Leiden University Master Arts & Culture
Specialization: Museums and Collections Master Thesis
Memory is the Foundation of the Future:
Holocaust Museums Memory Construction through Architecture and Narrative, Yad Vashem and the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
By Lucrezia Levi Morenos Student Number: 2231719
2018-2019
Supervised by Dr. Mirjam Hoijtink
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
III
Introduction
1
Chapter I
Yad Vashem
8
I.1
Geographic Significance and Architecture
9
I.2
The Holocaust History Museum’s Narrative
13
Chapter II
The Jewish Museum in Berlin
21
II.1
Geographic Significance and Architecture
22
II.2
Narrative of the Jewish Museum in Berlin
27
II.3
Old Permanent Collection Design and ‘Welcome to
Jerusalem’
33
Chapter III
Comparing Yad Vashem and the Jewish Museum in
Berlin and Exploring Current Events Surrounding the
Two Institutions
III.1
Yad Vashem and the Jewish Museum in Berlin
38
III.2
Current Debates
41
Conclusion
47
List of Illustrations
50
Acknowledgements
Writing this thesis has been a gratifying experience and there are some people I would like to thank for helping me shape this project.
First, I would like to thank my supervisor, Mirjam Hoijtink for always being available to help me and giving me suggestions on how to improve my work. In particular, I would like to thank her for introducing me to the field of memory studies; thanks to her advice I developed a work much more critical and I discovered a new field of studies that fascinates me.
The topic of Holocaust museums is very complex and this thesis gave me the opportunity to explore questions that have been in my mind for a long time. The first time I visited Yad Vashem was in the summer of 2017, and the Museum, as well as the land of Israel itself, left a big impact on me. It was an incredible experience that left me with many questions; with this thesis, I managed to answer some, and raise other new ones. I am also glad that with this work I was able to research the history of the Jewish Museum in Berlin as well as the construction of the national memory of Germany after WWII. Approaching the two museums after studying and researching national and collective memories allowed me to explore their narratives more in depth.
Vorrei ringraziare i miei genitori, Elisabetta e Luca, e anche i miei nonni, Gipi, Gian Maria e Mario per essermi stati vicini quest’anno un po’ difficile.
I would also like to thank my English friend and author Connor, who helped me proofread my thesis for the second time. My friends Hannah and Juliette: this year in Leiden would not have been the same without you two, and also Kilian who always supports me.
Introduction
Over the last decades, Holocaust and Jewish Museums have been opened all around the world. Jewish Museums preserve the memory of the past, as well as the future of Jewish communities.1 Some museums are focused directly on the Shoah, others show aspects of Jewish life before and after the Second World War.2 While in the past Holocaust museums were focused on the sensitization of the Shoah, nowadays some of these museums relate to other ethnic minorities too, like the Jewish Museum in Berlin. One of the purposes of the German institution is to respect and recognize other minorities, such as Muslims as religious minorities in Germany, to fight prejudices.3 As of June 2019, its permanent collection is being renovated: the reopening is scheduled for 2020. In the meantime, the floors dedicated to the Holocaust as well as some temporary exhibitions are open to the public. The Jewish Museum in Berlin is the leading Jewish institution in Germany, the perpetrators’ country. One cannot speak of Holocaust museums without mentioning the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the biggest research center in the world to remember the Shoah. It is a very interesting example because of its geographic location and the way it relates to Jewish-Israeli memory. The study is dedicated to show how the Shoah is perceived by the victims as well as by the perpetrators nowadays in the two main Holocaust museums in Israel and Germany.
‘It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and everywhere… thus we must sharpen our senses, beware of the charmers, those
1 The difference between Jewish and Holocaust museums: while both types of museums deal with the Holocaust, Jewish museums mainly focus on Jewish life and rituals. For example, the Jewish Museum in Venice concentrates on their collection of textiles and goldsmith objects made between the 16th and 19th centuries, as well as on the life of Venetian Jews. Holocaust museums instead center their narrative around the event of the Holocaust, and even when giving background information on Jewish history or religious life, it is always in relation to the Shoah. This thesis will discuss the Jewish Museum in Berlin as a Holocaust museum since it has been long associated mostly with the Shoah.
2 The terms ‘Shoah’ and ‘Holocaust’ are both used to talk about ‘the genocide perpetrated by German Nazis during World War II’, however the words have originally different meanings. ‘Holocaust’ comes from Greek and it originally referred to an ‘offering burnt as a whole’ and it was a Greek religious animal sacrifice; the word can also mean more generally a massacre by fire. The term was previously used to describe other Jewish massacres in history such as the anti-Jewish violence during the reign of Richard I of England, it was also used to describe the Armenian genocide. ‘Shoah’ is a Hebrew biblical term that means ‘calamity’ and is more closely related to the genocide of Jewish victims. ‘Holocaust’ is a more common term in Anglo-Saxon countries, while ‘Shoah’ is generally used in Europe. ‘What is the difference between Holocaust and Shoah,’ About the Holocaust, Accessed June 5, 2019, https://aboutholocaust.org/facts/what-is-the-difference-between-holocaust-and-shoah/.
3 ‘Academy Programs,’ Jewish Museum Berlin, Accessed April 23, 2019, https://www.jmberlin.de/en/academy.
who say nice words not driven by good reasons.’4 This sentence written by Jewish-Italian author Primo Levi offers an explanation on why Holocaust Museums are always relevant and how they can contribute to prevention by engaging with history and personal experiences of survivors like Levi.5 Whereas in Europe, Holocaust related sites like the former concentration camps became increasingly professional museums, in the United States and Israel, Holocaust museums and monuments arose for reasons more related to a Jewish need to connect to this dramatic phase of its history.6 In fact, when the Nazi regime came to power, many Jewish people emigrated to the US and Israel to seek safety, their lives were completely disrupted as many lost family and friends in the Holocaust, therefore Holocaust and Jewish museums helped them cope and deal with what happened in Europe.
Developing this thesis in present times is especially meaningful; right-wing movements are rising in Europe and the survivors of World War II are almost all gone, therefore we will rely more and more on Holocaust museums to understand the Shoah.
In the last decades, many discussions about Holocaust institutions have been raised. This thesis examines material written on Holocaust museums, historiography and memory studies discourses. In order to discuss both Yad Vashem and the Jewish Museum in Berlin (JMB), Jewish authorship provides a first approach to these museums’ architecture and narrative. Rotem,7 in her book Constructing Memory discussed the power of architecture for Holocaust narrative. She wrote a chapter on Yad Vashem, and one on the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Neuman8 wrote about Yad Vashem, focusing on the new museum building opened in 2005, in
Shoah Presence. ‘Museum architecture as spatial storytelling of historical time’ by Lu
examined how architecture can become a form of storytelling of the Holocaust.9 Lu argued that
4 Original text: ‘È avvenuto, quindi può accadere di nuovo: questo è il nocciolo di quanto abbiamo da dire. Può accadere, e dappertutto ... occorre quindi affinare i nostri sensi, diffidare degli incantatori, da quelli che dicono belle parole non sostenute da buone ragioni’ my translation from Italian.
Primo Levi, I sommersi e i salvati, 165.
5 Primo Levi was a Holocaust survivor. He was captured in 1943 and escaped from Auschwitz in 1945. He died in 1987, unclear whether his death was an accident or suicide.
