The painted garden
Standing inside a scene you just saw in the paintings.
Jean-Pierre Dalbéra from Paris, France — CC BY 2.0 · Zyance — CC BY-SA 3.0 · A.Savin — CC BY-SA 3.0 · t.przechlewski — CC BY 3.0
Yes if you go in the garden season from May to September, because the essential value is seeing the paintings and then stepping out into the same scene alive. In winter the garden loses most of its effect and the museum becomes a small house with a limited collection — not worth forty-five minutes each way. The Wannsee Conference House is minutes away and the two can be combined.
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The Liebermann Villa is a summer house on the shore of Lake Wannsee in Berlin's south-west, built by the painter Max Liebermann in 1910, where he spent every summer until his death. Liebermann was the most famous German painter of his day and president of the Prussian Academy of Arts, and among the leading figures of German impressionism. The garden rather than the house is the heart of the place: Liebermann designed it himself with a landscape architect's help, then painted it more than two hundred times across twenty-five years — making the garden his principal subject in his later life. It was later restored using his own paintings as the visual reference, so you stand today inside a scene you saw in the museum a few minutes earlier. The ending is tragic: Liebermann was Jewish, stripped of his position after 1933, and died isolated in 1935; his widow Martha was ordered out of the house in 1943 and took her own life before deportation. The house was seized and only became a museum in 2006. It is a long way out, but the combination of the paintings and the real garden justifies the trip.
Standing inside a scene you just saw in the paintings.
The terrace descending from the house to the Wannsee.
Colomierstrasse 3, 14109 Berlin