Bikes Are a Two Wheeled Utopia

And other lessons from Berlin’s best interactive museum.

Berlin’s global reputation as a history-rich city isn’t easily lost on visitors. The bullet holes lining streets are exhibitions as telling as the neighboring Museum Island. It’s difficult to ignore the variety of spaces that display aspects of this city’s alternative side or less textbook artifacts — be it typical street art or not. And even then, conversations and interactive exhibits about the future abound. Berlin’s museum culture is nothing short of circular, linear, jumbled, and extraordinary.

The Humboldt Forum, a museum and space for “culture and science, for exchange and debate”, might be my favorite of a world-class handful. The building, a 2022 reconstruction and restoration of the Berlin Palace, rests on a site with a complex 800 year resume. The history of the site itself, and what it means to Berlin, deserves its own attention. But for now, I’ll spend a moment appreciating the exhibitions inside that make this space one of my favorite museums in Berlin.

Humboldt Forum, with the Berliner Dom in the background.

Until you visit yourself, walk with me through my two favorite exhibits: BERLIN GLOBAL and Nach der Natur.

Discovering the connections between Berlin and the world, interactive exhibit BERLIN GLOBAL isn’t just a space for dialogue and discovery about Berlin as a global city, but also free space and its inherent ability to open and close. The exhibit focuses on seven main themes to explore the development of Berlin’s spaces and the reciprocal ability of place to shape people; providing visitors with choices around every corner, and visceral experiences to accompany informational plaques. Each theme gives visitors a chance to reflect on how Revolution, Free Space, Boundaries, Entertainment, War, Interconnection, and Fashion have shaped this city, as well as their own lives around the globe.

The first thing you’ll do is activate the somewhat clunky bracelet handed out at the entrance, allowing you to make a choice every time you step through the exhibit’s various doorframes. No time wasted, Humbolt Forum will ask you to choose quickly. First, under one of two identical doorways hangs the phrase “I want to help my community”, and the other, “I want to help the world”.

With a tendency to reject premises outright, I stood between the doorways nearly unable to decide. How do I choose between two inseparable things? I didn’t want to enter either door; viewing community and world as integral to one another. Two rings on the same tree.

But you can’t keep going unless you choose. The bracelet let out a small ding to alert me that my choice had been recorded. I was still thinking about the restricting binary of that question as a bedazzled bike came into view.

With a reputation for freedom of expression, Berlin’s communities use and create space in the city to pursue their authentic lifestyles — religious, sexual, artistic, and beyond. The exhibit postulates the foundational idea that free space might be liberating, but is simultaneously exclusionary. After multiple wars and the division of Berlin, urban land that remained abandoned was utilized in an array of new ways. Reclamation of space as one’s own often pushed others out, resulting in conflicts, the museum says, that can’t always be resolved.

But if we’re going to talk about reclamation, what better place to start than with subcultures themselves. Cycling subcultures to be exact. Amsterdam and Copenhagen can hold off on this one, Berlin gets a bike moment too. Not only a form of transportation, bikes in Berlin have served their riders as a lifestyle and form of protest. The interaction of cycling culture with fashion, music, design, politics, and urban planning holds the potential to shape lives and cities themselves.

Take Critical Mass, an organization of bikers in numerous cities and villages across Germany that holds monthly rides to draw attention to bike traffic and change the priorities of city’s cycling and car infrastructure. Peddling for over a decade, Critical Mass has become a social movement beyond the bike lane; there’s more to sustainable cities than bike infrastructure that satisfies even the most dedicated hobby cyclists.

Cycling as German identity. An East German stamp depicting a German cyclist (left); a Critical Mass poster supporting Ukraine (right). Source: Critical Mass twitter.

But even cyclists hop off the bike for other kinds of movement, and in Berlin, that’s dancing. Step into the next room and your eyes will land on the enormous, rusting, tiered mass — unmistakable to anyone who’s seen a heist movie — as a vault door. Out of place? Hardly. The alleged birthplace of techno music in Berlin was behind this vault door; discovered in the uninhabited Wartheim Bank on Leipziger Straße in 1989. Empty for the previous 45 years, Berliners playfully used the space as techno club, full of worldwide guests, to create something new from the remnants of a divided city. It’s now an office building.

As you meander through the exhibit stations you’ll face more questions, smells, and sounds. Should your city “take care of its residents” or “be open to the world”? Pick up a set of salt-shaker looking cans and experience smells of the city. Turn the corner of a rounded wall and choose one of nearly ten options that exhibits how you “join in on revolution”. Enter a large red dome and find the inside equipped with mirrors and headphones, letting you dance to 80’s music in a quasi disco ball. Do you “share free space”, or “make free space [your] own”?

Are you “ready for change” or do you “protect what we have”?