6 Edward van Voolen ‘Shaping Memory in Judaism’ in Jewish Identity in Contemporary Architecture, eds. Angeli Sachs and Edward van Vollen, 18.
7 Stephanie Shosh Rotem, Constructing Memory: Architectural Narratives of Holocaust Museums. Stephanie Rotem got her PhD at Tel Aviv University and is currently teaching there.
8 Eran Neuman, Shoah Presence: Architectural Representations of the Holocaust. Eran Neuman (1968) studied at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and got a Ph.D. from the University of California in Los Angeles. He is now the director of the David Azrieli School of Architecture at Tel Aviv University.
9 Fangqing Lu, ‘Museum architecture as spatial storytelling of historical time: Manifesting a primary example of Jewish space in Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum’.
‘the idea of spatial storytelling contributes toward a unique embodied experience for the general public to support the process of “self- learning,” as well as interpreting and mediating memory through tangible artefacts and architecture.’10 Silke Arnold-de Simine also highlighted the ‘importance in the contemporary memorial landscape.’11
As these authors create a background for an architectural discussion, regarding the narrative, Edward Rothstein12 in 2016 wrote a piece titled ‘The Problem with Jewish Museums’ in which he controversially argued that many Jewish museums have lost the sense of Jewish identity itself, and ended his essay provocatively arguing that we need to ‘start to think about what it would be like to create a new Jewish museum in the first third of the 21st century.’13 Appelbaum,14 answered to Rothstein’s essay with an article titled ‘Why Are There So Many Jewish Museums?’15 where she also recognized that the ‘apparent inability (or unwillingness) of Holocaust museums to address the uniqueness of antisemitism, which Rothstein analyzes so well, is a problem.’16 Even though Rothstein refers mainly to general Jewish, and not particular Holocaust museums, he raised a critical point for this thesis, which is the importance of narrative in Holocaust museums. To support why this thesis will analyze the Jewish Museum in Berlin as a Holocaust institution, Sodaro17 explains why the JMB is often considered a Holocaust museum: ‘in rejecting the categorization as a memorial museum and in focusing on a celebration of German–Jewish culture and history rather than the tragedy of the Holocaust, the Jewish Museum is what we might call a counter memorial museum. […] At the same time, the museum often seems to conflict with Libeskind’s building18, which is infused with Holocaust symbolism and meaning.’19
A core part of the discourse of the research is memory studies and this thesis deals with some key concepts taken from different authors. Through essays such as Assmann’s ‘On the (in)compatibility of guilt and suffering in German history’, this thesis introduces the notions
10 Ibid., 443.
11 Silke Arnold-de Simine, ‘Memory Museum and Museum Text: Intermediality in Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz,’ 14.
12 Edward Rothstein (1952) is an American-Jewish critic who writes articles for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Mosaic Magazine, a conservative Jewish magazine.
13 Rothstein, ‘The Problem with Jewish Museums,’ Mosaic, February 1, 2016, https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/2016/02/the-problem-with-jewish-museums/. 14 A conservative Jewish writer and historian.
15 Appelbaum, ‘Why Are There So Many Jewish Museums?’ Mosaic, February 9, 2016, https://mosaicmagazine.com/response/2016/02/why-are-there-so-many-jewish-museums/. 16 Ibid.
17 A scholar in memory studies who is specialized in memorial museums.
18 Libeskind designed the two new modern buildings of the Berlin Jewish Museum. 19 Amy Sodaro, ‘Memory, History, and Nostalgia in Berlin’s Jewish Museum,’ 77.
of guilt and suffering and analyses how Yad Vashem and the Jewish Museum in Berlin deal with history and national memory in their exhibitions.20 In fact, there is a very strong relation between Yad Vashem and the State of Israel as Steven Erlanger writes that ‘the Holocaust is the cornerstone of the Israeli state, and Yad Vashem is its guardian.’21 This thesis uses Assmann’s notion of memory from ‘Canon and Archive’ adapted to museums: cultural memory is based on the tension between remembering and forgetting, its contraction and its expansion.22 The concepts of trauma and conflict are also introduced by Thomas in ‘Collective Memory of Trauma’23 where he explores the trauma and suffering dynamics in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Svetlana Boym’s definition of nostalgia as a longing for a home that no longer exists or never existed is adapted to analyze Yad Vashem’s exhibition.24 Rob van der Laarse’s competing memories concept is also used to investigate memory dynamics in Berlin and Eastern European countries.25 In order to understand the JMB’s past and present, this thesis is based on the reading of German historiography, German victimhood and Holocaust memory in Germany pre and post-unification. The Berlin cityscape is analyzed by Sandler in ‘Counterpreservation’26, the German historiography debate discussed in ‘German historiography and the Holocaust’ by Von der Dunk 27 and in ‘Major Trends and Tendencies in German Historiography on National Socialism and the "Jewish Question"’ by Kulka are the starting point of the second chapter.28 Amos Goldberg,29 analyses the narrative used by Yad Vashem, ‘the museum presents the story of the Shoah from a uniquely Jewish perspective.’30
20 Aleida Assmann, ‘On the (in)compatibility of guilt and suffering in German Memory.’
21 Erlanger, ‘Museum in Jerusalem exhibits Holocaust horrors anew,’ The New York Times, February 16, 2005,
https://global-factiva-com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ga/default.aspx.
22 Aleida Assmann ‘Canon and Archive’ in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and
Interdisciplinary Handbook eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning.
23 Shannon Andrea Thomas, ‘Collective Memory of Trauma: The Otherization of Suffering in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’.
24 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia.
25 Rob van der Laarse, ‘Competing Memories: Interview with Rob van der Laarse.’ 26 Daniela Sandler, ‘Counterpreservation.’
27 H. W. von der Dunk ‘German historiography and the Holocaust,’ review of Der Holocaust und die
westdeutschen Historiker. Erforschung und Erinnerung, by Nicolas Berg.
28 Otto D. Kulka, “Major Trends and Tendencies in German Historiography on National Socialism and the ‘Jewish Question’”.
29 A liberal Jewish writer who recently published the groundbreaking book The Holocaust and the
Nakba.
30 Amos Goldberg, ‘The “Jewish narrative” in the Yad Vashem global Holocaust museum,’ 192. Associate Professor at the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry and a fellow at the Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
He also focuses on problematics arising from the historic narrative defining it monochromatic.31
The aim of this thesis is to analyze the role of Holocaust museums in the past, from when they were first instituted, and in the present, focusing on two Holocaust museums: the Jewish Museum in Berlin, in the perpetrators’ land, and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, situated in the victims’ country. This dissertation studies the geographic location of these museums because of its great influence on the narrative of these museums: Yad Vashem, being situated in Jerusalem, follows a Zionist narrative derived from the State’s national memory, while the Jewish Museum in Berlin sometimes falls into a guilt-induced narrative because it is in the capital of the country that perpetrated the Holocaust. Sodaro highlights the shift of the memorial museum from a dark nostalgic memory of the past to a new celebratory memorial museum.32 This thesis explores whether it is really the case for the JMB and emphasizes the strengths and weaknesses of the JMB and Yad Vashem in order to narrate the Holocaust to spread a message of compassion and prevention. The dissertation analyzes the Jewish Museum in Berlin and Yad Vashem to make a statement on how much of need Holocaust museums are today, not just to remember what happened in the past, but to prevent it ever happening again in the future. This does not apply solely to Jewish people, but to all the minorities.
