Bundeswehr Military History Museum

About this place

The building began as a Saxon arsenal, put up between eighteen seventy-three and eighteen seventy-six and turned into a museum in eighteen ninety-seven. Every German regime since has used it: imperial, Nazi, Soviet and East German curators each rewrote what the collection was supposed to say about war, which makes the house itself part of the exhibition. It reopened in October twenty eleven after six years of work, with Daniel Libeskind's wedge of steel, concrete and glass driven straight through the symmetrical neoclassical front. The footprint of the wedge echoes a bomb crater, and its point is aimed at the Ostragehege, the loop of land Allied crews used as a marker on the night the city burned. The old wings tell military history in chronological order; the wedge cuts across them with thematic rooms on violence and memory, on war and play, on animals in the military, on music, and on what weapons actually do to a body. Allow two hours at the very least. More than ten thousand objects are on show, including a V-2 rocket standing in the central void, and the upper viewing deck at the tip of the wedge looks out over the city. Labels are in German and English and an audio guide is available. The one thing to get right is the closing day: this museum shuts on Wednesday, not Monday, and on Monday it stays open until nine in the evening with free entry for the last three hours. Trams seven and eight stop at Stauffenbergallee, a short walk away.