Every new museum is a negotiation -- in the end, just one version of many possibilities. It is an artifact of its cultural and political contexts, as well as of the ideals, skills, and limitations of its creators. The Jewish Museum Berlin, whose permanent exhibition on “Two Millennia of German Jewish History” opened last month, is a fascinating case in point.
The very existence of the museum, in the heart of the old Third Reich and the capital of a reunified democratic Germany, is both provocative and potentially healing. It represents a milestone in Germany’s quest to become what it calls “a normal nation,” a country whose Vergangenheitsbewältigung -- or process of coming to terms with the past -- is complete. To W. Michael Blumenthal, the former U.S. treasury secretary who is the museum’s director, one of its express purposes is to normalize the idea of the Jew in Germany by presenting Jews as something more than victims of the Holocaust. They need to be remembered, he said at the museum’s opening, as “living members of society and cobuilders of the nation.”
In some ways, those twin desires for normalcy -- by both the one-time perpetrator nation and its one-time victim (Blumenthal’s prominent German-Jewish family fled Berlin for Shanghai in 1939, at nearly the last possible moment) -- are mutually reinforcing. At the Jewish Museum, they have helped shape an exhibition that gives more weight to Jewish accomplishments than German persecutions, and that ends optimistically with a look at renewed Jewish life in today’s Federal Republic of Germany. While the show does touch on anti-Semitism, centuries of discriminatory laws and taxes, and, finally, the Holocaust, it never tries to explain how dislike could have degenerated into mass murder. Maybe that remains an impossible task, but scholars such as Peter Hayes, of Northwestern University, argue convincingly that the role of the historian is to attempt it.
Other interesting questions, too, are posed only implicitly. What, for example, constitutes Jewish identity in a country where so many Jews assimilated and converted? That is precisely the sort of contested historical point -- particularly in light of the Nazis’ discredited “racial” criteria -- that the museum should tackle. In fact, it has become a touchy issue again, as Russian immigrants with tenuous Jewish ancestry seek special economic benefits by entering the country as Jews.
In keeping with current museum fashion, the Jewish Museum highlights personal stories -- from the successful career of the 17th-century merchant-widow Glikl Bas Judah Leib to the disastrous one of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer. An 18th-century court Jew who was hanged after his patron’s death for the “crime” of having relationships with Christian women, Oppenheimer became the subject of a famous 1940 Nazi propaganda film, Veit Harlan’s Jud Süss.
But the overall exhibition narrative often seems to lack focus and depth. Sprawling and sometimes hard to navigate, the 13-section, 3,900-artifact show designed by Wrth and Winderoll is at once too full (in terms of objects, more than half of them replicas or facsimiles) and too empty (in its examination of ideas).
Some of the exhibition’s design and content flaws, as well as the surprising number of technical problems, no doubt stem from the almost heroic speed with which it was mounted. In response to political pressures, Blumenthal insisted on compressing the exhibition-development process, normally a five-year enterprise, into about 18 months. Stung by early criticism from journalists, he promised to create a museum for families rather than for “the intellectuals, the historians, or journalistic snobs.” He hired Ken Gorbey, a New Zealand anthropologist who had masterminded the tremendously popular and tech-heavy Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, to accomplish the task. Accomplish it he did, although Thomas Friedrich, the Jewish Museum’s head of research, said the short time frame meant skipping stages in the design-review process.
Many of the resulting glitches -- from nonfunctioning audiovisuals to poor lighting and missing or inaccurate labels -- will presumably be fixed. But the exhibition’s interpretive shortcomings will be harder to remedy. Even more unyielding are the museum’s underlying dilemmas: how to serve an astonishingly diverse international audience that includes both the sons and daughters of survivors and the sons and daughters of perpetrators; and how, in the end, to balance truth-telling with reconciliation.
Berlin’s first Jewish museum opened in 1933, on the eve of Hitler’s ascendancy, and was shuttered by the Gestapo five years later. The new Jewish Museum respectfully remembers its predecessor -- with a photograph of visitors surveying art in one of its galleries, and a label explaining that the earlier museum served as a refuge during hard times.
The current museum has its origins in the 1975 founding of the Society for a Jewish Museum in Berlin, and in the 1979 creation of the Jewish Department of the Berlin Museum. The new museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, was supposed to be an extension to the city museum, showcasing both its Jewish department and its theater collection. Approved in 1989, the year the Wall fell, the project was plagued by construction delays, as Berlin dealt with the economic and political fallout of reunification. When the “zigzag building,” as the German papers called it, opened a decade later, it created a sensation. The American architect, most of whose own Polish-Jewish family had been killed in the Holocaust, had designed an award-winning, symbolically rich structure whose purposeful dissonance evoked not just Jewish losses, but Germany’s.