The main research question that this thesis will explore is: how do Holocaust museums, such as the Jewish Museum in Berlin and Yad Vashem, incorporate the past into the present memory through their narrative and architecture? Therefore, the purpose of this project is to focus on architecture and memory construction in Yad Vashem and the Jewish Museum in Berlin and discuss the problematics arising from this research. Since antisemitism and violence against minorities are still part of our society today, this thesis argues that after commemoration, prevention should be one of the purposes of Holocaust museums around the world. Do Yad Vashem and the Jewish Museum in Berlin include a prevention and tolerance message in their narratives? From the statement of the Jewish Museum in Berlin regarding the future opening of the new display of their permanent collection, they state how ‘We will be incorporating the latest research and allocating more space to the period after 1945.’33 Therefore, they will give
31 Ibid., 193.
32 Sodaro, ‘Memory, History, and Nostalgia in Berlin’s Jewish Museum,’ 77. 33 ‘Permanent Exhibition,’ Jewish Museum Berlin, Accessed December 5, 2018, https://www.jmberlin.de/en/permanent-exhibition.
a bigger space to the present, to what happened after the Shoah. Is giving more space to the present the best way to improve Holocaust museums’ narratives and effectiveness in fighting antisemitism and discrimination?
The methodology of this thesis includes my personal visit to Yad Vashem and the JMB as primary sources. I will use different methodological approaches as secondary sources such as close reading and analysis of the museum. From my own experience of the museums and the literature previously mentioned, I developed a method of analysis focusing on the narrative.
For the first and second chapters I introduce the history of the museum, study its location and the significance of it, then I consider their architecture and architectural narrative, and finally their exhibitions and display techniques:
Chapter I discusses Yad Vashem’s Holocaust History Museum (YVHHM). After giving a general introduction of the Museum, this thesis considers the meaning of the geographical position of Yad Vashem in the heart of the Biblical Promised Land, Jerusalem. ‘Promised Land’ is a concept at the center of Zionist discourse stating that Israel being the homeland of Jewish people is a Divine right from the Thora. Then, this thesis analyses the architecture of the Museum in relation to its location. The final part of this chapter is dedicated to the YVHHM’s exhibition narrative and the architectural interior of the Museum.
In Chapter II the Jewish Museum in Berlin is examined starting from its location in Berlin, then analyzing the ideas behind the architect of the JMB, the Polish-Jewish Libeskind, who shaped the Museum according to his own experience of the Holocaust as the son of two survivors. The second sub-chapter is dedicated to the narrative of the architecture and exhibition, these are particularly connected and united thanks to Libeskind’s Holocaust architecture. Since the permanent collection of the Museum is currently being renovated, the last part of the chapter is dedicated to the old display of the permanent collection and to the temporary exhibition ‘Welcome to Jerusalem’ (11 December 2017 – 1 May 2019): ‘dedicated to a city that for two thousand years has been revered as a holy place by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike: Jerusalem’34. Therefore, it does not focus only on the Jewish perspective on the city, but also on other cultures living in the city.35
34‘Permanent Exhibition,’ Jewish Museum Berlin, Accessed December 5, 2018, https://www.jmberlin.de/en/permanent-exhibition.
35 Since the end of WWII, Berlin’s population became increasingly more multicultural. The Deutsche
Demokratische Republik (DDR) government incremented the Russian and Polish population, and the
second nationality in Berlin after German is Turkish. From ‘Statistischer Bericht: Einwohnerinnen und Einwohner im Land Berlin am 31. Dezember 2017’ [Statistical Report: Residents in the state of
For Chapter III, this thesis uses comparison to analyze the two museums together, and then uses discourse analysis to examine current debates surrounding Yad Vashem and the JMB based on Foucauldian discourse analysis to explore the power relationships between State and museum through these current debates.36 Both the Jewish Museum in Berlin and Yad Vashem have vast online catalogues on past exhibitions, publications, collections, and an online library easily accessible. Literature related to memory studies is the base of discussions on memory, trauma and suffering. Museographical and museological methodologies are adopted in order to study the museums and their exhibitions and architecture. Museological methodology refers to the description of more conceptual aspects of the museums, while museographical approach involves more practical elements of the museums. Klausewitz argues that applied museology includes the more theoretical questions of collecting, documentation, museum education, etc., while museography deals with techniques and methods on a day-to-day level, for example security and exhibition techniques.37
Berlin on 30 June 2018] (PDF). Amt für Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg (in German). 4, 13, 18–22. Retrieved 20 December 2018.
36 Julianne Cheek, ‘Foucauldian Discourse Analysis,’ in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative
Research Methods ed. Lisa M. Given.
Chapter I
Yad Vashem
Established on the 19th of August 1953, five years after the State of Israel’s independence in 1948, on the Mount Herzl, also called the Mount of Remembrance, the Yad Vashem Remembrance Center masters on the hill (Fig.1). It is dedicated not only to the victims of the Holocaust, but also to ‘the Righteous Among the Nations, honored by Yad Vashem, the non-Jews who took great risks to save non-Jews during the Holocaust. Rescue took many forms and the Righteous came from different nations, religions and walks of life. What they had in common was that they protected their Jewish neighbors at a time when hostility and indifference prevailed.’38 Yad Vashem was named after a verse in Isaiah’s 56:5, and it literally means ‘a place and a name’. Biblically referring to promising ‘a memorial even to the pious eunuchs’ whose name will not be carried after their death. By naming the Holocaust Remembrance Center ‘Yad Vashem’, the institution aims to carry on the names, and therefore the essence, of the forgotten victims of the Shoah.39
Yad Vashem is not only a Holocaust museum, but includes the Museum of Holocaust Art, an Exhibition Pavilion, a Synagogue, a Visual Center, a Learning Center and, of major importance, the Archives. The Hall of Names, one of its main memorials, was opened in 1977; in the 1950s, the institution began collecting the names and all the biographical information available of the hitherto unnamed victims of the Holocaust, in order to commemorate and remember them. Today, there is an impressive number of more than 2.5 million names catalogued in the Hall of Names. On the shelves of the memorial, there is space for millions more names, a space that will never be filled. In 2004, the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names was launched, free and accessible for everyone to research lost relatives’ and friends’ names.40 The new museum complex was inaugurated in 2005 with new buildings and with the museums’ exhibitions completely renovated. When the Holocaust History Museum reopened, the Hall of Names became part of the exhibition.
This chapter focuses on the way in which the Holocaust is represented throughout the Holocaust History Museum. Its aim is to inform and commemorate, therefore the permanent
38 ‘Righteous,’ Yad Vashem, Accessed March 2019, https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/about-the-righteous.html.
39 Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory, 22.
40 ‘Hall of Names,’ Yad Vashem, Accessed March 2019, https://www.yadvashem.org/archive/hall-of-names.html.
exhibition at the YVHHM is very educational and deeply rooted in both historical facts and personal experiences. How does Yad Vashem weave the past into the seams of the present through the architecture and the narrative of the Holocaust History Museum? This question is explored through this first chapter.
