Historian Neil MacGregor has been Germany’s favourite Brit – next to the queen – since his History of Germany in 100 Objects exhibition attracted enthusiastic crowds in London.
Weeks after that exhibition came to Berlin for an honour lap, and further rave reviews, Mr MacGregor, the former director of the British Museum, has now unveiled what he hopes will be an even bigger coup.
After two decades of emotional debate and years of building work, Mr MacGregor is risking his reputation by trying to knock into shape one of modern Germany’s most ambitious and unwieldy museum projects: the Humboldt Forum.
Housed in a re-creation of Berlin’s old Prussian palace, home to kings and kaisers and demolished in 1950, the Humboldt Forum is a form seeking a function. Urgently.
It is scheduled to open in 2019. So Germany hopes Mr MacGregor can work his magic and knock some shape into a sprawling concept that appears to be aiming to be a new kind of interdisciplinary museum.
On Wednesday he invited journalists to a press conference in the building site to end the mystery.
“So much has been said and written about the Humboldt Forum, now is the time to move over to the objects,” he said. With two other directors, Mr MacGregor said the new space would be a “place of networking, communication and participation”, a kind of “base camp” for setting out on missions to better understand the world’s big existential questions such as life, death, religion, migration and globalisation.
Ethnological museums
Cornerstones of the new building will be exhibits from Berlin’s ethnological and Asian art museums, leading collections of non-European art, as well as other museums in the capital.
By bringing together traditional museum objects with science and art in an forum, the curators hope to create a new kind of interdisciplinary museum that will “break existing modes of thinking and institutional borders”.
Doing that, the directors hope, will be in the spirit of the man the forum is named after: explorer, scientist, artist and all-rounder, Alexander von Humboldt.
“The museum’s collections will serve as a basis to understand global interconnections and perceive the world as a whole, in the Humboldtian spirit,” said Mr MacGregor.
History and culture
As well as the big exhibitions, the forum will have an exhibition on Berlin’s history and culture as well as spaces for lectures, conferences, research and performance.
For its critics, the Humboldt Forum is a multimillion, neo-Prussian field of dreams: a fake historic building that is approaching completion on the outside but is still struggling to explain its reason for being or why anyone should visit.
Before the complex opens its doors at the end of 2019, however, Berlin visitors can preview the coming attractions at a exhibition in a temporary pavilion overlooking the site.
The Humboldt Forum is expected to cost €600 million. When it opens, Berlin’s newest attraction will be either a roaring success – a Pompidou Centre for the 21st century perhaps – or a limping white elephant.
