Potsdam-Museum - Forum für Kunst und Geschichte

The Potsdam Museum was founded as a municipal museum in 1909 by Potsdam citizens and patrons who were active in the Potsdamer Kunstverein and Potsdamer Museumsverein.

Even in the early days of the museum, comprehensive estates, foundations and donations with historical and cultural value were given to the municipal museum. Today, the museum's collection includes over 200.000 objects. Important focal points of the collection are the areas of fine arts, photography, everyday culture and applied arts, writing and printing as well as the comprehensive museum library.

The Potsdam Museum has experienced a chequered history over the past 100 years and has frequently changed its location. In 2012 it returned to its founding location in the Old Town Hall at the Alter Markt in the heart of the city of Potsdam. The museum is dedicated to urban themes in the fields of art, culture and history.

In June 2011, with the support of the Provenance Research Unit (at the SMB's Institute for Museum Research), work began on examining the collection holdings for Nazi looted property. In addition to the systematic processing of relevant files, two collection areas are in the foreground for autopsies: the book holdings and the painting holdings; both primarily because of their documentary merits: Stamps, stickers, bookplates, notes and other traces of previous ownership. All cases in which indications of property seized as a result of persecution emerge during the research will gradually be published in the Lost Art database.