The German capital's important ancient Egyptian and Middle Eastern collections make it a natural port of call for Arab visitors, writes David Tresilian from Berlin Visitors to the German capital today are confronted by a set of apparent contradictions. While the city still resembles a giant building site, as it has done since the fall of the Wall a little over two decades ago, it can also seem strangely depopulated. Even on a weekday morning the central districts often have a Sunday afternoon feel. Friedrichstrasse, for example, a grand commercial thoroughfare that runs from Unter den Linden to the Schiffbauerdam and beyond, may have plenty of energy but it still lacks the crowds that fill comparable streets in Paris or London. Berlin at night can also seem like a place of paradoxes, people feeling their way about in what can sometimes be close to semi-darkness as they search for the city's famously unbuttoned nightlife. Even the central districts have a kind of noir-ish aspect when night falls, the street lights casting dramatic shadows on walls and across streets from early evening onwards. These shadows are only heightened by the absence of floodlighting on many of the city's public buildings. Berlin, it seems, is short of money, and while marvelous things have been done over the past two decades to restore the historic central districts, allowed to decay under the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), there is still some way to go in smoothing over the city's rougher edges. However, this occasional roughness, combined with the sense of space and the city's undeniable scale, may also explain the feeling of potential that Berlin often conveys to visitors. While it seems unlikely, unless Europe's centre of gravity moves dramatically eastwards, that Berlin will regain its previous centrality on the European continent, the money that is being poured into restoring the city's status as a national capital should go a long way towards restoring its cultural standing. When combined with Berlin's unique history, the new visitor attractions that are going up across the city should also make it an essential stopping-off point on the itinerary of any visitor to Europe, with Egyptian and Middle Eastern visitors being perhaps especially well served. Nefertiti in Berlin: Among Berlin's attractions for those interested in ancient Egyptian culture is the famous bust of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti, part of the German state collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts now given pride of place in the recently restored Neues Museum on the city's Museuminsel, a dedicated "island of museums" in the River Spree. Discovered by the German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt in 1912 and depicting the "great royal wife" of the 18th Dynasty Pharaoh Akhenaten, the bust's naturalism makes it unique among ancient Egyptian works of art. Unlike virtually all other pieces of ancient Egyptian statuary, it is also made of painted plaster and not from stone. As well as being one of the best-known images of any ancient Egyptian figure, royal or commoner, the bust has been one of the most fought over of all Egyptian works of art, with the authorities in Cairo periodically demanding its repatriation, only to be rebuffed by a firm Germanic no. Moving from museum to museum over recent decades along with the collection of which it is a part, the bust today has been given a dedicated room on the first floor of the Neues Museum. This neo-classical building, built in the 1840s by Friedrich Stueler, a pupil of the famous Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, was reopened at the end of 2009 after painstaking restoration by the British architect David Chipperfield. Visitors are thus able not only to inspect the Museum's extensive ancient Egyptian collection in the building originally built to house it, but also to admire Chipperfield's fascinating restoration. The Museuminsel brings together a group of museums built from the early decades of the 19th century onwards and expressing the civic pride and cultural and educational ambitions of the Prussian and then German state. From the earliest of the buildings, Schinkel's Altes Museum, which houses ancient Greek and Roman materials, to the latest, the Pergamon Museum, built to house an immense Hellenistic temple brought from Pergamon in what is now Turkey to Berlin in the early 20th century, the vocabulary of the buildings is neo-classical, befitting 19th-century notions of public building and the important place accorded to classical culture in 19th-century Germany. The Neues Museum, set behind and at right angles to the older Altes Museum, was one of the most damaged in the Second World War, and while plans were drawn up under the former GDR, which inherited most of Berlin's historic centre, to restore the building, only basic consolidation work was carried out before the Wall came down in 1989. It took another 20 years before Chipperfield's restoration of what had until recently been an empty, bombed-out shell �ê" a "crudely patched-up ruin" is how the guidebook describes it �ê" was unveiled to the public in October 2009. The restoration is a triumph, and it is worth a visit to Berlin just to see it. As a result of the bombing, the Museum's central hall was completely gutted, and nothing survived of the north-west wing, two sides of Stueler's original "Egyptian Court," the building's south-east projection and much of the interior decoration. What did remain of the building was