I.1 Geographic Significance and Architecture
Engraved into Jerusalem’s land, the Holocaust History Museum as a symbolic construction is embedded in Jewish history. Mount Herzl, named after Theodor Herzl (Budapest 1860- Austria 1904), the father of the Zionist movement, who is buried on the Mount dedicated to him, is also called the Mount of Remembrance and it does not only host Yad Vashem, but also the Israel Military Cemetery and Herzl Museum.41 This already positions Yad Vashem in a Zionist narrative, as the Shoah institution shares the mount with two of the most meaningful places for Zionism and for the Israeli State.42 The building, designed by the Jewish-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie, cuts Mount Herzl from one side to the other, resulting in most of the museum being underground. As Neuman argues, ‘Safdie often indicated that the Holocaust must be represented in Jerusalem although it did not take place there, because many survivors live in Israel and the event is part of the local consciousness.’43 A matter to consider and analyze when dealing with Holocaust museums is its geographic location. Positioning the Israeli Holocaust main institution in Jerusalem, in fact, has a political agenda behind it. As Levin writes, ‘The Holocaust plays an important role as a justification for an independent Jewish state.’ 44 In fact, since the first Zionist rulers like David Ben-Gurion, Zionists are still justifying nowadays the establishment of the State of Israel in name of the Shoah. Rotem points out that ‘the collective memory of the Holocaust bears a prominent role in both the construction of Israeli identity and in the political and cultural struggle over its specific form.’45 Thus in 1953, building Yad Vashem on Mount Herzl in a city with such a layered history and present, was an affirmation of ownership on that land. Young argues that ‘ironically, however, by linking the State’s raison
d’etre to the Holocaust, the early founders also located the Shoah at the center of national
41 Theodor Herzl was the father of Zionist movement, he is buried on Mount Herzl, dedicated to him. 42 Zionism is the movement of Jewish people who wanted to create a Jewish state in the Promised Land of Israel. Inspired by nationalist movements in the 19th century and motivated by antisemitism. Today Zionism defends the right of existing of the State of Israel after its foundation in 1948. 43 Neuman, Shoah Presence, 69.
44 Levin, ‘Jewish Identity in Architecture in Israel’ in Jewish Identity in Contemporary Architecture, 38.
identity: Israel would be a nation condemned to defining itself in opposition to that very event that makes it necessary.’46 Therefore, this raises important questions such as ‘how to remember the Holocaust in Israel without allowing it to constitute the center of one’s Jewish identity?’47 The Museum deals with such questions through its narrative, helping Jewish people all over the word to not only commemorate a tragic past, but also define themselves in the present and future. The cultural memory of the Holocaust in Europe and in Israel took, and takes, very different forms. However, as Gelernter pointed out in the article mentioned in the introduction, many representations of the Holocaust can easily fall into the kitsch/fetishistic area. Architecture is an appropriate medium of Holocaust expression, as Rotem writes.48 Neuman analyses Holocaust commemoration architecture: there are ‘larger questions about Holocaust commemoration places, sites and architecture. After all, the Nazi atrocities against Jews, Romas, homosexuals, communists and all others they defined as non-Aryan took place in space, in architecture and sometimes even through the active agency of architecture.’49 Although architecture was a silent witness to Nazi’s atrocities, in present days it is transformed into a relief agent. Jewish architecture shapes the identity of Jewish people; after centuries of exile, Jewish people affirm their existence through their buildings, their schools, their synagogues. Yad Vashem is an anthem of survival, or rebirth, not just a place of commemoration and mourning. The architecture of the Holocaust institution has the duty to convey both hope for the future, as well as remembering the past for it to be imprinted in the collective memory of the world. Safdie’s architecture complies with the Zionist narrative by turning the landscape into part of the museum exhibit, as Neuman argues:
‘On the northwest side of the prism, where it breaks out of the mountain, its edges part completely and spread to the sides, revealing the mountainous Jerusalem landscape. At this point the landscape is appropriated, objectified and turned into another exhibit in the history museum; what began with the display of the events in Europe ends in the Jerusalem landscape. The building itself supports this process and marks an act of liberation, both symbolically and experientially. The visitors are liberated from the past, from the building, as they move toward the present, to the contemporary Jerusalem landscape.’50
46 Young, ‘Jewish Museums, Holocaust Museums, and Questions of National Identity’ in Jewish
Identity in Contemporary Architecture, 49.
47 Ibid.
48 Rotem, Constructing Memory, 10. 49 Neuman, Shoah Presence, 4. 50 Ibid., 68.
The museum is not only situated on the top of Mount Herzl, but it invades the landscape as it becomes part of it. The journey of the visitor inside of the underground museum is rewarded with a view of Jerusalem at the end (Fig.2). However, the underground space is not a claustrophobic dark atmosphere, but, as Lu argues, ‘the design of underground space not only contributes to creating a harmonious atmosphere between the natural and built environments but also makes interior space of the museum mysterious and unpredictable.’51 This effect is achieved through the high triangular ceiling with windows at the top (Fig.3). Safdie’s building, in comparison with the previous Holocaust Museum’s architecture, highlights its geographical position as it is not only on the top of the mount, but it is an integral part of it, not a guest as much as the owner, invading and adapting to the territory at the same time: it is the museum architectural peak of the Zionist ideology.
Yad Vashem is a national institution, sponsored mainly by the Israeli government as well as by many organizations, such as the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany and the American Society for Yad Vashem, and privates. Its claim is that the Holocaust cannot be compared to any other genocide in history. A claim so strong that in 2009 the Museum fired an instructor, Itamar Shapira, who compared the Shoah to Nakba, the 1948 Palestinian exodus.52 According to the online edition of the newspaper Haaretz, the man violated the extremely strict policy of its employers not to discuss political issues or use the Holocaust for political uses. Shapira mentioned the Nakba because from the hill visitors can see the ruins of Deir Yassin, the village that saw the 1948 massacre. Looking at the Judean hills some see the redemption of Jewish people, others are reminded of the most egregious acts of violence against Palestinians during the Nakba.53 The Nakba, which means ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic, is the 1948 exodus of Palestinian people from their homes in former Mandatory Palestine after the end of British mandate in 1947 during the Israeli-Palestinian War 1947-1949. In national Israeli memory, the Nakba is called War of Independence and is celebrated every year as Independence Day. Shapira argued in the article that ‘Yad Vashem talks about the Holocaust survivors' arrival in Israel and about creating a refuge here for the world's Jews. I said there were people who lived on this land and mentioned that there are other traumas that provide other nations with motivation.’54 Yad Vashem follows the State narrative and as Thomas argues, ‘by emphasizing and silencing different events, Israel has managed to create a
51 Lu, ‘Museum architecture as spatial storytelling of historical time,’ 447.
52 Stern, ‘Yad Vashem Fires Employee Who Compared Holocaust to Nakba,’ Haaretz, April 23, 2009, https://www.haaretz.com/1.5041498.
