Steglitz-Zehlendorf

Population: 293,989
Sub-districts: 7

Steglitz

Lichterfelde

Lankwitz

Zehlendorf

Dahlem

Nikolassee

Wannsee

Brücke Museum | Bridge Museum

This discrete and discreet one level gallery is situated on the southwest edge of the city on the tip of the glorious Grunewald. The Bridge Museum is focused on a group of friends who practiced and promulgated Expressionist art in Germany, known collectively from 1905 as the Brücke.

Edvard Munch is arguably the most well-known Expressionist painter ­– certainly in the UK – but before the Great War a movement bubbled with ever-building vigour in Dresden that many people today may be completely oblivious to. Opened in 1967 this museum aims to rectify this and has the most expansive collection of that movement's oeuvre.

From August 2014 until the 16th November 2014, the gallery is primarily concerned with their work during the First World War. Emil Nolde, Otto Mueller, Max Pechstein, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner are here featured. Their pencil and pen sketches, charcoals, watercolours and – the distinctive staple medium of the Brücke – woodcuts line the walls. Erich Heckel's 'Der barmherzige Samariter' (The Good Samaritan) sequence is one highlight. It is a 1915 triptych of coloured woodcuts that pictorially narrate the eponymous Biblical passage. The last in the sequence looks to be more sun-faded than its siblings, but the family otherwise still hold their shock of deep bluescale colours. Heckel's watercolour 'Roquairoi' from 1917 – the painting that inspired American rockstar Iggy Pop's angular pose on his The Idiot album sleeve ­– is displayed later in the gallery. Both Mr Pop and his British friend and contemporary David Bowie were said to have been regular visitors to the gallery. Max Pechstein's 1918 ultra-detailed and complimentary woodcut caricature of his son Frank is another highlight.

The Brücke Museum, like the Radio Tower in the neighboring Bezirk of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, is relatively unknown to tourists – indeed all of the displays here are German-language only – and is better for it. The gallery is quiet, understated and brilliant and, like the Ethnologisches Museum (Ethnological Museum), simply another remarkable reason for you to invest time in the green and affluent Steglitz-Zehlendorf district.

Fohlenweg, 14195 Steglitz-Zehlendorf

Bus: X10 Königin-Luise-Straße/Clayallee

Open: Wednesday-Monday, 11.00-17.00

Admission: €5/€3 Concessions

bruecke-museum.de

A Brücke Aside

The mental decline of painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner can be followed chronologically through his paintings in the gallery. Walk clockwise around the museum to view first a brief biography complete with a blurred photo of his face and follow his timeline in reverse. Towards the end of his reported mental illness his work consisted mostly of erratic pencil sketches. His 1917 pen-sketched 'Selbstbildnis im Morphiumrausch' (Self-portrait in a Morphine Fugue [my translation]) compared to his oil painted self-portrait in 1914 indicates how his (self-)perception had altered. In the latter portrait, arguably the more Expressionist of the two, his features have become indistinct and spread out. He looks – and clearly felt he was – ill. His face is roughly the same size but his forehead is now creased and his jawline has all but disappeared. The 1917 picture is part worrying, part diseased and wholly fantastic abstraction.

Other Site of Interest:

The Ethnologisches Museum, my favourite Berlin museum, exhibits perhaps everything from every other indigenous culture that the Mitte-based, Ancient Egypt-focused Neues Museum | New Museum – my second favourite – doesn't.

Ethnologisches Museum | Ethnological Museum

Lansstraße 8, 14195 Steglitz-Zehlendorf

U-Bahn: U3, Dahlem-Dorf

Open: Tuesday-Friday, 10.00-17.00; Saturday-Sunday, 11.00-18.00

Entry: €8/€4 Concessions
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