Location

Akademie der Künste Berlin

Founded in 1696, the Academy of Arts in Berlin is one of Europe’s oldest cultural institutions. It was established by Elector Frederick III, who wanted to underpin his claim to royal status with an art academy inspired by a French model. In the hope of providing a basis for art in backward Berlin, the new Academy was expected to systematically promote artistic activities, establish rules of artistic taste and bring together art lovers and artists.

This philosophy of the Academy has lived and developed over the last three hundred years, despite all political upheavals and artistic or aesthetic changes. Since the 1993 unification of the two Academies that, after the Nazi years and World War II, had been established separately in the eastern and western parts of Berlin in 1950 and 1954 respectively, it had been the Academy’s hope to return to its historical location at Pariser Platz 4. The new building was inaugurated on 21 May 2005. The Academy building has a plenary hall seating approximately 250, and, on the ground floor, five exhibition halls offering 680 m 2 of exhibition area. The archives departments have an extra exhibition showroom on the first basement floor. The archives’ art collection, architecture collection and library will also be using the new premises. The library reading room is housed in a wonderful upper-floor area facing Pariser Platz.

The Academy is an international community of artists which appoints its members in recognition of their work in the fields of visual arts, architecture, music, literature, performing arts as well as in film and media arts. It currently has some 370 members, more than a third of whom live outside Germany. The Academy’s work is addressed to the general public. It is devoted to both disseminating new artistic tendencies and preserving cultural traditions. It organizes art and documentation exhibitions, workshops, concerts, lectures, literary readings and film screenings as well as theatre and dance performances.

An important element of the Academy is its archives. With 880 individual collections, a special library of 550,000 volumes and an art collection of 60,000 objects, the Academy archives represent the most important interdisciplinary archives for 20th-century art in the German-speaking world. The Academy is the custodian of the private archives of Walter Benjamin, Elisabeth Bergner, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Busch, Paul Dessau, Hanns Eisler, Günter Grass, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Walter Jens, Alfred Kerr, Käthe Kollwitz, Fritz Kortner, Heinrich Mann, Heiner Müller, Gret Palucca, Erwin Piscator, Hans Werner Richter, Hans Scharoun, Anna Seghers, George Tabori, Peter Weiss, Mary Wigman, Christa Wolf, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Arnold Zweig, and many others. 

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