The Berlin Jewish Museum

Visiting the Jewish Museum in Berlin was of the highlights of our trip. The building itself is striking. The exterior is metal-plated, silver, shiny and cold. To me it looked imposing, even though it’s not particularly tall. The facades are disrupted by gashes - windows that look like scars. Its angular shape and sharp edges give it an almost violent appearance, though the surrounding gardens ensure the site is not entirely devoid of life.

Upon entering the exhibition space, we were for a few minutes rather disoriented and confused. There were several possible directions we could walk in - down the axis of exile, the axis of the holocaust, or through to the gallery of continuity. The two axes ended abruptly. The first, which told the stories of Jewish-German families who migrated to different countries on the walls, led out into a garden filled with stone blocks rising at an angle from the ground in a manner I found at once appealing and strange. The axis of the holocaust had a minimalist display of personal objects and letters that had belonged to internees of the concentration camps. It led into a very tall, hollow tower which admitted a little sunlight through a slit near the roof. As we stood silently against the iron walls inside it, we could hear the voices of people outside.

The gallery of continuity is devoted to the history of German Jews from the middle ages to now. Its collections are extensive and even a ‘quick’ visit requires several hours. The nineteenth and twentieth century sections were most interesting to me - and depict Jewish responses to the European enlightenment, their presence in popular culture and their contributions to philosophy and the arts. Actually moving through the exhibition was an interesting experience too. The exhibition is ordered in a way that requires you to begin on the top floor and work your way down. And because the building itself is irregularly shaped, walking along level is a distinctly non-linear exercise. Its impossible to keep sight of the beginning and the end, and a sense of both timelessness and vulnerability is evoked by the actual space.

The holocaust section of the museum contained some graphic images, but even more powerful was the gallery’s bottom floor. It has been left entirely empty. In the place of what might have been, there is an awful, angular void.

Pics: exterior of the Jewish museum, the view out one of the windows, the stairway to the gallery of continuity, the bottom floor [ML]