Project Diary: Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin Speaks to a History That Is Both Rich and Tragic

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The Jewish Museum is an architectural dagger plunged into the heart of complacency. Critics have argued that this passionate and complex design is impossible from a curatorial perspective. But even empty—the building opens this month without displays—the museum asks a profound question: Can architecture and art help us come to terms with the enormous accomplishments and unfathomable evil experienced by a culture? After 10 years of controversy, visitors will offer their own answers.

1988 A competition is announced for the design of a new wing to the Berlin Museum. On its face, the project seems much like any other. It will accommodate growth in such departments as theater, fashion, toys, and graphics. But it offers one particularly compelling aspect. Realizing a long-held dream—it will create a distinct and united Jewish Department.

Once numerous, prominent, and successful in Berlin, Jews had succeeded in creating a museum to celebrate their contributions to the city in 1933, just as Adolf Hitler consolidated his power. It closed in 1938. Though almost all Berlin’s Jews either fled or were sent to death camps in the Holocaust, discussion of a new Jewish Museum went on for decades after World War II. The nonexistent musuem’s collection swelled with acquisitions and donations. In West Berlin, the idea of a Jewish Department was incorporated into the city museum of Berlin and a number of sites were considered. By the 1980s, the Jewish Department comprised two rooms in two separate locations.

(In East Berlin, a similar effort to recognize the Jewish contribution to the city’s history focuses on reconstructing the Neues Synagogue (Eduard Knoblauch and Friedrich August Stüler, architects, 1866) as a community center. It begins this year under architect Bernhard Leisering’s direction. The effort is daunting: the domed, neo-Moorish pile that once had held 3,200 worshippers had been burned by Nazis in 1938, bombed in the World War, and demolished in 1958.)

The Berlin Museum competition site is on Lindenstrasse at the southern end of the historic heart of Berlin. It’s an area of the city somewhat isolated by wobbles in the path of the Berlin Wall. The museum, founded only in 1962 (the earlier collections remain in the Märkisches Museum, in the East), is housed in the Collegienhaus, a reconstructed Baroque palace of 1735. The program for the competition recognizes that the treatment of Jews is a dilemma requiring resolution within the larger goals of the museum. The curatorial concept for the Jewish Department proposes Religion, Community, Jews in Society 1750-1870, and Jews in Society 1870-1945. Anti-Semitism and Hitler’s Final Solution are to be dealt with in the history department.

1989 The jury comprises Harald Deilmann, of Münster; Christoff Hackelsberger, Munich; Herman Hertzberger, Amsterdam; Klaus Humpert, Freiburg; Josef Paul Kleihues, Berlin; Isaak Luxemburg, Tel Aviv; Peter P. Schweger, Hamburg; and a group of special assessors. All the jurors are architects. They begin deliberating in May, completing their work on June 23. “The obvious thing may have been to build a normal museum,” comments the jury, “had not one entry put forward a quite extraordinary, completely autonomous solution.” This is Daniel Libeskind’s submission, which is granted first prize. The jury went on to call the entry “a profound response” to the competition requirements.

Libeskind’s triumph is all the more impressive because the jurors initially found the scheme “impossible to interpret.” Libeskind did not feel constrained by the surroundings, for example. Though a few historic structures survived wartime bombing, slab-sided, object buildings—the fruits of various postwar planning fads—litter blocks laid out on Baroque principals.

What drove Libeskind’s solution was the intertwined history of Jews, many of whom were important historical figures, and Berlin. It is a history in which physical traces, such as synagogues, are now all but gone. He explored the history of important Berliners, both Jewish and non-Jewish. He looked up their addresses, plotted them on a city map, and traced lines among them, making what he called “an irrational matrix” in the form of a system of squared triangles, yielding distorted versions of the star of David that Jews were forced to wear during the Hitler era.

He was also inspired by the composer Arnold Schoenberg, a key figure in Modern music, who attempted but failed to complete his only opera, Moses and Aaron, as Hitler rose to power. Coming after the spectacular musical edifice of the first two acts, the third act is recited, and is only minutes long. Libeskind was drawn to this monumental absence, the power inherent in uncompletion. He also stirred into his mix inspiration derived from art and literary critic Walter Benjamin’s essay, “One Way Street,” which Libeskind calls an “apocalyptic guidebook.”

The sense that the tragic history of Berlin’s Jews was too large for art was amplified when Libeskind discovered the voluminous records of the deported. The government sent him two large volumes, which contain Jewish names, dates of birth, dates of deportation, and places—not the places where those people had lived, but where most were put to death.

Libeskind does not articulate the alchemy by which he transformed such a heady mix into architecture. He names his scheme, cryptically, Between the Lines. One line is the slablike form of the building, the northern end of which holds tight and orthogonal to the street and the Collegienhaus. To the south, it uncoils explosively: walls tilt crazily in a shattered and broken-open version of the Star of David.

Galleries documenting the achievements of Berliners, both Jew and non-Jew, follow this zigzag. Slashing across the galleries in a straight line perpendicular to the street is another line, this one of empty, raw-concrete space, lit dimly by indirect slitlike windows and skylights. These are void spaces, free of artifacts, that represent the inexpressible “absence” of Jewish lives perpetrated by the Holocaust. The architectural intertwining of these parallel “stories” wins over the jury.

Since the program requires that the addition be entered from the existing building, Libeskind carries visitors down, entering the addition underground. He offers no bridge or other above-ground visual connection.

Arriving at the addition confronts visitors with three choices. Moving in a straight line takes them to the main stair, which in a single run ascends the entire museum, allowing visitors to choose one or all the levels.

Another axial corridor leads to a heavy metal door that opens to the base of a dark, echoing tower. It “represents the end of Berlin as we knew it,” Libeskind has written, “the apocalyptic void.” He calls it the Holocaust tower, a singular gesture that recognizes those hundreds of thousands murdered whose names were dutifully recorded in the archives.

It is one of four towers which in a sense stand guard on the site, surrounding a tilted plane surmounted by 48 square columns (the number represents the year of Israel’s founding, 1948) filled with dirt, planted with vegetation that grows downward. The planted columns are a garden named for writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, and is at the culmination of a third axial corridor. It represents the exile and emigration of Berliners—to New York, to Tel Aviv, and elsewhere.

As visitors moves through the exhibit spaces, they encounter narrow passages, which prove to be bridges across the empty, inaccessible voids. These spaces intrude, creating oblique corners, reminding the visitor of the Holocaust’s profound interruption of the exhibition narrative. Visitors returns to the basement to exit, either the way they came, or through the garden. “There’s no final space that ends the story or puts it together for the visitor,” explains Libeskind. “It should continue in their minds.”

Though the program called for a Jewish department, Libeskind’s response was “that it is not possible to compartmentalize Jewish culture, business, politics. It’s not just another department; it is fused with the whole history of the city.”

The Libeskind team’s joy at winning such a prominent competition doesn’t last long. Libeskind confesses that “most interesting competitions are tickets to oblivion. The problem was not to win the competition but to build it.” No one anticipated that the reunification of Germany, undreamed-of when the commitment to the museum addition was made, would so complicate realization of the decades-long dream of a Jewish museum in Berlin. The two Germanies are officially reunited in October; the Berlin Wall comes down in November.

(Continued)

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