TO AN UNINFORMED eye, the course of the Berlin Wall, twenty years after its destruction in November 1989, is difficult to discern, so thorough has been its obliteration. But other remnants of the city’s tragic history, from the Third Reich, the Allied bombardment and the Cold War, are yet unavoidable in what, since 1999, has been the German capital. Until very recently no building stood as witness to this concentration of history more poignantly than the Neues Museum. After devastating bombing in 1943 and 1945 it remained in East Berlin as a romantic overgrown ruin, decaying and vandalised, a constant reminder of the past at a time when so much else was gradually being transformed. This October, however, it became the latest component of Berlin’s Museumsinsel (a World Heritage Site) to be opened once more to the public, following on from the successful renovation of its neighbouring Alte Nationalgalerie (2001) and the Bode-Museum (2006). At the outbreak of the Second World War the Neues Museum’s collections, universally known for their Egyptian holdings, were stored (not, however, preventing the destruction of some of them); more found their way to the Soviet Union and those works not returned to Berlin in 1958 are still the subject of restitution claims. But by a miracle the majority was saved. The urgent question was to what kind of home were the objects to return. Some patchy remedial work had been undertaken on the building in the years of partition (and parts of it demolished), but it was not until the late 1990s, when a master plan for the constellation of the five museums on the island had evolved, that a specific vision emerged as to how Friedrich August Stüler’s Neo-classical and technically innovative structure was to be reborn in the twenty-first century.

Any attempt to revive the Museum had to take into consideration several factors. First among these concerned its historicising origins, as conceived by Stüler in the 1840s. He drew up a scheme of display in which the somewhat severe exterior of the building (Fig.I) belied the highly embellished rooms within, reflecting a mostly fanciful vision of the historical periods to which the objects belonged – for example Egypt, Rome, Pompeii, seen in especially commissioned murals and reliefs. Eventually these rooms began to speak more redolently of the mid-nineteenth century as a last fling of Prussian Enlightenment than of the ancient civilisations they were intended to evoke. Should these be faithfully recreated or be allowed to disappear – what was left of them – in a total interior renovation? Secondly, about forty per cent of the structure had gone, including the ‘shocking void’ where once had been the impressive main staircase, and the entire north-west wing; some rooms were virtually intact, others in disarray, without floors and ceilings. This led some extremists to believe that only a complete new interior was possible. Thirdly, would a ‘faked-up’ Museum cast a shadow over what was to be displayed inside, lending the exhibits themselves an inauthentic air contrary to the highly specialised nature of the collections? There was also the consideration of whether a strict restoration would carry the right kind of historico-political symbolism (as is evident in the rebuilt Frauenkirche in Dresden). Lastly, a truce had to be forged between those who cared primarily for the preservation of a historic structure, particularly the vociferous Gesellschaft Historisches Berlin e.V. (the ‘Historical Berlin Society’) and the curators whose job it would be to display the outstanding collections, bearing in mind the needs of the huge numbers of expected visitors and their twenty-first century expectations. The problem of the Neues Museum was to be, perhaps, the sorest test of all these claims, not unprecedented in themselves, but here needing someone with reserves of tolerance and patience as well as a vision to make the past tantalisingly alive.

An international competition for the renovation of the building in 1997 was won by David Chipperfield, the British architect known for his restrained classic-modernist style, whose current projects include the extension of the S. Michele cemetery in Venice and an addition to the Kunsthaus Zürich. The Neues Museum presented him with perhaps his greatest challenge. Given the general acclaim for his work following the October reopening, he has met this challenge with an ingenuity and a sensitivity that are at the service of a masterly intellectual framework. It is a superb synthesis of what at first seemed impossibly conflicting objectives. In a sense, Chipperfield has submerged his architectural identity; his hand is almost hidden. Yet the building has instantly become a highly original solution from which many a preservationist might learn.

From room to room, the rhythm and tone change almost imperceptibly, from cool restraint to dramatic display. The chic, somewhat gaudy bust of Nefertiti, the most celebrated object in the Museum, queens it over the rotunda with its coloured walls and marble floor; in the Moderne Galerie, the flow is momentarily stopped by the great cast of Ghiberti’s Gates of Heaven for the Baptistery in Florence, a reminder of the famous cast collection that once occupied the first floor. Wisps of history – from architectural fragments to bullet holes – are in transparent harmony with the obviously new interventions. This lack of uniformity to the galleries – so different from the succession of numbingly similar rooms in many a new museum or extension – keeps the visitor both visually and taxonomically alert. Those who worried that the emphatic character of Stüler’s building, strengthened by its renovation, might overwhelm the interior displays need have had no fears. The resurrection of the Mus­eum’s history (without recourse to portentous nostalgia) exists seamlessly with the demands of the future.