Berlin: a city of art collectors? Even after 1945, the effects of National Socialism and the war, as well as the division of Germany, prevented the development of a viable private collecting culture, as the city had to demonstrate during the German Empire. Last but not least, Berlin's art collectors were responsible for the fact that the then capital of the Reich evolved from an economic and political center into an art metropolis whose charisma radiated far beyond the region. While the German Empire is often glorified in the context of current cultural politics as the golden age of bourgeois clientele, the study, which is close to the sources, paints a differentiated picture of the cultural engagement of the social elite of this time. . It questions the variously motivated artistic interests of captains of industry, aristocrats, artists, Jewish citizens and, last but not least, previously little-known art collectors. It reconstructs the position of the art collector in imperial society using cultural, journalistic and literary textual sources. Numerous interior shots of private art collections not only give life to a past world, but above all serve as a key to the taste and self-image of collectors. On the contrary, both stereotypical standards and innovative taste deviations in art and interior design are emerging. After all, it was the dynamics of "fine differences" that opened the culture of collecting, initially mainly linked to the taste of ancient art, for the works of international modernism by Manet, van Gogh and Cézanne. The collector's interiors played a central role in the dissolution of the historicist canons of furniture in favor of modern and purely formal design principles.