left unroofed and open to the elements, destroying the interior plasterwork and much of the historical detailing. In restoring the building for its re-use according to its original function, Chipperfield rebuilt the central hall and missing wing in reclaimed brick, deciding on different solutions for the other rooms according to their surviving architectural elements. No attempt was made to restore what had been lost, if by that is meant a modern pastiche of a 19th-century original. Instead, Chipperfield reconstructed the spaces out of surviving materials, while clearly marking new additions and reconstruction work and consolidating, but not restoring, damaged surfaces. The result is a kind of historical palimpsest, the building bearing the marks of its past destruction while regaining its original function as host to Germany's pre-eminent ancient Egyptian collection. Chipperfield's decision to reconstruct the interior of the building according to the original plan, retaining the rhythm of the original spaces, means that visitors are able to re-experience, in chastened form, Stueler's gallery design and the intimate character of the original presentation. The Nefertiti bust is located in a dedicated domed room on the Museum's first floor, sightlines leading through the adjoining galleries to a parallel room at the other end of the building. Looking through a set of open doors and along the building's classically proportioned piano nobile, Nefertiti is surrounded by the evidence of the Museum's destruction and reconstruction, not least in the domed room at the other end of the gallery. This room, entirely destroyed by war, has been reconstructed in reclaimed brick. The effect is one of historical layering, past and present dialoguing with each other against a background of ever-present loss. Mesopotamia and the Islamic Arts: The presence of the Nefertiti bust in Berlin's restored Neues Museum, together with other important items from the Amarna Period of ancient Egyptian history, bears witness to the intense work of German archaeologists in Egypt and the Middle East in the decades before the First World War. In addition to the excavations carried out in Egypt, German archaeologists were also working in the Mesopotamian provinces of the then Ottoman Empire, part of present-day Iraq, where they uncovered, and brought back to Berlin, one of the most celebrated discoveries of these years in the shape of the famous Ishtar Gate and Processional Way from the ancient city of Babylon. Reconstructions of this Gate and Way, painstakingly assembled out of quantities of glazed blue tiles, can be seen in the neighbouring Pergamon Museum. This building, completed only in 1930, was the last historical addition to the Museuminsel, and it was designed to house the monumental Pergamon Altar, built in the first half of the 2nd century BCE in the city of Pergamon in Asia Minor, which was dismantled and brought to Berlin with the agreement of the then Ottoman government. Visitors to the Museum today pass through the enormous entrance hall in which the Pergamon Altar is located on their way towards the ancient Mesopotamian collections within, among them being the Ishtar Gate, one of the city gates built by the ancient Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in the 6th century BCE, and the associated Processional Way used in religious festivals. The Ishtar Gate and Way were excavated by the German archaeologist Robert Koldewey before the First World War, and Germany's active presence in the Ottoman Empire at the time is underlined by one of the Museum's lesser-known but equally important acquisitions from the period in the shape of the fa��ade of the Mshatta Palace kept on the building's first floor. This carved stone fa��ade, 32 metres long and five metres high, was excavated from the remains of an Ummayad Period palace some 30 kms south of what is now the Jordanian capital Amman. It dates from the rule of the caliph Al-Walid in first half of the eighth century CE, and was given to the German emperor Wilhelm II in 1903 by the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II. Brought to Berlin, the fa��ade was reconstructed in the Pergamon Museum, where, barring damage sustained during bombing raids in the Second World War, it still stands today. Casual visitors to the Pergamon Museum might be forgiven for not necessarily appreciating the importance of the Mshatta fa��ade and its place in the development of Islamic art and architecture. However, as the Museum's catalogue explains, the fa��ade, constructed only a few decades after the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, is one of the earliest surviving examples of early Islamic palace architecture, and its decoration of vine scrollwork, griffins, winged lions, peacock dragons and centaurs stands "at the last high point of the development of art under the Ummayads." "Its origins lie in the pre-Islamic traditions of the Syro-Palestine and Iraq-Iran art that were superseded and melted in this period into a particular Ummayad style," the catalogue explains. Much of the collection gathered together in the Museum of Islamic Art located on the Pergamon Museum's upper floors and redesigned and reorganised a decade or so ago can be traced back, like the Ishtar Gate and Mshatta fa��ade, to German archaeological activity in the Middle East before the First World War. The presentation is chronological, beginning with the Ummayyads and ending with the later Ottomans, and it is distinguished by its notably clearly written wall