Museums, Museums, Museums

As the title of this post suggests, I've been to a lot of museums lately. Most of my museum visits in the past couple weeks were on Berlin's Museum Island, a small island in the Spree river with five major museums including:

1. The Bode Museum, an art museum with lots of paintings and sculptures from the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque eras. Some favorites included an intricately carved set of wood side tables from around the 1500s:

and a special exhibit with religious treasures from the Middle Ages:

2. The Alte Nationalgalerie, an art museum with mostly paintings by German painters from the Classical and Romantic eras. While the paintings were stylistically similar to most other paintings of the era I've seen, it was cool to visit an art museum with a uniquely German focus. In addition to being introduced to some new artists, I was able to see some works by Casper David Freidrich, one of the most famous German painters in history:

3. The Altes Museum, which has a large collection of Greek and Roman artifacts. I particularly enjoyed this mosaic. In addition to mosaic being one of my favorite ancient art forms, both the intricacy and preservation of the work are impressive:

4. The Neues Museum, which houses Germany's Egyptian artifacts and exhibits on early history (Stone Age, Bronze Age, pre-Roman Europe, etc.). This museum houses one of Berlin's most famous artifacts, this bust of Nefertiti which visitors aren't allowed to take photos of:

It was one of the most impressive collections of Egyptian artifacts I've seen. My favorites included the sarcophagi collection and these tomb walls (I'm pretty sure I've never seen this much hieroglyphic text at one time):

5. The Pergamon Museum, which houses Berlin's Middle Eastern artifacts including the remains of Pergamon, an ancient Greek city in Turkey. Here's the recreation of the altar from Pergamon with the original reliefs:

and the Ishtar Gate from Babylon:

On the whole, I found all of the museums to be really great, especially the ancient history museums. Similarly to other European and American ancient history museums, namely the British Museum, Berlin's museums bring up a wide variety of questions regarding ancient artifacts and their ownership. Understandably, Egypt and Turkey would really like the Nefertiti Bust and Pergamon Alter, respectively, to be returned to their original location. While I have no idea how this particular international issue should be resolved, I enjoyed the opportunity to learn more about ancient history and see some amazing artifacts.

Another interesting part of the Neues Museum was a very small exhibit discussing the history of the museum. In particular, I found the section discussing the Second World War to be interesting. The museum both  evacuated the artifacts to other parts of Germany and hid some of them in air raid shelters in Berlin to protect them from bombing attacks. Despite their efforts, many of Germany's ancient artifacts were destroyed in the bombing. Additionally, soldiers from the Soviet Union stole many of the gold artifacts from Troy, an incident mentioned numerous times in the exhibit (for the record, Russia also hasn't returned any of these artifacts). 

Overall, this section of the museum got me thinking about the consequences of war. While not unsurprising, I had never thought too much about the consequences of war for cultural centers. How do you protect your nation's treasures? What do you decide to protect? When is the right time to protect your cultural past? As someone who grew up in a country that's rarely been attacked on home soil, these were issues and questions I've never really had to think about.