Don’t go searching for Berlin’s newest museum among the imposing neoclassical monuments of Museum Island. You would be looking in entirely the wrong place. Dedicated to the works of George Grosz, the most celebrated artist of 1920s Weimar-era Berlin, Das Kleine Grosz Museum is on the other side of town, hidden behind a high wall on a rather seedy thoroughfare where trains rush along the elevated railway.

It is in many ways a fitting location. Even in the wild days of Weimar Berlin where pushing boundaries – of art, of life, of politics – was standard operating procedure, and where artists were inspired by dadaism, expressionism, surrealism, cubism and more, Grosz’s work was considered shocking. His canvases featured often-grotesque figures – disfigured soldiers, desperate prostitutes, corpulent plutocrats – that highlighted a side of the glittering 1920s that some preferred to ignore. Nonetheless, his works helped define the era.