Museums in Berlin

So, apologies for having ignored this the last couple of days. I have been drunk. Less intensely drunk granted, but it’s been no easier on my liver. I guess I’ve been coquettishly flirting with a nuclear power plant as opposed to my usual of dry humping an atom bomb, but the effect is just the same: I’m gonna wind up sterile at some point in the future.

In between my bouts of cursory consideration for my body and rampant desire to get wasted and fall in love, I have been going to museums. Not as many, if I’m honest with myself, as I should have, but enough to warrant making noise about. Here are four places worth visiting:

My kind of museum.

National History Museum: you’ve been here before, sure, but when does natural history ever get boring? It’s basically the same as the last natural history museum you went to, but in German. You might not get the full experience, but you’ll get pretty close, as there’s plenty of quality translation. Highlights include a fucking great big dinosaur, an air-conditioned freak show of formaldehyde and fish, and a taxidermy wing that would make even the most disturbed of serial killers weak at the knees. 

DDR Museum: organisation can rarely be a good substitute for truth, but in this case it would be nice to feel as if someone hadn’t just crapped through a desk fan and let the pieces lie where they fell. Consistently surprising, and occasionally emotional, this museum offers an awful lot of information for such a small place. The only real trouble is that you do need a little time to piece things together, as there’s very little narrative of the East German regime. It’s one of the few commercial museums around, but no less enjoyable for it.

Sculpture, tat, random art and post-
modern tourism shit at Tacheles.

Kunsthaus Tacheles: not that I’ve been all the way through it, but this art house, for want of a better translation, is floor upon floor of piss-soaked commercialism. Even if you’re not buying, you’re still buying into something, and that’s appropriate given its history as a monument to commercial failure. The history is interesting, even if you don’t find the classical architecture or über-cool art quite as engaging. 

Wouldn't mind getting
inside her national dress.

The German History Museum: so this place is emotional. I got a helluva kick out of being there and enjoying both the serenity of the architecture and the quality of the exhibits. At time of writing it has a German police exhibition, covering pre, mid, and post war. When you get to the top floor – a place dealing with the logistics of wartime Germany – things get a little more real. The power of this exhibition, if you’re into voyeurism, is not in the exhibits, but in the emotion present in those viewing them. It may have just been the day I spent there, but there were a lot of wistful old German men and teary-eyed old German women. I didn’t belong there, so I left.

Scenesters. Cunts.

Daisies: a place to go in Wedding that, frankly, kicks ass. Not strictly a museum, but a little slice of something at least real. Ish. A pokey little dive, this will be the place you tell your mates about when you get home. Formerly an old Turkish men’s club, this place is currently run by two painfully cool New York scenesters with, apparently, enough balls to tackle the German bar bureaucracy obstacle course. You go girls!

There’s a metric shit-tonne more to do in Berlin, and hopefully I’ll cover it reasonably soon.