The Jewish Museum is certainly one of the most striking works of architecture in modern Berlin, no minor achievement taking into account the city’s recent construction increase. The silver lightning bolt cutting through suburban Kreuzberg is the effect of an worldwide contest which got architects to design a building that would accommodate a unending exhibition chronicling German-Jewish history. The winning design was by Daniel Libeskind, a Polish-born Jew whose significant theoretical offerings to architecture had never been put to the realistic exam. His building is full of sloping corridors, black-walled voids and unbalanced windows intended to throw the visitor off balance. The architecture displays the many inspiring offerings made by Jews to German culture and learning over the hundreds of years when Berlin was home to some of the most alive Jewish communities in Europe. The gap left by the holocaust is represented by a huge, blank, echoing tower, and the disorientation of immigration to a new land by the E. T. A. Hoffmann garden. See the museum homepage for more info and photos. You could stay close to this in Holiday apartments berlin germany

Checkpoint Charlie

Checkpoint Charlie is a remarkable location for a museum about the former GDR. Unluckily the privately-owned Haus am Checkpoint Charlie glorifies the win of capitalism over communism with over-sentimental art, over-the-top descriptions of escapes over the Wall, and long-winded digressions about peaceful resistance to dictatorship in Eastern Europe. The fall of the Wall was in truth an worldwide mark of the end of the cold war, and of autonomy in a united Europe, but the museum avoids exploring the problems of dichotomies akin to those the wall represented. It substitutes romantic stories for complicated explorations of East German reality. The explanations are translated into English, French and Russian. Too bad the display contains an exhausting amount of text.

German Historical Museum

The everlasting home of the German Historical Museum (DHM) in the Zeughaus is being renovated and will be shut until 2011. In the mean time the DHM has a temporary home across the road in the Kronprinzenpalais (Unter den Linden 3). The foremost collection of the museum isn’t open to the general public for the period of the renovations. The DHM in the Kronprinzenpalais shows a programme of topical exhibitions. You can stay near to this on your Berlin trip by staying in apartments berlin germany and enjoy the central location to everything else the city has to present.

German Resistance Memorial Centre

On the grand scale of things there was not much resistance to the Nazi dictatorship of 1933-45; options of likely disagreement were found rapidly and shut down. These hardy souls who did try to resist are the subject of this permanent exhibition in rooms which were part of German army command center for the period of World war 2. The museum is situated here because it was from this building that Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg planned his failed attempt on Hitler’s life in 20. July 1944. Guided excursions of the exhibition are free of charge and are good value as they cover the rise and fall of Nazi Germany as well as those who resisted it.