German Chancellor reopens Berlin's Neues Museum

For seven decades Berlin's Neues Museum was a derelict, but finally it is back. German Chancellor Angela Merkel officially opens the restored museum on Friday. It's a day that took decades to arrive. One of the jewels of Berlin's Museum Island complex will reopen its doors. The Neues Museum reopens on Friday, meaning that the entire ensemble of Berlin's neoclassical galleries will be open for the first time since World War II. "It is a special day ... 70 years after it was closed, this building can be handed over to the public again," Hermann Parzinger, the head of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees Berlin's museums, told journalists ahead of the opening of the galleries, which will hold the city's Egyptian Museum and the Museum of Pre- and Early History. "It is, in a way, the end of the postwar era for the Museum Island."