Samurai Museum in Berlin: battle noise and shamisen

When Peter Janssen was traveling through Japan a few years ago, he came across an eighteenth-century samuraire residence near Nagoya that was in the process of being demolished.

The enthusiastic collector decided on the spur of the moment to buy the massive wooden courtyard gate – without the faintest idea where it would one day find its place in Germany.

Now it has found it: the exhibition area of ​​the Samurai Museum in Berlin is accessed from the foyer through the heavy double-winged portal.

And behind it another world opens up.

Andrew Plathaus

Responsible editor for literature and literary life.

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Easily said with a topic like the samurai.

But far more difficult to do with all the clichés that exist about her.

Japanese warrior caste - everyone knows that much.

But that the samurai were also the Japanese cultural caste is less well known.

Theater, literature, painting and music were privileges of this social class until four hundred years ago.

What we understand today as Japanese art goes back aesthetically to the samurai, even if a bourgeois culture developed with the rise of merchants in the Edo period, which built on the earlier refinement and enriched it with realism -

(the flowing world) is the Japanese paraphrase for everything that is not marked by death.

was not the subject of warrior culture.

But the stylization turned out to be all the more beautiful in the art of the samurai.

In it, eternity is the measure, because there was no reliance on the earthly.

The Samurai Museum tells of this, for example with a closed bridal sedan chair in which the user found a painted allegorical picture program because it was not worth looking outside.

At the beginning, however, there is an interactive historical crash course on several sensory levels.

Behind the courtyard gate, the noise of battle and

-lute music, because a colorful, flashing video installation offers an outline of Japanese history in ten minutes, which can be individually supplemented by countless touchpad fields with individual facts.

On the other side, on a more general level, black and white outline drawings reveal information about aspects of Japanese social life: from Buddha to Shogun and from women to peasants.

Above this, a room-wide triptych with silent projections of classic scenes from samurai films creates an atmospheric mood.

Anyone who has gone through this flood of sounds, images and information should be prepared for what is to come: the collection of Peter Janssen, who has amassed four thousand objects over four decades, a thousand of which are now on display.

About the technical standard that the museum sets

It is not the first presentation of this inventory;

In 2018, Janssen opened a three hundred square meter exhibition space on Berlin's Clayallee.

But the new, much larger house is in the middle of Mitte, on Auguststrasse, right next to the Kunst-Werke (now only KW);

the building previously served as the domicile of the Olbricht Collection.

So it's an established art venue, and that's why Janssen jumped in when Olbricht moved his collection from Berlin two years ago, had the premises converted to allow a two-story tour, and hired Ars Electronica from Linz to create a contemporary form of presentation get something that offers something for both laypersons and specialists.

Across all generations.