All’s Well That Ends Well? A Visit to the Deutschlandmuseum
By Florence Potter
Proclaiming to cover an expansive ‘2,000 years of history in 60 minutes’, the newly opened Deutschlandmuseum invites visitors on a whistle-stop tour of ‘German history’ from the ‘Ancient World’ right through to the 1990s. Part museum, part theme park, the museum is crucially heralded due to its immersive and interactive nature, encompassing visual, olfactory, tactile and aural elements. The visitor can therefore embark on a kind of sensory odyssey through twelve galleries, or epochs, each marked as a ‘key moment in German history’ brought to life. As such, the museum claims that visitors need no prior knowledge of Germany’s past to get a comprehensive understanding of the nation and invites the visitor to partake in fun and games whilst navigating periods from the Enlightenment to the Third Reich. The Deutschlandmuseum thus appears to be presenting a stylised summary of German cultural heritage, packaged within a new conception of the museum as an institution, one in which you can pass through in a short amount of time and learn the breadth of a nation. With this in mind, the BEYONDREST team decided to take a trip to Potsdamer Platz to interrogate the presentation and experience of this recent addition to Berlin’s museum circuit.
Moving through the turnstile entrance, the first invitation into German lineage starts back in 9CE with the ‘Germanic Peoples’ in a shadowy forest diorama, built up with trees, rocks and plants, through which the visitor can walk and interact with. Electronic campfires crackle and the clang of armour sounds as the visitor emerges into the ‘Battle of Teutoberg Forest’ – a battle between the Roman Empire and a conglomerate of Germanic tribes. The battle resulted in a major defeat of the Romans, which has been described as preventing Roman rule in the area which now constitutes modern Germany and has led to hypotheses of religious and linguistic hegemony in western Europe had the Germanic people failed. While the Romans might have viewed the Germanic tribes as barbarous, it is the Romans who needed to be stopped in order to preserve, not only the cultural heritage of Germany, but of the whole of western Europe. By opening the Deutschlandmuseum with this specific battle, the tone is set, not only of a lineage of strength and gumption dating back to Germania, but one of cultural preservation against ‘interlopers’ in the name of both Europe and Germany.
Emerging from the forest, the next room the visitor finds themselves in is styled like a medieval castle. Its decor speaks to the period of Charlamagne, featuring a large glass strategy table that highlights various tribes and delineates Francia – a resplendent war room. Up some stairs and the Middle Ages continue, though now you finds yourself in a sort of parapet complete with screens looking out as though you are viewing a jousting match, or looking down into the toilet to see rats scurrying on the ground down below. The key moment to this epoch is the crowning of King Frederick II, who began to shape the so-called political landscape of a future emergent Germany. There is a slight feeling of disjointedness. As one transitions from room to room and from epoch to epoch, a sense begins to emerge that the previous, neatly packaged markers of history are being left behind, and that the future is continuously unfolding on the timeline of German history. The space itself feels modular, much like an IKEA, as you move from entrance to exit along a specific line with little idea of what kind of sensory immersion lies around the corner.
Following this line, the visitor travels through the Reformation (the advent of the printing press the focal point), the Enlightenment (a room full of heads, with Kant’s emerging rather spookily from the ground) and into the German Confederation, where the pace of history and the breadth of time covered begins to slow. This room is dominated once more with a central map which alters depending on which wheel you turn to join together the various different states united as the ‘German nation under Prussian rule’. The concept of the nation state and it’s iconography is at the heart of this room, the German flag a key visual, alongside a slightly perturbing AI tool in which the visitor can make their own personal flag to varying results. The interactivity of flag-based games doesn’t end there, with a quiz asking the visitor to guess the symbolic meaning of the colours of the German flag, to a ‘gotcha’ result revealing there is no meaning. This seems to ignore the various poetic inferences and symbolism attributed to the black, red and gold from around the very time this ‘epoch’ represents (1848).1
The slowing of time means that WWI is just around the corner, in a room fashioned as a sort of trench bunker replete with sandbags and binoculars to view a screen of no-mans-land. The occasional shaking and clattering ahead suggests the fall of bombs. Stepping on, the darkness of WWI gives way and we land in the Weimar era, along a tiled high street, featuring gramophones, an alcohol-filled bar, a tailor, a pharmacy, but also a shady alleyway in which some nefarious business seems to be occurring. Trumpets are tooting and through a window a couple are dancing – it’s a quaint scene projecting a slightly seedy underbelly, or perhaps an omnipresent poverty induced by the financial crash.
Moving forward, leaving the Weimar era in the past, one arrives in a blackened room – a literal metaphor for the darkest period of German history – and thus named ‘Third Reich’ epoch. The portrayal of Nazism in this room is curious: there are dozens and dozens of blank 2D figures, all with one arm up in the Nazi salute, as well as silhouettes of soldiers running with rifles. Nazi propaganda and cheers sound in the speakers. An incongruous sign, stuck up ad hoc, asked people not to emulate the salute (not least because of its illegal distinction in Germany), therefore suggesting that (presumably) children had felt compelled to copy the silhouettes in the room. Perhaps this is an unlikely meta comment on the strength of the sway of fascism, though it feels shortsighted, given the emphasis on ‘fun’ and likeness to a theme park that the rest of the museum projects: the encouragement of selfies and sharing social media content is also generally associated with ‘immersive’ museums and historical sites more generally, creating an inappropriate tension.
