Altes Museum

This guide to the Altes Museum in Berlin opens on the fuel-truck explosion that set the building ablaze on the very day the war in Europe ended, tearing through the columns and rotunda that architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel had designed a century earlier as a museum for ordinary citizens, not royalty. It follows the twenty-one years the scarred colonnade stood empty on Museum Island before rebuilding began, and traces what it took to bring the ruined rotunda back to life.