Berlin -- Jewish Museum turns 10

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Quick reposting of an article on the Jewish Museum in Berlin -- which last month celebrated its 10th anniversary.

I well remember how, as the article puts it

Even in the late 1990s, people would wait for months to get a tour of the bare frame of the building with its dark stairwells, empty spaces and crooked walls. Paths and corridors branch off to symbolic destinations - to the outside, to freedom, to a 'Garden of Exile,' or to a dead end.

Berlin -- Jewish Museum to Expand

This news dates from a couple weeks ago, but I am just catching up -- the Jewish Museum in Berlin has announced it will expand its space considerably, taking over space across the street where the Central Flower Market is currently located to provide space for educational programs, and the archive, library and research facilities. The Market Hall, dating from the 1960s, will not be demolished, but it will be modified to suit the Museum's needs.

Here's the full press release, from April 29:

A hope the Jewish Museum Berlin has had for some time is now to be realized: The Museum will be granted its much-needed expansion into the area on the opposite side of the road which currently houses Berlin's Central Flower Market. The space provided by expansion into the market hall will satisfy the Museum's urgent need for additional room for educational programs, the archive, the library, and research. André Schmitz, State Secretary for Cultural Affairs in Berlin, has approved the project, ensuring that the state of Berlin will hand over the use and management of the whole hall to the Jewish Museum Berlin. The Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg District Authority is seeing to the alteration of the land-use plan for the area between Lindenstrasse and Friedrichstrasse, in which the Central Flower Market premises are currently a designated “mixed-use” area. This will enable the hall to be used as a cultural center in future.

Hall Conversion Financed Through the Generous Support of the State and Private SponsorsThe building planned by the architect Bruno Grimmek between 1962 and 1965 will not be demolished, but merely modified to suit the requirements of the Jewish Museum Berlin. Construction work can begin in 2010 when the approximately 6,000 m² hall will be vacated by the Berlin Central Market, which will move to the Beusselstrasse. The costs are estimated at 10 million euros, of which the state – under the direction of Bernd Neumann, Minister of State for Cultural and Media Affairs – will cover 6 million. The remaining 4 million euros will be raised by the Jewish Museum Berlin through sponsors. Amongst the Museum's supporters are a generous sponsor from the US and the American Friends of the Jewish Museum Berlin: Their gift to the Museum is the design for the hall's modification, for which it is hoped the Daniel Libeskind Studio can be won. Berlin's Kreuzberg district would thus gain a further architectural attraction, which alongside the Libeskind Building and Libeskind-inspired Glass Courtyard would complete the Lindenstrasse ensemble – without burdening public coffers with the expense of a star architect's design.

Education and Research Will be Under One RoofThe expansion has become necessary due to the growth of the education and research areas at the Jewish Museum Berlin. The new building is to bring the education department, the archive, and the library under one roof, thus creating synergies between scientific research and educational work. Direct access to information, a clearer overview of what is on offer, and more room for exchange, transfer of knowledge, and encounters – the new location will ensure all these. The objective is to establish in the Lindenstrasse in Berlin one of the most important research and education centers on the history and culture of German-speaking Jewry.

Increasing Demand for the JMB's Educational ProgramsSince the opening of the Jewish Museum Berlin in 2001, its educational work has more than doubled. In addition to the roughly 7,000 guided tours each year, the Museum holds around 300 educational events such as training courses, seminars for students, vacation programs, workshops on special exhibitions and Jewish festivals, workshops about the archive featuring talks with witnesses, theater workshops, programs against antisemitism, project days, and training courses for teachers. Over 100,000 visitors per year come to these events. Furthermore, at least 10 times a year the Jewish Museum Berlin hosts large-scale educational events with up to 300 school pupils, for example as part of international youth meetings or commemoration days for schools such as the Anne Frank School.

This diverse range of activities and the increase in demand, particularly where whole-day activities are concerned, has resulted in a space shortage that will be solved with the expansion into the Central Flower Market hall. It will enable more events to be held at the same time and a clearer representation of findings. More space will also be available for educational work on a theme the Museum intends to bring into sharper focus: Integration, understanding, and tolerance in a multiethnic society. Moreover, the spatial proximity of the archives, library, seminar rooms, workshops, and multimedia activities will ensure more efficient logistics in the organization of events. Last but not least, it will take the pressure off the flow of visitors into the Old Building and the Libeskind Building, which are frequented by more than 750,000 people a year visiting the permanent and special exhibitions.

