The Jewish Museum is certainly one of the most striking works of architecture in modern Berlin, no small achievement bearing in mind the city's recent building increase. The silver lightning bolt cutting through suburban Kreuzberg is the consequence of an worldwide contest which challenged architects to propose a building that would house a permanent exposition chronicling German-Jewish history. The successful proposal was by Daniel Libeskind, a Polish-born Jew whose significant theoretical offerings to architecture had never been put to the realistic experiment. His building is full of sloping corridors, black-walled voids and unbalanced windows intended to throw the visitor off balance. The architecture reflects the many resourceful offerings made by Jews to German society and learning over the hundreds of years when Berlin was home to some of the most animated Jewish communities in Europe. The void left by the holocaust is represented by a enormous, vacant, echoing tower, and the confusion of immigration to a new land by the E. T. A. Hoffmann garden. See the museum website for more information and photos. You could stay close to this in Holiday apartments berlin germany

Checkpoint Charlie

Checkpoint Charlie is a remarkable setting for a museum about the former GDR. Unluckily the privately-owned Haus am Checkpoint Charlie glorifies the win of capitalism over communism with maudlin art, exaggerated descriptions of escapes over the Wall, and long-winded digressions about peaceful opposition to dictatorship in Eastern Europe. The fall of the Wall was certainly an worldwide mark of the end of the cold war, and of freedom in a united Europe, but the museum avoids exploring the problems of dichotomies like those the wall represented. It substitutes beautiful tales for demanding explorations of East German reality. The descriptions are translated into English, French and Russian. Too bad the display contains an tiring amount of text.

German Historical Museum

The permanent home of the German Historical Museum (DHM) in the Zeughaus is being re-done and will be closed until 2011. In the mean time the DHM has a interim home across the path in the Kronprinzenpalais (Unter den Linden 3). The major expo of the museum is not open to the general public for the duration of the renovations. The DHM in the Kronprinzenpalais shows a programme of topical exhibitions. You can stay close by to this on your Berlin city break by staying in apartments berlin germany and enjoy the central location to all else the city has to put forward.

German Resistance Memorial Centre

On the main scale of things there was not much opposition to the Nazi dictatorship of 1933-45; sources of likely rebellion were found quickly and shut down. These hardy souls who did resist are the focus of this permanent exposition in rooms which had been part of German army headquarters for the duration of The second world war. The museum is positioned here for the reason that it was from this building that Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg premeditated his botched attempt to kill Hitler in 20. July 1944. Guided excursions of the exposition are free and are well worth while as they cover the rise and fall of Nazi Germany as well as those who resisted it.