Adolf Hitler planned a Jewish Museum in Berlin which, after the successful implementation of the Final Solution, would document the way of life of an extinct people. After a painful birth, Berlin's new Jewish Museum opened its doors yesterday with a very different aim: to celebrate two millennia of German-Jewish history and the rebirth of Jewish life in Germany today. The museum poses controversial questions about the fundamental role of museums and what it means to be Jewish in Germany today.
Berlin's first Jewish Museum opened in 1933 on Oranienburgerstrasse, in the heart of the city's Jewish community, but was closed by the Nazis six years later. The idea of a new Jewish museum resurfaced in 1975, but the wheels didn't start moving until 1989, when New York-based architect Daniel Libeskind won an architectural competition with his design for a new museum.
Libeskind was born in post-war Poland to Jewish parents, and most of his family died in concentration camps. He grew up in the US but moved to Berlin over a decade ago to work on the Jewish Museum, which he completed in January 1999.
Since then he has moved on to other projects, including a £100 million speculative proposal for Carlisle Pier in D·n Laoghaire. In the two years following construction, as museum directors fought over exhibition concepts, the empty museum became one of Berlin's most visited tourist attractions.
Many of the 350,000 people who visited called for the museum to be left empty, a memorial to the loss of the Holocaust. But Libeskind has always rejected the idea.
"The building was not built for itself. It is not a mausoleum, it is a museum, and it is only now with the exhibition finally installed that the balance has been restored and it has become what it was supposed to be, a museum celebrating Jewish life," he said.
What was originally planned as a small Jewish department of the city museum developed into a fully-fledged national Jewish museum, the largest in Europe, with full funding from the federal government.
Several exhibition concepts were announced, then abandoned, the result of a bitter board-room struggle, as documented in the book Jewrassic Park: How (Not) to Build a Jewish Museum in Berlin.
Two prominent directors left before a final concept was agreed, another died. Last year the museum's curator, who had relocated from New York to oversee the new museum, resigned after several personal and professional disputes with the museum's director, Michael Blumenthal, a former US treasury secretary, who was born just outside Berlin but fled Germany aged 13 with his family in 1939. He was parachuted into place in 1997 to co-ordinate the exhibition that opened yesterday, Two Millenia of German-Jewish Culture.
"When people talk about German-Jewish culture, they always mention well-known figures like Kurt Tucholosky and Albert Einstein. But then it's straight on to the Holocaust," said Blumenthal. "The museum shows just how the lives and achievements in two millennia of Jewish history in this country are intertwined with German history and society." He is determined to prove wrong critics who say a separate museum is not the best place to reintegrate Jewish and German cultures still separate after they were forcibly split by Nazi doctrine. In his book, The Invisible Wall, Blumenthal admits it is a difficult task.
"The typical German doesn't view a Jew in this country just any other German, but as a Jew who lives here and is German. For that reason it stops Jews developing a feeling of fully belonging here," he says.
When the doors of the finished museum were opened yesterday for the first time, it was easy to see why the museum has caused such a fuss, even when empty.
Libeskind's building is a bold, uncompromising structure and a masterwork of deconstruction. The building is encased in zinc, with lightning bolt-like slashes in the metal for windows. The building takes an asymmetrical zig-zag shape, designed to symbolise a ruptured star of David. Visitors enter by descending underground into a warren of corridors with sloping floors and impossibly angular corners, all designed to disorient the visitor and recreate feelings of loss and confusion experienced by the Jews who were forcibly uprooted from their homes and sent to death camps or who fled into exile.
Two of the museum's most impressive spaces are the two emptiest. The Holocaust Void is a tall four-sided asymmetrical tower of smooth concrete. Visitors stare up at a tiny slit of light in the uppermost corner, while an out-of-reach ladder shows the impossibility of escape. Sounds from the street outside are eerily distorted by the concrete walls, and even with people coming and going, the chamber soon elicits a feeling of claustraphobia and loneliness.
Further on in the exhibition is the Memory Void, another vast chamber that cuts through the heart of the museum. It houses the affecting installation Schalechet ("Fallen Leaves") by the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman. The floor of the chamber is filled with round slices of metal, into which have been burned screaming faces, the lost victims of the Holocaust.
But the Holocaust is remembered in only one of the museum's 13 sections. Upstairs, the museum celebrates Jewish life in Germany, past and present, in an exhibition co-ordinated by Ken Gorbey, the former director of the national museum in New Zealand. His appointment was viewed with scepticism, as Germans wondered how a man who is neither Jewish nor speaks German could co-ordinate, conceptualise and install such an exhibition, and in just over a year.
The challenge for Gorbey and his team was to reassemble a picture of Jewish life when so much that made up their every-day life was left behind as they fled the Nazis. "If, in fact, we were limited to telling a story only through the property that exists . . . Hitler would have won," says Gorbey. "The treasured items that you might normally expect to feature in your average museum are not strong in this collection."
He has combined traditional presentation methods with a multimedia presentation, with mixed results. There are paintings by Jewish artists alongside ancient artefacts, including a manuscript dated 341 AD, which is the earliest surviving reference to a Jewish community in Colonia, today the city of Cologne.
The opening of the museum was the source of huge media and public interest in Berlin, despite fears that the city is suffering from memorial fatigue and historical overload. For years, the city had the dubious honour of hosting a museum without an exhibit, an exhibit without a museum, and a site with neither a museum nor an exhibit.
The Libeskind structure stood empty for almost three years while its directors argued over concepts, a museum without an exhibit. Nearby is an exhibit without a museum, the Topography of Terror. This open-air exhibition, set in the foundations of the former Gestapo headquarters, has won international acclaim for its documentation of the Nazi regime of fear. Yet the exhibit's directors continue to fight a running battle with the city fathers to secure funding for a building to house the exhibit.
Added to the confusion was an empty site with neither a building nor an exhibit, the Holocaust Memorial. The site beside the Brandenburg Gate was the subject of successive architectural competitions which only lead to further in-fighting. A design was finally chosen at last, and construction work has begun.
After two decades of planning and almost three years of standing empty, the Jewish Museum in Berlin is finally finished. Even housing an exhibition, Libeskind's building is still the star of the show. The exhibition it houses, covering a time span of 2,000 years, is lively but sometimes lacks focus, and the directors admit things still have to be fine-tuned.
The opening of the Jewish Museum in Berlin is the beginning of the end of a farcical round of memorial musical chairs in the city. More importantly, it is a timely addition to the landscape of Jewish life in Berlin. With over 100,000 members, the city where the Holocaust was planned is now home to the fastest growing Jewish community in the world.
For more information on The Jewish Museum in Berlin, tel: 0049-30-25993300 or see www.jmberlin.de