Growing Archives and Intensification of Scientific ResearchThe archival holdings of the Jewish Museum Berlin have likewise more than doubled since its opening. Further growth is expected in the near and mid-term future, since the last generation of Holocaust survivors is passing away. The Jewish Museum Berlin (JMB) has the task of conserving this heritage by continuously adding to its collections. Furthermore, the archive would like to expand its holdings on postwar history of Jews in Germany.

In addition, there are the dependencies of important archives on German-speaking Jewry housed at the JMB: The holdings of the dependency there of the Leo Baeck Institute New York Archive have quadrupled since 2001. The Jewish Museum Berlin opened a dependency of the Wiener Library London in 2008. In cooperation with the British partners, the holdings, which have so far not been inventoried, are to be made accessible at the JMB.

The number of users has also risen appreciably: The holdings of the Jewish Museum Berlin, the Leo Baeck Archive, and the Wiener Library are in international demand. Inquiries from researchers come not only from Europe, but also from other parts of the world such as Israel, the USA, and Canada. The extension will not only ensure improved conditions for using the materials, but will also provide more space for collaboration with universities and other scientific institutions – an area that is to receive sharper focus. Alongside a fellowship program, more scientific events such as conferences, meetings, and lectures are planned.

Library Expansion and Improved Conditions for UsersThe library at the Jewish Museum Berlin will also move into the extension. Initially planned as a reference library for employees, it originally housed around 70,000 media and has been used as a specialist reference library since 2001. The holdings have trebled in the past 10 years. As well as literature on German-Jewish history, culture, literature, music, art, and other humanistic sections, it also boasts a historical collection whose oldest book dates back to the 14th century. In 2005, the library began to collect audiovisual materials and thus became a media center.

Hidden away at the back of the Libeskind Building, the current library is not in a part of the Museum to which the public has free access. Therefore prior notification is required of its visitors, who are then accompanied by staff to and from the reading room. In the new building on the opposite side of the Lindenstrasse, the library rooms will be freely accessible making use of them easier and thus more attractive.

Berlin - Jewish Museum

The New York Times runs a devastating critique of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. It contrasts the Museum with the more recent exhibition at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

Published: May 1, 2009

BERLIN — There may be worse Jewish museums in the world than the Jüdisches Museum Berlin, which opened in 2001. But it is difficult to imagine that any could be as uninspiring and banal, particularly given its pedigree and promise. Has any other Jewish museum been more celebrated or its new building (designed by Daniel Libeskind) so widely hailed? Is any other Jewish museum of more symbolic importance? [. . .]

The resulting strain is almost bipolar, with the building aggressively screaming about apocalypse as its exhibition affirms harmonious universalism, with neither making its case.

The building, for example, proposes that the shattered, fractured world of the Holocaust is best suggested by shattered, fractured space. You enter the exhibition by descending a lobby staircase that leads into a world of skewed geometry. The floors are raked and tilted. Displays are off-kilter. And rather than feeling something profound, you almost expect moving platforms and leaping ghosts, as in an amusement park’s house of horrors.

Add to this a sheen of pretense. One corridor is called the Axis of Exile, because along it are the personal effects of Jews who fled Germany during the 1930s. Another is named the Axis of the Holocaust, which shows letters and photographs of murdered Jews. And lest it all look too bleak, an Axis of Continuity leads upstairs, where you learn about where all of this fits into 2,000 years of German Jewish history.

Meanwhile, the items on display are so cursorily identified and their owners so obliquely described that they might as well have been anonymous points on an Axis of Victimhood. The space trivializes history rather than revealing it.

Read full article

Rothstein criticizes the architecture, with its axis of exile, etc, but he does not really go into the development of the concept behind them. OK, it may seem (and be) pretentious, at least in hindsight, but during the development phase, in the 1990s, it made bold new statements that touched chords and made them resolate loudly. I remember visiting the partly complete building in something like 1997 and feeling the power of the structure -- indeed, it became a major attraction in itself, both before completion and after completion, before the exhibition was installed. Books were written on it. My friend, the Berlin artist Joachim Seinfeld guided hundreds of tours to the empty building.

