The 10 Best Museums in Potsdam, Brandenburg

Extavium: Knowledge at your fingertips: The Extavium offers an outside-the-classroom-experience for anybody who is or wants to become interested in the natural sciences. This experience will spark everybody's interest in the natural sciences and give insight into the complex processes of nature. With its interactive exhibition and many various workshops the museum has been an essential part of the scientific community in and around Potsdam for ten years. Is it possible to freeze your own shadow? And what do marshmallows have to do with air pressure? These are only some of the questions that you will find answers to when visiting the museum. All objects within the exhibition can be explored and lead to unexpected and surprising results.

A museum specialising in the Fluxus movement is unique within Potsdam's and Berlin's - museum scene. Nowhere else in the region can one see such an extensive collection of artworks, correspondence, objects, relics and films connected with this art movement. This collection is supplemented by an extensive display of artworks by Wolf Vostell, who was also a member of the Fluxus movement.

The Leistikow Strasse memorial commemorates the former Soviet military counterintelligence central remand prison that was once located here. There are few historical prisons so authentically preserved. While the mass cells and facilities in the upper floors reveal the conditions in the 1970s, the primitive basement cells with their crude wooden benches testify to the privations endured by prisoners well into the 1950s. Numerous inscriptions carved into the walls by detainees from that time speak of isolation and desperation as well as resilience. The permanent exhibition is illustrated with photographs, endowed with historical artefacts and equipped with media stations that reveal the prison’s story within the wider drama of the Cold War. Fifty biographies have been unearthed, showing just how many different people became inmates, from Nazi-era perpetrators to spies – both real and falsely accused - and Soviet army deserters. Some of them give eyewitness accounts of their fates.

With the opening of the Museum Barberini in 2017 Potsdam gained a new art museum. Exhibitions range from Old Masters to contemporary art, with a major focus on impressionism. Based on the works from the collection of Hasso Plattner, the museum’s benefactor and patron, the Museum Barberini presents three exhibitions each year with loans from international museums and private collections. The exhibitions are prepared at conferences with renowned academics and displayed in new contexts alongside smaller shows. Digital offers like the Barberini App and a media wall, together with a diverse events and education program, make art more accessible for everyone.