Kunstbibliothek Berlin

The Kupferstichkabinett, or Museum of Prints and Drawings, is a prints museum in Berlin, Germany. It is part of the Berlin State Museums, and is located in the Kulturforum on Potsdamer Platz. It is the largest museum of graphic art in Germany, with more than 500,000 prints and around 110,000 individual works on paper (drawings, pastels, watercolours, oil sketches).

The Kunstgewerbemuseum, or Museum of Decorative Arts, is an internationally important museum of the decorative arts in Berlin, Germany, part of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Berlin State Museums). The collection is split between the Kunstgewerbemuseum building at the Kulturforum (52°30′35″N 13°22′03″E) and Köpenick Palace (52°26′38″N 13°34′22″E).

The Gemäldegalerie (German pronunciation: [ɡəˈmɛːldəɡaləˌʁiː], Painting Gallery) is an art museum in Berlin, Germany, and the museum where the main selection of paintings belonging to the Berlin State Museums (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) is displayed. It holds one of the world's leading collections of European paintings from the 13th to the 18th centuries. Its collection includes masterpieces from such artists as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Hans Holbein, Rogier van der Weyden, Jan van Eyck, Raphael, Botticelli, Titian, Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens, David Teniers the Younger, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds and Antonio Viviani. It was first opened in 1830, and the current building was completed in 1998. It is located in the Kulturforum museum district west of Potsdamer Platz.

The Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery) at the Kulturforum is a museum for modern art in Berlin, with its main focus on the early 20th century. It is part of the National Gallery of the Berlin State Museums. The museum building and its sculpture gardens were designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and opened in 1968. The gallery closed in 2015 for renovation. The work, by David Chipperfield Architects, was completed in 2021, and the museum reopened in August 2021 with an exhibition of works by American sculptor Alexander Calder.

The WZB Berlin Social Science Center (German: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, WZB), also known by its German initials WZB, is an internationally renowned research institute for the social sciences, the largest such institution in Europe not affiliated with a university. It was founded in 1969 through an all-party initiative of the German Bundestag. Around 140 German and foreign sociologists, political scientists, economists, historians, statisticians, computer scientists and legal scholars work in the WZB conducting basic research on selected social and political issues, concentrating on the industrialized societies of Japan and the West, as well as the transformations of Central and Eastern Europe and China. The question of globalization is of particular importance.

Aktion T4 (German, pronounced [akˈtsi̯oːn teː fiːɐ]) was a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany. The term was first used in post-war trials against doctors who had been involved in the killings. The name T4 is an abbreviation of Tiergartenstraße 4, a street address of the Chancellery department set up in early 1940, in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, which recruited and paid personnel associated with Aktion T4. Certain German physicians were authorised to select patients "deemed incurably sick, after most critical medical examination" and then administer to them a "mercy death" (Gnadentod). In October 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a "euthanasia note", backdated to 1 September 1939, which authorised his physician Karl Brandt and Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler to begin the killing. The killings took place from September 1939 until the end of the war in 1945; from 275,000 to 300,000 people were killed in psychiatric hospitals in Germany and Austria, occupied Poland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic). The number of victims was originally recorded as 70,273 but this number has been increased by the discovery of victims listed in the archives of the former East Germany. About half of those killed were taken from church-run asylums, often with the approval of the Protestant or Catholic authorities of the institutions. The Holy See announced on 2 December 1940 that the policy was contrary to divine law and that "the direct killing of an innocent person because of mental or physical defects is not allowed" but the declaration was not upheld by all Catholic authorities in Germany. In the summer of 1941, protests were led in Germany by the bishop of Münster, Clemens von Galen, whose intervention led to "the strongest, most explicit and most widespread protest movement against any policy since the beginning of the Third Reich", according to Richard J. Evans. Several reasons have been suggested for the killings, including eugenics, racial hygiene, and saving money. Physicians in German and Austrian asylums continued many of the practices of Aktion T4 until the defeat of Germany in 1945, in spite of its official cessation in August 1941. The informal continuation of the policy led to 93,521 "beds emptied" by the end of 1941. Technology developed under Aktion T4, particularly the use of lethal gas on large numbers of people, was taken over by the medical division of the Reich Interior Ministry, along with the personnel of Aktion T4, who participated in mass murder of Jewish people. The programme was authorised by Hitler but the killings have since come to be viewed as murders in Germany. The number of people killed was about 200,000 in Germany and Austria, with about 100,000 victims in other European countries. Following the war, a number of the perpetrators were tried and convicted for murder and crimes against humanity.

The Memorial and Information Point for the Victims of National Socialist Euthanasia Killings (German: Gedenk- und Informationsort für die Opfer der nationalsozialistischen "Euthanasie"-Morde) is a memorial in Berlin, Germany to the victims of Nazi Germany's state-sponsored involuntarily euthanasia program. Over 70,000 people were murdered between 1940-41 under official order of Aktion T4. Despite the program's technical cessation in August 1941, the killings continued in state-run institutions and care facilities until Germany's surrender in 1945. This amounted to a death toll of approximately 300,000.

The Berliner Philharmonie (German: [bɛʁˌliːnɐ fɪlhaʁmoˈniː] (listen)) is a concert hall in Berlin, Germany, and home to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. The Philharmonie lies on the south edge of the city's Tiergarten and just west of the former Berlin Wall. The Philharmonie is on Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße, named for the orchestra's longest-serving principal conductor. The building forms part of the Kulturforum complex of cultural institutions close to Potsdamer Platz. The Philharmonie consists of two venues, the Grand Hall (Großer Saal) with 2,440 seats and the Chamber Music Hall (Kammermusiksaal) with 1,180 seats. Though conceived together, the smaller hall was opened in the 1980s, some twenty years after the main building.

The Berlin State Library (German: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin; officially abbreviated as SBB, colloquially Stabi) is a universal library in Berlin, Germany and a property of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. It is one of the largest libraries in Europe, and one of the most important academic research libraries in the German-speaking world. It collects texts, media and cultural works from all fields in all languages, from all time periods and all countries of the world, which are of interest for academic and research purposes. Some famous items in its collection include the oldest biblical illustrations in the fifth-century Quedlinburg Itala fragment, a Gutenberg Bible, the main autograph collection of Goethe, the world's largest collection of Johann Sebastian Bach's and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's manuscripts, and the original score of Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 9.

The Shell-Haus (Shell House) is a classical modernist architectural masterpiece that stands overlooking the Landwehrkanal in the Tiergarten district of Berlin, Germany. It was designed by Emil Fahrenkamp and was built in 1930–31.

The Kulturforum (English: Cultural Forum) is a collection of cultural buildings in Berlin. It was built up in the 1950s and 1960s at the edge of West Berlin, after most of the once unified city's cultural assets had been lost behind the Berlin Wall. The Kulturforum is characterized by its innovative modernist architecture; several buildings are distinguished by the organic designs of Hans Scharoun, and the Neue Nationalgalerie was designed by Mies van der Rohe. Today, the Kulturforum lies immediately to the west of the redeveloped commercial node of Potsdamer Platz.

The Berlin Musical Instrument Museum (German: Musikinstrumenten-Museum Berlin) is located at the Kulturforum on Tiergartenstraße in Berlin, Germany. The Museum holds over 3,500 musical instruments from the 16th century onward and is one of the largest and most representative musical instrument collections in Germany. Objects include a portable harpsichord once owned by Prussia’s Queen Sophie Charlotte, flutes from the collection of Frederick the Great, and Benjamin Franklin’s glass harmonica.