Museum Secrets (2011–…): Season 2, Episode 12 - Inside the Pergamon and Neues Museums, Berlin - full transcript
(tense piano and strings music)
- [Narrator] Berlin,
a city of refinement and regret,
and at it's heart, an
island devoted to museums
with secrets dark and strange.
An Egyptian queen's mysterious beauty.
A deadly Viking misadventure.
The magic of a wizard's hat.
And a sacred alter
bent to the cause of evil.
- [Crowd] Heil!
Secrets hidden in plain sight
inside the Berlin island museums.
(mysterious music)
(mysterious industrious music)
Every morning in Berlin, Germany,
several thousand people make a journey
(bicycle bell ringing)
through the center center
to cross a bridge to the past.
The Spree River surrounds an island
that boasts five renowned museums,
including two that harbor
secrets of the ancient world,
the Neues and the Pergamon.
(bombs whistling) (detonations rumbling)
Both museums were nearly
destroyed in World War II.
The Pergamon was
rebuilt just as it was before.
But when the Neues Museum reopened in 2009,
its bold design didn't
hide its recent past.
Instead, architects left
some bullet-riddled walls,
evidence of a brutal conflict.
(machine gun chatters)
In this gallery, there is evidence
of another kind of warfare.
We suspect this ancient Viking sword
was ripped from a cold, dead hand.
That's because Viking code
proclaimed that a warrior
and his sword were inseparable
in life and in death. (metallic tapping)
(sword swishes)
(slow mysterious music)
Today, the ancient Vikings are gone,
but live on in feature films
that require stunt fighters,
like Keller Longbow and his son Garnet.
(dramatic drum-heavy
music) (swords clashing)
Like real Vikings, these men know
what they like in the sword.
- Sharp as hell, flexible, well balanced,
and made of good steel,
so it will cut perfectly through flesh.
(groaning) (metallic clashing)
- [Narrator] The Vikings claimed
that their swords were indestructible.
But there is a mystery about
them that confounds historians.
They are often discovered
shattered into pieces.
If they were so mighty,
why did so many break?
That is our museum secret.
We begin our investigation
with a closer look at the museum's sword.
On one side, letters
spell out the word Ulfberht.
It is a word historians often
see on broken Viking swords.
(sinister droning music)
During their forays on
the coasts of Europe,
Vikings often sailed down the Rhine
to buy swords made in German foundries,
including one called Ulfberht.
This modern foundry specializes
in recreating ancient weapons.
Here we hope to discover
why Ulfberht swords were prone to shatter.
So, we asked swordsmith Jens Nettlich,
but what he says surprises us.
(metallic clatter)
- An Ulfberht sword was
the Rolex, the Mercedes,
under the Medieval time.
(grunting) (swords clashing)
If you hit flesh, it's no
problem to get inside.
It was almost impossible that it breaks.
(monks chanting) (swords clashing)
- [Narrator] We asked Jens to prove
that swords really are strong
when made the Ulfberht way.
- The first act is to have
different types of steel
so you need weak, or soft, and hard metal.
- [Narrator] The combination
can produce steel
hard enough to take a sharp edge,
but flexible enough to
prevent shattering on impact.
(metallic clanging)
The key is to create a blade
that contains just the
right amount of carbon.
This involves a lot of
pounding to combine the metals,
reheating in a coal fire,
and twisting to get the
molecular structure just right.
There are so many steps
in work for making a sword
that in each step of them could
get a failure inside, somewhere.
- [Narrator] Jens is confident
that the way he forges steel today
is very similar to the method
of the Ulfberht swordsmiths.
(metallic tapping)
- It's done.
(sighs heavily with relief)
- [Narrator] Because the steel
has just the right carbon content,
the final blade is both
sharp and shatter-resistant.
- This was the pride and
also the soul of the real warrior.
- [Narrator] But what about
the museum's Ulfberht sword?
How good is this steel?
(mysterious music)
Not far from the museum is a lab
for testing the chemistry
of ancient artifacts.
Here the sword was
subjected to molecular analysis
and an x-ray that reveals
the physical structure of the metal.
Conservation expert Dr
Hermann Born shares the results.
- That contained 0.6% carbon,
which indicates a really
good steel for a sword plate.
(droning cello music)
- [Narrator] But if Ulfberht
swords were so good,
why did so many shatter?
It turns out not all 11th
century weapons merchants
were on the up-and-up.
Some sold swords with the Ulfberht name
that were really made by someone else.
- The name Ulfberht was a quality brand
and of course the people knew this
and they tried to imitate it.
(metallic clashing)
- [Narrator] But the imitations lacked
the strong steel created
through labor intensive effort.
(flames hissing) (mysterious music)
Metal went straight from the fire
to its final form.
A weak knockoff can
look just like a strong sword
made the Ulfberht way.
At the right price and with the
famous Ulfberht brand name,
an unsuspecting Viking
might well buy it. (laughing)
To find out what the
deception would cost him,
we will put these two
swords to a practical test.
One is Ulfberht quality, the other is not.
Keller will test their cutting power.
We haven't told him which blade is which.
(tense orchestral music)
With this sword and a lot of effort,
Keller inflicts some minor damage.
Will the other sword be more effective?
(blade swishes) (tense drumming)
(dramatic music)
If you're thinking this sword
was made the Ulfberht way...
You're right.
(dramatic music) (swords clashing)
But in combat you can't cut anything
until you get through
your opponent's defenses.
The first blows are
likely to be steel on steel
and that's when a Viking will discover
whether his sword is strong or not.
(screaming) (tense music)
(sword swishes) (blood splatters)
Good sword or bad,
a Viking who dies with a
sword in his hand dies happy.
- This was the key to go, after his death,
to Valhalla, the hall of the death.
Dying in the battlefields
with a sword in his hand
was the aim of each warrior.
(mysterious music)
- [Narrator] Up next, the
secret of Nefertiti's beauty.
(dramatic mysterious music)
Inside the Neues Museum
there is one gallery that
always draws the biggest crowds.
The gallery displays a single artifact,
but one is enough when
it's the bust of Nefertiti.
She was Queen of Egypt 3,000 years ago,
in the Age of the Pharaohs.
Today, she's a box-office superstar.
- Normal time we have between
2,000 and 3,000 visitors each day.
In our first year after the
opening of the Neues Museum,
we have more than 1 million visitors.
- [Narrator] Some seem
only mildly interested.
