What's new in Germany

Rick Steves

The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.

Munich celebrates its 850th anniversary this year with a series of cultural events (theater, cabaret, concerts, exhibitions, tours, and so on), mostly on weekends in June and July. Munich's new Jewish Museum features a small but well-done exhibit on Jewish life, and its City Museum will reopen with shiny new exhibits after an extensive renovation. The charming new Beer and Oktoberfest Museum is located in a brightly lit, but creaky house with low ceilings (the oldest in the city center) and covers the history of Munich's breweries and the origins of Oktoberfest, its famous annual keg fest. The renovated and now futuristic -- rather than frumpy -- BMW Museum has reopened. And just outside Munich, at Dachau, a new visitors' center/cafe opens in 2008.

In Berlin, a crisp mini-museum called "The Kennedys" has just opened on Pariser Platz; it's a cross between an archive of documents related to JFK and Jackie's visit to Berlin during the Cold War, and a photographic shrine to the good-looking couple. On the other end of Unter den Linden boulevard sits the Hohenzollern Palace (blown up by the East Germans and rebuilt as the "Palace of the People" to standard communist-era eyesore standards). While its facade is being restored to its Prussian glory, the new interior will hold a mall. Also in Berlin, the building that formerly housed the Egyptian Museum (which moved to the city's Museum Island) reopens this spring as the Scharf-Gerstenberg Museum, featuring Surrealist art.