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.