53 Thomas, ‘Collective Memory of Trauma,’ 203.
hegemonic, authoritative narrative of its history while allowing for collective amnesia to erase the Palestinian counter-narrative.’55 Both Palestine and Israel based their national memory on the ‘otherization’ of each other’s suffering. As Israel ignores that the Nakba ever happened, the State created a collective amnesia banning Nakba commemoration from 2011.56 At the same time, Palestinians are not made aware of the events of the Holocaust. As Thomas writes, when discussing both Yad Vashem and the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit (25 km from Jerusalem) neither of the museums are ready to ‘take steps to recognize the mere presence of the Other, let alone to formally acknowledge the other side’s narrative.’57 Therefore, as this wall of indifference of both countries stays up, the reaction of Yad Vashem to the educator’s comment is not unexpected.
However, when it comes to politics, Yad Vashem is politicized by the State of Israel often, as Matti Friedman analyses in his article in The New York Times, as State leaders from all over the world always visit it during their diplomatic stays in Israel. Therefore, while its employees are not allowed to mention politics because of Yad Vashem’s politics, it becomes ‘a tool of Israeli Realpolitik’58 in the hands of the State. Yad Vashem argues that its ‘position is that the Holocaust cannot be compared to any other event and that every visitor can draw his own political conclusions.’59 Yet, visitors are presented from the very beginning with a Zionist narrative, first of all through the landscape architecture. Tom Segev, an Israeli writer and historian who is part of Israel's New Historians,60 commented on the new opening in 2005 in an article by Chris McGreal. The Jewish writer argues that the reason beyond the complete renovation was not purely to attract more audience and update their exhibit, but ‘The new museum's a statement of two things. It tells you that nowhere in the world should there be a more magnificent Holocaust museum than in Jerusalem, not in Washington, not in Berlin. This is the reason why it was built in such a way. There's an element of competition here.’61 Therefore, Israel positions itself at the center of Holocaust narrative in the world, and it needed
55 Thomas, ‘Collective Memory of Trauma,’ 201. 56 Ibid.
57 Ibid., 206.
58 Friedman, ‘What Happens When a Holocaust Memorial Plays Host to Autocrats’ The New York
Times, December 8, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/08/opinion/sunday/yad-vashem-holocaust-memorial-israel.html.
59 Stern, ‘Yad Vashem Fires Employee Who Compared Holocaust to Nakba.’
60 Israeli’s New Historians is a group of scholars challenging many concepts that are part of Israel’s narrative.
61 McGreal, ‘This is ours and ours alone’ The Guardian, March 15, 2005,
the appropriate architecture and museum to affirm its dominance in the field. And it was successful, as it is the leading institution dedicated to the Shoah in the world.
I.2 The Holocaust History Museum’s Narrative
The narrative of the Holocaust History Museum is strictly connected to the architecture of the building. Therefore, this subchapter is going to analyze how the display and architecture work together in the telling of the Shoah in it.
The importance of Holocaust collective memory has increased in these last years. In fact, most of the Holocaust survivors are now dead. Therefore, it is our duty to make sure that their stories and memories are recorded and presented to the public. Holocaust museums contribute to the way the Holocaust collective memory is presented to their visitors. Collective memory is made of different voices and opinions, and Yad Vashem, as well as all Holocaust museums are responsible for showing different sides and perspectives of the Shoah. The importance of the connection between Holocaust collective memory and Holocaust museums is also addressed by Rotem who writes that ‘the generation of survivors has been passing on their personal legacy to the museums, which will construct a collective memory by molding their autobiographical recollections into a constricted narrative to be remembered by future generations.’62 The 2005 new YVHHM took the need of the visitors into consideration for a more personal display. As The New York Times reported on the day of the opening, ‘rather than the dry history and emphasis on photographs of the old museum, the new one relies on more modern techniques of film and recreation of reality through artefacts, concentrating on the stories of individuals caught up in the horror of a previously unimaginable world.’63
For years Holocaust survivors lived without ever mentioning what happened to them, their children almost unaware of the events. Neuman talks about it at the beginning of his book,
Shoah Presence: ‘I woke up the next morning and I could not recall a single detail of my
father’s story. I had completely repressed it, unwilling to deal with the narrative, with the horrific details and their significance. I completely rejected my father’s representation of his Holocaust story. […] It was a failure of representation; the mind could not absorb the details.’64 Segev explains how at the beginning what Jewish people went through in Europe was
62 Rotem, Constructing Memory, 16.
63 ‘New Holocaust Museum Opens in Jerusalem’ The New York Times, March 15, 2005,
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/15/international/middleeast/new-holocaus-holocaust-museum-opens-in-jerusalem.html.
considered a taboo in Israel, however as the years went by, especially with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in the 1960s, there was an increasing urge to break the silence around the Shoah.65 Apart from the trauma, horror and pain surrounding the genocide, another reason why Holocaust survivors did not openly initiate a conversation on what happened is that as soon as the European Jews started to live in Israel, the Jewish people living there saw them as weak and their stories were met with disinterest. Shannon Andrea Thomas writes about this, stating that for some years right after the Shoah, the Jews of the diaspora were seen as ‘Old Jews’ and they were in antithesis to the ‘New Jews’ who were living in the Biblical land and were considered superior Jews. He also points out that the Yishuv66 textbooks written between 1930 and 1948 used the same anti-Semitic stereotypes applied in Europe in those years. ‘Old Jews’ were depicted with very prominent ‘Jewish noses’ and hunched backs in opposition to the ‘New Jews’ who were strong and handsome. Some of these books even implied that the diaspora Jews were punished because they did not recognize Zionism.67 ‘This contributes to a separation or a strange wall between Holocaust survivors and the native Israelis... Ben Gurion called it “a barrier of blood and silence and agony and loneliness.”’68 Therefore, before the Holocaust became one of the explanations for the founding of the State of Israel, Jews escaping from Europe and Holocaust survivors were marginalized. As the second-generation Holocaust survivors grew up, it became clear how their parents’ trauma was passed on to them, for example Samuel Juni discusses in his essay ‘Identity Disorders of Second-Generation Holocaust Survivors’ or Art Spiegelman in his Holocaust graphic novel, Maus. Thus, in the new museum they shifted the narrative from a historical-chronological one, to a personal and individual story based one. This was in reaction to a need to help young Jews find their own identity in a post-Holocaust world.
The following paragraph describes and analyzes the Holocaust History Museum, alongside narrative-atmosphere-architecture-display, from the entrance main gate to the terrace on Jerusalem at the end of Safdie’s building. The description and analysis is based on both my personal visit to the museum and written material on it.
The YVHHM ‘presents the story of the Shoah from a unique Jewish perspective, emphasizing the experiences of the individual victims through original artefacts, survivor
65 McGreal, ‘This is ours and ours alone.’
66 Yishuv: the old Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel before the founding of the State of Israel. 67 Thomas, ‘Collective Memory of Trauma,’ 207-208.
testimonies and personal possessions.’69 Visitors enter the museums through a wooden bridge that, as Rotem points out, is meant to detach them from daily life in favor of entering the realm of memory.70 Since the exit is not visible from the entrance, the visitors seem to enter in a place where there is no escape. The prism building is designed according to an evolving narrative, beginning with an overview of the prewar life of Jewish people in Europe, and ending with the previously mentioned terrace of Jerusalem. Visitors are forced to follow the chronological narrative of the museum because the possibility to just walk straight towards the end is blocked by transition barriers guiding you through the different galleries (Fig.4). Therefore, as visitors zigzag the rooms, the triangle of light becomes closer and closer. As Rotem reports the words of the exhibition’s designer Dorit Harel, ‘Visitors should experience every part of the exhibition, without short cuts or abridgements.’71 The lighting differs in the main corridors and in each room: at the top of the prism there is a glass skylight which allows the main corridor of the museum to have natural light even if underground. The lateral galleries get darker as the theme gets more dramatic, but they are all still softly illuminated by natural light through small slits. Safdie’s building is built so that the floor of the underground structure goes downhill until it rises again at the end when the visitors reach the terrace. This is especially clear from Sadfie’s sketches of the museum (Fig.5). The dark years of the Holocaust are therefore depicted as a downhill path that is saved by the light of Jerusalem and the rise of the floor towards safety: Israel.
