"Zwillingsmuseen" im geteilten Berlin: Zur Nach-kriegsgeschichte der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin 1945-1958.

• Author: Beckman, Gary
• Position: Book review

"Zwillingsmuseen" im geteilten Berlin: Zur Nach-kriegsgeschichte der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin 1945-1958. By PETRA WINTER. Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen, Beiheft 2008. Pp. 235, illus. Berlin: GEBR. MANN VERLAG, 2008. [euro] 138.

Among the casualties of the Second World War were the museums of Berlin, which prior to the conflict had been among the most prominent cultural institutions in the world. Centered for the most part on the Museums-insel in the River Spree, the museums' buildings had been largely reduced to rubble by bombing and by street fighting during the first months of 1945. Fortunately, the bulk of their artistic, ethnographic, and historical treasures had been dispersed to secure locations throughout the GroBdeutsches Reich, but the recovery of these holdings for their various museums would prove to be no simple matter.

The victorious Allies had taken possession of most of this material. The Americans and British, who discovered significant caches of paintings in disused mines in Kaiseroda and Grasleben, collected art and artifacts from throughout their conquered territories in depots in Wiesbaden and Celle, respectively. To the east, Soviet "trophy brigades" not only emptied the major art storage facilities in two antiaircraft towers in Berlin, but stripped the museum buildings themselves of most of what they still contained, including the massive Pergamon Altar of the Vorderasiatisches Museum. Their prizes were dispatched to the USSR; whether as booty or for safekeeping remained unclear.

The volume under review presents an institutional history of the Berlin museums during the immediate post-war period and the early days of the Cold War. With the division of Germany and of...