By then, Blumenthal, who became director in December 1997, had won independence for the Jewish Museum. He also expanded its mandate. Unlike its counterparts in Frankfurt, Worms, and other German cities, or the more modest Centrum Judaicum in Berlin itself, it is now a national museum, supported by the German federal government. The September 9 exhibition opening, attended by such dignitaries as German President Johannes Rau and Henry Kissinger and covered by German television as though it were a sporting event, showed how far this former stepchild had come. Blumenthal was said to have personally meted out the 850 invitations, which the news media trumpeted as a sign of membership in a new international elite -- an irony that could not have been lost on anyone.
The Jewish Museum’s ambitions have been fueled by the changing cultural and political context in which it finds itself, including Berlin’s position as the new German capital. The museum is at once a product of Germany’s burgeoning memorial culture and, in its striving for normalcy, part of the reaction against it.
One of the most intriguing artifacts in the permanent exhibition is a 1959 film consisting of random street interviews with unidentified Germans, who are asked about their attitudes toward the Nazi era. Some passers-by speak in favor of forgetfulness; others, obviously uncomfortable, simply refuse to talk; several admit they “of course” knew that Jews were being killed. Since then, new generations of Germans have shown increasing willingness to discuss the Nazi regime and the Holocaust -- a process that has only accelerated with reunification.
Over the past decade, Germany’s Jewish population has grown to about 100,000 (compared with its prewar peak of 560,000, according to the exhibition), thanks largely to an influx of Russian Jews. Jews have become chic, especially in Berlin, and the suppression of memory has given way to near-obsessive discussion of the Holocaust. At the same time, some mainstream voices, notably that of novelist Martin Walser, have denounced what they see as German self-flagellation and the reduction of German-Jewish relations to a journey to Auschwitz.
One of Walser’s targets was the proposed construction, in the heart of Berlin, of a massive memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe, which he called “a football-field-size nightmare.” Nevertheless, a memorial was finally approved by the German Parliament in 1999 and is under construction. Another big project, a museum called the Topography of Terror, sited where the SS and Gestapo headquarters once stood, and aimed at telling the story of Nazi perpetrators, is also under way.
With its architectural voids, jagged windows, and Holocaust Tower, the Jewish Museum took its place within Berlin’s memorial landscape even before its exhibition opened, welcoming more than 350,000 visitors since January 1999. Many here questioned whether an exhibition was needed at all -- or whether Libeskind’s expressive building should simply be permitted to speak for itself.
The Jewish Museum is still most compelling in those places where it allows the building to do just that. Libeskind has praised the new exhibition as fulfilling the spirit of his architecture. But as some visitors discerned, the building, with its strong Holocaust references, and the exhibition, which seeks, in a sense, to contain the Holocaust, often seem at odds with each other.
As the bilingual (German and English) museum labels clearly explain, Libeskind’s building consists of three “axes” representing the history of Jews in Germany: the Axis of Holocaust, the Axis of Exile, and the Axis of Continuity. To reach those pathways, visitors descend a staircase from the Baroque Kollegienhaus next door. Once part of the Berlin city museum, this annex now houses the Jewish Museum’s gift shop, an excellent cafeteria-style restaurant, and other visitor services.
The Axis of Holocaust contains an exquisitely restrained presentation of authentic objects and images. They are mounted in display cases whose glass has been partially blacked out. The effect evokes the circular dissolves that framed transitions in old movies. It’s an apt reference. The heartbreakingly worn teddy bear, the black-and-white photographic portraits, the lovingly assembled scrapbooks, and other iconic artifacts summon up not just their martyred owners, but the passage of time and the irrevocability of loss. Each vitrine, filled by living donors, is a shrine to memory itself.
This corridor, on whose walls the names of Nazi death camps and ghettos are emblazoned, leads to the Holocaust Tower. After a metal door clangs shut, visitors enter an unheated space, a tetrahedron with high, blank concrete walls. Here, one feels isolated, imprisoned, connected to the world only by the sounds of the street and the single shaft of light that pierces the darkness.
The Axis of Exile tells another powerful story, of 276,000 Jews who successfully fled Hitler’s Germany, according to the museum’s figures. It includes a display of unlabeled household objects, a series of passports -- from Britain, Czechoslovakia, Brazil, Bolivia, and the United States -- used by a woman named Irma Marcus, and a listing of places that offered refuge to German Jews. This path leads to the Garden of Exile, where willow oak trees grow, improbably, from 49 concrete columns filled with the soil of Berlin and Jerusalem. The path through the maze of pillars is slanting, reminding us of the emigrants’ disorientation.
To reach the main exhibition, visitors climb a daunting set of stairs, part of the Axis of Continuity. In the first gallery, they encounter an artificial pomegranate tree on which one of the museum’s many helpful “hosts” invites them to hang a paper “wish for the museum.” With its shelves filled with silks, spices, and other contemporary equivalents of medieval trade goods, its movie screen and plentiful chairs, this introductory gallery evokes a children’s museum. Gorbey says the intention is to show that the museum is not a fearful place. Scattered through the exhibition are also special passageways in which children can play, hide, and watch films, while adults move through two floors of German-Jewish history.