Lu highlights the importance of the landscape of Yad Vashem for its engagement with
historical time.72 One thing that Yad Vashem emphasizes is how, differently from most Holocaust museums, their exhibition is based on authentic objects.73 Although not mentioned in the landscape analysis by Lu, this use of original items also speaks about the historical time concept the museum works with. As the museum narrative progresses in the museum, a strong sense of nostalgia is felt by the visitors in the rooms. Nostalgia as Boym discussed it, in the sense of a longing for a place that does not yet exist, a sense of completeness in other historical times.74 By the end of the museum, that nostalgia is fulfilled by the Zionist narrative: the ‘Promised Land’ idea of a Divine right on the land of Israel from the Bible is permeated with
69 ‘Holocaust History Museum,’ Yad Vashem, Accessed March 2019, https://www.yadvashem.org/museum/holocaust-history-museum.html. 70 Rotem, Constructing Memory, 63.
71 Ibid., 64.
72 Lu, ‘Museum architecture as spatial storytelling of historical time,’ 446. 73 Rotem, Constructing Memory, 66.
nostalgia and is also a very problematic aspect of Zionist politics as it critically is a colonial attitude.
Just like chapters in a book, each gallery of the Museum has a different title. The first room, ‘The World That Was’, presents a video made by Michal Rovner called Living
Landscape. Made specifically for Yad Vashem, the exhibit covers the entire thirteen-meter-tall
triangular south wall of Safdie’s building. Perry analyses the work as an in-between space between life outside and the museum, it initiates the visitor to the visit. She further argues that, ‘Not only does the piece welcome us into the museum, it also thematizes hospitality in returning to the motifs of home/land and the address/greeting. Positioning its viewers alternately as host and guest, it presses us to an ethical reflection on our relationship to the history and memory of the Holocaust and its victims.’75 Living Landscape introduces the visitors to two concepts beyond the museum: the idea of home for Jewish people, before the war Europe and today Israel, as well as individuality. Jewish people were never all the same, each victim of the Holocaust has their own story and they all differ from each other. Thus, Rovener’s video portrays the diversity of the lives of Jewish people in order to show how it was not just six million murders, but six million individual victims.
Holocaust museums often include literary Shoah narratives into their exhibitions, the use of literature in the telling of the Holocaust in museums gives more power to the narrative and shows an individual unique perspective. In the room ‘From Equals to Outcasts’, that discusses the rise of National Socialism and anti-Jewish policies, Yad Vashem’s curators reported a well-known poem written by pastor Martin Niemöller on the wall. Niemöller at the beginning of the Nazi regime was a Nazi supporter, but he later opposed to Hitler risking his life: he was captured by the Gestapo and for eight years he was a prisoner in different concentration camps.76 His poem is a warning on the dangers of apathy:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
75 Rachel E. Perry, ‘Holocaust Hospitality: Michal Rovner's Living Landscape at Yad Vashem,’ 89. 76 ‘Galleries: From equals to outcasts’, Yad Vashem, Accessed March 24, 2019,
https://www.yadvashem.org/museum/holocaust-history-museum/galleries/from-equals-to-outcasts.html.
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.77
Like pastor Martin’s story, Primo Levi as well as Anne Frank have their own view of the Shoah events, and museums incorporate their talent of expression to highlight the horror of the genocide. Yad Vashem creates a narrative in which individual and common views are united in order to present many different Jewish perspectives on the Shoah to the visitors, who are presented with both the Nazi-German environment at the end of the 1930s as well as with the testimonies of the survivors. The display of the second room focuses on 1938 and the
Kristallnacht as the point of realization that life in Germany for Jewish people was not possible
anymore, and it was never going to be the same. While the room presents a deep insight into the rise of antisemitism in Germany, it skips the historical background and it directly starts from the rise of Nazism. Goldberg in fact argues that:
‘It is obvious that the decision to skip almost all introductory explanations regarding the European and German context from which Nazism arose is deliberate. This decision introduces a very significant gap at the beginning of the narrative. Consequently, the whole story begins in its very middle. […] Modernity racism, former genocides, colonialism and imperialism, the development of discourses and practices of exclusions in the sciences, totalitarianism, fascism, the First World War, the Weimar Republic, mass society, modern nationalism the modern nation-state and so on are all omitted.’78
Here, Goldberg highlights a very problematic aspect of the YVHHM, that is its monochromatic portrayal of the Holocaust. The display narrative shapes the so called Final Solution as a decision that was made already when Nazism came to power. YVHHM’s narrative implies that antisemitism was almost the only cause of the Holocaust when it alone cannot be the only historical background to explain it. Otherwise, it is not clarified why, since antisemitism was already rooted in Europe for centuries, it happened in the 20th century and not before.
Goldberg further argues that the Museum does not provide the visitors with information on why the persecution got worse. As an example of how the YVHHM creates this misleading
77 ‘Martin Niemoller: First they came for the Socialists,’ Holocaust Encyclopedia, Accessed April 12, 2019, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-niemoeller-first-they-came-for-the-socialists.
representation of the Final Solution, Goldberg chooses an installation in the second room of the museum, which is a clip from “Hitler’s infamous speech of January 1939 is presented. The visitor cannot avoid this clip, which repeats over and over again Hitler’s words that ‘if international finance-Jewry. . . should succeed in plunging the nations into a world war yet again, then the outcome will not be the victory of Jewry, but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!’”79 However, as Ian Kershaw argues, this ‘prophetic speech’ is much more complex than the Museum suggests and it cannot be identified as the definitive moment when National Socialist planned the Final Solution.80 This omission of the museum is identified by Goldberg as an anti-representation of history.81 In fact, visitors without an extensive historical background on the Holocaust are brought to see the entire narrative of the Holocaust Museum as a simplistic path that leads to the genocide.
While the Museum offers an emotional Holocaust history, its lack of a text or video explaining the complexities of the Shoah is problematic. In fact, the objects and installations of the Museum offer a unique experience to the visitors, piles of silver Menorahs stolen from the Jews, original photographs taken in concentration camps, first-person testimonies presented with various medias, the focus on antisemitism of the institution commemorates the victims in a respectful and engaging/interesting way. Nonetheless, the Museum is not transparently dealing with the omission of historical information leading the visitors to gain a misguided historical view of the Holocaust. This is problematic because historical inaccuracy on the Holocaust is what the Yad Vashem Remembrance Center fights against. This dissertation argues that an introductory text briefly explaining how multi-layered and complex the events of the Shoah are, and how the narrative focuses on the rise of antisemitism in Europe would improve the museum overall narrative and experience.
