Der Traum vom Museum

Around 1800 the Berlin Kunstkammer was suddenly stocked with numerous objects. The book places this apparent revival of a baroque type of collection within a tradition of encyclopaedic museums that has received little attention and that unfolded alongside the emerging single-discipline museum.

When Friedrich Wilhelm III filled the collection rooms of the Berlin Palace with objects once more, the baroque Kunstkammer was already regarded as an outdated type of collection. What emerged was a reinterpretation of the Kunstkammer as an encyclopaedic museum attached to a teaching or research institution — a model realised many times elsewhere in the eighteenth century. Comparisons with the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel, the St Petersburg Kunstkammer, the collections of the Francke Foundations in Halle and the Dresden “Palais des Sciences” show how it developed. In this way the book traces a tradition of encyclopaedic academy museums that formed the point of departure for the Berlin developments shortly before the founding of the Altes Museum.