Do you “like to have fun” or do you “consume consciously”?

After the wall fell, Berlin as a city of boundaries — both physical and imagined — came into question. What were the boundaries after the wall came down? What have they continued to be? Boundaries and borders are made visible in a variety of ways, but they ultimately determine who belongs and who doesn’t whether they’re made of physical things or constructed things.

Half of Berlin’s residents, the sign tells me, are “from somewhere else”. If there is such a thing, Berlin might be the perfect representation of a globalized world. Feeling tied to Berlin and elsewhere simultaneously can be enriching, but painful. It can be romanticized, or regretted.

“Borders protect me”. “Borders exclude me”.

Well not only did I hesitantly or begrudgingly choose a path forward at each doorway of decision, but I felt unsettled by the incongruence in these exhibits. I reached the last room, and it was…empty. Freiflächen — free spaces — was all the sign reveled. With an invitation for exhibition suggestions, the forum’s last question for visitors asks for the use of free space.

Without the ability to abstain, each visitor is pushed through choices they might reject if given the chance. But free space, daily life, tragedy, revolution, biking, dancing, living, hardly allows one to stop and discuss one’s grievances. Choices made daily impact our world, our city, our community. It’s not about making a ‘right’ choice, but observing how choices impact worlds close to us and far from us.

If free space is a question, it’s open ended. It’s revolutionary or it’s exclusionary, or maybe both. If dancing is liberating then so too is it limiting, depending which wide of the door you’re on.

A section of a wall-wide mural that reads “Why the half-hearted reanimation of an out-of-time relic? Not the original. Not unique. Everything stolen together and pressed into FORM by force. No own identity. Only a soulless shell that shines on the outside, but doesn’t know what to do with itself on the inside. Only work and feed the self-eating system”. Layered words under it read “what comes after the castle”?

If BERLIN GLOBAL hasn’t given you enough to think about for weeks, you might want to cross the hall to the exhibit Nach der Natur (After Nature). It doesn’t take my best friends to know this exhibit had my name written all over it. Relieved to not be answering questions, the entrance draped me in a curtain projecting a school of shoal fish who’s movements are manipulated by the movement of the audience throughout the room. An artistic representation of ecosystem sensitivity.

The exhibit’s main concern is the “friction of species and ecosystems”, and how humans attempt to “learn form nature”. Because the interconnection of global cities wasn’t enough, Nach der Natur braids climate change, species extinction, and the crisis of democracy together as one large question.

In the main exhibition room you’ll find oddities hanging in clear cases from the ceiling. A cabinet of curiosities, showing how much modern research reveals, and how much it doesn’t.

The entire south wall projects a dialogue of political scientists concerned with the future of democracy. Three experts of different disciplines discuss how the liberal script faces worldwide pressure; you can view them separately or in conjunction. Your choice.

You can manipulate a model fish and watch real shoal respond, or walk along a floor to ceiling installation of wooden netting that breathes when wet. Or listen to researchers from Freie Universität explain how literature creates relationships, endows the power and privilege of reading with its form, and alters itself when exposed to different types of media.

You can find an oral history of German reunification in the corner, or turn the nob on colored lights to activate electrical impulses in a 3D printed organism. There are more connections in our brain than stars in our galaxy.

If you’re confused, so was I. So am I. This exhibit didn’t quite make sense to me. But the transformation of human-environment systems, and the controversial debate regarding the liberal social order of the “western world”, doesn’t quite make sense either. It does make perfectly clear though, how intricately intertwined global processes of change truly are.

But if doubt is the engine of research, confusion might be the spark of investigation. And this exhibit is nothing short of a cabinet of curiosities that instigates curiosity in its audience. Connecting political ideology to scientific research in this way, as Berliner Morgenpost writes, is a form of scientific communication that doesn’t hide complexity, but makes you curious about it.

It’s certainly confusing, but all non-linear connections are. There’s nothing easily traceable about a spider’s web either.

While I have yet to experience the rest of Humboldt Forum’s exhibits, it’s approach to its own identity as a museum was visible enough through these two exhibits. “Cultural institutions”, it says, “are never neutral, and must be understood as a part of political and civil society engagement”.

Well I was certainly engaged, and to keep you engaged I won’t rewrite the worlds on Humboldt Forum’s own website, but rather acknowledge my gratitude for a museum of this sort. One that engages through senses of all sorts, acts on its responsibility as a colonial exhibitor, seeks the input of visitors, and identifies its role and definition as ultimately malleable.

Before you leave, don’t miss the underground level that lets you walk amongst the hundreds-of-years-old building’s foundation. If nothing else, that part is pretty digestible.

Humboldt Forum begs a return, or two, or however many times it might take to understand how interconnected human and non-human lives around the globe are. Keep investigating, that’s all I got.