Perhaps Nefertiti was
simply on their bucket list
but some appear to be trying to peer
through the glass into Nefertiti's soul.
Why is she the object of
such intense fascination?
That is our museum secret.
Our investigation begins a
short tram ride from the museum
on the outskirts of Berlin.
Here we enter a building
filled with plaster gods and heroes.
Some look like ancient artifacts,
but looks can be deceiving.
(whimsical music)
This isn't a museum.
It's an artist's workshop.
We're here because the people who might
understand Nefertiti's fascination
could be those who strive to recreate it.
This is where reproductions are made
for the museum's gift shop.
As the workshops manager
Thomas Schelper reveals,
there have been many attempts
to perfect Nefertiti replicas
over the years.
(speaking in foreign language)
- [Narrator] The 3D scan
revealed the exquisite planes
of Nefertiti's face in every detail.
She is clearly a superstar
who is ready for her close-up.
But science can't reveal
the source of her fascination.
(speaking in foreign language)
Hello.
- [Narrator] Perhaps
the workshop's painter,
Anette Schultz, knows what that secret is.
Each day she recreates the facial features
that are crucial to Nefertiti's look.
(speaking in foreign language)
- [Narrator] Anette also strives
to capture something else:
subtle lines that reveal that Nefertiti
was a mature woman.
(speaking in foreign language)
- [Narrator] Is Nefertiti's life experience
the true source of her fascination?
- She was really a queen and
not only the wife of the king.
We know that the couple
together ruled over Egypt.
- [Narrator] Nefertiti's husband
was the great king Akhenaten.
He conceived a plan to enhance his power
by decreeing that all the
gods were aspects of one God,
a God who spoke only through him.
- The idea of Akhenaten
was to bring together
all these ideas into one God
into the visible sun disk of Aten.
- [Narrator] To promote
the new top-down religion,
Nefertiti employed her prestige
as a mother, as a warrior,
and as a famous beauty.
(mysterious Egyptian music)
She maintained her
mystique by remaining aloof.
Those who gained an audience would find
she had arranged
herself for maximum effect,
anointed with special oils
that made her skin glisten in the sun.
Her calculated beauty
helped sell the new religion
but, after she died, the old one
came back with a vengeance.
- All names of Nefertiti and Akhenaten
was completely destroyed and
was erased from all King lists.
(mysterious music)
- [Narrator] Nefertiti's history
might make her more fascinating,
but many people in this room
probably don't know much about her.
They are fascinated by her
likeness in the here and now,
and Olivia Zorn thinks she might know why.
Within Nefertiti's glass enclosure,
the illumination has been designed
to light up her glass eye.
If you have a special
light on the one eye of her,
she can go to you directly
and if you are alone together with her,
it's a very special feeling.
It's a queen who has
lived so many years before
and now she is life-like.
This is a secret of Nefertiti.
- [Narrator] And if you want
to take the secret home,
she is available in the gift shop
for 4,200 U.S. dollars.
Even after 3,000 years, this
superstar doesn't come cheap.
Up next, a sacred altar's secret power.
(high-pitched choral chanting)
(dramatic music)
Berlin's museum island is
for those who love the past.
But the past can be a dangerous thing
in the hands of those who
use it in the cause of evil.
And that is especially true
of what lies beneath this glass roof.
An ancient artifact so large
that an entire building was
constructed to contain it.
It was unearthed in 1865
by a German archeologist
in the ruins of an ancient
Greek city called Pergamon.
Today, it fills a hall six stories high
with the area of a football field.
It is known as the Pergamon Altar.
This is certainly a monument celebrating
the cultural ambitions
of the Pergamon kings,
who really wanted to make
Pergamon into a second Athens.
- [Narrator] Their ambitions are carved
into the altar's walls
in battle scenes of primordial giants
defeated by the mighty gods of Olympus.
- It's the absolute summit of achievement
in Greek relief sculpture.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] And if we consider
the altars original hilltop setting,
it seems that the builders
intended it to be a place of power.
- There is none with
such a spectacular setting.
The view you had from
the monumental staircase
towards the surrounding mountains
and especially towards the Mediterranean,
which is roughly 30 kilometers away,
were the part of Pergamon
which you could see the city of Elaia.
You could see the ships
approaching the harbor.
- [Narrator] What is the
power of the Pergamon Altar?
That is our museum secret.
(regal strings music)
We begin our investigation
by climbing the stairs.
At the top we discover
a feeling of exhilaration.
Looking down, one feels almost like a god.
(imperious orchestral music)
Shortly before World War II,
someone else stood here
and felt the same thing.
He was a young architect
named Albert Speer,
a loyal follower of Adolf Hitler.
- 1934, Albert Speer was appointed
to the chief party architect,
and Hitler referred to him
as the First Architect of the Third Reich.
- [Narrator] Hitler assigned Speer
to build a stadium in
Nuremberg for Nazi Party rallies.
Recalling the powerful
feeling of the Pergamon Altar,
he made it his model.
- He adopted at first
the symmetrical shape of Pergamon Altar,
and second, the combination
of staircases and colonnades,
and returned to classical architecture
and the use of huge stone blocks
should give an impression
of durability and strength.
- [Narrator] This is all that's left
of the stadium that Albert Speer built.
His initial design included
a frieze of giants and gods
but he decided against it.
- Albert Speer modified the ancient model.
He waived the relief of gods
and he smoothed the whole structure,
because in Nazi Germany there
was only one god, the Fuhrer.
- [Crowd] Heil, heil, heil!
- [Narrator] And this was the result.
(dramatic music) (speaking
in foreign language)
- He created a structure of enormous scale
to impress the people and
he accented the central part
to express the leadership principle
as the main principle of Nazi ideology.
- [Narrator] At this podium,
as he looked down on a massive crowd,
Adolf Hitler proclaimed
that the Third Reich
would last for a thousand years.
(speaking in foreign language)
- When you are here together
with 100,000 of people,
you feel superiority.
You are a part of a
strong and powerful nation,
and this is the effect Speer intended
in creating this architecture.
- Sieg heil!
- Heil, heil, heil!
- [Narrator] Speer understood
the power of architecture
but he never learned
the true power or purpose
of the Pergamon Altar.
Speer thought the structure in the museum
was the entire
original altar, but it isn't.
In reality, there was
a large raised platform
beyond the stairs, open to the heavens.
Speer also didn't know
that, when the altar was built,
the hilltop complex already had
an amphitheater for speech-making.
