The Trace of the Unborn - Jewish Museum Berlin

the trace of the unborn J端disches Museum Berlin

The Trace of the Unborn - Jüdisches Museum Berlin

1 Oedipus Rex “The spirit with which I designed this museum is part of me as a person.”[1] - Daniel Libeskind Sometimes we are doing things independently from our consciousness. Sometimes we react to outside factors in a purely instinctive manner just because the roots of who we are grow so deep within us than there is no outsider, no external decision. Sometimes there is just the self. Born in Łódzźin the spring of 1946, Daniel Libeskind won the competition for The Jewish Museum, Berlin in 1989.

“Neutral architecture is perhaps appropriate for nonevents”[2] (Daniel Libeskind, The Space of Encounter: 27-8). But his project for the Jewish Museum was eventful, so was the history of the Jewish culture in Berlin and him being part of it made Libeskind feel one with the pathos of production. Having lost most of his family in the Holocaust, this competition unlocked a visceral way of analysing the brief, a way more subjective approach than other competitors. He just expressed what he had already been feeling for more than half of his life. Perhaps we are talking about the cathartic power as a decisive aspect in winning the competition.

2 Symbiosis

Fig.2 Analytical diagrams of The Jewish Museum Berlin

“This is the most difficult project for a museum that I can imagine. It is difficult and it must remain that way because history has left us with this difficulty. If it ever became easy it would lose its meaning.”[3] - director of Yeshiva University Museum Libeskind’s proposal for the Jewish Museum portrays in an uncompromising way the Jewish dimension of Berlin’s history throughout the generations. The past of the Jews and the history of Berlin are strongly interconnected to the extent that any intent of separation is impossible. They are linked through the unhealable wound of faith. As Libeskind would say, they are like “the molecules in a glass of water”[4] , “two souls withing a single body”[5] (Amos Elon).

In the Jewish Museum’s context, we can certainly

talk about architecture as a “representation of historical meaning”[6] (Rolf Bothe). Wolfgang Nagel is describing Berlin’s history as having experienced many extremes along its changing course. There was a period of openness and toleration when the city flourished leading to the settlement of the Jewish citizens in Berlin. Being descendants of one of the oldest cultures, of the region that became the cradle of world’s religions, they were pioneering, active co-creators of the German history.

Fig.3 U.S. newspaper announces the wearing of the Star of David in Berlin, Germany

Fig.4 1941 Nazi Germany sends Berlin Jews to Poland

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Also, he touches upon the period of darkness and shamefulness of Berlin, the Nazi decades, that Vera Bendt describes as being nothing else but a loss of substance, the loss of any trace of morality.

3 Looking Forward “I have always believed that this Museum should represent the future, not only the past.”[7] - Daniel Libeskind The two lines of thinking underlying the project represent a resourceful start point both geometrically and conceptually. The straight line, broken into fragments (the organisation line) cuts all the way through the tortuously long line ( the relationship line).

Three clearly stated basic ideas formed the foundation for the Jewish Museum. Firstly, the indispensability of integrating both physically and spiritually the meaning of Holocaust into the consciousness of Berliners represents a very important factor in understanding and appreciating the design of the Museum.

Secondly, the acknowledgement and incorporation of the Jewish void should be seen as a healing process that must be undertaken in order for not only Germany, but Europe to move on. Thirdly, the symbiosis established between the Germans and the Jews is regarded as an important cultural, economical and intellectual aspect.

Also, there is the idea of exhibiting the past in the light of the future and the future in the light of the past which would enable the visitor to engage on an emotional, mental and visceral level with the Jewish dimension of Berlin history. This bond between the visitor and the building is working only on a paradoxical background between exhilaration and tragedy, closed and open, fatality and hope. Libeskind intends to offer a museum that represents an attempt to give a voice to a common fate – not only the Einsteins or the Schoenbergs, but the nameless Jewish Berliner who is now inextricably bound with the identity of the city, caught between the vocal and the silent, the chosen and the ignored, the ordered and the disordered.

