The Märkisches Museum (Marcher Museum; originally Märkisches Provinzial-Museum, i.e. Museum of the Province of the March [of Brandenburg]) is a museum in Mitte, Berlin. Founded in 1874 as the museum of the city of Berlin and its political region, the March of Brandenburg, it occupies a building on the northern edge of Köllnischer Park, facing the Spree, which was designed by Ludwig Hoffmann and completed in 1908. It is now the main facility of the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, Landesmuseum für Kultur und Geschichte Berlins, the City of Berlin museum foundation, which also operates four other sites.

Märkisches Museum

Märkisches Museum, Berlin

In the second half of the 19th century, Berlin grew very rapidly. The foundation stone of a new, much larger town hall, the Rotes Rathaus, was laid in 1861. The changes provoked interest amongst the bourgeoisie in the city's past and in preserving what had not already been lost. The Verein für die Geschichte Berlins (Association for the history of Berlin) was founded. It included early photographers such as Friedrich Albert Schwartz^[1] who began to document the changes to the city, assembling one of the first systematic photographic portraits of a city and its architecture. Beginning in the 1860s, they urged the foundation of a regional history museum. Ernst Friedel, a judge and antiquarian who had personally collected prehistoric and historic objects and paintings from Brandenburg for this purpose, persuaded the Magistrat, the executive council of Berlin, to form a new department of "Collections" and Friedel was appointed to head it together with the existing library and archive. On 9 October 1874 with the city's official acceptance of his plan, the Märkisches Provinzialmuseum (Provincial museum of the March) was founded.^[2][3] This was the first museum in Berlin to be completely independent of the Prussian crown.^[4] It had a budget of only 2,000 Goldmarks a year for purchases, and was therefore dependent from the start on donations from foundations and individuals.^[5] The Emperor later contributed a small fund for the purchase of photographs of the city.

In March 1875, Friedel put out a call for the donation or loan of objects of historical or scientific interest, which was so successful that the collection had to move late that year from the old town hall to the Palais Podewils, a Baroque residence in Klosterstraße, and in 1880 to the former town hall of Cölln. At that time it had over 29,500 objects.^[6] In addition, Berlin in the "Gründerzeit" was full of demolitions and excavations, which yielded both fragments of old buildings and prehistoric and medieval finds.^[7] The collection was crowded and in particular the large pieces taken from churches could not be properly displayed.^[8] However, the inventory was not without its uses: an executioner's axe from the collection was used on 16 August 1878 to behead Max Hödel after his attempted assassination of Emperor Wilhelm I.^[9]

At the urging of Friedel, a competition was held in 1892 for a building to house the collection, but the results were disappointing. 76 entries were received, but the winning design, by Wilhelm Möller, proved on examination to be both unsuitable and too expensive, and the architect had died,^[3][10][11] so the project was shelved.^[12][13]

Creating a new building for the museum was the first large task for Ludwig Hoffmann after his appointment in 1896 as Stadtbaurat (chief of construction) for the city of Berlin. His first sketches date to that year; the plans were accepted the following year, and construction began in 1899 and was completed in 1907.^[13] It was not ready for occupation until 1908,^[14] 12 years after the start of the project. Meanwhile, in 1899, in advance of the demolition of the Cölln town hall, some of the collection had been placed in storage and some shown in temporary quarters on the first floor of one of the city's covered markets, until 1904.^[3][13]

Hoffmann designed the museum as a complex of six differing buildings which echo Brandenburg brick architecture of periods from the Gothic to the Renaissance in a "historical collage", in order to reflect the contents of the museum and evoke the "atmosphere" of various times and types of building.^[12][15] Part of his reasoning was that Berlin no longer had much of an old centre.^[16] The buildings are grouped around two courtyards and based on historic details which he had studied and sketched throughout the region; his "quotations" are accurate copies, but there is disagreement as to the originals, as in a façade which has been said to be based on the town hall at Tangermünde^[12] or on St. Catherine's Church in Brandenburg an der Havel,^[17] and the hip-roofed tower, 53 metres (174 ft) high,^[3] based on the bergfried (keep) of the Bishop's Castle in Wittstock^[17] or on the cathedral of Ratzeburg.^[18] Hoffmann also modified the layout of Köllnischer Park to make an attractive setting for the museum.^[19]

The interior of the museum also seeks to evoke the atmosphere of different historical settings (as was then the fashion in provincial museums in Germany).^[12] For example, the low vaulted ceilings and roughly plastered walls on the ground floor were intended to suggest great age and housed the displays on prehistory, where the display cases for funerary urns and flint axes were rough in form; the setting for the medieval altars and sculptures was a vaulted Gothic chapel echoing medieval church interiors;^[18] weapons were shown in a room with thick columns, recalling a monastery;^[12] and rococo porcelain and snuffboxes were displayed in elegant vitrines in a light and airy room on the second floor. There were a total of about 50 exhibition galleries. The visitor was led repeatedly back to the central vaulted Great Hall.^[20]

A week before the opening on 10 June 1908, Emperor Wilhelm II and Empress Auguste Viktoria toured the exhibits for two hours.^[17][21] The museum is now judged to be amongst Hoffmann's most important works, and also one of the most outstanding German museum buildings.^[22][23]