With Ruin and Rush, the Neue Nationalgalerie highlights selected works from its Classical Modern collection that explore Berlin in the 1910s and 1920s. These decades – shaped by the First World War and the Weimar Republic – were marked by constant tension between extremes: excess and poverty, emancipation and extremism, all coexisting in a rapidly growing, cosmopolitan city. Featuring around 35 works in a variety of artistic styles, the exhibition brings to life the contradictions of Berlin’s past.
Around 1910, Berlin was on the rise: the city was growing at a rapid pace and becoming one of the most important centres of modernism in the world. Technological advances in industry, construction, and transportation accompanied the rise of a new mass culture, with an emphasis on leisure. As the city transitioned from the conservative German Empire to the democratic Weimar Republic, its intellectual climate underwent a profound transformation – defined by sharp contrasts: liberating and unsettling at once, chaotic yet innovative, brilliant and ominous. The traumas of the First World War and political unrest cast a long shadow over the “Golden Twenties”.