Wielding our 3-Tages-Karten, one of the things at the top of our Berlin to-do list was to visit the Jewish Museum—I’d heard great things and wanted to refresh my memory regarding Jewish history leading up to and during World War II, in particular.
As we walked through the door of the museum, the first thing important thing I saw there was an aggressive reminder of how much history lives with us and persists daily in our contemporary world: a security checkpoint, more rigorous than that at the entrance to the Louvre and like I’ve seen in no other museum I’ve been to in Germany. Very much like the airport, visitors empty their pockets, walk through a metal detector, and send their bags through the x-ray machine on a conveyor belt. Needless to say, I felt a little ashamed that I was there to “brush up” on the history that makes this kind of security precaution completely necessary.
The museum itself was designed by architect Daniel Libeskind and is shaped like an enormous zig-zag. I’ve never been in a building like it—it’s very beautiful and very disorienting. Libeskind says the structure’s unusual shape is not supposed to represent anything; rather, what is important is the spatial experience that visitors have within it. Trying to write about it reminds me a little of trying to describe coming down the narrow staircase in St. Michaelis’s church of Hamburg when the enormous bells started to ring: words don't suffice, but anyone on the staircase could feel the tolling through the entirety of her body. Though much more quietly, so, too, with great buildings. Nowhere in the Jewish Museum does the Jewish Museum disappear or fall away from the consciousness of the visitors. It is fully present all of the time, which is what the museum, in turn, demands of the visitors—I thought this was really amazing, and it’s so fun to be inside of for several hours at a time.
As we walked through the door of the museum, the first thing important thing I saw there was an aggressive reminder of how much history lives with us and persists daily in our contemporary world: a security checkpoint, more rigorous than that at the entrance to the Louvre and like I’ve seen in no other museum I’ve been to in Germany. Very much like the airport, visitors empty their pockets, walk through a metal detector, and send their bags through the x-ray machine on a conveyor belt. Needless to say, I felt a little ashamed that I was there to “brush up” on the history that makes this kind of security precaution completely necessary.
The museum itself was designed by architect Daniel Libeskind and is shaped like an enormous zig-zag. I’ve never been in a building like it—it’s very beautiful and very disorienting. Libeskind says the structure’s unusual shape is not supposed to represent anything; rather, what is important is the spatial experience that visitors have within it. Trying to write about it reminds me a little of trying to describe coming down the narrow staircase in St. Michaelis’s church of Hamburg when the enormous bells started to ring: words don't suffice, but anyone on the staircase could feel the tolling through the entirety of her body. Though much more quietly, so, too, with great buildings. Nowhere in the Jewish Museum does the Jewish Museum disappear or fall away from the consciousness of the visitors. It is fully present all of the time, which is what the museum, in turn, demands of the visitors—I thought this was really amazing, and it’s so fun to be inside of for several hours at a time. My favorite thing about the design of the museum is that Libeskind created empty spaces, 
referred to as voids, in several parts of the building. The voids, which are meant to represent the absence of Jews from German society, are openings that cut vertically from the top of the building to the ground floor (about 20 meters), sort of like large, irregularly shaped elevator shafts. In the walls of these shafts, narrow windows allow one to look out into these spaces while walking through the different levels of the museum.
One of the voids, known as the Memory Void, contains an installation by the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman, entitled “Shalekhet” or “Falling Leaves.” There are over 10,000 metal, 2-dimensional faces scattered throughout the space of the Memory Void, which are dedicated to innocent victims of war and violence. Also, the faces are created by a negative process—the features of the faces do not protrude from the metal discs, rather they are places where the material has been cut away—reiterating the voids throughout the museum. But, again, it’s the space in which the installation appears that makes it so arresting; it is quite dim, narrow, and angular, and it echoes when you speak or walk inside of it. One can’t help but whisper, though when we went in no one else was there. The Memory Void felt as bleak and isolate as it sounds.
referred to as voids, in several parts of the building. The voids, which are meant to represent the absence of Jews from German society, are openings that cut vertically from the top of the building to the ground floor (about 20 meters), sort of like large, irregularly shaped elevator shafts. In the walls of these shafts, narrow windows allow one to look out into these spaces while walking through the different levels of the museum.One of the voids, known as the Memory Void, contains an installation by the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman, entitled “Shalekhet” or “Falling Leaves.” There are over 10,000 metal, 2-dimensional faces scattered throughout the space of the Memory Void, which are dedicated to innocent victims of war and violence. Also, the faces are created by a negative process—the features of the faces do not protrude from the metal discs, rather they are places where the material has been cut away—reiterating the voids throughout the museum. But, again, it’s the space in which the installation appears that makes it so arresting; it is quite dim, narrow, and angular, and it echoes when you speak or walk inside of it. One can’t help but whisper, though when we went in no one else was there. The Memory Void felt as bleak and isolate as it sounds.
The museum exhibits themselves were really great, too. Along one of the corridors, or “axes” of the building, windows opened into display cases containing various possessions and personal belongings of Jews who had lived in Germany in the late 1930s to early 1940s. Beside the objects were descriptions and pictures of the individuals who had owned them, brief accounts of what became of them under Nazi power (most were sent to labor or concentration camps and died in there), and correspondence they maintained with friends or family as long as they were able. It was sort of eerie to be able to read parts of these letters in German.
Another exhibit was all about a Jewish tradition called Sukkah, which seemed very important within the context of Libeskind’s architecture. If you’re not familiar, a Sukkah is a small, temporary dwelling, which is meant to be constructed with three walls and a roof of foliage in late September through late October (during the Hebrew month of Tishrei) for worship during and celebration of Sukkot. This is a tradition I really don’t know much about beyond what I saw in the museum and have read on Wikipedia, so if anyone can say something more and detailed about it, please leave a comment! I would very much like to understand this better. But what I did learn by way of the exhibit is that the Sukkah are meant to serve as a reminder of the make-shift dwellings where ancient Israelites lived during their 40 years of wandering in the desert after the Exodus from Egypt, and symbolize abstract places of belonging. I really liked this in relation to the building of the museum—the two kinds of structures both work with cultural memory and displacement, and interact in some way with the idea of the structures as manifestations of the transitory (the museum, for example, is covered in a layer of zinc; as it gradually oxidizes with exposure to the elements, the building will turn the color blue! Exposure to “damage” or change seems to be a key principle of the construction of Sukkah as well, i.e. three instead of four walls.)Lastly, the Jewish history exhibit is really impressive, and because of it I recommend going to the museum early in the day so you can spend as much time as you want to go through it. It is so gigantic and comprehensive—covering everything from Jews in the Middle ages through World War II, from telling the stories of important Jewish figures in history to detailing a number of Jewish traditions (synagogue architecture, for example, or the Kosher diet)—that I was in the museum for close to 4 hours and didn’t come close to finishing this exhibit. I was chased out by employees very promptly at closing time (which was 8pm on a Sunday).
(the arial picture obviously isn't one I took myself--I borrowed it from the Jewish Museum's website, which is cool and gives a lot of great images of the building if you're curious!)
"Please brighten up this waiting room," says my busy boss, one morning "Put some art on the wall." Admittedly, the room is on the drab side but as a car spare part supply office, I thought that not many of the clients coming through notice much of it.
ReplyDeleteFrom wahooart.com, I ordered online canvas prints about car art, of course, like this one http://en.wahooart.com/A55A04/w.nsf/OPRA/BRUE-5ZKEMR by Salvador Dali.