The exhibition concept and layout has been problematic since the beginning; at first it was so overcrowded with objects it seemed hard to breathe. These were weeded out, but the difficulty of mounting the installations in the weird space remained a constant. Already in 2003 I was on a panel at the annual meeting of the Association of European Jewish Museums that among other things offers critiques.

I thought I'd take a look at what the Times said in earlier articles about the museum.

Michael Kimmelman, in 2004, was just as critical as Rothstein of the museum, but he put a lot of its problems into more context, focusing in part on how Daniel Libeskind's widely-acclaimed design created difficulties of its own.

The building was opened with nothing in it in 1999. Nearly 350,000 people came to see it before any exhibition was installed. Many writers speculated about whether it might best be left empty, as a Holocaust memorial sculpture, not least because it looked nearly impossible to fill coherently with objects. It has been. Sloping grades, crooked passageways, dead ends, tall voids and other willful spaces were explained by Mr. Libeskind and then by others as architectural metaphors for the fate of Germany's Jews, for their difficult journey through history. [. . . ]

Stories of individual Jews, many of them of women, humanize the exhibition. They are told about different sorts of people, not only about artists and writers; the museum thereby sidesteps the stereotype of Jews as people of culture, which, while flattering, may imply that the life or death of a Jewish banker or street peddler is less worth honoring.

But over all the architecture and the exhibition trivialize and overwhelm history. The museum panders to the sort of audience of middlebrow Germans and tourists who don't know any real, live Jews, watering down and sweetening up the past. Even pared back from the 3,900 objects it had at the opening, the exhibition is a smorgasbord of tidbits. Visitors graze. Here are the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn's glasses next to recipes for kosher food; there is a display about medicine next to one about Jews being burned.

Mr. Libeskind's building posed obvious practical hurdles, but the installation is its own inchoate maze of added nooks and crannies, platforms, stairs and partitions, stuffed with gadgets and gimmicks. You can put on a backpack as heavy as a peddler wore. You can peel open a giant sculpture of a garlic. You can mint a coin. You can participate in computerized straw polls.

At article about its opening, in September 2001, puts the conceptual aspect in the foreground.

But while the museum is devoted to a fine, carefully planned exhibit of the full range of Jewish life here, from the arts to the ordinary, it lives in an extraordinary building, designed by Daniel Libeskind, that is itself a sculpture on the theme of the Holocaust. It is a deconstructed, riven Star of David, full of slashing windows and sharp angles, twisting corridors and tilting floors, rough cement and tall, cold empty voids, that bring to a visitor the dizziness and horror of absence, loss, dislocation and loneliness. [. . . ]

A visitor enters this building from an airy, light hall, but is directed down, along a twisted black metal staircase lined by grills at odd angles.

There are three ''underground roads,'' in Mr. Libeskind's conception. The first and longest leads to the main stairs, which rise to the exhibition floors about Jewish life here since Roman times. The second leads outdoors, to a ''Garden of Exile,'' representing the forced emigration of Germany's Jews, with angled pillars topped by willow oaks and cobbled walkways tilted to produce a kind of nausea.

The third leads, Mr. Libeskind wrote, ''to a dead end -- the Holocaust Void,'' called the Holocaust Tower. Here, a large, forbidding, empty space rises up the full height of the building and ends at an acute angle.

Another void, devoted to memory, has a compelling sculpture by an Israeli, Menashe Kadishman, called ''Fallen Leaves.'' Much of the floor is filled with thousands of rusted steel faces, some large and some tiny, most of them open-mouthed and screaming.

Berlin - Major Conference on Jewish Cultural Treasures in Europe after the Holocaust

A major conference on Jewish Cultural Treasures in Europe after the Holocaust will take place at the Jewish Museum in Berlin on Jan. 24-25. The conference comes at the conclusion of the exhibition "Looting and Restitution. Jewish Owned Cultural Artifacts from 1933 to the Present," which has been running at the museum since September.

The conference topics look fascinating and important, and I wish I could go, but logistics (and finances) will probably not permit me...

