5 Best Sights in Potsdamer Platz, Berlin

The Kulturforum's Gemäldegalerie reunites formerly separated collections from East and West Berlin. It's one of Germany's finest art galleries, and has an extensive selection of European paintings from the 13th to 18th centuries. Seven rooms are reserved for paintings by German masters, among them Dürer, Cranach the Elder, and Holbein. A special collection has works of the Italian masters—Botticelli, Titian, Giotto, Lippi, and Raphael—as well as paintings by Dutch and Flemish masters of the 15th and 16th centuries: Van Eyck, Bosch, Bruegel the Elder, and Van der Weyden. The museum also holds the world's second-largest Rembrandt collection.

Bauhaus member Ludwig Mies van der Rohe originally designed this glass-box structure for Bacardi Rum in Cuba, but Berlin became the site of its realization in 1968; it closed in 2015 for a freshening up by British architect David Chipperfield, finally reopening in August 2021. Highlights of the collection of 20th-century paintings, sculptures, and drawings include works by expressionists Otto Dix, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Georg Grosz, along with a fine collection of East German art plus works from the likes of Francis Bacon, Paul Klee, and Pablo Picasso. Temporary exhibitions, such as Alexander Calder's mobiles, dominate the top floor, while the excellent permanent collection sprawls over the bottom floor.

With more than 1 million items on the history of European art, the Kunstbibliothek in the Kulturforum is one of Germany's most important institutions on the subject. It contains art posters and advertisements, examples of graphic design and book design, ornamental engravings, prints and drawings, and a costume library. Visitors can view items in the reading rooms, but many samples from the collections are also shown in rotating special exhibitions.

Inside the Kulturforum's Kunstgewerbemuseum are European arts and crafts from the Middle Ages to the present. Among the notable exhibits are the Welfenschatz (Welfen Treasure), a collection of 16th-century gold and silver plates from Nuremberg; a floor dedicated to design and furniture; and extensive holdings of ceramics and porcelain. Though there is a free English-language audio guide, the mazelike museum is difficult to navigate and most signposting is in German. A second part of the collection resides at the Schloss Köpenick.

One of the Kulturforum's smaller museums, Kupferstichkabinett has occasional exhibits, which include European woodcuts, engravings, and illustrated books from the 15th century to the present (highlights of its holdings are pen-and-ink drawings by Dürer and drawings by Rembrandt). You can request (at least 10 days ahead) to see one or two drawings in the study room. Another building displays paintings dating from the late Middle Ages to 1800.