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The map alone!
The first room in the Pergamon Museum on Berlin's Museum Island welcomes you with a huge map showing the Middle East, from Istanbul to Iran.
Travel memories pop up immediately.
Unfortunately, the Orient is still taboo due to Corona, currently you can only travel to it in the museum, with a mask, negative Corona test and online appointment.
But at least - until recently, all museums nationwide were closed.
Berlin's Museum Island is a World Heritage Site, five museums were built on behalf of Prussian kings, one of which is the Pergamon Museum with a collection of antiquities, the Middle East Museum and the Museum of Islamic Art.
It houses treasures that the German Orient Society dug out of the desert sand in Babylon, Uruk, Assur and Egypt, among others.
Just the thing for head travelers!
Even then, one goal of the museums was: They wanted to give people who could not travel a glimpse into distant countries.
That benefits me now.
I stroll through the processional street of Babylon, past ceramic lions on an azure blue ground, towards the huge Ishtar Gate.
Memories pop up in the Pergamon Museum
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While one is out and about in the ancient world, one naturally asks oneself: Don't all the Iraqi pottery shards and Persian plates belong in their countries of origin?
The discussion about looted property is at least documented in the Pergamon Museum.
One reads, for example, that Babylon's brick fragments were legally exported under contracts, but “the division of the grave was in a colonial context”.
Visiting a museum during a pandemic is like a gift.
I absorb almost everything, now that I am finally allowed to go back into the holy halls.
And look at every detail.
There is, for example, this shell necklace that looks like a souvenir from Greece - in fact, according to the label, it is over 5000 years old and comes from Uruk, the world's first major city.
The reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate was first seen at the opening of the Pergamon Museum in 1930
Source: Barbara Schaefer
Or there is a photo with the archaeologist Robert Koldewey in a white linen suit in Babylon - photographed by Gertrude Bell!
The British explorer, spy and confidante of King Faisal I helped build the Iraqi National Museum.
Would I have read this photo notice in normal times and been happy about it?
Hardly likely.
It continues to Islamic art with pictures from the Alhambra in Granada, alas - Andalusia!
How nice it was there.
Museums in Munich, Hamburg and other cities
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The people of Munich can also make a pilgrimage to the Greeks, Romans and Etruscans in the Antikensammlung on Königsplatz (currently by prior arrangement), so you travel to Perugia and Piraeus in your mind.
Until recently, you could see mummy sarcophagi and stucco masks from the ancient Orient in Hamburg.
Unfortunately, the Museum of Arts and Crafts won't open its doors again until the incidence drops.
In Baden-Württemberg, the opening of museums is not uniformly regulated.
The State Art Gallery in Karlsruhe is closed again, as are all the museums in Stuttgart.
Whereas some museums in Tübingen are open.
Almost everything is accessible in Saarland - with an appointment.
In Hesse everything is closed, in NRW a lot is open.
That's just how it is in federalism.
The best thing to do is to get up-to-date information on site.
One question crossed my mind after my visit to Museum Island: Is the antique-looking metal plate that I bought years ago in the farthest corner of a market hall in Isfahan a real antique that I should never have exported? Or just old craftsmanship? How I would like to clarify this on site!