The Humboldt Forum is, above all, a monument to capitalist decay. Germany’s ruling class has almost limitless resources — but it clearly has no vision for the world. As their system causes biblical floods, they have clearly given up hope for its future. So they invest in rockets, reflecting a nihilistic hedonism that dreams of a billionaires’ colony on Mars. This is reflected in an architecture that is nothing but despair, combing nostalgia for the aristocracy with the generic look of a shopping mall. (I really can’t overstate just how ugly this all is!) Yet they realise that most people find their aesthetics disgusting, so they hand over the central exhibition space to their critics, leaving nothing more than a cowardly mishmash.
