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.Held at the Bode Museum in 2015, the exhibition The Lost Museum shed light on the historical circumstances of the fires in 1945 and the subsequent fate of the works of art. With the help of plaster casts and photographic reproductions of works in their original size, masterpieces of the Berlin sculpture and painting collections were brought back into public consciousness. The exhibition also explored the ethical and practical problems behind the restoration and presentation of war-damaged art.