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Berlin museum reborn after WWII damage

(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-03-05 23:35

BERLIN – The restored Neues Museum was unveiled Thursday after six years of painstaking work to repair World War II bomb damage that ruined much of the renowned building.

The restored Neues Museum was unveiled Thursday after six years of painstaking work to repair World War II bomb damage that ruined much of the renowned building. [Agencies]

British architect David Chipperfield handed over the empty building's key to city museum officials. The museum is one of five which make up the neoclassical Museum Island, the German capital's best-known cultural complex.

The museum will open in October - housing, as it did before the war, Berlin's Egyptian collection, complete with a famous 3,300-year-old bust of queen Nefertiti. That will mark the first time since 1939 that all the island's five museums have been open to the public.

"The Neues Museum has finally awoken from its coma," Mayor Klaus Wowereit said, describing the handover as "a great day for culture in the whole world."

The euro200 million ($250 million) restoration incorporates the original material that survived wartime bombing and decades of exposure to the weather — including fluted stone columns and faux-Egyptian painted ceilings.

Entire wings were destroyed, including the central staircase. Chipperfield sought to restore their dimensions rather than imitating every detail, using plain concrete and brick in some of the rebuilt parts.

"There's really one dominant idea, which is to hold on to the original material that we were given in 1997," when he won the restoration job, Chipperfield told reporters.

Chipperfield's restoration "is fascinating, convincing and historically honest, because it does not plaster over the dramatic history of this building. It brings old and new together," said Hermann Parzinger, the head of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees Berlin's museums.

Work on the Neues Museum, designed by Friedrich August Stueler, began in 1841. It opened to the public in 1855.

In 1924, the bust of Nefertiti, discovered a decade earlier by German archeologists, went on public view at the museum.

The Neues Museum shut at the beginning of the war in 1939, and its contents were put into storage.

East German authorities patched up the complex's other museums after the war, but the cash-strapped country never managed a full restoration of the Neues Museum.

"I think the complexity of the problem was one of the reasons it was left so long," Chipperfield said. "The quantity of damage was very strange, very erratic."

As well as the Egyptian collection, the restored building will house Berlin's Museum of Prehistory and Early History.

The restoration is part of a wider government-funded euro1.2 billion ($1.51 billion) overhaul of the once-decrepit Museum Island, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, some of whose facades still bear the marks of wartime bullets.

Two other museums already have been fully restored; work on the next-door Pergamon Museum, one of Berlin's best-known tourist attractions, is expected to last until the mid-2020s.