After the collapse of Communism, East and West Berlin reunified with astonishing speed. But in the past few years, as Berlin emerged as a major contemporary art center, another division arose — one between the city’s famed museum collections and its rapidly expanding gallery world. With the retirement last October of Peter-Klaus Schuster, the general director of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the government-funded entity that controls nearly all the city’s major art museums, that wall may now be coming down, too.

During his decadelong tenure, Schuster, 65, was regarded as a visionary, drawing up ambitious plans to modernize and reorganize the Staatliche Museen’s art, artifacts and antiquities holdings, but he won few friends in Berlin’s thriving contemporary-art scene. "Under Schuster, the Staatliche Museen did their job, and we did ours," says Bruno Brunnet, the co-director of Contemporary Fine Arts, one of the German capital’s leading galleries. Another Berlin dealer, Guido Baudach, is blunter: "Everyone knows that Schuster has no interest in contemporary art."

With the changing of the guard, however, the divide between the museum and gallery worlds may well narrow. "We all agree that Berlin has become important for contemporary art," says Hermann Parzinger, the president of the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, the independent government foundation that oversees the activities of the Staatliche Museen. Speaking from the foundation’s headquarters, Parzinger, who has himself been on the job only since last spring, explains that Schuster’s duties will be divided in two: The office of general director has been taken over by Michael Eissenhauer, who led the Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, which maintains holdings as varied as Berlin’s, if much smaller, while Udo Kittelmann, the head of Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst, has been named director of Berlin’s Nationalgalerie. "I’m very glad to have Udo Kittelmann [on board]," says Parzinger, "because his main area of expertise is contemporary art. Through him the museums can become better connected with that scene."

A standard complaint during the Schuster years was the lack of communication between museum curators and artists and dealers. Baudach — whose vast space in the working-class Wedding district is one of Berlin’s hottest galleries — compares the city with others, like Munich, where art openings are conspicuously attended by local museum directors. At Berlin openings, he observes, even staff from the Hamburger Bahnhof, the Staatliche Museen’s premier venue for contemporary art, have been hard to find. "With Kittelmann," he says, "this will be fundamentally different."

While Eissenhauer, 52, will be responsible for "thinking larger concepts," says Parzinger, the 50-year-old Kittelmann will provide strong curatorial guidance at five of the organization’s leading institutions, including the Hamburger Bahnhof and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Mies van der Rohe’s late-modernist masterpiece. Officially home to the city’s important collection of modern art, the Neue Nationalgalerie frequently hosts temporary exhibitions, and Kittelmann is planning a major installation there in the fall featuring works by the German photographic artist Thomas Demand. "This will be a Demand show like no one has seen before," he says, noting that the exhibition, titled "Nationalgalerie," will address Germany’s national identity.

Schuster does not leave his post without some major achievements. His costly dream of rehousing whole collections to make administrative and curatorial sense is almost reality. It now seems certain that Berlin’s renowned non-European collections — which contain, among other treasures, a unique cache of West African sculpture — will move from suburban Dahlem to the center of town, to the rebuilt Hohenzollern Palace (the Italian architect Franco Stella was recently awarded the commission for the project). And Schuster’s plan to consolidate the pre-20th-century European holdings on or near the Museumsinsel, the city’s signature cluster of five 19th-century museum buildings, has backing, if not yet funding, from the government. In a few decades, Berlin may once again host an array of museums that will astound the world.