EVERYWHERE you go, there are angles and lines. No right angles, only wrong angles; few flat surfaces, but slopes which disturb the body’s equilibrium. Gravity offsets us, upsets us. Edges are sharp rather than smoothed and rounded.
Twenty-five years after Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum Berlin opened, its architecture retains an extraordinary capacity to disorientate. Museums conventionally contain objects and although there are plenty here – notebooks, candlesticks, photographs and the personal paraphernalia of lives lived – this museum does something else. Libeskind makes the visitor a participant.
The building itself is an exhibit: an architecture of disruption in which space, light, sound and our own bodies become part of the experience.
Born in Łódź in 1946 to Jewish parents who survived the Holocaust, Libeskind left Poland with his family for Israel in 1957 and later settled in New York. A gifted accordionist before turning to architecture, he won the competition for the Jewish Museum Berlin in 1989, the project which established his international reputation.
Later work includes Imperial War Museum North and the master plan for the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site.
When I spoke to Libeskind recently, he was unequivocal about the intentions behind the Berlin museum. Architecture, he told me, could communicate beyond “ideas, or words”. History had to be experienced through “light, through space, through your body, through your emotions”. He had, he said, “narrated the story in an architectural sense”.
His zigzag extension, developed as Between the Lines, won first prize only months before the Berlin Wall fell. Asked whether he would design it differently today, his answer to me was no. Even when designing it, he had wondered what would remain if somebody blew the building up.
“The void cannot be blown up,” he told me, “because it’s not there.”
The void is not a single space. A system of voids runs vertically through the building where two conceptual lines intersect: one zigzagging, the other straight and invisible. Most are inaccessible, although visitors cross them on bridges. For Libeskind, they give architectural form to something a museum cannot replace: the absence left by the destruction of German-Jewish life.
At the end of the underground Axis of the Holocaust lies the Holocaust Tower, which Libeskind calls the “Voided Void”. Unlike most of the voids, visitors can enter it. The concrete structure is isolated from the main museum above ground, neither heated nor cooled, with a narrow opening high above admitting daylight.
“It’s kind of nothing in terms of what it shows,” Libeskind told me. “What is shown in a museum cannot be shown.” These spaces occupy, for him, “the margins of thought”: what is absent from the text.
For me, the Holocaust Tower released a memory from 1989. Travelling through Poland with one of Richard Demarco’s Edinburgh Arts expeditions, I visited Auschwitz I, part of the German Nazi Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex established in occupied Poland, which took its German name from the nearby Polish town of Oświęcim.
Our guide had grown up there and recalled railway wagons carrying their human cargo, smoke and the smell of burning.
In Block 11 he showed us the tiny brick standing cells into which prisoners were crammed, unable even to sit. I was 26 and almost entirely unprepared. The calculated cruelty of forcing several human beings into such an impossibly confined space remained with me for the next 37 years.
It returned with almost violent clarity when I found myself alone inside the Holocaust Tower. There was nowhere obvious to go, nothing to read, no object to contemplate, no conventional museum narrative to provide intellectual distance. I thought again of Auschwitz. When I described this to Libeskind, he told me something extraordinary.
Originally, the tower was to have been completely dark. During construction, he read the testimony of a woman deported to Stutthof who remembered seeing a sliver of white light through a crack in the railway wagon and clinging to it throughout her captivity. At the last moment, Libeskind cut an opening high in the tower.
“It’s part of that sense,” he says, “of saying something with the light.”
That sense of hope is important to Libeskind. Growing up in post-war Łódź, he inhabited a city profoundly altered by the destruction of its Jewish population.
His family left Poland in 1957 and, when I asked whether antisemitism had been part of the reason, his response was immediate: “Oh, of course.”
His parents’ experience meant that he did not approach this history simply through archives.
“I experienced it myself through who was not there, through those who were lost.”
Before architecture there was music. Libeskind was a gifted young accordionist, and music remains embedded in his architectural thinking: “proportions, harmonies, disharmonies”.
One influence on the museum was Arnold Schönberg’s unfinished opera Moses Und Aron. Libeskind conceived the footsteps of visitors crossing bridges over the voids as a kind of continuation of the unfinished work. Walter Benjamin supplied another intellectual map: Libeskind used Benjamin’s Berlin addresses and One-Way Street in developing the museum.
The system of voids interrupts any reassuring narrative of progress. It expresses, Libeskind says, something “more fundamental, philosophically or spiritually”: our inability to confront hatred and difference. Walking through the building, “it doesn’t confirm your idea of continuity of things”.
THE museum’s achievement may therefore lie not in persuading us that catastrophe can be fully understood, but in confronting us with the limits of what can be explained or comprehended.
Jewish history, however, cannot be reduced to persecution, pogrom and extermination. This is where comparison with POLIN, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, becomes revealing. Standing within the former Warsaw Ghetto and facing Nathan Rapoport’s Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, POLIN tells a thousand-year history. Its architecture, by the Finnish practice Lahdelma & Mahlamäki, was selected in a 2005 international competition in which Libeskind participated.
POLIN’s great curving entrance has been interpreted through the biblical image of the parting of the Red Sea. Libeskind was reluctant to comment on another architect’s building but identified a fundamental difference.
In Berlin, he told me, there is deliberately no final space in which visitors can gather and conclude: “Yes, we understand everything.” He sees in Warsaw a redemptive quality which he deliberately refused in Berlin.
“You’re left with a disturbance,” he says. “You’re left with an aporia. You’re left with something that you have to take into yourself.”
The comparison also exposes questions about national memory. Germany has spent decades confronting responsibility for the Holocaust. Poland was subjected to murderous German occupation, while its Jewish history also encompasses centuries of coexistence, antisemitism, rescue, indifference and anti-Jewish violence.
Libeskind is outspoken about what he regards as Poland’s difficulty in confronting parts of this history. Yet he also observed that Polish Jews “have lived in Poland for hundreds of years. They share so much.” Their destruction, he said, “was also the destruction of Poland”.
Perhaps this is why the voids are ultimately not empty. We fill them with historical, inherited and sometimes personal memory. Architecture cannot reproduce the experiences of those who were persecuted and murdered, nor should temporary disorientation be mistaken for their suffering.
But it can disrupt the comfortable distance from which history is contemplated.
Twenty-five years after it opened, Libeskind’s Jewish Museum still refuses to let us leave with everything neatly resolved. Against the void stand centuries of Jewish presence; against destruction stands the simple act of building.
“Without hope,” Libeskind says, “there would be absolutely no reason to build this museum.”
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