So what was the altar's purpose?
Today, historians believe
it was built not long after
the city was attacked by an army of Gaulls.
(arrows swishing)
Though outnumbered,
the citizens of Pergamon
rallied to defeat them.
- Their victories, the victories
of the Pergamon kings,
were celebrated with many votive offerings
and this is one aspect of the altar,
to be a monumental votive
offering to Zeus and Athena
in thanksgiving for, yeah,
saving the city from the Gaulls.
(whimsical harp music)
Very lavish sacrifices were
usual on specific festivals.
It was common to sacrifice
100 bulls at the same time.
- [Narrator] So the altar was not designed
as a symbol of the power of a demagogue,
but as a place where
grateful citizens gathered
to give thanks for their survival.
It was not about the power
of man but of the spirits.
Could there be a more striking contrast
to the totalitarian spectacle
offered up on a Nazi grandstand?
(somber music) (handpump squeaking)
Next on Museum Secrets,
why this ancient relic
was destined to explode.
(explosion booms)
(dramatic music)
On Berlin's Museum Island,
ancient artifacts often arrive
a little the worse for wear.
They usually require careful cleaning
and perhaps a spot of glue.
And then there's this...
A warehouse filled with
shards and fragments,
all from the same place
in a Middle Eastern desert
and all over 3,000 years old.
You might think that whoever excavated them
found them like this, but they didn't.
They were unearthed as intact artifacts,
each weighing several tons.
How did they end up in so many pieces?
And is there any hope of
putting them back together?
Those are our museum secrets.
Our story begins in 1899
with a wealthy young Berliner
named Max von Oppenheim.
He moved to Cairo to take a diplomatic post
but was soon bored with his job.
Like his contemporary, Lawrence of Arabia,
Max developed a love of Arab culture
and a dream to seek
adventure as a relic hunter.
(tense orchestral music) In nearby Syria,
he embarked on a dangerous expedition
to the headwaters of the river Khabur.
Among the Bedouins,
he heard astonishing tales of monoliths
beneath the desert sands.
Max wanted to believe.
(mysterious music) (tools clinking)
And on a hill called Tell Halaf,
his belief was rewarded.
He unearthed a strange stone statue,
half human and half inhuman.
For many years, Max's
team continued to dig,
excavating 30 complete statues
that confirmed the existence
of a biblical people called the Arameans.
His new dream was to show
the Gods of Aramea to the world.
In 1930, Max returned to
Berlin with his treasures,
convinced that museums
would compete to display them.
And if they had, these
fragments would not be laid out
on a warehouse floor today.
But with budgets stretched
by other costly exhibitions,
every museum in town showed Max the door.
Not one to be thwarted,
he renovated a former iron
foundry into a private museum.
- Here sits enthroned
the big goddess of the Tell Halaf
who has perserved her stony smile
for 5,000 years.
I would enjoy it immensely
if once I would be able
to show you in person
my Tell Halaf Museum in Berlin.
(air raid sirens howling) (dramatic music)
(explosions booming)
- [Narrator] But then came World War II.
On a November night in 1943,
an Allied bombing raid struck Berlin
and the Tell Halaf Museum was hit.
(detonation booms)
Incredibly, the stone
statues survived the blast
and when the floor beneath them caught fire
they withstood the inferno.
Fire crews arrived to put out the blaze
and as cold water made
contact with hot stone,
the statues exploded.
The ancient treasures of Aramea
and the dream of a relic hunter
were reduced to rubble.
Before Max died in 1946,
he wrote how wonderful it would be
if all the fragments could be reassembled,
but what a horrendous task that would be.
In 2001, some of the
world's top restoration experts
decided to attempt the impossible.
(mysterious percussive music)
It would be like doing a jigsaw puzzle
without knowing if all
the pieces are in the box.
Dr. Nadja Cholidis is
one of the project leaders.
- When we started, we didn't exactly know
how many fragments they
have recovered in 1944.
Most of the pieces were in box lots
and we had to organize
pallets to unpack the fragments.
It was really a hard job in the first year
getting so much pallets
and to spread out the fragments
and then, started with
the identification process.
- [Narrator] Luckily, Max had
taken pictures of the puzzle
before it went to pieces.
And his photographs
had not gone up in flames.
- We have the photo in one hand
and the fragment in the other hand
and then compare both of them
and then you are able to say,
"This must be a fragment
of the lion, or for the lioness."
- [Narrator] But photos
alone were not always enough.
Sometimes, you have fragments
which are so hard to identify,
because we said, "It must
belong to this sculpture,"
and you try, and try, and try.
(mysterious music)
- [Narrator] When matching
pieces are identified,
some require special
fittings to hold them in place,
and most require careful application
of special glue and cement
to fuse the shards of ancient stone.
Some fragments weigh over a ton,
while others are as small as a fingernail.
(whimsical harp music)
The puzzle pieces went together one by one,
and after nine years of painstaking effort,
the restoration team
transported the statues
to a public gallery.
Today, the public is once again invited
to meet the Gods of Aramea.
Though Max von
Oppenheim didn't live to see it,
sometimes Nadja feels his presence.
- [Max] Where I discovered two...
- I believe during the years here,
there are so many situation that I thought,
must be Max von Oppenheim
who look from the sky,
"What are they doing here?"
and help us with... Well, with...
What is the, intuition,
I was feeling was
something like this, so yes.
But, it's not for the camera,
it's not for television. (chuckles)
(soft choral music)
- [Narrator] The museum calls the exhibit
The Rescued Gods of Tell Halaf.
Max von Oppenheim's
dream has been rescued, too.
Next on Museum Secrets:
the golden hat of an ancient wizard.
(dramatic music)
(mysterious music)
In Berlin's Neues Museum,
one gallery is devoted
to a single artifact of solid gold.
It looks a lot like a wizard's hat,
something straight out of a fairy tale.
On the other side of the city
lives this man, Manfred Boyachevski.
Manfred keeps bees, thousands of them.
Manfred and the gold hat
share a very special connection.
That connection is our museum secret.
(bees buzzing)
The hat is a masterpiece
of the goldsmith's art.
Its complexity led historians to believe
it was made by a craftsman
of the Middle Ages.
But scientific dating methods prove
that it was made 3,000 years ago,
during the Bronze Age.
Bronze Age humans lived
at a bare level of subsistence.
