Bern Historical Museum

• 1. Introduction

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  The Bern Historical Museum was almost Switzerland's national museum. When the Neuchâtel architect André Lambert drew up his plans in the early 1890s, the city of Bern was competing to host the entire country's heritage collection. Lambert designed accordingly, drawing on the forms of medieval castles from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as his architectural model. Bern lost that competition to Zurich. But the building Lambert finished in 1894 survived as something remarkable in its own right: the second largest historical museum in Switzerland, and a place where a Gallo-Roman bronze group, a meteorite-born arrowhead, and the life's work of Albert Einstein all share the same address. What ended up inside those castle-inspired walls is the question worth following.

• 2. A Castle Built for History

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  André Lambert modeled his design on historic castles from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the result is a building that announces its ambitions before a visitor steps inside. Above the entrance, a glass mosaic titled "The Age of History" was installed in 1900, the work of the Swiss painter Léo-Paul Robert. The figures of Poetry and History look down on everyone who enters. An extension to the original building was completed in 2009, more than a century after Lambert laid the foundation stone. That long gap between the original construction and its expansion reflects how stable the museum's core purpose remained: the collections grew, but the idea stayed constant.

• 3. Loot from Burgundy

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  Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy died at the Battle of Nancy in 1477, and his camp was stripped after his defeat. Among the items taken were tapestries and other objects that eventually found their way into the Bern Historical Museum's permanent collection. These are not minor curiosities. The tapestries are described as among the most important pieces in the collection, physical evidence of one of the pivotal military defeats of the late medieval period. The museum holds Bern's history from prehistoric times through to the present day, and its collection extends beyond Europe to include artefacts from Asia, Oceania, America, and Egypt.

• 4. Objects With Unexpected Histories

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  One of the strangest stories attached to any item in the collection belongs to the Moringen arrowhead. It sat in the museum for well over a century before researchers determined in 2023 that it is of meteoric origin, meaning it was fashioned from material that fell from space. The Muri statuette group, a set of six Gallo-Roman bronze figurines, stands alongside it as one of the collection's most remarked-upon items. The museum also holds the mummified head of a man who lived in Egypt in the first or early second century BC. Each of these objects arrived through different routes, across different centuries, but they now share the same heritage site of national significance.

• 5. Einstein in Bern

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  Albert Einstein developed the Relativity Theory while living in Bern, and the museum opened a dedicated Einstein Museum to mark that connection. It began as a temporary exhibition in 2005 before becoming a permanent fixture devoted to his life and work. The house where Einstein lived during that period, known as the Einsteinhaus, is also open to the public, though it sits elsewhere in the city and charges separate entry fees. The two sites together give visitors an unusual chance to trace both the physical spaces Einstein inhabited and the intellectual legacy he left behind. The Einstein Museum's origins as a temporary show, only later made permanent, echo the museum's own founding story: an institution that began as something else and became something larger.

• 6. The Multaka Network

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  In 2019, the Bern Historical Museum joined six similar museums across Germany, Italy, Greece, and the United Kingdom to form the international Multaka network. The project trains Arabic-speaking guides, identified as Multaka guides, to lead free tours specifically designed for refugees and migrants. Those tours are visitor-centered discussions conducted in the guests' own language. The focus falls on the historical origins of the objects on display and on how they were acquired, including the visitors' own relationship to their country's cultural heritage. The network turns the museum's role inside out: rather than presenting history to a passive audience, it invites people whose own histories have been displaced to engage with how objects travel across time and borders.