Exhibiting Trauma: The Berlin Painting and Sculpture Collections Seventy Years after World War II, a Curatorial Reflection

Abstract

For the Berlin Museums, the memory of May 1945 is linked to the loss of objects from their collections. In the days just before and after the end of the war, two fires in a bunker destroyed countless works of art that had been stored there for safekeeping. Over the course of 1945, large parts of the museum holdings came under control of the Allies. The majority of these works only returned to the then-divided Berlin in the 1950s. The effects of the war and the postwar period on the collections of the Berlin Museums are felt to this day. The Gemäldegalerie lost about four hundred paintings, the Skulpturensammlung a third of its holdings. Among the works that did return, many were severely damaged.