Developing the skills and finding the time
to create something like this
would have been an enormous challenge.
Why would people who were barely surviving
create something so extravagant?
Historians have been asking
this question for decades.
Dr. Wilfried Menghin became determined
to be the one to find the answer.
- My idea was to decode
the ornament of the gold hat,
so to see what really
does this gold hat mean.
What is his function in old times?
For me it was a kind of hobby,
but it was also an obsession.
- [Narrator] Menghin was convinced
the repeating patterns of circles and dots
weren't just decorations.
They must have something
to do with numbers,
but he couldn't figure out what.
- I woke up in the night and was counting,
adding up, counting, argh!
77-5 doesn't (mumbles) nothing,
but 365, 177, and so on and so on.
Then at last, he had a Eureka moment.
He counted down the number of rows
and the rings around each symbol
and discovered two remarkable
numbers, 365 and 354.
- Then it was clear,
we have the Sun year and the Moon year.
Dr. Menghin had
discovered that the gold hat
is a kind of calendar.
The ornamentation accurately predicts
the cycles of the Sun and
Moon over a period of 19 years.
(dramatic music)
But Dr. Menghin had only
solved part of the puzzle.
He knew what the symbols meant,
but why were the cycles of the Sun and Moon
so important to Bronze Age humans,
that they expended such great effort
to inscribe them on a gold hat?
For the answer, we return
to Manfred's Berlin rooftop and his bees,
because Manfred uses Bronze Age methods
to keep his bees healthy and productive.
- You can kiss them.
(mysterious music)
- [Narrator] To guide his
work on any given day,
Manfred relies on the
cycles of the Sun and Moon.
(speaks in foreign language)
(ethereal music)
- [Narrator] One day in the solar cycle
is particularly important
for honey production.
(ethereal music) (low-level buzzing)
(speaks in foreign language)
- [Narrator] Maximum bees
means maximum honey.
In some ancient cultures,
the summer solstice was
called the honeymoon,
as it was the best time to
harvest honey from bees.
Today, many farmers rely on
modern calendars of Sun and Moon
to tell them when to
plant and when to harvest.
(wolf howls) (ethereal music)
Dr. Menghin thinks a Bronze Age human
provided the same vital information
by observing the solar and lunar cycles
and inscribing them onto a gold hat.
And someone very special in their community
used the gold hat to
show them how to do it.
You can say it like this.
This is a sorcerer who tells the community
something interesting.
He has a secret knowledge about things
where the normal man cannot think about,
and so you can say these hats
have been the hats of wizards.
(sinister music)
Next on Museum Secrets:
Why did Hitler hate this
masterpiece of modern art?
(dramatic music)
(upbeat ethereal music)
On Museum Island, the
Neues Museum specializes
in treasures from long ago and far away.
Every gallery displays artifacts
that are at least a thousand years old,
but here there is one
exception to the rule.
(excavator rumbling)
Recently, less than a
kilometer from the museum,
excavation began for a new subway station.
One morning, construction
worker Hendrik Schultz
noticed something unusual in the dirt.
(speaks in foreign language)
- [Narrator] Within days,
the pit became an archeological site.
The finds that emerged
were not ancient artifacts
but important treasures of modern art.
Today, they are in the Neues Museum.
11 startling sculptures
by respected European
artists of the 20th century.
What were they doing underground
and why are they displayed in a museum
dedicated to ancient history?
Those are our museum secrets.
Our story begins in 1937,
when the Nazis were
confiscating works of modern art,
art that Hitler called degenerate.
- They go to the museums
and collections all over Germany
and took all these objects
out of the museums.
- [Narrator] In his deranged mind,
Hitler had decided that modern art
was the evil work of the Jews.
(sinister music)
Under his direction,
Nazi propagandists
mounted an art exhibition
called Degenerate Art.
Loyal Germans were expected to line up
to view the art with derision.
It was part of Hitler's plan
to unify the German people through hate.
The exhibition included
sculptures and paintings
by artists now considered
to be modern masters.
Though only a small handful
were actually Jewish,
propagandists featured their work.
This sculpture by Otto Freundlich
is on the cover of the
exhibition's catalog.
- The Nazis have two aims,
to make a propaganda exhibition
and to sell the objects
in foreign countries
to get foreign currency.
After the exhibitions,
which were ended in 1942,
a lot of objects came back to Berlin
and there also still were a lot of objects
which haven't been
sold in the years before.
(pensive music) (tram bell jingles)
- [Narrator] But after the war,
it seemed that no one knew or remembered
the whereabouts of the
confiscated degenerate art.
- It was a great question
for many art historians.
What happened with these objects?
- [Narrator] Recently, a
researcher discovered a clue
in a wartime letter from the
Nazi Ministry of Propaganda.
- In this letter it's told
that they have to bring the
objects from the exhibition
back to the Konigstrasse 50.
So, this is a very important letter.
It was something like
an official storage in this house.
(bombs whistling) (detonations booming)
- [Narrator] In 1944, allied bombs
ignited a firestorm on Koenigstrasse.
Untold lives were lost.
Nearly every nearby building was destroyed.
Except for Berlin's City Hall.
And that's why, 66 years later,
11 statues lay beneath the earth
waiting to be discovered.
(tools scraping)
Archeologists believe they
have found some paintings, too.
But they have been reduced to ashes.
Now we know how the modern
sculptures ended up underground
but how did they end up in a museum
dedicated to ancient history?
For the museum's German visitors,
a visit to the distant past
is an escape from a nearer past
that many would like to forget.
Dr. Wemhoff believes
the museum should encourage remembering.
- [Narrator] This object was in the fire.
It burned very strong and
that gets a very strong patina
and so it was really signed from the war
and signed from the history.
So, these objects have really
a kind of transformation made.
They are not only art.
They also tell us something
about an important dark part
of the German history.
- [Narrator] The artworks
also provide a way
to remember the artists who made them.
Some disappeared during the war,
some became refugees,
and at least one of the Jewish artists
died in a concentration camp.
- You see this head,
and this head is broken.
It's come from a very important sculpture
from Otto Freundlich.
And the most of his objects were demolished
during the Nazis time,
and he was killed in Majdanek.
(melancholy music)
If you look to the picture
from Otto Freundlich,
you can see that this could
be a self-portrait of him.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] A museum is not an island
but a bridge to the past.
For every mystery we reveal,
far more must remain unspoken.
