Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart

The Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart presides over a comprehensive collection of contemporary art, which it presents in a variety of exhibitions.  The museum’s name refers to the building’s original function as one of the first terminal stations of the rail system in Germany. It opened as the terminus of the railway line between Hamburg and Berlin in December 1846. The building’s late Neoclassical style was conceived by the architect and railway pioneer Friedrich Neuhaus. It set an architectural precedent for the subsequent designs of Berlin’s train stations through the second half of the 19th century. Today it is preserved as the city’s only train station remaining from that time.

Despite several renovations to the building, the Hamburger Bahnhof could not keep pace with the increasing volume of traffic on the rails, and it closed in 1884. Over the next twenty years it would be used for residential and administrative purposes before it was finally re-designated as an exhibition hall in 1904, fittingly as a museum of transport and construction. The hall behind the entrance was added to accommodate this museum. The east wing of the cour d’honneur was built in 1909, and construction of the west wing began in 1914. Even amidst the turbulence of the First World War, the wing was finished by 1916, establishing today’s view of the building from Invalidenstraße. In 1943 however, during the Second World War, the building sustained severe damage. In the subsequent division of Germany, it remained unused for decades, located as it was in the no-man’s land between East and West Berlin.

In February 1984, the Hamburger Bahnhof was absorbed into the administration of West Berlin’s Senate and was partially restored to coincide with the city’s 750-year anniversary. The Bahnhof premiered the exhibition “Journey to Berlin” in 1987, marking the first time it had been used as a museum in over forty years. One year later, the Senate transferred oversight of the building to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Years later, after lengthy reconstruction by architect Josef Paul Kleihues, the Hamburger Bahnhof reopened on 2 November 1996 as a museum of contemporary art, the “Museum für Gegenwart”.

The museum expanded significantly to accommodate the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, presented to the museum in 2004 as a long-term loan. The former dispatch warehouses located behind the main building were renovated by the architectural firm Kuehn Malvezzi and connected to the historical building via a passage. The resulting structures, which became known as Rieckhallen, nearly doubled the available exhibition space. Today the Nationalgalerie’s Hamburger Bahnhof division is one of the largest and most significant public collections of contemporary art in the world.