Sammlung Boros

Top choice in Berlin


This Nazi-era bunker presents one of Berlin's finest private contemporary art collections, amassed by advertising guru Christian Boros who acquired the behemoth in 2003. A third selection of works went live in May 2017 and includes installations by Katja Novitskova, digital paintings by Avery Singer and photo series by Peter Piller. Book online (weeks, if not months, ahead) to join a guided tour (also in English) and to pick up fascinating nuggets about the building's surprising other peacetime incarnations.

Tours begin with an introduction to the exhibit and the building against the noisy backdrop of a clattering blackboard by Belgian artist Kris Martin called Mandi III. Leading the group past preserved original fittings, pipes, steel doors and vents, guides provide enough thought fodder, context and explanations about the artworks to help even the uninitiated tame their bewilderment.

Built for 2000 people, the bunker's dank rooms crammed in twice as many during the heaviest air raids towards the end of WWII. After the shooting stopped, the Soviets briefly used it as a POW prison before it assumed a more benign role as a fruit and vegetable storeroom in East Berlin, a phase that spawned the nickname 'Banana Bunker'. In the 1990s, the claustrophobic warren hosted some of Berlin's naughtiest techno raves and fetish parties.


Lonely Planet's must-see attractions

Nearby Berlin attractions

1. Tränenpalast

0.22 MILES

During the Cold War, tears flowed copiously in this glass-and-steel border-crossing pavilion where East Berliners had to bid adieu to family visiting from…

4. Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus

0.36 MILES

Home to the parliamentary library, this recently expanded, extravagant structure has a massive tapered stairway, a flat roofline jutting out like a…

5. Gedenkort Weisse Kreuze

0.4 MILES

The seven white crosses on the southern Spree bank behind the Reichstag were put there in 1971 by a group of West Germans in memory of the East Germans…

6. Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof I

0.41 MILES

This compact 18th-century cemetery is the place of perpetual slumber for a veritable roll-call of famous Germans, including the philosophers Hegel and…

7. Brecht-Weigel Gedenkstätte

0.43 MILES

Playwright Bertolt Brecht lived in this apartment from 1953 until his death in 1956. Tours (in German) take you inside his office, a large library, and…

8. Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum

0.44 MILES

This Charité Hospital–run museum chronicles 300 years of medical history in an anatomical theatre, a pathologist's dissection room, a laboratory and a…