Did you know there are *thousands* of dead bodies held in Berlin museums?

honestly this is one of those things where berlin is kinda uniquely bad because of how centralized the collection efforts were. the prussian cultural heritage foundation alone holds remains across like 20 different institutions and theyre still figuring out what they even have. the senatsverwaltung für kultur has a dedicated restitution unit now but its painfully slow - they returned like 5 skulls to namibia in 2023 and that was considered a big win

if you want to see something thatll stick with you, go to the dorotheenstädtischer friedhof and find the row of unmarked graves near the back wall. thats where some of the anatomical schools leftovers ended up before anyone started asking questions. the whole thing is less a museum problem and more a city problem tbh

arrow_drop_up 5 arrow_drop_down

chat_bubble Reply ios_share

/

Reply

It's not just colonial remains either. The Anatomical Institute at the Charité had a collection of over 10,000 skulls from executed prisoners and people who died in hospitals without family claims, used for "research" well into the 20th century. A lot of that stuff was only properly cataloged and digitized starting around 2019, when they began publishing the provenance online. The whole thing is a rabbit hole if you visit the Charité's own website on the history of their collections.

arrow_drop_up 5 arrow_drop_down

chat_bubble Reply ios_share

/

Reply

ngl the scale of it is wild. the museum für naturkunde has like 30,000 human remains in storage, mostly skulls from tanzania and rwanda. there's a group called berlin postkolonial that's been tracking this for years and they have maps of where stuff is held. the whole thing gets extra messy because some collections were split between east and west berlin during the cold war so records are incomplete

arrow_drop_up 5 arrow_drop_down

chat_bubble Reply ios_share

/

Reply

Worth noting that Berlin street names have official umlaut and ß rules that trip people up, so a sign showing "Strasse" versus "Straße" is not actually a spelling error, just an older transcription. Same with "ue" versus "ü" (e.g. "Kantstrasse" vs "Kantstraße"), both are considered valid renderings and you'll see the ß version on the blue Schilder and the ss version on older plaques or in databases that predate Unicode. If the difference you're seeing is between those two forms, there's nothing to fix and both are technically correct.

arrow_drop_up 4 arrow_drop_down

chat_bubble Reply ios_share

/

Reply

if the signs u mean are the old enamel ones on the house facades those are often protected as Baudenkmal so nobody's allowed to correct them even if the spelling is outdated. the binding version is whatever is in the Berliner Strassenverzeichnis plus the entry in the Liegenschaftskataster, so if u tell me the street i can point u to the right Bezirksamt Mitte or Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf page. tbh the merged district thing is real but the facade signs are a separate story, theyre basically museum pieces at this point

arrow_drop_up 3 arrow_drop_down

chat_bubble Reply ios_share

/

Reply

honestly thats super common in Charlottenburg, the district offices were merged from older Bezirke and nobody ever fixed all the Schilder. if its a real street you can check the official strassenverzeichnis on berlin.de, that list is what the Burgeramt actually goes by. which street is it? some of the Kaiserdamm / Kantstrasse signs are notorious for this.

arrow_drop_up 1 arrow_drop_down

chat_bubble Reply ios_share

/

Reply