Museum Island
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How it came to be
Five museums stand on the northern part of an island in the Spree in central Berlin. King Frederick William III of Prussia charged Karl Friedrich Schinkel with designing a public museum for the royal art collection, and Schinkel drew up plans in 1822 and 1823. The Royal Museum, now the Altes Museum, opened on 3 August 1830, with Wilhelm von Humboldt overseeing the arrangement of the collection.
In 1841 Frederick William IV decreed that the whole northern part of the island be turned into a sanctuary for art and science. The Neues Museum by Schinkel's pupil Friedrich August Stüler was followed by the National Gallery, now the Alte Nationalgalerie, in 1876 and the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, now the Bode Museum, in 1904. The Pergamon Museum, built from 1910 to 1930, holds reconstructions of the Pergamon Altar and the Ishtar Gate of Babylon.
In the Second World War the Neues Museum was badly damaged in air raids on 23 November 1943 and in February 1945. During the Cold War the collections were split by the division of the city, and they were reunited after German reunification. The island was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1999, and under a master plan the Neues Museum reopened on 16 October 2009 as the home of the Egyptian Museum and the bust of Nefertiti.
Travellers who came here
- 1873-03
They arrived on 9 March and stayed until the 28th. On the 14th they visited Siemens and the Altes Museum, and on the 15th Bismarck gave a dinner for them at his residence.
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