Ethnological Museum of Berlin

Inside the Humboldt Forum, the noise of the city drops away. Your footsteps soften on stone floors. The air is cool and still, and the light in the galleries is kept low to protect wood, feathers and painted fibre. Somewhere ahead, a long dark hull rises out of the dimness. Its curved prow points toward you like the bow of a ship coming into harbour. This is the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, and you are standing in one of the largest collections of its kind anywhere in the world.

The museum is much older than the building around you. It was founded in 1873 as the Royal Museum of Ethnology, at a time when Berlin was the new capital of a newly united German Empire. Its first director was Adolf Bastian, a ship's doctor who became a tireless traveller and collector. Bastian believed that all human cultures shared a common set of basic ideas. He also believed that traditional ways of life were disappearing fast, and that a museum had to gather records of them before it was too late.

That sense of urgency shaped everything that followed. Over the following decades, objects arrived in Berlin from Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific. Some came through scholars and scientific expeditions. Some were bought or traded. And many arrived through the colonial system, when Germany held territories in Africa and the Pacific. Today the collection holds roughly half a million objects. Only a small share of them can be shown at any one time. Most rest in storage and research rooms, out of public view.

For much of the twentieth century, the collection lived far from here. After the Second World War, it was housed in the leafy southwestern district of Dahlem, a quiet suburb a long ride from the city centre. Many Berliners still remember visiting the boats and masks there. Then, in the early twenty-first century, the decision was made to bring the collection back to the historic heart of Berlin. The museum opened its new galleries here in stages, beginning in 2021.

The building itself carries a complicated story. On this site stood the Berlin Palace, the residence of Prussian kings and German emperors. It was damaged in the Second World War, and the East German government demolished it in 1950. Later, East Germany built the Palace of the Republic here, a modern parliament and culture building with bronze-tinted glass. After reunification, that building was taken down too. The structure you are inside now recreates three of the old baroque facades, combined with a plain modern side facing the river.

The Humboldt Forum takes its name from two brothers. Alexander von Humboldt was a naturalist and explorer who travelled through South America. Wilhelm von Humboldt was a scholar of languages and a reformer of education. Together they stand for curiosity about the whole world. The museum shares this building with the Museum of Asian Art and other institutions. That is worth knowing, because you can move from one collection to another without stepping outside.

Now, the boats. The Pacific galleries are the part many visitors remember longest. Large canoes and outrigger vessels fill a tall hall, some of them long enough to carry dozens of people. The best known is the boat from Luf, a small island in what is now Papua New Guinea. It is a large outrigger, carved and painted, built for the open sea. It came to Berlin in the early 1900s, during German colonial rule. In recent years, historians have questioned how fairly it was obtained, and the museum now tells that story openly.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. The hall was designed around the boats, not the other way round. The largest vessels were placed before parts of the building were closed in, because they would not fit through an ordinary door. So when you look at them, you are seeing objects that the architecture literally grew around. Nearby, look also for a painted meeting house from Palau, in the western Pacific. Its beams are covered with pictures that tell stories, almost like a carved and painted book.

Another surprise is something you cannot see at all — only hear. The Ethnological Museum is home to the Berlin Phonogram Archive. In the early twentieth century, researchers recorded songs and speech on wax cylinders, in many parts of the world. These fragile recordings are among the earliest sound documents of music from many cultures. The archive has been listed in the UNESCO Memory of the World register, which protects documents of global importance. Some galleries let you listen to sounds and voices, so keep an eye out for listening points.

The museum does not hide the harder questions. Throughout the galleries, you will find texts about where objects came from and how they came to Berlin. This research is called provenance research. It traces each object's journey, owner by owner. The best known case involves the Benin Bronzes, metal plaques and sculptures taken by British troops from the Kingdom of Benin in 1897, in present-day Nigeria. In 2022, Germany agreed to transfer ownership of its Benin Bronzes to Nigeria. Some objects went back, and the conversation continues.

That makes this a different kind of museum visit. You are not only looking at beautiful things. You are also watching an institution rethink its own past in public. Many exhibits now include the voices of people from the communities where the objects were made. Artists, scholars and descendants have helped shape the labels and displays. So when a text seems to ask a question instead of giving an answer, that is deliberate. The museum invites you to think alongside it.

As you move through the rooms, take your time with the smaller objects too. A woven basket, a carved spoon, a feather headdress — each one was made by a person with skill and purpose. Many of these things were used every day, in kitchens, ceremonies and journeys. Lean close to the glass and look at tool marks, repairs and worn edges. These traces show that the objects had full lives long before they ever reached a museum case in Berlin.

When you are ready for a break, step out onto the upper levels of the building. From the roof terrace, you can look across the centre of Berlin. Museum Island lies just to the north, with its domes and columns. The tall television tower rises to the east, and the river Spree runs beside the building. It is a good moment to see how this collection sits at the meeting point of old Prussia, divided Berlin and the city of today.

Before you leave, stand once more near the boats. Notice how quiet the hall is, and how the low light catches the curve of the hulls. These vessels were built to cross open water, to carry families, goods and news between islands. Now they rest far from any sea, in the middle of a European capital. As you walk back out into the streets of Mitte, you might keep one question with you — whose stories are kept in a museum, and who gets to tell them.