texts, helping visitors to notice the kind of detail in individual exhibits that can help them make sense of what may be an unfamiliar field of art. Aside from the monumental Mshatta fa��ade, the highlights of the exhibition probably fall within the early rooms, notably those on the Abbasid Period, where the provenance of the pieces in early 20th-century German archaeological expeditions to Mesopotamia provides the background. Excavations directed by the archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld at the site of the Abbasid city of Samarra in what is now Iraq between 1911 and 1913 uncovered the ruins of the city's great mosque and caliph's palace, revealing the plan of Abbasid palace buildings and providing details of architectural styles and building techniques. Some of the objects on display, among them carved stucco wall panels, may look opaque, but in fact they provide some of the best surviving evidence of how the buildings once inhabited by the Abbasid rulers and princes, among them those mentioned in the Thousand and One Nights, may have looked. Ancient Mesopotamia was short of stone for building, and as a result Abbasid buildings were built of brick and decorated with carved stucco panels. In many cases, the brick has long since disappeared, making it difficult to establish how Abbasid cities such as Baghdad may once have looked. As a result, the surviving stucco panels are essential surviving witnesses. Reconstructing Berlin: Opposite the Museuminsel at the top of Unter den Linden and before the road widens out to reach Alexanderplatz, there is a large vacant lot, once the site of the Palast der Republik, or parliament building, of the former GDR and before that of the Berlin Stadtschloss, seat of Prussia's Hohenzollern kings and residence of the German emperors. In one of the most controversial architectural gestures of recent years, the Berlin authorities decided in 2003 to demolish the GDR building, citing not only its ugliness, but also the threat of asbestos. However, critics at the time and later saw the decision as having been motivated by a desire to erase memories of the former GDR and as an act of "revenge" for the GDR's own demolition of the bomb-damaged Stadtschloss in 1950. Today, the "Humboldt-Box," a temporary structure, occupies part of the land, and this has been erected to present what for some people is simply an extension of plans to restore the country's capital and for others is an act of folie de grandeur on an unprecedented, and possibly sinister, scale. Following a vote in the German parliament in 2007, it was decided to rebuild the destroyed Schloss on the empty site, recreating the vanished historical building down to every baroque detail on its original footprint, and it is this decision that has given rise to the controversy. Much of the comment on the project in the press has been hostile, and it is true that it stands in intriguing relation to Chipperfield's work at the nearby Neues Museum. On the other hand, restoration work like Chipperfield's was clearly impossible at the Schloss, given its demolition by the GDR authorities, and a review of the plans presented in the Humboldt-Box reveals that the decision was not taken lightly and without consideration of possible objections. An international competition was held for the reconstruction in 2008 and a winner announced in the shape of the Italian architect Francesco Stella. Stella's design, the subject of exhaustive comment in the German press, envisages the reconstruction in the original materials of three of the Schloss's facades, with the fourth being done in a contemporary style as a gesture towards historical layering. No attempt will be made to reconstruct the interior spaces of the building. Instead, behind the reconstructed historical facades there will be a contemporary cultural centre, dubbed the Humboldt Forum after the 19th-century German intellectuals Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, who also give their name to Berlin's Humboldt University. It seems unlikely that debate over the reconstruction project will die down any time soon, particularly since it has now been held up by technical issues and worries over funding. However, it would be a pity if those who for whatever reason are against the project did not look carefully at Stella's design and the fascinating technical and other questions that it raises. In particular, it would be a pity if they did not look at the plans for the Humboldt Forum that the rebuilt Schloss will house, now that these are becoming available, notably in the Humboldt-Box presentation. What these reveal is a project of a rare scale and ambition, carried out with impressive care and thoroughness. Among other things, the Humboldt Forum will house a contemporary anthropological and ethnographic museum, perhaps something along the lines of the Mus��e du quai Branly in Paris, itself the subject of controversy when it opened five years ago. However, the Humboldt Forum seems set to improve on the Branly Museum in every way, if the designs presented in Berlin are anything to go by. Not only will the institution be larger, but the exhibition design, one of the flaws of the Branly Museum, seems set to be both innovative and informative, while avoiding the pitfalls of aestheticisation. For this visitor at least, the exercises in "pre-figuration" contained in the Humboldt-Box presenting design ideas for the planned Humboldt Forum gave rise to little aside from enthusiasm for the project and a desire to know more about it.
