclaimed new museums (opened 2001). An institution of Jewish culture – but NOT (at least not primarily) a Holocaust memorial museum, as some people erroneously seem to presume. It does cover some of these dark elements, but in the main its permanent exhibition is about non-dark cultural things, and thus only of secondary interest to the decidedly dark tourist. It's still worth a visit – if for the extraordinary architecture and design alone! > More background info > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos More background info: In a way, the museum isn't actually that new at all – the old wing of today's Jewish Museum was built as early as the 18th century, but it wasn't until the 1960s that the (reconstructed) building (the orginal had been largely destroyed in WWII ) became a museum, namely the "Berlin Museum", a museum about the history of the city. This already had a section on Jewish history, but the idea of turning the whole institution into a dedicated Jewish museum was only developed in the late 1980s, shortly before the reunification of Germany . The prominent "star" architect Daniel Libeskind ( USA ) won a design competition for the museum-to-be, and after reunification of Germany and Berlin it became one of the first large-scale redevelopment projects in the city. It was a highly controversial undertaking at first, though, and it took a lot of campaigning to see the actual realization of the radically modernist new museum building design through. Construction began in 1992 – and this too dragged on. When it was finished in 1999, it was first opened to the public as an empty building. The permanent exhibition came later and was inaugurated in 2001.