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Open Air Gaslamp Museum

TIERGARTEN

Despite being exposed to the elements – and the indiscriminate wrath of vandals and graffiti artists – for three decades, the Open Air Gaslamp Museum still looks good as new; or at least, as new as a collection of centuries-old gas lamps can look. Each of the 90 lamps has been regularly restored with fresh coats of paint and new parts over the years, and from dusk onwards each night they continue to cast their warm, golden luminescence while attracting the inevitable armies of nighttime insects.

Located right next to the Tiergarten S-Bahn, the museum is often visited by accident, with some couples and lovers noticing only a mysterious romantic charge as they pass along the pathway. The largest exhibition of its kind in Europe, it was created in 1978 to honour a time when street lighting wasn’t merely pragmatic, but aesthetic.

There are local favourites like the Spandau lamp, the Dresden model and the Charlottenburg Chandeliers, still used in the area around the Schloss Charlottenburg. Some unusual names crop up as well, like the ‘Wilmersdorf Widow’ and the ‘Boot Leg’. Especially alluring is the neo-Gothic Camberwall lamp, a converted English oil lantern imported to Berlin in 1826, which once helped make Unter den Linden one of the most attractive streets in Europe.

The museum makes for an enjoyable visit day or night, though your stroll may take on a more poignant aura when you learn that plans are afoot to replace the city’s existing 40,000 gas lanterns with electric versions. You might decide to take a pause on one of the (recently added) park benches to better admire the parade of posts, and perhaps mull over the battle between nostalgia and sustainability.

If you do, take a peek behind you. On some seat backs you’ll find inscribed a poem by German-Jewish anarchist and writer Erich Mühsam, which relates to one of his characters, a revolutionary lamplighter who staunchly defended his street lamps as criminals tried to tear them down. It reads: ‘...If we do unscrew the light, no citizen can see anything.’ PS

Str. des 17 Juni south of S-Bahn Tiergarten, 10557; S Tiergarten; www.museumsportal-berlin.de

Map: West E1