Originally planned for May 2022, the opening of DAS MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam was delayed by several months. On the weekend of September 24 and 25, its gates will finally open.
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DAS MINSK is the latest project of the Hasso Plattner Foundation, established in 2015 by software billionaire Hasso Plattner (SAP), which is dedicated to promoting science, art and social projects. In 2017, the foundation opened the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, which houses Plattner's collection of over a hundred works by French Impressionists. One of the most prominent pieces is Claude Monet's Meules from 1890, which Plattner bought from Sotheby's in New York in the spring of 2019 for $110.7 million.
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Also in the spring of 2019, the Hasso Plattner Foundation acquired the former terrace restaurant "Minsk" on the Brauhausberg in Potsdam, which had been opened in 1977 to reaffirm the friendship between the German Democratic Republic (GDR), also known as East Germany, and the Soviet Union with Belorussian folklore charm. In the years that followed, it developed into a popular meeting place. In 2000, the business, which continued as a café after reunification, was closed and the building, constructed in the modernist style of the GDR, was in danger of falling into ruin.
With its reinvention as a museum, the "Minsk" is now transformed with the focus on Hasso Plattner's collection of GDR art, which the businessman has been collecting since the 1980s.