The secrets some try to forget
and those we long to remember,
hidden in plain sight inside
the Berlin island museums.
(somber mysterious music)
- [Narrator] Berlin,
a city of refinement and regret,
and at it's heart, an
island devoted to museums
with secrets dark and strange.
An Egyptian queen's mysterious beauty.
A deadly Viking misadventure.
The magic of a wizard's hat.
And a sacred alter
bent to the cause of evil.
- [Crowd] Heil!
Secrets hidden in plain sight
inside the Berlin island museums.
(mysterious music)
(mysterious industrious music)
Every morning in Berlin, Germany,
several thousand people make a journey
(bicycle bell ringing)
through the center center
to cross a bridge to the past.
The Spree River surrounds an island
that boasts five renowned museums,
including two that harbor
secrets of the ancient world,
the Neues and the Pergamon.
(bombs whistling) (detonations rumbling)
Both museums were nearly
destroyed in World War II.
The Pergamon was
rebuilt just as it was before.
But when the Neues Museum reopened in 2009,
its bold design didn't
hide its recent past.
Instead, architects left
some bullet-riddled walls,
evidence of a brutal conflict.
(machine gun chatters)
In this gallery, there is evidence
of another kind of warfare.
We suspect this ancient Viking sword
was ripped from a cold, dead hand.
That's because Viking code
proclaimed that a warrior
and his sword were inseparable
in life and in death. (metallic tapping)
(sword swishes)
(slow mysterious music)
Today, the ancient Vikings are gone,
but live on in feature films
that require stunt fighters,
like Keller Longbow and his son Garnet.
(dramatic drum-heavy
music) (swords clashing)
Like real Vikings, these men know
what they like in the sword.
- Sharp as hell, flexible, well balanced,
and made of good steel,
so it will cut perfectly through flesh.
(groaning) (metallic clashing)
- [Narrator] The Vikings claimed
that their swords were indestructible.
But there is a mystery about
them that confounds historians.
They are often discovered
shattered into pieces.
If they were so mighty,
why did so many break?
That is our museum secret.
We begin our investigation
with a closer look at the museum's sword.
On one side, letters
spell out the word Ulfberht.
It is a word historians often
see on broken Viking swords.
(sinister droning music)
During their forays on
the coasts of Europe,
Vikings often sailed down the Rhine
to buy swords made in German foundries,
including one called Ulfberht.
This modern foundry specializes
in recreating ancient weapons.
Here we hope to discover
why Ulfberht swords were prone to shatter.
So, we asked swordsmith Jens Nettlich,
but what he says surprises us.
(metallic clatter)
- An Ulfberht sword was
the Rolex, the Mercedes,
under the Medieval time.
(grunting) (swords clashing)
If you hit flesh, it's no
problem to get inside.
It was almost impossible that it breaks.
(monks chanting) (swords clashing)
- [Narrator] We asked Jens to prove
that swords really are strong
when made the Ulfberht way.
- The first act is to have
different types of steel
so you need weak, or soft, and hard metal.
- [Narrator] The combination
can produce steel
hard enough to take a sharp edge,
but flexible enough to
prevent shattering on impact.
(metallic clanging)
The key is to create a blade
that contains just the
right amount of carbon.
This involves a lot of
pounding to combine the metals,
reheating in a coal fire,
and twisting to get the
molecular structure just right.
There are so many steps
in work for making a sword
that in each step of them could
get a failure inside, somewhere.
- [Narrator] Jens is confident
that the way he forges steel today
is very similar to the method
of the Ulfberht swordsmiths.
(metallic tapping)
- It's done.
(sighs heavily with relief)
- [Narrator] Because the steel
has just the right carbon content,
the final blade is both
sharp and shatter-resistant.
- This was the pride and
also the soul of the real warrior.
- [Narrator] But what about
the museum's Ulfberht sword?
How good is this steel?
(mysterious music)
Not far from the museum is a lab
for testing the chemistry
of ancient artifacts.
Here the sword was
subjected to molecular analysis
and an x-ray that reveals
the physical structure of the metal.
Conservation expert Dr
Hermann Born shares the results.
- That contained 0.6% carbon,
which indicates a really
good steel for a sword plate.
(droning cello music)
- [Narrator] But if Ulfberht
swords were so good,
why did so many shatter?
It turns out not all 11th
century weapons merchants
were on the up-and-up.
Some sold swords with the Ulfberht name
that were really made by someone else.
- The name Ulfberht was a quality brand
and of course the people knew this
and they tried to imitate it.
(metallic clashing)
- [Narrator] But the imitations lacked
the strong steel created
through labor intensive effort.
(flames hissing) (mysterious music)
Metal went straight from the fire
to its final form.
A weak knockoff can
look just like a strong sword
made the Ulfberht way.
At the right price and with the
famous Ulfberht brand name,
an unsuspecting Viking
might well buy it. (laughing)
To find out what the
deception would cost him,
we will put these two
swords to a practical test.
One is Ulfberht quality, the other is not.
Keller will test their cutting power.
We haven't told him which blade is which.
(tense orchestral music)
With this sword and a lot of effort,
Keller inflicts some minor damage.
Will the other sword be more effective?
(blade swishes) (tense drumming)
(dramatic music)
If you're thinking this sword
was made the Ulfberht way...
You're right.
(dramatic music) (swords clashing)
But in combat you can't cut anything
until you get through
your opponent's defenses.
The first blows are
likely to be steel on steel
and that's when a Viking will discover
whether his sword is strong or not.
(screaming) (tense music)
(sword swishes) (blood splatters)
Good sword or bad,
a Viking who dies with a
sword in his hand dies happy.
- This was the key to go, after his death,
to Valhalla, the hall of the death.
Dying in the battlefields
with a sword in his hand
was the aim of each warrior.
(mysterious music)
- [Narrator] Up next, the
secret of Nefertiti's beauty.
(dramatic mysterious music)
Inside the Neues Museum
there is one gallery that
always draws the biggest crowds.
The gallery displays a single artifact,
but one is enough when
it's the bust of Nefertiti.
She was Queen of Egypt 3,000 years ago,
in the Age of the Pharaohs.
Today, she's a box-office superstar.
- Normal time we have between
2,000 and 3,000 visitors each day.
In our first year after the
opening of the Neues Museum,
we have more than 1 million visitors.
- [Narrator] Some seem
only mildly interested.
Perhaps Nefertiti was
simply on their bucket list
but some appear to be trying to peer
through the glass into Nefertiti's soul.
