I visit your memory in Museums

Case In Point- The Jewish Museum Berlin

Commemorative architecture such as museums, memorials and monuments are known to use collective memory associated with tragedy and sacrifice as a means to mourn or glorify the past by evoking a sense of cultural ownership and belonging. This imbues the space with the soft power of being able to shape narratives around history. For instance, memorial architecture such as the Vietnam War Memorial by Maya Lin hosts a space activating ritual. The surfing of fifty-eight thousand names of martyrs (etched into the negative space of the ground) by the visitors is the ritual that enables space activation. It speaks about the loss of individual life rather than musemifying the sacrifice made. The space can therefore be regarded as a counter monument- because it resists overarching narratives of statesmanship and instead aims to humanise the history and make it relevant to those that experience the space in the present. In Berlin, the renewal of the Jewish Museum by Daniel Libeskind establishes a similar stance by making visible the history of the Holocaust without fossilising the Jews. This essay aims to explore and investigate the gestures through which this is done and how the Jewish Museum Berlin departs from the commemorative museum typology.

Museums are known to aim to make histories visible and assimilate visitors under an overarching collective identity. In 1933, when it first opened its doors in the same week as Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor, the Jewish Museum in Berlin aimed to do the same as it stood in direct opposition to the Nazi rise to power. The building was formerly a synagogue and Jewish community centre. It reminded Berlin’s Jewish community to resist the antisemitic sentiment and soldier on. For years it presented exhibitions of both the Jewish and the Non-Jewish artists until the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 criminalised Non- Jewish Germans from visiting and exhibiting at the museum. Therefore, one may conclude that from its very inception, there have been political codes embedded in the space and its function that became increasingly relevant with the passage of time.

Today, the JMB deliberately challenges the archetype and function of museums. The zinc facade, for example, is perforated by slit-like fenestrations and has a considerable size of 11,450 square meters from which 7,450 square meters is exhibition space. Yet, it deliberately departs from common traits of monuments such as symmetry, hierarchy and adherence to the golden ratio. In fact, it also entirely denies the ritualistic entry sequence that is usually celebrated in museum typology. Instead, here the visitor enters through an underground passage from the adjacent old baroque Berlin Museum and is eventually elevated up to “The Great Void” and “Path of German Jews”-a pass-through space that runs on three axes of the building; the Axis of Continuity, Emigration and the Holocaust. While the Axis of Continuity leads the visitors to the permanent exhibition, the Axis of Emigration leads them outside to the “Garden of Exile” where visitors are allowed a glimpse of daylight through a labyrinth of stone stelae and perforations created by the canopy of trees- a metaphor for hope for those who were able to escape persecution during the Holocaust. The Axis of the Holocaust on the other hand is a terminate-at space that is lined with display cases containing personal belongings of those who were left behind. This space offers a directional view to the Holocaust Tower which is a dark, brutalist structure illuminated by a single slit letting in a sliver of light- accentuating the contrasting darkness.

The Void is the most prominent architectural feature of the space since the emptiness and inaccessibility of it is a trope for the absence of the Jewish population in Berlin today. Libeskind admits that it originates from the geometry of two lines, "one straight, but broken into fragments, the other torturous but continuing into infinity."The fragmented line is manifested through a series of voids that one periodically encounters when walking along the exhibition spaces. Unheated and unventilated, these are uncomfortable spaces that the onlooker is made aware of but denied interaction with. While they cannot be sequentially seen together by virtue of the zigzagged arrangement of space, it is possible to connect the dots and see this space as a whole. The void not only talks about the absence of something but also symbolises the relationship to its Jewish history which was historically- to eradicate it.

Functionally, museums concentrate their efforts on prized objects and artefacts. Identifying their role as temples of citizenship and repositories of cultural capital, attention is paid to the ritual performance of traversing through a museum and the curatorial power of the space. The exhibition openings, memorial services, symposia and guided tours can be seen as a ritual around the relic and the visitor the venerator. The JMB, however, focuses less on the objects it beholds and more on its role as a facilitator of reviving memory through ritual. The challenge it faces here is that like any memorial or monument, representation of victims risks their extreme othering by reducing their history and presence to a great tragedy. In the case of the JMB, this would have been counterproductive since it aims to keep the conversation about Jewish presence on-going. Therefore, attention is paid to the curation of the ritual practice in the exhibit space.

While the JMB does not have any fixed guided tours of the permanent exhibit, its space offers a range of interactive activities and thematic tours in dozens of languages. One may annotate and sketch on cardboard pomegranates and hang them from trees in the Garden of Exile. They may also write and print out their names in Hebrew, traverse through tunnels with Levi Strauss, the jeans-maker, and push buttons to help Glickl of Hameln pack her suitcase. They can also watch a film on theological concepts such as pilgrimage or paradise. In an attempt to reach out to people of all backgrounds- especially those of Arabic or Islamic descent, the museum employs Muslim; Turkish and Arab guides. Usually, Muslim tourists have reservations about visiting a Jewish museum due to distrust of Zionism in the wake of Israeli atrocities on the West Bank but the conversation about the Jewish past, is known to make them more open to the experience. In the end, a small section is dedicated to Jewish reactions to the Holocaust and the exhibit concludes, leaving the visitors with a question to take home- an interactive screen reading: 'should all people born today in Germany receive citizenship automatically?’ Therefore, through media, dialogue and interactive and playful exhibits, the museum attempts to diffuse the dingy shadow of the Holocaust by making Jewish people and the conversation about Judaism more relatable and relevant in contemporary times.

In all, since its opening in 2001, over 7.5 million people have visited the museum out of which 87 percent of visitors were tourists and only 9 percent were Jewish. Schools and academic conferences are known to organise tours to this site and it is listed as one of the

'Must Visit’ sites of Berlin. While most visitors enter the space with the expectation of learning about the Holocaust, they walk out having undergone something more experiential. Feelings of helplessness, entrapment and isolation are evoked as a result of the architecture and curation of the space and yet by these spatial gestures, the building orients the conversation towards simultaneity of the past, present and future. It not only seeks to capture the plight of the Jews of Berlin but also situates them in the present and didactically cautions us against repeating mistakes of those before us. While one may question what modern monumentality is, perhaps the commemorative, memorial and redemptive gestures in architecture are not mutually exclusive. This would explain why the JMB has been a tremendous success in terms of redefining the functions of a museum, rejecting catering to only ocularcentrism or only narrative building, instead focusing more on the experience of the user in the space itself and how spatial gestures can catalyse conversation in it.

Bibliography

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