The Jewish Museum Berlin (Jüdisches Museum Berlin) is the principal German national museum of Jewish history, culture and contemporary Jewish life. It is located on Lindenstrasse in the Kreuzberg district of central Berlin and consists of three connected buildings: the original Baroque Kollegienhaus (built 1735 to 1745, the eighteenth-century Prussian high court), the dramatic zinc-clad Libeskind Building (designed by Daniel Libeskind, opened 1999, the museum’s main exhibition space), and the Academy across the street (added in 2012, housing the museum’s library, archives and education programmes). The museum opened to the public on 9 September 2001 and has received over 12 million visitors since.
The Libeskind Building
The Libeskind Building is one of the most discussed pieces of museum architecture of the late twentieth century. The building’s exterior is a zinc-clad zigzagging structure with no apparent main entrance (the visitor enters from the original Kollegienhaus through an underground passage), with windows cut as long irregular slits across the facades. The interior is organised around three “axes” that cross underground: the Axis of Continuity (which leads to the main exhibition), the Axis of Emigration (which leads to the outdoor Garden of Exile), and the Axis of the Holocaust (which terminates in the Holocaust Tower, a 24-metre concrete chamber lit only by a single slit at the top).
The building was completed in 1999, two years before the museum’s permanent exhibition was installed; for two years between completion and opening, the empty building was open for visitors as an architectural work in its own right and attracted around 350,000 visits. The architectural conception was Libeskind’s response to a commission that asked specifically for a building that would communicate the absence at the heart of post-Holocaust Berlin: the absence of the German-Jewish life and culture that had been central to the city before 1933 and that had been destroyed in twelve years.
The Holocaust Tower is the building’s most-discussed single space. The visitor enters through a heavy steel door that closes behind them; the chamber is unheated, almost dark (the only light is a thin slit twenty-four metres above), and the visitor stands inside it briefly before leaving by the same door. The intended effect, on Libeskind’s account, is a brief and bounded experience of architectural disorientation that no exhibition panel could communicate. The Garden of Exile, outside the main building, is a sloped courtyard of 49 concrete pillars planted with willow oak; the slope and the irregular pillar spacing produce an unsteady walk that Libeskind designed to communicate the exile experience.
The permanent exhibition and the collection
The permanent exhibition, opened in 2001 and substantially redesigned and reopened in 2020, occupies the upper floors of the Libeskind Building and traces the history of Jewish life in the German-speaking lands from the medieval period to the present. The exhibition is structured chronologically and includes substantial sections on the medieval communities, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Berlin Haskalah, the nineteenth-century emancipation, the imperial-era flourishing of German Jewish culture, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi period and the Holocaust, the post-war Jewish presence in East and West Germany, and contemporary Jewish life in reunified Germany.
The collection includes around 24,000 objects, of which around 1,000 are on display at any time. The objects span the medieval to the contemporary and include religious artefacts, documents, photographs, family papers, art works and personal effects donated to the museum by Jewish families with German connections. The Holocaust section of the exhibition is contained within the wider chronological narrative and is presented as part of German Jewish history rather than as a separate subject; the museum’s curatorial decision was that the German-Jewish twelve hundred years should not be reducible to the twelve years that ended them.
The educational and academic work
The museum’s W. M. Blumenthal Academy, opened across Lindenstrasse from the main building in 2012 in a converted flower market designed by Libeskind, houses the museum’s library (around 100,000 volumes), the archive (substantial Jewish family papers and institutional records), the Jewish Museum Berlin Foundation administration, and the museum’s extensive education programme. The Academy’s courtyard contains the “Garden of the Diaspora”, a series of inclined planted boxes that are the building’s external visual signature.
The museum’s education programme works extensively with German schools, with around 60,000 school students visiting per year on structured visits. The museum has been a substantial voice in German public discussion of Jewish life in contemporary Germany, of the relationship between the Holocaust legacy and the present-day Jewish communities (which are now substantially Russian and Ukrainian Jewish in origin, the result of post-Soviet migration), and of contemporary German antisemitism.
The institutional history
The Jewish Museum Berlin had a long and complicated pre-history before its 2001 opening. A Jewish Museum had operated in Berlin from 1933 to 1938 in the Oranienburger Strasse synagogue complex; the museum’s collection was confiscated by the Gestapo in November 1938 and most of it was lost. A Jewish Department was established in the post-war Berlin Museum (the city historical museum) in 1971 as part of the city’s wider engagement with the lost German-Jewish history. The decision to establish a separate Jewish Museum was taken in 1989, the architectural competition was held in 1989, Libeskind’s design was selected the same year, and the long process of construction and exhibition development followed through the 1990s.
The institutional separation of the Jewish Museum from the Berlin Museum, its position as a German federal foundation since 2001 (the Jewish Museum Berlin Foundation), and its substantial public funding constitute the German federal recognition of Jewish history as a constitutive part of German history rather than as a peripheral subject. The museum is, in this respect, the institutional expression of the wider German Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) that has shaped German public life since the 1960s.
See also
- The Weimar Republic
- The Jews of Berlin
- Sigmund Freud Albert Einstein and Jewish Intellectuals in Exile
- The Jews of Vienna
- Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe Berlin
- Topography of Terror Berlin
Sources
- Daniel Libeskind, Jewish Museum Berlin, G+B Arts International, 1999
- James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture, Yale University Press, 2000 (chapters on the Libeskind building)
- W. Michael Blumenthal, The Invisible Wall: Germans and Jews, Counterpoint, 1998 (Blumenthal was the museum’s founding director)
- Cilly Kugelmann, “The Jewish Museum Berlin”, in The Jewish Quarterly Review, vol 95 no 1, 2005
- Karen E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place, University of Minnesota Press, 2005
- Bernhard Schneider, Daniel Libeskind: Jewish Museum Berlin: Between the Lines, Prestel, 1999
- Jewish Museum Berlin, https://www.jmberlin.de