Why is she the object of
such intense fascination?
That is our museum secret.
Our investigation begins a
short tram ride from the museum
on the outskirts of Berlin.
Here we enter a building
filled with plaster gods and heroes.
Some look like ancient artifacts,
but looks can be deceiving.
(whimsical music)
This isn't a museum.
It's an artist's workshop.
We're here because the people who might
understand Nefertiti's fascination
could be those who strive to recreate it.
This is where reproductions are made
for the museum's gift shop.
As the workshops manager
Thomas Schelper reveals,
there have been many attempts
to perfect Nefertiti replicas
over the years.
(speaking in foreign language)
- [Narrator] The 3D scan
revealed the exquisite planes
of Nefertiti's face in every detail.
She is clearly a superstar
who is ready for her close-up.
But science can't reveal
the source of her fascination.
(speaking in foreign language)
Hello.
- [Narrator] Perhaps
the workshop's painter,
Anette Schultz, knows what that secret is.
Each day she recreates the facial features
that are crucial to Nefertiti's look.
(speaking in foreign language)
- [Narrator] Anette also strives
to capture something else:
subtle lines that reveal that Nefertiti
was a mature woman.
(speaking in foreign language)
- [Narrator] Is Nefertiti's life experience
the true source of her fascination?
- She was really a queen and
not only the wife of the king.
We know that the couple
together ruled over Egypt.
- [Narrator] Nefertiti's husband
was the great king Akhenaten.
He conceived a plan to enhance his power
by decreeing that all the
gods were aspects of one God,
a God who spoke only through him.
- The idea of Akhenaten
was to bring together
all these ideas into one God
into the visible sun disk of Aten.
- [Narrator] To promote
the new top-down religion,
Nefertiti employed her prestige
as a mother, as a warrior,
and as a famous beauty.
(mysterious Egyptian music)
She maintained her
mystique by remaining aloof.
Those who gained an audience would find
she had arranged
herself for maximum effect,
anointed with special oils
that made her skin glisten in the sun.
Her calculated beauty
helped sell the new religion
but, after she died, the old one
came back with a vengeance.
- All names of Nefertiti and Akhenaten
was completely destroyed and
was erased from all King lists.
(mysterious music)
- [Narrator] Nefertiti's history
might make her more fascinating,
but many people in this room
probably don't know much about her.
They are fascinated by her
likeness in the here and now,
and Olivia Zorn thinks she might know why.
Within Nefertiti's glass enclosure,
the illumination has been designed
to light up her glass eye.
If you have a special
light on the one eye of her,
she can go to you directly
and if you are alone together with her,
it's a very special feeling.
It's a queen who has
lived so many years before
and now she is life-like.
This is a secret of Nefertiti.
- [Narrator] And if you want
to take the secret home,
she is available in the gift shop
for 4,200 U.S. dollars.
Even after 3,000 years, this
superstar doesn't come cheap.
Up next, a sacred altar's secret power.
(high-pitched choral chanting)
(dramatic music)
Berlin's museum island is
for those who love the past.
But the past can be a dangerous thing
in the hands of those who
use it in the cause of evil.
And that is especially true
of what lies beneath this glass roof.
An ancient artifact so large
that an entire building was
constructed to contain it.
It was unearthed in 1865
by a German archeologist
in the ruins of an ancient
Greek city called Pergamon.
Today, it fills a hall six stories high
with the area of a football field.
It is known as the Pergamon Altar.
This is certainly a monument celebrating
the cultural ambitions
of the Pergamon kings,
who really wanted to make
Pergamon into a second Athens.
- [Narrator] Their ambitions are carved
into the altar's walls
in battle scenes of primordial giants
defeated by the mighty gods of Olympus.
- It's the absolute summit of achievement
in Greek relief sculpture.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] And if we consider
the altars original hilltop setting,
it seems that the builders
intended it to be a place of power.
- There is none with
such a spectacular setting.
The view you had from
the monumental staircase
towards the surrounding mountains
and especially towards the Mediterranean,
which is roughly 30 kilometers away,
were the part of Pergamon
which you could see the city of Elaia.
You could see the ships
approaching the harbor.
- [Narrator] What is the
power of the Pergamon Altar?
That is our museum secret.
(regal strings music)
We begin our investigation
by climbing the stairs.
At the top we discover
a feeling of exhilaration.
Looking down, one feels almost like a god.
(imperious orchestral music)
Shortly before World War II,
someone else stood here
and felt the same thing.
He was a young architect
named Albert Speer,
a loyal follower of Adolf Hitler.
- 1934, Albert Speer was appointed
to the chief party architect,
and Hitler referred to him
as the First Architect of the Third Reich.
- [Narrator] Hitler assigned Speer
to build a stadium in
Nuremberg for Nazi Party rallies.
Recalling the powerful
feeling of the Pergamon Altar,
he made it his model.
- He adopted at first
the symmetrical shape of Pergamon Altar,
and second, the combination
of staircases and colonnades,
and returned to classical architecture
and the use of huge stone blocks
should give an impression
of durability and strength.
- [Narrator] This is all that's left
of the stadium that Albert Speer built.
His initial design included
a frieze of giants and gods
but he decided against it.
- Albert Speer modified the ancient model.
He waived the relief of gods
and he smoothed the whole structure,
because in Nazi Germany there
was only one god, the Fuhrer.
- [Crowd] Heil, heil, heil!
- [Narrator] And this was the result.
(dramatic music) (speaking
in foreign language)
- He created a structure of enormous scale
to impress the people and
he accented the central part
to express the leadership principle
as the main principle of Nazi ideology.
- [Narrator] At this podium,
as he looked down on a massive crowd,
Adolf Hitler proclaimed
that the Third Reich
would last for a thousand years.
(speaking in foreign language)
- When you are here together
with 100,000 of people,
you feel superiority.
You are a part of a
strong and powerful nation,
and this is the effect Speer intended
in creating this architecture.
- Sieg heil!
- Heil, heil, heil!
- [Narrator] Speer understood
the power of architecture
but he never learned
the true power or purpose
of the Pergamon Altar.
Speer thought the structure in the museum
was the entire
original altar, but it isn't.
In reality, there was
a large raised platform
beyond the stairs, open to the heavens.
Speer also didn't know
that, when the altar was built,
the hilltop complex already had
an amphitheater for speech-making.
So what was the altar's purpose?
