The Jewish Museum Berlin has opened amid the most spectacular celebration imaginable in this national capital. As one German put it; “the Germans are absolutely crazy about this museum.” When asked why, this scholar (an expert on anti-Semitism} responded that because of the enormous effort and capital expended, the Germans feel that this signals the end of the Nazi past, finally putting the Germans on the “right” side after fully learning the necessary lessons from the past. He maintained that the museum symbolizes the total acceptance of Jews in Germany and a final act of absolution for the Germans.

Jews understand that only God can dispense absolution and this museum is a totally secular phenomenon. And as a phenomenon, the Jewish Museum Berlin is complex, wonderful and puzzling.

First and foremost, it must be understood as an educational museum created for non-Jews designed to widen non-Jewish German understanding (now limited to the Holocaust) of German Jewish life throughout the more than thousand years they have lived in Germany. As the largest Jewish museum in Europe it is supported by both the state and federal German Government. W. Michael Blumenthal, the director of the museum and the man who perhaps more that any other brought the museum to fruition, was born near Berlin in 1926 and fled with his family in 1938, ultimately to the United States. As an economist and businessman he has an extensive academic and corporate experience in American, international business and foreign affairs. He is neither a museum professional nor a recognized Jewish scholar.

The museum must be seen as two different and intertwined experiences. One experience, easily the strongest, is the architecture of Daniel Libeskind. It acts as an aesthetic expression of German-Jewish relations; while the other, the permanent exhibition, is a chronological history of the Jews in Germany.

First one enters the stately cream colored Baroque palace of the former Berlin Municipal Museum. It only contains the museum shop and other facilities. To the right the descent begins down a steep ramp into an underground passage that will lead to the striking Daniel Libeskind building. From the outside you have already seen that this is a masterpiece of 21st century architecture. The three-story structure is a dramatic zigzag sheathed in titanium zinc panels that are cut and slashed at acute angles to provide windows large, small and tiny, always on some type of diagonal. The predominance of complex angles, broken surfaces and irregular fenestration emphasizes the shifts, discontinuities and disasters of Jewish life in Germany.

The stark underground tunnel ends at an elaborate intersection of corridors that symbolizes the fate of German Jews in the 20th century. One corridor is the “Axis of Exile.” It ascends straight to an outside door past a series of windows and wall texts that delineates the travels of the expelled German Jewish communities. Outside is the Garden of Exile comprised of a grid of forty-eight square pillars towering twenty feet high with willows planted atop their earth filling. The “Garden” is set on a surface that is slanted in two directions simultaneously, causing a constant sense of imbalance as one tries to orient between the sky, the trees and sliced views of the surrounding architecture. It is a perfect tenuous expression of the imbalance of exile.

Upon returning from this unsettling experience the “Axis of Holocaust” is encountered. Again a series of dark windows line the corridor. They contain small intimate displays of highly personal objects from Jews who survived or did not survive the Holocaust. A grammar school autograph book, drawings and love letters of two young Jews deported or letters from a mother who was trapped in Berlin are among the incredibly moving documents and objects assembled. They all lead to the “Holocaust Tower.” It is a bare, narrow unheated chamber that rises the full height of the building, silent and unlit except for indirect light from one slit high up, echoing dimly the end of a thousand years of Jewish life in Germany.

Now one makes the ascent up to the long and steep “Axis of Continuity” that is the beginning of the historical museum three levels above. The next level up interrupts the ascent with one of the series of vertical “Voids” that slash through the entire structure, top to bottom, in a straight line. Encountered through interior windows again and again, they give visual expression to the loss of Jewish life in Germany. Walking into this void the floor is covered with thousands of raw steel circles. Iconic open-mouthed faces are cut through each inch thick disk. “Shaleket” (Fallen Leaves) [1999] is by Menashe Kadishman and expresses in physical form the millions slain. After pausing, reflecting and perhaps crying, the wrenching sorrow and terror of the 20th century has been experienced through minimal architecture and exposition. The linear history awaits the visitor above.

The permanent exhibition contains approximately fourteen discreet chronological sections. The earlier sections on the Middle Ages, Worms, Mainz and Speyer and the persecutions are excellent. There is a disproportionately large section on Gluckel van Hamein but little on Rashi and the generations of talmudic interpreters known as the Tostafos. There is extensive material on Moses Mendelssohn but little on rabbinic or communal reaction. Nevertheless, the section on Rural and Court Jews (A Golden Cage) is creative and engaging. Typical of the innovative approach taken in the exhibition design is an interactive computer display mapping the varieties of choices available to Jews in the 18th century. The visitor, by making individual decisions concerning where to live, who to marry or what job to pursue, can experience a Jewish life lived. The dangerous role of Court Jew is brilliantly depicted through the life of Joseph Suss Oppenheimer (1698-1738) who modernized the financial system of the local noble but when his protector died, was seized by the competing nobility, tried and hung. He had to climb 52 rungs to his gallows and at each step cried out; “God is the Lord.”

Unfortunately the following section on religious life, tradition and change, loses focus and becomes confusing. The problems in exhibition focus continue to mount as the enormous changes that effected the German Jewish community in the Napoleonic emancipation, reaction to it, the rise of the Reform movement and the Orthodox reactions are never clearly delineated.

Moving into the late 19th and early 20th century the extensive treatment of Jews in commerce, entertainment, theater and modern art contrasts sharply with the amazing historical omission of Karl Marx. The superficial treatment of Sigmund Freud, Herzl, Jewish socialists and Zionists and the role of the immigration of Eastern European Jews at the beginning of the century is puzzling. The strength and vibrancy of the pre-war German Orthodox communities is unfortunately totally ignored.

While the permanent exhibition continues through the Nazi era, post-war reconstruction of the Jewish community and the overwhelming influx of Jews from the former Soviet Republics in the 90’s, it never regains the wonderful kind of focus, originality and emotional intensity of our original entrance at the “Axis.”

The Jewish Museum Berlin attempts many things. It succeeds as brilliant architecture and environment to evoke a tragic loss of Germany Jewry. It does inform a non-Jewish audience of some large sections of the history and social context of the German Jews. The museum is deeply conflicted about the pivotal role that Judaism and tradition plays both in past history and contemporary communities. And as such, is probably representative of the serious challenges facing the 100,000 Jews in Germany today.

Richard McBee
September 16, 2001

Published in The Jewish Press

Exterior Jewish Museum Berlin Architect Daniel Libeskind, 2001

Garden of Exile Jewish Museum Berlin, Architect Daniel Libeskind, 2001

Inside the Void, “Shalekhet” by Menashe Kadishman (1999)


Mizrach, 18th century Jewish Museum Berlin

Jude - Roll of fabric recovered from Nazi factory Jewish Museum Berlin