At the end of the YVHHM’s exhibition, Hansen-Glucklich focuses on the banner that says, ‘Remember what Amalek did to you!’ explaining that the Amalek nation is the Biblical paradigmatic enemy of the Jews, therefore knowing this shows how the curators of the exhibition create a controversial link between the Holocaust and Biblical tales of Jewish suffering and persecution and inscribing the Shoah as a climactic point into a larger Jewish
79 Ibid., 195.
80 Ian Kershaw, ‘Hitler’s prophecy and the Final Solution,’ in On Germans and Jews under the Nazi
regime, ed. Moshe Zimmermann (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2006), 49– 66.
narrative.82 The banner and the lack of in-depth information on the Holocaust perpetrators and bystanders in the narrative creates a religious Jewish and Zionist idea that of the Shoah as a pre-determined event to lead to the foundation of the State of Israel, and highlights how the Museum sees the diaspora as an unnatural event that had to be overcome. According to this narrative, the victims of the Holocaust are not always defined as victims, but as martyrs. Under the first banner, a second one reads: ‘Jews, do not forget the victims among the Jewish people. Your participation in the unveiling of the memorial stones honors all 6.000.000 Jewish martyrs’. Hansen-Glucklich differentiates between a victim and a martyr: a martyr has agency and the power to choose, they die for something, for a greater cause. A victim dies for nothing because they have no choice.83 This is highly problematic because if the Holocaust victims become martyrs who died for a greater cause, for Judaism or for the founding of Israel, then Yad Vashem changes history. The reason behind this choice is that they want to give to the victims their power back, to make them less weak following the Zionist idea of presenting Jewish people as strong and independent, not as helpless victims. Another example of this Zionist martyr-victim narrative is the focus that the museum has on the Ghetto uprising during WWII, in particular on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, as a proof of martyrdom instead of victimhood.
The problematic misuse of the word martyrs in Yad Vashem to reinforce the Zionist narrative is also controversial because of the Israeli history during the Holocaust. As Thomas analyzed, at the beginning the European Jewish survivors living in Israel were marginalized by the Israeli Jews. The last ones saw the first ones as weak and powerless, therefore Yad Vashem not acknowledging this first refusal of Holocaust survivors by the Israeli people and the use of the name martyrs becomes even more problematic, however it is specific of the Zionist narrative in the museum and the Zionist ideal of Jewish people as strong and powerful in order to defend themselves against antisemitism.
To conclude this chapter, the Yad Vashem’s decision of omitting part of the historic narrative compromises the informative qualities of the museum, that is restricted to a narrow Jewish-Israeli point of view. Because of this, the lack of both multiculturalism and recognition of other genocides results in the museum not being able to transmit larger values such as the importance of tolerance and empathy towards each other which, according to this study, should
82 Hansen-Glucklich, ‘Rituals of Remembrance: How We Remember the Holocaust’ Filmed 23 January 2019 at Mary Talks: University of Mary Washington, USA. Video, 59:20.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObBTgWgGcrI. 83 Ibid.
be a priority of Holocaust museums. Thus, in the YVHHM there is no prevention for the present and future and there is no space for anyone else’s suffering. However, the information and documents of the YVHHM are accessible and effectively engage the public, the lack of a broader view is because they have such a specific agenda with the Zionist narrative. The Yad Vashem Historic Holocaust Museum reaches its goal to commemorate the Holocaust victims as individuals rather than nameless victims where the names in the Hall of Names are presented as in their natural homeland (Fig.6).
Chapter II
The Jewish Museum in Berlin
While the first chapter focused on Yad Vashem, a museum built according to the point of view of the victims, the second chapter of this thesis analyses a museum located in the capital of the country of the perpetrators of the Holocaust. The Jewish Museum in Berlin is not defined as a Holocaust museum. However, like Rotem argues, naming a Holocaust museum ‘Jewish’ represents a political stand and cannot, therefore, be a deciding criterion by which to exclude the museum from the study of Holocaust museums.84 In the case of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, one of the main reasons why the museum is perceived by the public as a Holocaust museum is based on Daniel Libeskind’s building, inaugurated in 1997.85 The building creates a disrupting and intense experience through its sharp metallic shapes. As Rotem writes, ‘this building is possibly the most persuasive example of the tremendous influence that an architect can have on the museum’s narrative and the messages it conveys.’86 The importance of its architecture is demonstrated by the curatorial choice of leaving it empty for the first three years since the building was completed; the curators were having difficulties organizing an exhibition for such a unique space, therefore visitors toured the empty building until 2001, when the exhibition was opened.
The first Jewish museum in Berlin, opened in 1933, was located next to the New Synagogue. The museum became soon a significant part of the life of the Jewish people living in Berlin, as it was sponsoring Jewish artists. With the increasing antisemitism, Jews became increasingly attracted to Jewish culture. Nevertheless, after the Kristallnacht in 1938, the museum was damaged and closed, and the director was imprisoned by the Nazis.
In 1971, during the Bonn Republic, the exhibition Leistung und Schicksal87 on the Jewish history of Berlin was highly successful, therefore the idea of building a second Jewish museum in West Berlin was born. Rotem highlights the struggle of the Jewish congregation wishing to both build an independent display on their history and culture, as well as wanting to integrate
84 Rotem, Constructing Memory, 139.
85 Daniel Libeskind is a Polish-American architect and he is the son of two Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors. In Between the Lines he says that ‘my sense of Jewishness has nothing to do with either fundamentalism or rebellion.’ Apart from the Jewish Museum in Berlin, he also designed other Jewish Institutions: the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco and the Danish Jewish Museum in Copenhagen. The Jewish Museum in Berlin was his first project.
Daniel Libeskind, Between the Lines.
86 Details on the first Jewish museum in Berlin in Rotem, Constructing Memory, 141. 87 Translation from German: Achievement and Destiny.
their story to the city’s general historical narrative. Thus, they decided to create a separate Jewish Museum as part of the Berlin state museum, however during the years of construction, it became an independent institution, separated from the Berlin Museum.88 As the website states, ‘In 2001, responsibility for the Jewish Museum Berlin passed to the German federal government and the museum became a foundation under direct federal supervision.’89
This chapter examines how memory is constructed in the JMB, focusing on Libeskind’s building as architectural narrative and exhibition narrative of the Shoah, as well as on the temporary exhibition ‘Welcome to Jerusalem’. The aim is to analyze how the JMB deals with perpetrators’ guilt and explore whether the Museum really manages to be what they define themselves as: ‘a vibrant center of reflection on Jewish history and culture as well as about migration and diversity in Germany.’90 How does the JMB weave the past into the seams of the present through the architecture and the narrative of its collection?
II.1 Geographic Significance and Architecture Jewish Museum, Berlin
A zinc shell Housing a history Of terror In its emptiness. A giddiness Of uneven ground. Propels you forward In zig-zag light Towards inevitable Darkness.
A forest of stone Pillars brings Escape into air, Into exile.
Lotte Kramer91
88 Rotem, Constructing Memory, 142.
89 ‘Museum History,’ Jewish Museum Berlin, Accessed January 19, 2019, https://www.jmberlin.de/en/history-our-museum.