Today, historians believe
it was built not long after
the city was attacked by an army of Gaulls.
(arrows swishing)
Though outnumbered,
the citizens of Pergamon
rallied to defeat them.
- Their victories, the victories
of the Pergamon kings,
were celebrated with many votive offerings
and this is one aspect of the altar,
to be a monumental votive
offering to Zeus and Athena
in thanksgiving for, yeah,
saving the city from the Gaulls.
(whimsical harp music)
Very lavish sacrifices were
usual on specific festivals.
It was common to sacrifice
100 bulls at the same time.
- [Narrator] So the altar was not designed
as a symbol of the power of a demagogue,
but as a place where
grateful citizens gathered
to give thanks for their survival.
It was not about the power
of man but of the spirits.
Could there be a more striking contrast
to the totalitarian spectacle
offered up on a Nazi grandstand?
(somber music) (handpump squeaking)
Next on Museum Secrets,
why this ancient relic
was destined to explode.
(explosion booms)
(dramatic music)
On Berlin's Museum Island,
ancient artifacts often arrive
a little the worse for wear.
They usually require careful cleaning
and perhaps a spot of glue.
And then there's this...
A warehouse filled with
shards and fragments,
all from the same place
in a Middle Eastern desert
and all over 3,000 years old.
You might think that whoever excavated them
found them like this, but they didn't.
They were unearthed as intact artifacts,
each weighing several tons.
How did they end up in so many pieces?
And is there any hope of
putting them back together?
Those are our museum secrets.
Our story begins in 1899
with a wealthy young Berliner
named Max von Oppenheim.
He moved to Cairo to take a diplomatic post
but was soon bored with his job.
Like his contemporary, Lawrence of Arabia,
Max developed a love of Arab culture
and a dream to seek
adventure as a relic hunter.
(tense orchestral music) In nearby Syria,
he embarked on a dangerous expedition
to the headwaters of the river Khabur.
Among the Bedouins,
he heard astonishing tales of monoliths
beneath the desert sands.
Max wanted to believe.
(mysterious music) (tools clinking)
And on a hill called Tell Halaf,
his belief was rewarded.
He unearthed a strange stone statue,
half human and half inhuman.
For many years, Max's
team continued to dig,
excavating 30 complete statues
that confirmed the existence
of a biblical people called the Arameans.
His new dream was to show
the Gods of Aramea to the world.
In 1930, Max returned to
Berlin with his treasures,
convinced that museums
would compete to display them.
And if they had, these
fragments would not be laid out
on a warehouse floor today.
But with budgets stretched
by other costly exhibitions,
every museum in town showed Max the door.
Not one to be thwarted,
he renovated a former iron
foundry into a private museum.
- Here sits enthroned
the big goddess of the Tell Halaf
who has perserved her stony smile
for 5,000 years.
I would enjoy it immensely
if once I would be able
to show you in person
my Tell Halaf Museum in Berlin.
(air raid sirens howling) (dramatic music)
(explosions booming)
- [Narrator] But then came World War II.
On a November night in 1943,
an Allied bombing raid struck Berlin
and the Tell Halaf Museum was hit.
(detonation booms)
Incredibly, the stone
statues survived the blast
and when the floor beneath them caught fire
they withstood the inferno.
Fire crews arrived to put out the blaze
and as cold water made
contact with hot stone,
the statues exploded.
The ancient treasures of Aramea
and the dream of a relic hunter
were reduced to rubble.
Before Max died in 1946,
he wrote how wonderful it would be
if all the fragments could be reassembled,
but what a horrendous task that would be.
In 2001, some of the
world's top restoration experts
decided to attempt the impossible.
(mysterious percussive music)
It would be like doing a jigsaw puzzle
without knowing if all
the pieces are in the box.
Dr. Nadja Cholidis is
one of the project leaders.
- When we started, we didn't exactly know
how many fragments they
have recovered in 1944.
Most of the pieces were in box lots
and we had to organize
pallets to unpack the fragments.
It was really a hard job in the first year
getting so much pallets
and to spread out the fragments
and then, started with
the identification process.
- [Narrator] Luckily, Max had
taken pictures of the puzzle
before it went to pieces.
And his photographs
had not gone up in flames.
- We have the photo in one hand
and the fragment in the other hand
and then compare both of them
and then you are able to say,
"This must be a fragment
of the lion, or for the lioness."
- [Narrator] But photos
alone were not always enough.
Sometimes, you have fragments
which are so hard to identify,
because we said, "It must
belong to this sculpture,"
and you try, and try, and try.
(mysterious music)
- [Narrator] When matching
pieces are identified,
some require special
fittings to hold them in place,
and most require careful application
of special glue and cement
to fuse the shards of ancient stone.
Some fragments weigh over a ton,
while others are as small as a fingernail.
(whimsical harp music)
The puzzle pieces went together one by one,
and after nine years of painstaking effort,
the restoration team
transported the statues
to a public gallery.
Today, the public is once again invited
to meet the Gods of Aramea.
Though Max von
Oppenheim didn't live to see it,
sometimes Nadja feels his presence.
- [Max] Where I discovered two...
- I believe during the years here,
there are so many situation that I thought,
must be Max von Oppenheim
who look from the sky,
"What are they doing here?"
and help us with... Well, with...
What is the, intuition,
I was feeling was
something like this, so yes.
But, it's not for the camera,
it's not for television. (chuckles)
(soft choral music)
- [Narrator] The museum calls the exhibit
The Rescued Gods of Tell Halaf.
Max von Oppenheim's
dream has been rescued, too.
Next on Museum Secrets:
the golden hat of an ancient wizard.
(dramatic music)
(mysterious music)
In Berlin's Neues Museum,
one gallery is devoted
to a single artifact of solid gold.
It looks a lot like a wizard's hat,
something straight out of a fairy tale.
On the other side of the city
lives this man, Manfred Boyachevski.
Manfred keeps bees, thousands of them.
Manfred and the gold hat
share a very special connection.
That connection is our museum secret.
(bees buzzing)
The hat is a masterpiece
of the goldsmith's art.
Its complexity led historians to believe
it was made by a craftsman
of the Middle Ages.
But scientific dating methods prove
that it was made 3,000 years ago,
during the Bronze Age.
Bronze Age humans lived
at a bare level of subsistence.
Developing the skills and finding the time
to create something like this
would have been an enormous challenge.
Why would people who were barely surviving
create something so extravagant?