More information about the exhibition and the conference can be found at the Jewish museum web site.

Meanwhile, here is the program:

Saturday, 24. January 2009

PANEL I: CONFRONTING LOOTING AND DESTRUCTION: NEW STRATEGIES
10.00 Introduction
Inka Bertz, Jewish Museum Berlin

10.30 Reconstructing Jewish Cultural Landscapes - The »Tentative Lists«
Project 1944-1948
Elisabeth Gallas, Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at
Leipzig University

11.15 Hashavat Avedah: JCR, Inc. and the Rescue of Heirless Jewish Cultural
Property After WW II
Dana Herman, Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives,
Cincinnati

PANEL II: GERMANY AND AUSTRIA
13.30 To Whom Do the Jewish Cultural Treasures Belong after 1945? Conflict
of Interests in the City of Frankfurt am Main
Katharina Rauschenberger, Jewish Museum Frankfurt am Main

14.15 The Situation in Berlin 1945-1953
N.N.

15.00 Displaced on Three Continents. The Fate of the Material Heritage of
the Jewish Community in Vienna
Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek, Jewish Museum Wien

PANEL III: EAST CENTRAL EUROPE I
16.15 What Happened in Prague?
Michaela Sidenberg, Jewish Museum in Prague

17.00 Dealing with the Jewish Cultural Assets in Post-War Poland
Nawojka Cieslinska-Lobkowicz, Art Historian and Provenance Researcher,
Warsaw/Munich

17.45 The Jewish Historical Institute as a Repository for Jewish Cultural
Treasures in Poland
N. N.

Sunday, 25. January 2009

PANEL IV: WESTERN EUROPE
10.00 A Matter of Conscience? Legal and Moral Aspects of Dutch Restitution
Policy
Julie Marthe Cohen, Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam

10.45 The Fate of Jewish-Owned Cultural Treasures in Paris and in France
Laurence Sigal, Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme, Paris

11.30 Looted Jewish Art and Cultural Properties in Italy. The Difficult
Restitution and Compensation after 1945
Paola Bertilotti, Sciences-Po, Paris / Ecole Normale Supérieure Lettres et
Sciences Humaines, Lyon

PANEL V: EAST CENTRAL EUROPE II
13.45 Lviv 1944 - Now. Jewish Cultural Objects and Property. Some Cases and
Tendencies
Tarik Cyril Amar, Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, Lviv

14.30 Restitution Issues in Post-War Romania
Hildrun Glass, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

15.15 »Disappeared?« The Fate of Jewish-Owned Cultural Artifacts in Hungary
after 1945
Eszter Gantner, ELTE University of Budapest - Center for Central European
German Jewish Culture

16.00 Final discussion: Open Questions, Ongoing Controversies

5 Millionth visitor to Jewish Museum in Berlin

The Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel reports that a 17-year-old highschool student, on a school trip, has become the 5 millionth visitor to the Jewish Museum in Berlin. According to the paper, Sarah-Denise Heellmanns was given a gift package and kosher gummy-bear candies.

The Museum opened in September 2001. Even before its formal opening, the empty building was a tourist draw because of its distinctive design by Daniel Libeskind. According to Tagesspiegel, it is the fifth most popular museum in Berlin, with 733,000 visitors in 2007 -- including 140,000 under the age of 18. (The Pergamon Museum hold the top spot with 1.3 million visitors). About two-thirds of visitors to the Jewish Museum come from outside of Germany.

According to a Museum Press Release

"a steady increase in visitor numbers has been sustained since 2004. In the first eight months of this year, around 515,000 people visited the Libeskind Building and the exhibitions on German-Jewish history, 8 % more than in the same period last year (visitor total in 2007: approx. 733,000).

"The Jewish Museum Berlin, whose zinc-coated building has long-since become established as one of the capital's landmarks, continues to belong to Berlin's greatest attractions and Germany's most frequented museums. The Museum is particularly popular with kids, teens, and twens: About every other visitor in 2007 was under 30 years old - a considerable number for a historical museum. The twens represent the largest visitor age group with 29 %. Almost every fifth visitor last year was under 18 (19 %). Young people often visit the Museum on school trips: Of the total number of over 7,000 tours booked in 2007, nearly two thirds (63 %) were for school groups."