Fig.5 Perspective of “The Alphabet” Model showing the volumetry of The Jewish Museum Berlin

Fig.6 Perspective of “The Alphabet” Model showing the volumetry of The Jewish Museum Berlin Fig.7 Perspective of “The Alphabet” Model showing the volumetry of The Jewish Museum Berlin

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and their places of residence trace a net of connecting lines and collude in forming a Star of David which casts its crooked shadow across the city of Berlin.

The second aspect is referring to music and his recognition towards Schoenberg. The cutoff of Act 2 of “Moses and Aaron”, addresses the absence of the word and how one can clearly understand it as a text. Moses does not sing anymore. He just speaks, “Oh word, thou word”, a call for the dead. What Libeskind intended to accomplish through his design was an architectural reply to the “Moses and Aaron” unfulfilling end, a third act of the opera that would be silently sung by the final space of the Void, in its stone walls, heard through the echoing footsteps of the visitors.

Fig.8 Perspective of “The Alphabet” Model showing the volumetry of The Jewish Museum Berlin

4 “Oh word, thou word” “It may seem unusual to base a building on an unwritten piece of music. […] It may seem abstract and inscrutable – and maybe it is.”[8] - Daniel Libeskind Daniel Libeskind identifies four aspects that had driven his design. Even though the competition was held before the Wall fell, he was fascinated by the bound between Jews and Germans despite the political circumstances. Workers, actors, writers, artists and scientists were the main people who formed this connection in spite of any physical separation. He then plotted an irrational matrix over the map of Berlin, the purpose of which was to yield reference to the symbolism of a compressed and distorted star. However, he was not content with the map and its location in the city, but inscribed its site instead into an invisible topography.

Names of individuals such as Rachel Varnhagen, Paul Celan, Mies van der Rohe, Friedrich Schleiermacher

The ever present dimension of deported or missing Berliners constitutes another aspect that guided the design process. The Gedenkbuch, “two huge volumes bound in gold-embossed black leather” had enclosed many Libeskinds among the 160 000 Jews from Berlin. It also recorded dates of birth, home cities, presumed dates of death and the ghettos and concentration camps in which the victims perished.

The fourth aspect consists in the inspiration Libeskind took from “Einbahnstrasse” or “One-Way Street” by Walter Benjamin, a “marvelously enigmatic and apocalyptic” (Breaking Ground – Daniel Libeskind p.

91) book. The continuous sequence of sixty sections along the zigzag is one of the elements of the design that was animated by the urban apocalypse of Walter’s sixty sections of aphorisms and ruminations.

Having to design a new museum right near a big Baroque building had given Libeskind the opportunity to use this on a metaphorical level by entering the Jewish Museum from inside the old building.

The project unfolds three main routes, each having a singular destination: the first axis ends with a long staircase that leads to the permanent exhibition rooms; there is a passage that connects the Museum to the Garden of Exile and finally, the third route leads from the Museum to the Holocaust Tower. The Tower signifies an abrupt dead end. Measuring 27 meters in height, it is built of raw concrete in an acutely angled space. It is a space that has to be experienced as an end in the memory of the ones that will not return, signifying the Holocaust void. Therefore, the space is not heated in winter nor cooled in summer.

The E.T.A. Hoffmann Garden carries an important connotation within the 49 columns placed on an oddly tilted surface in a rigid grid. One would feel disoriented once entering the Garden of Exile due to the sloped floor.

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Fig.9 Collage consisting of the plan and models of The Jewish Museum Berlin

Libeskind tries to evoke emotions akin to the ones the exiled Jews from Berlin felt when they left their homes to having arrived without bearings, in a strange, new land – confusion, turbulence, turmoil. The deep disturbance meets its climax in the mirrored rotation of the Garden. Vegetation grows only at the top and it is completely hidden in the 7-meter high columns.

On a physical level, the architect touches upon the strong connection between Jews and Berliners once again by filling 48 of the pillars with earth of Berlin, signifying the Birth of the State of Israel in 1948. Moreover, one of the columns is filled with the earth of Jerusalem representing the city of Berlin.

