The massive metal entrance door of a renowned techno club in post-Wall Berlin has been relocated to a recently constructed museum. This door, once the gateway to the original Tresor nightclub, has become the museum's inaugural exhibit, showcasing the city's history that spans the turbulent 20th century.

This door's odyssey parallels Berlin's own tumultuous past and is regarded as a symbol of the city's resurgence following its Cold War division. Initially, the door secured the vast bank safe rooms of the pre-war Jewish-owned department store Wertheim. The Wertheim family, owners of the store, were dispossessed by the Nazis, with some members sent to concentration camps and others forced into exile.

Despite the destruction of the elegant shopping center in Allied bombing during World War II, the heavy metal door remarkably survived almost unscathed. For decades, it languished in the no-man's land along the highly militarized border of the city.

However, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, numerous abandoned industrial spaces, especially in the former communist east, were transformed into temporary electronic music venues, drawing partygoers from both East and West Germany, as well as from around the world. One of the most iconic clubs of the early 1990s was Tresor, which owner Dimitri Hegemann established within the underground safes of the former department store, with the famous door serving as its entrance.

In 2005, the original location of the club shut down, making way for the construction of a large shopping mall and office buildings. Although the nightclub found a new home in a power station, retaining its original steel bars and safe-deposit boxes from the safe rooms, the door, weighing five tonnes and measuring 2.3 meters in height, proved too cumbersome to install.

Hegemann retained the door, still adorned with the club's distinctive spray-painted symbol: a circle with a dot inside and a line below it, representing a significant era in Berlin's cultural history.