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

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Can Architecture Transform A Culture? An Assessment

A visitor to the still-empty Jewish Museum can appreciate how the architecture contributed to the unending debate about the installations. The building “argues” its point of view so forcefully that it’s hard to imagine displays that are both sympathetic to the architecture and allow historic but prosaic objects to hold their own.

The brooding power of the exterior does not prepare the visitor for the more neutral and museumlike interiors. The gallery proportions are conventionally high and loftlike. The slashing window openings are dramatic, offering jaggedly cropped city views (a reminder that events depicted in displays occurred very close by), but the openings also read as a kind of scribed, background graphic.

The building testifies to Berlin’s commitment to reconciliation. Fresh, raw, and driven by emotion, it avoids the mawkish theatricality that is endemic to recent memorial architecture, but not by much. Whether its expression will wear well, is another question, especially as the building is sure to spur less surely rendered imitations. Even now, it is hard to assess Libeskind’s most daring moves: the voids and the Holocaust tower. Will they make people think? Or will they have to be explained, as conventional displays are, and thereby come to seem merely a kind of diorama, albeit of an arty, abstract kind?

Critics have said that the complex and difficult story of Jews and Berlin should have been told by curators, not the architect. “It is the responsibility of architecture and culture to address events and history,” Libeskind replies. Yet he does not see the building as a specific statement about history, but a composition that deals with the contradictory notions of “incredible contributions and abysmal losses,” as he puts it. “I thought of this as a living presence. History is not over.”

Libeskind admits a powerful faith in the ability of people to learn both from history and from architecture. In this he eerily echoes the assimilated Jews of the Hitler era. They believed profoundly in German culture and felt proud of their contributions. That such a culture could succumb to evil on the gargantuan scale of the Final Solution was for all too many inconceivable. Their faith in culture cost them their lives. Undeterred, Libeskind declared in a talk in New York City, “A building and a city are always present across time and across history. The act of building transforms the culture of a city.” Time will tell.

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