The Stair of Continuity leads to the exhibition places of the Jewish Museum being a metaphor of continuation of Berlin’s history.

Another dramatic factor are the windows, radically penetrating through the walls. The configurations of the windows are created on the basis of a topographical record. Similarly, the writing on the walls reveals a matrix of lines and addresses connecting Jewish Berliners to their fellow citizens. The zinc clad body of the museum building, marked and perforated by a hieroglyphic series of incisions, lend silent voices to their memory.

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Fig.10 Section through The Jewish Museum Berlin

Fig.11 Plan of The Jewish Museum Berlin

The Void The Baroque Building The Garden of Exile

Fig.12 Section through The Jewish Museum Berlin

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5 Empty Saturation “The entire premise of the Jüdische Abteilung, I thought, was in that Void”[9] - Daniel Libeskind The concept of two lines of thinking was previously mentioned, the line of organisation and the line of relationship respectively. The straight, broken line cuts through the convoluted tracing of relationship. The intersections between these two give birth to what Libeskind calls The Void. Its impenetrability forms the central focus around which the exhibitions are organised. Different acoustically, materially and architecturally from the white walls of the exhibition spaces and illuminated by the skylights – it refers to that which can never be exhibited in this museum, no matter how many objects are brought to it and stories told in it. Along the straight corridor of Jewish Museum the architect engraved on the walls the names of all the deported and murdered, a silent invocation at once imploring and rebuffing the visitor.

One of the many connotations for these resulting spaces is its symbol of “broken backbone” of a society. Vera Bendt talks about The Void as being a reaction to all the societal problems in Germany during the National Socialist ideologies: emigration, expulsion and abduction culminating in murder of Jewish Berliners. Therefore, we are talking about the Void as a dreadful recognition of an unhealthy society.

From a social point of view, Libeskind goes further in giving meaning to The Void in terms of individuals and their experiences. The emptiness of these places is filled with feelings and questions. Therefore, the visitor should experience them as their absent presence. The embodiment of absence is crossed by sixty bridges that help people traverse one space to another.

Fig.13 Collage of models of The Jewish Museum Berlin

Fig.14 Sections through The Jewish Museum Berlin

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Fig.15 Internal view, Jewish Museum Berlin

Fig.16 View looking up in The Void, Jewish Museum Berlin

Fig.17 Internal view from The Holocaust Tower, Jewish Museum Berlin

Fig.19 Internal view, Jewish Museum Berlin

Fig.18 Picture showing windows from the inside

Fig.21 Internal view, Jewish Museum Berlin

Fig.20 Internal view showing the quality of light, Jewish Museum Berlin

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Fig.22 Picture showing a facade of The Jewish Museum Berlin

Fig.24 Picture showing the “Upside down” Garden

Fig.23 Picture showing part of a facade of The Jewish Museum Berlin

Fig.25 Picture showing The Garden of Exile and one of the facades in the background, Jewish Museum Berlin

Fig.27 View showing the materiality of the facades, Jewish Museum Berlin

Fig.26 View from The Garden of Exile, Jewish Museum Berlin

Fig.28 View towards the Garden of Exile, Jewish Museum Berlin

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6 Zig-Zag “If in architecture, you neutralise the issue, if you find yourself focusing on numbers and ‘good taste’, you no longer participate in the truth of it.”[10] - Daniel Libeskind The jagged line in the plan of the Jewish Museum has its many precedents that fascinated Libeskind from way before the competition for the Jüdische Abteilung. Paul Klee’s “Destruction and Hope” was drawn in the midst of the World War I. Its colliding and twisted lines suspended between two colossal stars were the starting point for the museum as a jagged crack. Although Klee keeps the snake and the punishing bolt in total antinomy, Libeskind collides both symbols into one so that the bolt and the snake are the same thing, zig-zagging across a deserted site.

Libeskind did something similar in the Jewish Museum by creating an antinomy, between a route that remains external to the building and a building that is neither fully accesible nor exposed to view. Yet this design approach did not come just from pure inspiration from other architectural projects in the past, but from something much deeper, the desire of lending silent voices to an endless list of Berlin Jews who were driven from the city.

