Memory and Jewish Berlin

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The slanted floors, the sharply angled walls and floors, the generally disconcerting space - it was a deja vu moment. I had experienced this at the Jewish Museum in Copenhagen, and now I was confronting it on a much grander scale at the Berlin version. When I looked up the name of the architect, I was not surprised to find that the same guy had designed both structures: Daniel Libeskind. But with the Jewish Museum in Berlin he had taken his fractured vision to a whole new level. Rather than creating a space within an already existing structure, as he had done in Copenhagen, here Libeskind created something from scratch, a serpantine representation of an exploded Star of David, sheathed in zinc and slashed with narrow windows. It is both a museum and a monument, as complex as the complex history of Judaism in Germany.

The Holocaust Tower, a dark concrete space, pierced only by a thin strip of light at the very top, still haunts me. The ETA Hoffman Garden, an optical illusion of tilts, left me vaguely nauseous. Most disturbing of all was one of the "voids" in the actual museum with an installation of 10,000 metallic faces that you are invited to step on. The iron clank echoing off the concrete walls was sickening; the clownish faces of the disks were enough to induce nightmares.

Yet, despite the darkness, the museum possessed a remarkable sense of hopefulness and humor. Many of the exhibits are devoted to the successes of indivduals or the community as a whole. A kippa portraying the cast of Friends, tucked into a display on contemporary Jewish life, makes passersby laugh. This sense of tempered hope is evident not just in the Jewish Museum. The city and its remaining (and returning!) Jewish community are in a fascinating struggle to preserve the memory of the years before and during Nazism and to move forward in the post-Cold War era.

Two key examples of this drive to remember and not let others forget are the Holocuast Memorial not far from the Brandenburg Gate and the Neue Synagoge in the area called the Scheunenviertel, not far from the famous Museum Island. The Holocaust Memorial, sort of in the same vain as the Jewish Museum, is a forest of concrete pillars of different heights, all a bit askew and on an undulating surface. It is a massive thing, situated in very prime real estate right in the heart of Berlin. The Neue Synagoge, damaged during Kristallnacht in 1938 and all but destroyed by Allied bombing in 1945, has been rebuilt and the space turned into an intimate museum of Jewish life in Berlin (as opposed to the Jewish Museum, which embraces the whole Jewish experience). You can see the newly restored dome, glittering in the sun, from many parts of town. Both the monument and synagoge are unavoidable, and that's the point.

More low key, but very important to the current Jewish population in Berlin, the Jewish geography of Prenzlaur Berg is important for understanding Berlin's Jewish past and present (the neighborhood seems to be influential all around!). Very close to where I am staying are several important sites. Just up the road is Berlin's oldest Jewish cemetery, now open and with an exhibit at the attached Lapidarium. It was one of the first things I explored after shifting from the Ostel in Friedrichshain to the apartment in Prenzlaur Berg. A block or so away from pretty Kollwitzplatz is the Synagoge Rykstrasse, the largest operating synagoge in Berlin (it was also the only one operating in East Berlin before 1989).

Libeskind got it right, I think, using architecture to try and express the memory of the Jewish experience in Germany. Memory can be beyond words...

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Comments

[Dad]

HI Jame, I might skip this place, not Disneyesque. Love, Dad