Twice a year the museums of Berlin open their doors long into the evening to show off their spaces under the cover of darkness, often with special events and performances to mark the occasion. This coming Saturday is the summer edition of the event, and 105 different venues are taking part. Before we pick a few things to look out for, here are some practical details:
- Combi-tickets which get you admittance to all venues cost €15. This also includes the shuttle bus network which is laid on between the different venues, and all other public transport on that evening until 3am. So it is a pretty good deal…
- You can buy tickets from all participating venues but also from BVG ticket machines, so if you want to get it in advance, check out the ticket machine down on the platform of the U-Bahn station at Rosenthaler Platz.
- The “central meeting point” for the event is the Kulturforum. Here is the starting point for all the shuttle bus routes, a number of different museums, and they are also hosting a programme of live music, wine tasting, some performance installations and a Twitterwall (no, us neither).
- The website for the Long Night of the Museums is in German, but if you scroll down you can download the English guide as a pdf, which includes an overview of every single thing going on around the city.
Right then, you know where you are going and how to get a ticket…but how do you possibly choose between 105 different venues? It’s not such a long night after all… Anyway, we’ve put together a sample of some things that look interesting to us, but we would definately recommend you download the English language guide from the website and make a plan for what you would like to see.
Five Things That Caught Our Eye
The DHM is one of Berlin’s best museums, exploring as it does over two thousand years of history in extraordinary detail. It would be impossible to see everything in one go, even with a long night, but at 6pm and 9pm they are offering summary tours in English of their collection.
At Potsdamer Platz, just down the road from the Kulturforum, the Film and Television Museum has a great exhibition on the history of, well, film and television. There is also a special exhibition going on of cinematic storyboards through history, from Hitchcock to Spielberg.
Each year the Martin Gropius Bau hosts around twenty exhibitions that are almost always well worth checking out. This Saturday you will have the chance to see wood-cuts and painting by Hokusai, as well as photographs from Budapest, Paris and New York by Andre Kertesz.
Alongside the permanent exhibition covering the history of computer and video games, there is a special performance on Saturday from 10pm-2pm by London’s gwEm and Aachen’s Microwave Massacre, who will be making music from the computer game theme tunes of the 70s and 80s with a modern twist.
The DDR Museum explores everyday life in East Germany, and for the Long Night of the Museums they will be playing top hits and forgotten gems from the GDR music scene, as well as serving up classic food and cocktails…what, no bananas?