Konstantin Melnikov’s Soviet Pavilion, exhibited at the Paris Exhibition of Decorative and Industrial Arts proposed one of the earliest buildings that allow visitors to pass through the pavilion yet without entering, as they ascended a stepped diagonal passage.

A previous work of Libeskind, the “Line of fire” (1988) constitutes another source of thoughts that drove the design process for the Jewish Museum. The jagged body of “the line of fire” is bisected by a straight cut, similar to the “between the lines” geometrical concept. The connection between the Museum and the “Line of fire” is much more profound than the phenomenon it describes. An early formulation of the Museum presented the building leaning dramatically, evoking force of such displacements that could alter the earth itself and bring the deeper layers to the surface.

Fig.29 “Destruction and Hope”, Paul Klee

Fig.30 Model of the Soviet Pavilion, Konstantin Melnikov

Fig.31 ”Line of fire”, Daniel Libeskind

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The mat glow of the galvanised sheet metal cladding will carry more than just a vague reminescence of the local roofing tradition. Its connotations point towards the sheen of a scaly building zig-zagging towards the Garden of Exile. The Museum appears as a metallic slough on a ravaged site, a mere skin with all its folds intact but deprived of the living body it once enclosed.

7 Tattoo “We are all mediators, translators.”[11] - Jacques Derrida Being a visitor myself of the Jewish Museum made me experience the profound feelings that one wouldsense once entering the building. The faults and the folds of Libeskind’s Museum relate to history like a tattoo to the skin, as a painful engraving of disembodied events on the memory of the living, multiplied by the number of visitors and reinterpreted as many times.

Therefore, this museum is not only a response to a particular program, but an emblem of belief and light.

The museum is open to many routes and perceptions, just like the pages of Talmud, where the margins are often as crucial as what is being explained.

Fig.32 Picture of The Jewish Museum Berlin

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References

Libeskind, D. (1991). Countersign. London: Acade-

my Editions Libeskind, D. (1992). Extension to The Berlin Museum with Jewish Museum Department. ( C. Emerson, Trans.). Berlin: Ernst & Sohn Libeskind, D. (1997). Radix - matrix. (P. Green, Trans.).

Munich: Prestel-Verlag (Original work published in 1991) Libeskind, D. (2001). The Space of Encounter. London: Thames & Hudson Libeskind, D. (2004). Breaking Ground. London: John Murray Dorling Kindersley Limited, (2011). The Philosophy Book. London Libeskind, D. (2016). Jewish Museum Berlin. Available at: http://libeskind.com/work/jewish-museum-berlin/ (Accessed: 21 March 2016) [1] [2]

Libeskind, D. (1997). Radix - matrix, p.34 Libeskind, D. (2001). The Space of Encounter, p. 28

[3]

Libeskind, D. (1992). Extension to The Berlin Museum with Jewish Museum Department, p.25 [4] Libeskind, D. (2004). Breaking Ground, p.81 [5] Libeskind, D. (2001). The Space of Encounter, p.25 [6] Libeskind, D. (2001). The Space of Encounter, p.24 [7] Libeskind, D. (2004). Breaking Ground, p.86 [8] Libeskind, D. (2004). Breaking Ground, p.93 [9] Libeskind, D. (2004). Breaking Ground, p.84 [10] Libeskind, D. (2004). Breaking Ground, p.82 [11] Dorling Kindersley Limited, (2011). The Philosophy Book, p.310 Fig.1: Libeskind, D. (1997). Radix - matrix, p.55 Fig.2: Libeskind, D. (1997). Radix - matrix, p.36 Fig.3: Dilemma X, (2015). Yesteryear: The Holocaust as reported in actual U.S. newspapers -The Jews of Europe. Available at: http://dilemma-x. net/2015/10/07/the-holocaust-as-reported-in-actual-newspapers/ (Accessed: 19 March 2016)

Fig.33 Underground model showing the three roads, Voids and ETA Hoffmann Garden (Garden of Exile)