Some twelve years later and we meet the ‘Division of Germany’, one of the smallest rooms, featuring a jagged, destroyed wall, an old desk, a piano and a pair of sunglasses worn by the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trials.
As to what the sunglasses elicit is unclear; perhaps it is an emblem to highlight that the trials took place at all, though it seems like a random addition. Walking on, the sunglasses are sealed in this period of history, in this room in the museum, and give way to the 1970’s, where we find a GDR-era apartment. Now a tale of two states: East Germany is represented by a life-size retro apartment, replete with authentic furnishings of the period you can lounge on in between historical periods. Then, descending a staircase to the final ‘epoch’, the museum closes on ‘Reunion’ – the dissolving of the GDR in 1990 – and draws on ‘image change’ through cultural events like the 2006 World Cup and the Loveparade running from 1989 to 2010. The setting for this epoch is an old Berlin U-Bahn train where joyous videos of the festival and football crowds are projected: the ‘image change’ suggests a revitalised nation up to the modern day.
The climax of ‘image change’ in the final room sets the tone of ‘all is well that ends well’, as though the passing through nearly demarcated epochs can be forgotten, both temporally and physically. This act of ‘walking through time’, or ‘organised walking’ by literally navigating the space in a linear fashion is employed to imply a kind of historicity, which suggests the linear progression of Germany and humanity. Hsu Huang draws on Tony Bennett to describe the museum institution as ‘marking out of time as a series of stages comprising a linear path of evolution; the organisation of these stages into an itinerary that the visitor’s route retraces; the projection of the future as a course of limitless development’,2 which we see enacted in the Deutschlandmuseum. Stages are marked and compartmentalised and swept through on the way to the ‘future’. The visitor is able to pass through each epoch as a mere observer, ultimately ending up in a position of ‘achieved humanity’:3 ‘all is well that ends well’.
Such achieved humanity seems to have been gained through a particularly militarised lens. The majority of the ‘epochs’ marked in the Deutschlandmuseum are centred around some kind of conflict: the Romans versus the Germani, Charlamagne, the German Confederation, World Wars I and II, Nazism, the Cold War. The impression given to the visitor is that the German nation state is something hard fought and won, and so, therefore, is the achieved humanity of the visitor. Yet that is as far as it seems to go in terms of impacting the present.
There is little acknowledgment, throughout, of present ramifications of each of the epochs. As such ‘experiencing history’ seems to instead manifest as a history removed from its context and entangled nature with itself and time. In fact, the past and the present seem to be kept so distinct that a lot of Germany’s history is eclipsed or made sterile. For instance, immigration to Germany is barely mentioned, even though it is a defining feature of the nation, whether we are talking about the Gastarbeiter immigration from Turkey to West Germany, immigration from communist countries to the GDR, or the refugee crisis under Merkel in 2015. Amid the growing popularity of far-right groups and intensified anti-migrant rhetoric across Germany (and indeed, Europe), this artificial separation makes it easy to conveniently ignore the ways in which the past shapes the present. An attempt at synthesising ‘immersive experience’ with historicity therefore falls flat. Rather than engaging with a complex past and reality, the Deutschlandmuseum shapes the museum institution for a kind of curated omission, which is designed to project a polished and neat narrative of the future, while including some interactive games to play in between.
Footnotes
1 One example is the poem by Ferdinand Freiligrath from March 1848, where the opening stanza exclaims: ‘Hurrah du Schwarz, du Roth, du Gold! Pulver ist schwarz, Blut ist roth, Golden flackert die Flamme!’, or Hurrah, black, red, and gold! Gunpowder is black, blood is red, and the flame flickers golden! (Freiligrath 1848).
2 Bennett, T. 1995. The Birth of the Museum. London, Routledge, London in Huang, Hsu. 2007. ‘Scopic Regime and Organised Walking – a Typological Study on the Modern Museum’. Opticon1826 0 (2). https://doi.org/10.5334/opt.020707.
3 Bennett, T. 1995. The Birth of the Museum. London, Routledge, London
About the Author
Florence Potter is a Master’s student studying the Archaeology of the Ancient World at Freie Universität, Berlin. Her areas of interest include museology, sensory archaeology and the relationship between colonialism and archaeology. She is a student assistant on the ERC-funded BEYONDREST research project.
Citation: Florence Potter, All’s Well That Ends Well? A Visit to the Deutschlandmuseum, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 29.09.2026, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/68963
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Forum Transregionale Studien (September 29, 2026). All’s Well That Ends Well? A Visit to the Deutschlandmuseum. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved October 7, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/16uo8
