Jewish Museum Berlin: An Ethical Architectural Response
If the spatial logic of Auschwitz-Birkenau announces the dehumanizing, destructive aims of Nazism, which architectural language constitutes an ethical response? Here, I think the Jewish-American architect Daniel Libeskind’s 1988 winning competition design for the Jewish Museum Berlin is instructive. In reflecting on the building, Libeskind described it as “a structure with its own narrative,” arguing that “the Jewish citizens of Berlin […] were and are a vital, vibrant part of the city’s fabric, their heritage woven throughout urban life. Their extermination during the Holocaust razed German culture—as if much of the preceding art, philosophy, music, and literature had been expunged from history. [He] believed it was possible to bring this erasure back to the public consciousness by designing a building that told the story.”9 The building is a zig-zag structure clad in metal that abuts dynamically against the older Baroque building that houses the Berlin Museum, challenging the idea of order, as shown in Figure Six.
In contrast to the architectural logic of Birkenau, which is devoid of any sense of human story and vitality, the zig-zag form is informed by the stories of Berliners, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Libeskind plotted the addresses of Heinrich Kleist, Rachel Varnhagen, Walter Benjamin, E.T.A. Hoffman, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Arnold Schoenberg, and Paul Celan on a map,10 connecting where they once lived to form a Star of David which then informed “the organization of the museum and the slashes that cut through the building’s façade.”11 Libeskind’s competition-entry text reveals a desire to bring to the fore what has been erased: “the past fatality of the German-Jewish cultural relation in Berlin is enacted now in the realm of the invisible. It is this invisibility which must be brought to visibility in order to give rise to a new hope and to a shared inner vision. Thus [sic] this project seeks to reconnect Berlin to its own history which must never be forgotten.”12
While key historical contributors to Berlin’s cultural life and impact shape the form of the building the remembrance of history also emerges in the series of seemingly irrational slashes in the structure:
The fragmentation is the spacing, the separation brough about by the history of Berlin which can only be experience [sic] as the absence of time and as the time fulfillment of what is no longer there. The absolute event of history—the Holocaust—with its concentration camp and annihilation—the burn-out of meaningful development of Berlin and of humanity—shatters the place while bestowing a gift of that which cannot be given: the preservation of the sacrifice, the offering: guardian night-watch over absent and future meaning.13
How does one create an architectural form to express the absence wrought by the Holocaust? In one register, Libeskind’s design gives shapes to such absence through the figure of the void, an empty rectangular volume that cuts through the zig-zag itinerary of the museum. The drastic difference in architectonic language, compared to the original baroque building of which the new museum forms an extension, suggests a shift from order to chaos. But the building works at the register of one’s experience as well. The interaction of the linear void with the zig-zag pieces jutting out creates multi-story atria and apertures that shape the museumgoer’s visit: “Linear structures interact to create an irregular and decisively accentuated set of displacements, providing an active path and distancing the viewer in the investigation of the exhibits.”14 Here, the “power of place” functions in both the symbolic and the experiential registers. As Libeskind reflects in his autobiography, “I would offer a design that would architecturally integrate Jewish history into Berlin’s rich, multitextured history and enable people, even encourage them, to feel what happened.”15
Fig. 6. Jewish Museum Berlin by Daniel Libeskind (Studio Daniel Libeskind, Creative Commons License)
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