Russian-German cooperation became difficult for this museum
As preparations begin for the 75th anniversary of the Berlin Airlift, a Cold War Western allies victory over a Soviet blockade, one of the museums is negotiating a memorial exhibition about the fallout from a more recent geopolitical conflict.
The Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, on the site of the formal surrender of the German army at the end of World War II, commemorates what it describes as Germany’s “brutal war of annihilation” against the Soviet Union. Founded in 1995 when Germany and the Russian Federation were on friendly terms, the museum’s collection includes many loans from Russia, including a Soviet tank that stands at the museum’s entrance.
But at a time when Germany joins in military hardware worth billions of euros to Ukraine so that the latter can protect itself against invading Russian forces, the management structure of the Berlin-Karlshorst Museum is — to say the least — clumsy. The board of directors includes representatives from Russia’s ministries of Foreign Affairs, Defense and Culture, plus members from three Russian museums and one of Russia’s ally Belarus.
Administrators on the other side of the current conflict come from a Ukrainian museum and several German institutions, as well as the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Defense and Culture. The Ukrainian representative stopped participating in board meetings in 2014, protesting Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
“The situation is unsustainable,” said Berlin-Karlshorst Museum director Jörg Morré. “We know we are at a turning point. But you can’t just throw trustees off a board. It’s not easy.”
The airlift exhibition, which the board approved before the invasion of Russia in 2022, will open on June 29 and will be held outdoors at the former Tempelhof airfield. It was here, in 1948, that the United States and Britain flew fuel and food from bases in West Germany to a cold, hungry, and bomb-ravaged Berlin that had been sealed off by Soviet forces.
The free-access exhibition, consisting of photos and text, is organized jointly with two other museums and is presented in German, English, French and Russian, with handout documents in Ukrainian. Despite the Russians on the board, the Berlin-Karlshorst museum has thrown its weight behind the Ukrainian cause.
In a Feb. 21 statement, it said: “We continue to condemn this war in the strongest terms. We stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian people.” The board has not met since the invasion, Morré said, and Russian representatives have been silent on the museum’s position.
When the museum was established, Germany was grateful to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, for tolerating the reunification, and Russia for the rapid withdrawal of troops stationed in East Germany. Germany’s relief at a peaceful end to the Cold War was accompanied by guilt over the destruction of 24 million Soviet citizens in World War II.
In that context, the new museum was “a gesture of reconciliation at the state level,” Morré said. The German government pays all costs.
Until 2020, the cooperation between the Russian partner museums and the Berlin-Karlshorst Museum worked well, Morré said.
“We always looked where we could find agreement,” he said. “That’s gone, it doesn’t work anymore. The Russian view has become narrower and narrower. Now it is completely biased, propagandistic and distorting.”
That said the German Ministry of Culture in a Statement of 8 May that his minister, Claudia Roth, is “preparing a reconfiguration” of the Berlin-Karlshorst administration in consultation with the foreign and defense ministries. A spokeswoman for Roth declined to comment further, and the Russian embassy in Berlin did not respond to a request for comment.
Morré said he remains convinced of the importance of this work of memory, which is at the center of a revamped permanent exhibition at his museum that opened in 2013. World War II will be a Russian victory.”
“It’s not enough to say ‘no, we don’t agree to this’,” he said. “We must actively distance ourselves from the Russian perspective.”
Although the Ukrainian board representative, from the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in World War II, in Kiev, no longer attends meetings, the two institutions continue to work together, Morré said. A historian from the Ukrainian museum temporarily joined Morré’s team in Berlin after the invasion and has since returned to Kiev. The Berlin-Karlshorst Museum also works closely with exiled members of Memorial International, a human rights organization that was banned by the Russian Supreme Court in 2021.
For now, Morré said, he can only work with exiled Russian historians. His colleagues from the three Russian museums were represented on the board of the Berlin-Karlshorst Museum – de National Historical Museumthe Central Museum of the Armed Forces and the Victory Museum in Moscow — have become silent partners.
“We know that there are still good colleagues in museums in Russia who have a clear view of history,” he said. “But they can’t express it.”
Morré said he does not know how the German government plans to rid the museum of its Russian curators. One option may be to take legal action on the basis that Russia has violated the museum’s statutes, which define one of its objectives as “promoting understanding between peoples,” he said.
If the Russian curators leave, the Berlin-Karlshorst Museum may also confiscate a large part of its collection. About 1,000 of the 20,000 objects are on loan from the Russian Federation. In addition to the military hardware on display outside the museum, there are also artifacts from the two-and-a-half-year German siege of Leningrad, now St. Petersburg.
“I imagine they will demand them back,” Morré said. “It would be a very big loss.”
The museum no longer describes itself as a “German-Russian” project, Morré said. The Russian and Belarusian flags hanging at the entrance were taken down on the day of the Russian invasion. Only one flag is still flying – and that is Ukraine’s.
Morré said he could not foresee a revival of cooperation with Russia anytime soon. “It will take a long time,” he said.