90 ‘Who are We,’ Jewish Museum Berlin, Accessed January 19, 2019, https://www.jmberlin.de/en/who-we-are.
The history of German Jews is a difficult one to tell, and narrating it in the Third Reich’s Capital is even more complex. While the Jewish Museum in Berlin is not per se a trauma site,92 like Auschwitz as a concentration camp is, its position in Europe, and more specifically in Berlin, is very significant, especially when placed in comparison with Jerusalem. Situated in Lindenstraße, the Museum was built in the former West Berlin, and it is very close to Checkpoint Charlie, the main crossing point between East and West Berlin after the construction of the wall in 1961, now part of the Mauer Museum.93 Collective memory was constructed very differently in West and East Germany, as argued by Wolfgram, but a common theme was German victimhood: they saw themselves as victims of the war and Jews were victims of Nazism.94 Therefore, a figurative wall was built between the good Germans and the evil Nazis. Both West and East Germany, not ready to face the perpetrators’ narrative, created the myth of Nazi-terror. Wolfgram explains ‘a myth is not necessarily untrue, but rather a specific narrative about the past invested with symbolic power.’95 The Nazi-terror myth is the claim that the Nazi Gestapo terrorized the entire German population equally, and this is why they remained passive to the Holocaust events. However, like Johnson’s studies reveal, the Gestapo was too weak to do investigations alone and it relied massively on popular collaboration, only specific minorities like the Jews and the Communists were targeted and more than 75 percent of Germans broke laws without being afraid of punishment.96
East Germany, under the DDR government, prioritized the remembrance of the November Revolution (1918) over Kristallnacht. The East German population saw themselves as victims of both Nazism and the DDR, leaving no space to address German antisemitism and their role as perpetrators of the Shoah until the late 1980s, before then, Holocaust commemoration was absent.97
In West Germany, the perpetrators’ narrative was recognized in the late 1960s, sooner than in the East, however they also struggled to face the Holocaust. The Shoah was not as muted as in the East, it was discussed, but the state, individuals and media first never discussed who the perpetrators were, and then they started discussing ‘the victims of National Socialism’,
92 Patrizia Violi, ‘Luoghi della memoria: dalla traccia al senso.’
93 ‘History,’ Mauermuseum, Accessed June 4, 2019, https://www.mauermuseum.de/en/about-us/history/.
94 Mark Wolfgram, ‘Getting History Right’: East and West German Collective Memories of the
Holocaust and War, 26.
95 Ibid.
96 Ibid., 26-27. 97 Ibid., 29-30.
thus taking distance from the perpetrators and avoiding a discussion on the Jewish persecution.98 Berlin was the center of Holocaust discussion because it had the largest Jewish population after the war. This Holocaust memory background is used to show the importance of historiography to understand the momentum of Libeskind’s building as a reflection of historiography and why a Jewish museum was first built long after WWII ended.
The JMB is a site of commemoration, of penitence, of celebration of the Jewish culture and minorities that quickly became one of the most visited museums in Berlin. The words of the poet and Holocaust survivor Kramer establish the concept that is at the core of Libeskind’s building: emptiness and absence. Hansen-Glucklich discusses the ‘Architecture of Absence in the Jewish Museum in Berlin’ in her PhD project ‘Holocaust Memories: Visuality and the Sacred in Museums and Exhibits.’99 She highlights the power of Libeskind’s architecture writing that some critics and visitors wanted the museum to stay empty as a memorial to the victims of the Shoah rather than a museum. However, the Polish-born architect designed the building as a space to hold a narrative and exhibition, not as a memorial.100
The Museum is structured in two different buildings: the Old Building, a ‘nineteenth century courthouse destroyed during World War II but later restored and subsequently used to house the Berlin Museum’s main collection’101 and the Libeskind Building, one of the first examples of deconstructivist architecture. The Old Building is the main entrance to the Museum, and it hosts the café, the ticket office, the clock room on the ground floor, and the exhibition ‘Welcome to Jerusalem’ on the first floor. Libeskind’s building shows the broken cityscape of Berlin. Sandler explains how Berlin’s roughness is not just a sing of the WWII bombing: in the nineteenth-century the city quickly grew because of industrialization, creating dirty buildings, slums, pollution. The Nazi regime also contributed to the decay of the urban environment between demolitions and new projects, left unfinished because of the war.102 Even after the war and reunification, Berlin continued, and continues, to show signs of its broken history. Therefore, the modern building of the JMB contrasting with the reconstructed Baroque building is a disruptive view that fits into the Berlin’s cityscape (Fig.7).
98 Ibid., 43-44.
99 An assistant Professor at the University of Mary Washington and specializes in German-Jewish literature and Holocaust Studies.
100 Hansen-Glucklich, ‘Holocaust Memories: Visuality and the Sacred in Museums and Exhibits,’ 29. 101 Brent Allen Saindon ‘A Doubled Heterotopia: Shifting Spatial and Visual Symbolism in the Jewish Museum Berlin's Development,’ 25.
Libeskind also created the Glass Courtyard where the Café resides six years after the opening. The architect was inspired by the sukkah, made with branches and leaves.103 The sukkah in the JMB is a modern representation of a real one, it is closed on three sides and open on one which leads outside, it is a permeable construction that references nature and reminds us of other Jewish traditions that are part of the Jewish Museum. Visitors can look up the glass ceiling cut by white metal branches and see the sky through them; this is the same experience that Jewish people have during Sukkot, when they look up to the sky through the roof of the sukkah. Libeskind argues that the Glass Courtyard is a symbol of life and tradition: visitors standing in it can still see the Old Building, but they also see the life in the Museum moving forward.104
From the Old Building, visitors access the permanent collection through an underground staircase. Visually, there is nothing connecting the Baroque building together with the new building (Fig.8). In the audio guide, the architect argues that ‘there is no bridge between the old baroque history of Berlin and the new museum: there is no obvious bridge, that bridge is underground, is lying in darkness, and the darkness represents the darkness of what happened in Berlin: it is a violent entrance.’105 Hansen-Glucklich, based on the discussion on the semiotic possibilities of architecture by Robert Venturi and Charles Jencks, defines two impressions for visitors approaching the museum: ‘The first consists of the irregularly spaced, jaggedly incised window bands that appear like sudden fault lines or cracks and destabilize the continuous, smooth zinc façade of the museum and create the image of a shattered Star of David. The second impression is that of the contrast between the Libeskind building and its neighbor.’106 The contrast represents the broken history of Berlin Jews, broken but still alive, healing through the underground bridge uniting the two buildings, healing through its cathartic architecture.
In the twentieth century, an architectural debate on modern museums started. On one side, the German architect Ludwig van der Rohe argued in favor of the neutrality of architecture as a container to the museums’ content. On the other, Frank Lloyd Wright believed architecture should have a starring role to engage with the public.107 Libeskind’s deconstructivist building,
103 The Jewish sukkah is a temporary celebratory structure, a small house built with autumnal harvest material like leaves and branches. It is used for eating and sleeping under it during the Sukkot festival that commemorates the Exodus and also celebrates the end of the harvest in Israel.
104 From the audio guide of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, April 2019. 105 Libeskind in the audio guide of the JMB.
106 Hansen-Glucklich, ‘Holocaust Memories,’ 34-36.