Historians have been asking
this question for decades.
Dr. Wilfried Menghin became determined
to be the one to find the answer.
- My idea was to decode
the ornament of the gold hat,
so to see what really
does this gold hat mean.
What is his function in old times?
For me it was a kind of hobby,
but it was also an obsession.
- [Narrator] Menghin was convinced
the repeating patterns of circles and dots
weren't just decorations.
They must have something
to do with numbers,
but he couldn't figure out what.
- I woke up in the night and was counting,
adding up, counting, argh!
77-5 doesn't (mumbles) nothing,
but 365, 177, and so on and so on.
Then at last, he had a Eureka moment.
He counted down the number of rows
and the rings around each symbol
and discovered two remarkable
numbers, 365 and 354.
- Then it was clear,
we have the Sun year and the Moon year.
Dr. Menghin had
discovered that the gold hat
is a kind of calendar.
The ornamentation accurately predicts
the cycles of the Sun and
Moon over a period of 19 years.
(dramatic music)
But Dr. Menghin had only
solved part of the puzzle.
He knew what the symbols meant,
but why were the cycles of the Sun and Moon
so important to Bronze Age humans,
that they expended such great effort
to inscribe them on a gold hat?
For the answer, we return
to Manfred's Berlin rooftop and his bees,
because Manfred uses Bronze Age methods
to keep his bees healthy and productive.
- You can kiss them.
(mysterious music)
- [Narrator] To guide his
work on any given day,
Manfred relies on the
cycles of the Sun and Moon.
(speaks in foreign language)
(ethereal music)
- [Narrator] One day in the solar cycle
is particularly important
for honey production.
(ethereal music) (low-level buzzing)
(speaks in foreign language)
- [Narrator] Maximum bees
means maximum honey.
In some ancient cultures,
the summer solstice was
called the honeymoon,
as it was the best time to
harvest honey from bees.
Today, many farmers rely on
modern calendars of Sun and Moon
to tell them when to
plant and when to harvest.
(wolf howls) (ethereal music)
Dr. Menghin thinks a Bronze Age human
provided the same vital information
by observing the solar and lunar cycles
and inscribing them onto a gold hat.
And someone very special in their community
used the gold hat to
show them how to do it.
You can say it like this.
This is a sorcerer who tells the community
something interesting.
He has a secret knowledge about things
where the normal man cannot think about,
and so you can say these hats
have been the hats of wizards.
(sinister music)
Next on Museum Secrets:
Why did Hitler hate this
masterpiece of modern art?
(dramatic music)
(upbeat ethereal music)
On Museum Island, the
Neues Museum specializes
in treasures from long ago and far away.
Every gallery displays artifacts
that are at least a thousand years old,
but here there is one
exception to the rule.
(excavator rumbling)
Recently, less than a
kilometer from the museum,
excavation began for a new subway station.
One morning, construction
worker Hendrik Schultz
noticed something unusual in the dirt.
(speaks in foreign language)
- [Narrator] Within days,
the pit became an archeological site.
The finds that emerged
were not ancient artifacts
but important treasures of modern art.
Today, they are in the Neues Museum.
11 startling sculptures
by respected European
artists of the 20th century.
What were they doing underground
and why are they displayed in a museum
dedicated to ancient history?
Those are our museum secrets.
Our story begins in 1937,
when the Nazis were
confiscating works of modern art,
art that Hitler called degenerate.
- They go to the museums
and collections all over Germany
and took all these objects
out of the museums.
- [Narrator] In his deranged mind,
Hitler had decided that modern art
was the evil work of the Jews.
(sinister music)
Under his direction,
Nazi propagandists
mounted an art exhibition
called Degenerate Art.
Loyal Germans were expected to line up
to view the art with derision.
It was part of Hitler's plan
to unify the German people through hate.
The exhibition included
sculptures and paintings
by artists now considered
to be modern masters.
Though only a small handful
were actually Jewish,
propagandists featured their work.
This sculpture by Otto Freundlich
is on the cover of the
exhibition's catalog.
- The Nazis have two aims,
to make a propaganda exhibition
and to sell the objects
in foreign countries
to get foreign currency.
After the exhibitions,
which were ended in 1942,
a lot of objects came back to Berlin
and there also still were a lot of objects
which haven't been
sold in the years before.
(pensive music) (tram bell jingles)
- [Narrator] But after the war,
it seemed that no one knew or remembered
the whereabouts of the
confiscated degenerate art.
- It was a great question
for many art historians.
What happened with these objects?
- [Narrator] Recently, a
researcher discovered a clue
in a wartime letter from the
Nazi Ministry of Propaganda.
- In this letter it's told
that they have to bring the
objects from the exhibition
back to the Konigstrasse 50.
So, this is a very important letter.
It was something like
an official storage in this house.
(bombs whistling) (detonations booming)
- [Narrator] In 1944, allied bombs
ignited a firestorm on Koenigstrasse.
Untold lives were lost.
Nearly every nearby building was destroyed.
Except for Berlin's City Hall.
And that's why, 66 years later,
11 statues lay beneath the earth
waiting to be discovered.
(tools scraping)
Archeologists believe they
have found some paintings, too.
But they have been reduced to ashes.
Now we know how the modern
sculptures ended up underground
but how did they end up in a museum
dedicated to ancient history?
For the museum's German visitors,
a visit to the distant past
is an escape from a nearer past
that many would like to forget.
Dr. Wemhoff believes
the museum should encourage remembering.
- [Narrator] This object was in the fire.
It burned very strong and
that gets a very strong patina
and so it was really signed from the war
and signed from the history.
So, these objects have really
a kind of transformation made.
They are not only art.
They also tell us something
about an important dark part
of the German history.
- [Narrator] The artworks
also provide a way
to remember the artists who made them.
Some disappeared during the war,
some became refugees,
and at least one of the Jewish artists
died in a concentration camp.
- You see this head,
and this head is broken.
It's come from a very important sculpture
from Otto Freundlich.
And the most of his objects were demolished
during the Nazis time,
and he was killed in Majdanek.
(melancholy music)
If you look to the picture
from Otto Freundlich,
you can see that this could
be a self-portrait of him.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] A museum is not an island
but a bridge to the past.
For every mystery we reveal,
far more must remain unspoken.
The secrets some try to forget
and those we long to remember,
hidden in plain sight inside
the Berlin island museums.
(somber mysterious music)