BERLIN — When Daniel Libeskind’s monumental Jewish museum was unveiled here in 1999, word of its stunning architecture got out so quickly that some 350,000 people toured it before one artifact was even mounted on its walls. The building alone was the draw.
With its metallic exterior and sharp, jutting angles, the structure is most often compared to a bolt of lightening or a fragmented Star of David. Designed by the same Polish-born architect responsible for the not-yet-built Jewish Museum San Francisco, it was praised as such a unique memorial to the Holocaust itself, that some wondered whether it wouldn’t be most effective left empty. A compelling argument to be sure, but the proponents of that idea lost.
The museum, which officially opened last month, has nearly 4,000 artifacts in its collection. Jews of German origin from throughout the world have donated them, showing the integral contributions to German culture the Jews have made throughout 2,000 years.
Because this is Germany — the country that conceived and implemented the Final Solution — some visitors might expect a Holocaust museum on a par with Yad Vashem in Jerusalem or the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
They will be disappointed. The Third Reich lasted 12 years, 12 out of 2,000, of German Jewish history. And organizers felt there are other more appropriate venues in the country to educate the public about the evils of National Socialism.
That it is a Jewish museum, and not a Holocaust museum, is deliberate.
“For centuries, Jews were Germans with very deep roots and they made an indispensable contribution to the intellectual life of the country and to Germany’s development into a modern nation,” said W. Michael Blumenthal, the museum’s director.
Blumenthal, who was born outside of Berlin and fled with his family to Shanghai in the late 1930s, later served in the State Department as an adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. In his two-year term as museum director that turned into four, he set out to create a museum that would educate a new generation of Germans about the integral role Jews played in shaping German culture. He did not want to portray them only as victims.
“Let us hope that this institution will help to implant permanently in the national consciousness the memory of what happened — not to arouse or perpetuate feelings of shame or guilt for future generations, but to ensure that they remain forever conscious of their national responsibility to shape a more just society, neither forgetting the past nor yielding to the temptation to distort it,” he said at the museum’s opening last month.
The official opening took place two days before the horrific events of Sept. 11, and the German media outlets were saturated with articles. Television showed the opening night black-tie affair for 850, with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and President Johannes Rau in attendance, along with dignitaries like Henry Kissinger and American Jewish heavyweights Ronald Lauder and Mort Zuckerman.
A stamp was issued. Daniel Barenboim led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. And this journalist — along with others from the United States and Israel, plus museum types and Jewish organization officials — were brought by the German government to partake in the festivities.
Besides the building’s unusual shape — with zig-zagging windows, angles jutting out in all directions and mysterious voids throughout to symbolize the void created by the extermination of European Jewry — there is also an “Axis of Exile” and a “Garden of Exile.” The axis is an elongated hallway, with the names of cities around the world where German Jews fled, or at least those who had the foresight to leave.
The garden outside consists of 49 cement columns, 48 of them filled with earth from Berlin, symbolizing 1948 and the founding of the state of Israel. The 49th is filled with earth from Jerusalem. Walking among the columns, on a rocky ground, produces a kind of dizziness which Libeskind intended to be the dislocation caused by exile.
Dislocation is the pervading emotion one experiences in the building; with all its recesses, angles and hallways that seem to go nowhere, one indeed gets the sense of disorientation and loss.
But the question remained: Would the museum’s display be able to impress anywhere near as much as the spectacular building it’s housed in?
Unfortunately, not quite.
As for its intent to show Jews as more than victims, the museum triumphs. Anyone visiting with only a rudimentary knowledge of Judaism will certainly learn something. But there are still a few kinks to be worked out.
On the day before the official opening, visiting journalists were told that some directional signs were not yet in place. This led several to wander aimlessly. In one place, a section devoted to Jewish history was side by side with glass cases showing ritual items for various lifecycle events: circumcision, a Jewish wedding, Shabbat. This led many viewers to wonder whether this section was put here for a lack of space elsewhere.
Explanations — which appear throughout the museum in German and English — were not always available. For instance, a painting depicting the pre-Yom Kippur custom of kapparot — in which a rooster is swung around three times symbolically taking on the sins of those present — is merely called “swinging a rooster,” with no explanation of the custom. While kapparot is not a widespread practice, such an image could give someone who knows little about Judaism the impression that Jews are practitioners of voodoo.
An extraordinary amount of space is devoted to the life of philosopher and German Jewish leader Moses Mendelssohn. While Mendelssohn was certainly a key figure of the German Enlightenment, one can’t help but wonder whether such a great emphasis on him is deserved — his eyeglasses are on display — since it comes at the expense of so many other prominent German Jews.
That German Jews differed from their Eastern European counterparts is well-known; they shunned Yiddish and assimilated to such a high degree that many converted. A certain Rahel Varnhagen decided to convert and was baptized in 1814. “How ghastly it is, always having to justify oneself,” she wrote. “That’s what makes it so horrible to be a Jewish woman!”
Varnhagen is just one of many German Jews whose stories are told in brief. The effect of this display works well, giving an entirely different view of peoples’ lives than the artifacts they once owned.
One case has a pair of Levi’s jeans, telling the story of Loeb Strauss, otherwise known as Levi, who came from Franconia in Bavaria.
Then, there is a huge decorated Christmas tree, with a photograph of a German Jewish family gathered around to celebrate Christmas. That some German Jews celebrated Christmas is not in question, but one can’t help but wonder whether such a tree belongs in a museum designed to teach about Judaism.
Nevertheless, there is much to praise in the museum’s collection. Perhaps most importantly, Jews are shown not as a relic from an extinct civilization but as a people who assimilated while still retaining their traditions, and whose distinct culture remains very much alive — a far cry from the “Museum for an Extinct Race” conceived but never carried out by Hitler.
One display case reminds of this with various yarmulkes from around the world, some with Disney characters and another touting Gore-Lieberman.
As most Germans who will come to the museum do not know Jews themselves, a section is devoted to the 90,000 Jews who live in Germany today. A learning center offers much in the way of interactive exhibits, for adults and children alike.
Whatever its faults, the museum is impressive — especially when one takes into account that the last Jewish museum in Berlin was closed down by the Nazis in 1938. That such a museum now exists on a piece of prime real estate in the capital of the reunified Germany testifies that this is not the Berlin of our grandparents’ or parents’ generation.
But then again, that is evident by any number of reminders around the vast city, like the billboard that looms over the place where Checkpoint Charlie — the gateway between the Communist East and the free West — used to be. On it, a larger than life Sarah Jessica Parker strikes a pose in her little black dress, reminding Berliners to watch “Sex and the City.”