The story
Hannover's museum of modern art is built on chocolate. Bernhard Sprengel ran the family confectionery firm and, with his wife Margrit, assembled one of Germany's best private collections of 20th-century art, then gave it to the city in 1969 on the condition that it build a home worthy of it. The concrete building on the Maschsee lake opened in 1979.
The collection reaches across the modern movements, with Nolde, Beckmann, Picasso and a strong body of German Expressionists, much of it the kind of work the Nazis had branded degenerate and stripped from public galleries.
Its local hero is Kurt Schwitters, born in Hannover, who spent years turning the rooms of his own house into a sculptural cave he called the Merzbau, built up out of glued rubbish and plaster until it broke through the ceiling. The original was destroyed in the war, and the museum keeps a full-scale reconstruction of it.