Amid the clutter, it is possible to miss two important displays. One is a 10th-century copy, on loan from the Vatican, of a decree promulgated in A.D. 321 by the Roman emperor Constantine allowing authorities “to appoint Jews to the papal court.” This is considered the first evidence of the existence of Jews in what is now Germany. The other is a modern replica of a small fourth-century terra-cotta lamp, bearing the impression of a menorah. These two artifacts are supposed to attest to the first 1,000 years of the Jewish-German relationship -- and both are copies.
The issue of authenticity has dogged the museum from the outset, not least because so much Jewish cultural property has been destroyed or dispersed. Before the opening, German critics worried that Gorbey, an apostle of high-tech and “visitor friendly” shows, would transform the museum into a Jewish Disneyland. Those fears turn out to have been overblown.
A virtual-reality presentation on medieval Jewish life, A Thousand Years Ago, featuring a rotating synagogue and ritual bath, is at the cutting edge of museum technology. And an engrossing computer game called “Test Your Skills as a Court Jew” pushes up against the border of good taste. There are also plenty of audio stations, computer interactives, and silent films (to its great credit, the exhibition avoids the excessive ambient noise that’s become a common annoyance in history museums). But, if anything, the overall effect is surprisingly traditional, at least by American standards.
More questionable is the intermingling of so many facsimiles and replicas with real finds such as a massive 14th-century Bible from Erfurt and the Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn’s horn eyeglasses. Such intermingling is increasingly the hallmark of what I call the postmodern museum, and Gorbey argues that he needed the replicas to tell his story. But even he concedes that the exhibition has too many objects. A less-busy display, along with better demarcations of each segment, would make the narrative more absorbing.
Another failure is the museum’s attempt to respond to the “voids” in Libeskind’s building with a three-part installation by Dresden artist Via Lewandowsky, called “The Gallery of the Missing.” Each installation consists of a hard-edged black glass sculpture. Visitors pick up headsets and walk along the sculpture to hear fragmentary allusions to the destruction of a Jewish encyclopedia, a Jewish hospital in Frankfurt, and a sculpture called “The New Man.” There are no labels, and a small pamphlet only adds to the confusion. By the time of my second visit, most of the headsets had been removed; Gorbey said that too many visitors had simply been walking off with them.
At its best, the exhibition does manage to capture some sense of the richness of the culture that was extinguished. One high point is a lively presentation of early-20th-century life in Berlin. As elsewhere, visitors get only the barest sense of the controversies of the time. But there’s still great pleasure to be had in original film and audio recordings that showcase the music of Kurt Weill and the movies of Ernst Lubitsch, among others. Jewish entrepreneurs, scientists, artists, and social critics also are represented.
Then, at last, we arrive at National Socialism, Hitler, and the Holocaust. A chronology briefly describes the accelerating persecution. Perhaps to allay the discomfort of visitors, the perpetrators themselves are nearly absent from exhibit labels, which embrace the passive tense (“Jews were murdered,” rather than “Germans murdered Jews”). But an anonymous denunciation of a Jew in hiding certainly points toward wide complicity in the Nazi program -- a subject that begs for more forthright treatment here.
In a series of labyrinthine niches, the museum details Jewish responses to persecution, both before and during World War II: special Jewish schools, agricultural training to prepare Jewish youth for Palestinian farms, life underground in Berlin, even the resort to suicide. All are described as forms of resistance. To balance out the denunciatory letter, there is a photograph of the “blind workshop” of Otto Weidt, a German brush-and-broom manufacturer who rescued Jews (many of them with visual or other disabilities) in the manner of a small-scale Oskar Schindler.
The exhibition continues with a suitcase plucked from Auschwitz and debris from a death march. (It’s hard to forget the metal lid that starving prisoners converted into a grater to scrape bark from trees.) But there is life after death. Visitors wander through exhibits on Germany’s struggles with historical memory and into a gallery that uses testimonials and iconic objects to describe the slow rebirth of Germany’s Jewish community. One of the museum’s own staff members has donated her set of Barbie and Ken dolls wrapped in prayer shawls -- surely a marker of the new normalcy. In these final galleries, several computer monitors pose provocative questions about today’s Germany, asking, for instance, whether it might be possible for a Jew to one day become president. Unfortunately, the computers -- like so much else here -- weren’t yet working properly.
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After seeing the Jewish Museum, I visited Otto Weidt’s workshop, now under the museum’s aegis. The workshop, looking much as it did in the 1940s, contains a small, spare exhibition on Weidt and his workers, as well as changing exhibitions. During my visit, Inge Deutschkron, author of I Wore the Yellow Star and Weidt’s former secretary, was sitting just beneath a large black-and-white photograph of herself as a beautiful young woman. Born in 1922, she hardly looked her age, and it was with a start that I realized who she was. Deutschkron was telling a group of high-school students how close she had come to being deported and how Weidt had helped her dodge the machinery of death. They leaned forward in their chairs as she talked, engrossed by this living history.
Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic based in Philadelphia who writes frequently about museums.
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