For Libeskind, architecture is a tool that shapes a place’s impact on the individual:
I had a passage that led to a dead end. I had a space, the Holocaust Tower, that got so dark you couldn’t see your feet, and the only light filtering down came from a slit in the roof that was barely visible from below. I had a garden where the vegetation was out of reach, in forty-nine tall pillars overhead, and where the foundation was oddly tilted, making visitors feel disoriented, even seasick.
Note Libeskind’s use of the word “feel.” At the museum, engaging with the Holocaust and Jewish absence/presence in the city is more than a cognitive or even emotional exercise. The experience is proprioceptive, that is, you feel the movement of your body in the space, and in being so moved, you engage concretely with abstractions like culture and ethics. Libeskind recounted the experience of two Holocaust survivors to the Holocaust Tower:
As we entered, a heavy metal door swung shut with an unforgiving thud. It was winter, and the tower was unheated. From outside the tower [sic] you could hear children playing in the schoolyard across the street, trucks grinding past on Lindenstrasse, people talking on the museum grounds. Like Jewish Berliners during the war, we were all cut off from normal daily life. The two elderly women broke into tears. Berliners understood the building, deep in their hearts. They stood in the Holocaust Tower, silently, many with tears in their eyes […] The building resonated with the people of Berlin.17
Shaping the built environment becomes another way to shape one’s encounter with the past. This emotional effect reveals that such encounters in the museum are of an ethical nature, since one is moved to consider one’s relationship to the historical trauma of the Holocaust.
Libeskind’s approach to formal language stands in stark contrast to the formal logic that underlies Birkenau:
There’s a presumption [...] that right angles and repetition provides us with a necessary sense of order […] The tyranny of the grid! I fight against it all the time: buildings designed like checkerboards, with repetitive units that march along the same track […] The grid imposes an unnecessarily restrictive pattern on experience […] Its clean right angles and geometric rigor feels [sic] scientific. But this is […] outdated [...] It makes me think of German architects of the 1920s who wore white coats […] as if they were involved in surgical operations […] Even those of us who live fairly quiet lives don’t experience ourselves as monolithic. So why settle for buildings based on a regimented formula that denies human desire and is antithetical to the quality of life?”18
It's interesting that Libeskind associates 1920s German architects with surgery, as it echoes Birkenau (even though designed by German architects of the 1940s) as kind of machine of death. The stated binaries—monolith/diversity, restriction/desire, and death/life—suggest an ethical dimension to these architectural forms. If the grid facilitates the dehumanization of Jewish prisoners at Birkenau, reducing people to numbers and bodies to be crammed into trains, barracks, and finally the death chamber, then the apparent chaos of the Jewish Museum Berlin is an essential rectification. It restores the diversity of humanity; it rebels against orderly tyranny. In a repressive milieu, the variety of spatial experiences reminds visitors of life beyond bare life. Unlike the functional barracks at Birkenau, Libeskind’s museum opens up myriad interpretations, keeping people engaged with this history rather than neatly explaining it away as a singular, past event.
This approach is not necessarily reproducible. One cannot simply follow the same architectonic formula to recreate the same resonance with the past, move people to tears in the same way. What is important to me is that through engaging with the social processes of the building—in this case how the architect’s design intention unfolds formally and how it shapes one’s encounter with the past—one is afforded a more corporeal approach to engaging with history and loss. We can appreciate the past in terms that are not dictated by the past, i.e., seeing Jewish and other marginalized lives and experiences as multiple and manifold instead of how the Third Reich would have it, as a number on the page to be eliminated. In this sense, the building works much like the numerous exhibits at Auschwitz, though using different means. These interventions resuscitate the humanity that the architecture of concentration camps sought to extinguish. On a more pragmatic level, these museums also show how sites can become active participants and engage with history, not merely existing in the background or as precious, preserved artifacts.
The Topography of Terror, Take One
The architecture of the Jewish Museum Berlin, however, does not engage directly with the perspectives of the perpetrators, a key FASPE idea. For that, we visited the Topography of Terror, the Gestapo and SS headquarters turned archeological site and museum. Largely forgotten and destroyed after World War II, the former site of key SS institutions was revived by community groups to document the site’s history19. The groups, united under the banner of Verein Aktives Museum (Active Museum Association), sought a place where “facts and sober documentation [w]ould provide an active reprocessing of history rather than an artistic interpretation.”20 Indeed, activists wanted the site to be “retained as a visible ‘open wound’ within the city to provoke reflection on history […preserving] the excavated ruins of the former SS building’s pantry basement.”21 The idea for a documentation center implies a social constructivist perspective on the “power of place,” as it was thought “that the site
could not speak for itself but rather that its authenticity ‘must be given a voice’ through documentation.”22
16 Ibid., p. 84.
17 Ibid.,p. 150.
Fig. 8. The Holocaust Tower in the Jewish Museum Berlin (Studio Daniel Libeskind, Creative Commons License)
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