Potsdam Museum - Forum für Kunst und Geschichte

In the Altes Rathaus on Potsdam's Alter Markt you find the Potsdam Museum - Forum für Kunst und Geschichte. It keeps one of the largest collections of art, culture and regional history in Brandenburg, more than 250,000 objects strong. Paintings, photographs, porcelain, glass, textiles and furniture wait here, together with the written traces of city life.

The city's own residents started it: in April 1909 they founded an association to give Potsdam a municipal museum. By that year they had gathered 485 "patriotic objects" and asked their neighbours to donate towards the first setup. The first exhibition hung in the north wing of the very building where the museum stands today. A British bombing raid in 1945 destroyed a significant part of the collections, yet the museum reopened within a year. After decades in other quarters of the city, it returned to its founding address in 2012.

The fine arts run from the late Middle Ages to the present, with a devotion to landscape painting and contemporary regional artists. Militaria recall the city's garrison years, while cultural history holds glass, ceramics, porcelain, textiles and furniture. The museum is wheelchair accessible, and special exhibitions, events and discussion series on the city's present questions run alongside the permanent display. Roughly 100,000 photographs chart Potsdam's political, urban and cultural story, so even a quiet corner from decades past has its picture waiting.