In Berlin, a Humboldt Forum Now at Full Capacity

On September 17, over 25,000 visitors discovered the final installations of the Humboldt Forum: a venture that has successfully made it through thick and thin over 20 years. After two partial openings—one virtual, because of the pandemic—this monumental journey, carried out under the auspices of Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) and his brother Wilhelm (1767-1835), has firmly established itself as one of the world’s biggest spaces devoted to non-European cultures. Comprising not one but two museums housed in a brand-new Berlin palace, the institution exhibits over 24,000 objects—out of a total of 500,000 references from the Ethnologisches Museum and 40,000 from the Museum für Asiatische Kunst—in 17,000 m 2 of exhibition space. This long development process, which was further slowed by the health crisis, is inseparable from another vast and controversial project. Although the idea of a Humboldt Forum as a "center for dialogue between cultures and science" (as it was originally called) dates from the 1990s and the fall of the Wall, it needed a few more years to become a reality. It eventually took the form of an imposing royal palace, destroyed 72 years ago. Its reconstruction was voted by the Bundestag on July 4, 2002, despite those arguing for a more contemporary architecture, who were in the minority. The project was contested by many people for budgetary reasons (the final bill will be €680 M), but according to its supporters, this monumental reconstruction—a sphere in which…