1920s at ‘Long Night of Museums’ in Berlin

This year, Berlin’s ‘Long Night of Museums‘ is dedicated to the culture of the 1920s. On this biannual event, over 80 museums and cultural institutions all over the city offer late-night events with a bus shuttle service running between all venues.

16 March 2013: 32nd Long Night of Museums in Berlin

The upcoming Long Night of Museums comes under the banner of the Theme Year 2013 “Diversity Destroyed“. With the National Socialist’s take-over of power in January 1933, gradually everything that had been suggested by the street terror of the SA became legally enforced: The repression of those cultural, political and economic powers that did not correspond to the ideological precepts of the NSDAP. Alongside the destruction of Parliamentarism, there resulted the near total obliteration of cultural diversity – which was what Berlin had come to be known for, all over the world.  An unimaginably high number of artists, authors, composers and theatre folk, as well as doctors, solicitors and teachers, who had shaped the colourful cultural and urban life in the Berlin at the start of the 1930s, became the victims of exclusion and persecution as they did not fit in with the National Socialist’s vision of “German Culture”. Successful careers were violently ended and hopeful new talents could no longer evolve. In place of a vibrant, internationally influenced culture, came the ‘Gleichschaltung’ of various cultural activities. Those who were excluded, driven out or murdered were sought to be wrested from the collective memory and any trace of them permanently deleted.  Exactly eighty years later, now that we have long since won back our cultural diversity, and know to cherish its worth, we remember the cultural life of the outgoing 1920s. Many of the 80 participating museums and institutions look back at the many facets of this time, its personalities, its music, literature, art and science. Visitors can acquaint themselves with its rainbow culture, which was exterminated by the National Socialists. In this way, the importance of preserving the diversity reclaimed within culture, ought to be made clear.

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