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References

Fig.4: Dilemma X, (2015). Yesteryear: The Holocaust as reported in actual U.S. newspapers -The Jews of Europe. Available at: http://dilemma-x. net/2015/10/07/the-holocaust-as-reported-in-actual-newspapers/ (Accessed: 19 March 2016) Fig.5: Libeskind, D. (1997). Radix - matrix, p.37 Fig.6: Libeskind, D. (1991). Countersign, p.95 Fig.7: Libeskind, D. (1991). Countersign, p.99 Fig.8: Libeskind, D. (1991). Countersign, p.98 Fig.9: Libeskind, D. (1991). Countersign, p.102-103 Fig.10: Libeskind, D. (1991). Countersign, p.104 Fig.11: Libeskind, D. (1997). Radix - matrix, p.38 Fig.12: Libeskind, D. (1991). Countersign, p.105 Fig.13: Libeskind, D. (1991). Countersign, p.100101 Fig.14: Libeskind, D. (1991). Countersign, p.98-99 Fig.15: Personal photo Fig.16: Libeskind, D. (2016). Jewish Museum Berlin. Available at: http://libeskind.com/work/jewish-museum-berlin/ (Accessed: 21 March 2016) Fig.17: Libeskind, D. (2016). Jewish Museum Berlin. Available at: http://libeskind.com/work/jewish-museum-berlin/ (Accessed: 21 March 2016) Fig.18: Libeskind, D. (2016). Jewish Museum Berlin. Available at: http://libeskind.com/work/jewish-museum-berlin/ (Accessed: 21 March 2016) Fig.19: Libeskind, D. (2016). Jewish Museum Berlin.

Available at: http://libeskind.com/work/jewish-museum-berlin/ (Accessed: 21 March 2016) Fig.20: Personal photo Fig.21: Libeskind, D. (2016). Jewish Museum Berlin. Available at: http://libeskind.com/work/jewish-museum-berlin/ (Accessed: 21 March 2016) Fig.22: Libeskind, D. (2016). Jewish Museum Berlin. Available at: http://libeskind.com/work/jewish-museum-berlin/ (Accessed: 21 March 2016) Fig.23: Libeskind, D. (2016). Jewish Museum Berlin. Available at: http://libeskind.com/work/jewish-museum-berlin/ (Accessed: 21 March 2016) Fig.24: Libeskind, D. (2016). Jewish Museum Berlin. Available at: http://libeskind.com/work/jewish-museum-berlin/ (Accessed: 21 March 2016) Fig.25: Libeskind, D. (2016). Jewish Museum Berlin. Available at: http://libeskind.com/work/jewish-museum-berlin/ (Accessed: 21 March 2016) Fig.26: Libeskind, D. (2016). Jewish Museum Berlin. Available at: http://libeskind.com/work/jewish-museum-berlin/ (Accessed: 21 March 2016) Fig.27: Libeskind, D. (2016). Jewish Museum Berlin. Available at: http://libeskind.com/work/jewish-museum-berlin/ (Accessed: 21 March 2016) Fig.28: Libeskind, D. (2016). Jewish Museum Berlin. Available at: http://libeskind.com/work/jewish-museum-berlin/ (Accessed: 21 March 2016) Fig.29: Libeskind, D. (1992). Extension to The Berlin Museum with Jewish Museum Department, p.18

Fig.30: The Charnel-House. From Bauhaus to Beinhaus (2016), Melkinov 1925. Available at: http:// thecharnelhouse.org/2013/08/03/the-soviet-pavilion-at-the-1925-paris-international-exposition/melnikov-1925/ (Accessed: 21 March 2016) Fig.31: Libeskind, D. (2016). Line of Fire, Center of Contemporary Art. Available at: http://libeskind.com/ publishing/line-of-fire-3/ (Accessed: 22 March 2016) Fig.32: Lomholt, I. (2014), Jewish Museum Berlin.

Available at: http://www.e-architect.co.uk/berlin/jewish-museum-building (Accessed: 20 March 2016) Fig.33: Libeskind, D. (1997). Radix - matrix, p.42

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