BERLIN.- More than 80 years after being condemned as "Degenerate Art" by the Nazis, a collection of sculptures, battered but unbroken, is back on display in Berlin. The "Berlin Sculpture Find," a collection of sixteen modernist masterpieces, has opened for the first time since 2019 at PETRI – The new house for Berlin Archaeology, offering a poignant and powerful confrontation with one of the darkest chapters of German history.

Discovered by chance in 2010 during subway excavations across from the Rotes Rathaus (Red City Hall), the find immediately made global headlines. The sculptures—works by artists like Emy Roeder, Otto Freundlich, and Marg Moll—were found buried in the bomb-shattered cellar of a former commercial building at Königstraße 50.

For months, the relationship between the modernist artworks and their burial site was a mystery. The puzzle was solved in 2011 with the discovery of a 1942 document from the Reich Propaganda Ministry. It confirmed that the sculptures were exhibits from the infamous 1937 "Degenerate Art" propaganda show, having been confiscated from museums and stored at the Königstraße address. They were violently thrown into the cellar and buried by debris when the building was bombed in 1944.

The state of the art today—pitted, cracked, and fragmented—is a visceral testament to the violence of the dictatorship's cultural purge. As the exhibition notes, the damaged pieces speak more eloquently about the persecution of modern art than some perfectly preserved works.

The exhibition at PETRI places the sculptures in their historical and archaeological context, tracing the journeys of artists who were either forced into exile or struggled to survive in hiding. It also highlights the significance of modern archaeology, which unearthed this crucial historical evidence from the urban soil.

After traveling to fifteen locations across Germany and Luxembourg, and even featuring in a major exhibition at the Musée Picasso in Paris, the find’s return to Berlin is a homecoming. In an era where cultural tensions and censorship are once again making headlines, the show serves as a moving reminder of the devastating consequences when political power targets artistic freedom. The scars on these sculptures are a permanent warning etched in stone and bronze.