Between Museum, Monument…
069(430.131)
BETWEEN MUSEUM, MONUMENT AND MEMORIAL: DANIEL
LIBESKIND’S JEWISH MUSEUM IN BERLIN (1999)
Željka Pješivac
University of Arts in Belgrade, Serbia
Abstract: The main hypothesis of this paper is that
Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin is moving between
museum, monument and memorial, that is, that this
musuem is ‘place of memory’ (lieu de mémoire). Using
Pierre Nora’s concept lieu de mémoire as the starting
point of this study and redefining this concept through
the language of architecture, the main aim of this paper
is to explore this architectural object in the frames of
cultural studies. The central foci of this paper are not
thus artistic (productional, technical, stylist, etc.) problems as specifics of autonomous world of arts, but problems of locating architecture within culture and representing procedures of culture within architecture.
Through aesthetics of architecture this paper explores
problems of representation and construction of cultural
mechanism, relations between culture and power, representation and construction of Jewish ethnical identity.
As cultural studies is a heterogeneous field, this paper
connects the following: theory of reception, narratology,
cultural anthropology, curator practices, ethnology, and
finally theory of performativity
Keywords: place of memory, museum, monument, memorial, the Jewish Museum in Berlin
I. PLACES OF MEMORY
The phenomenon of rapid time of globalization, democratization, and the rise of mass culture and media,
brought the new historical perceptions, revealing the
distance between real memory, social and unviolated,
embodied in primitive and archaic societies, and history as a way by which our society (condemned to oblivion, because they are led with change, rapid developments, flux and flow of information) organize the past.
Eradication of memory, reveals a fracture of an ancient
bond of identity, a rapture of the equation of history
and memory. ‘Places of memory’ (lieux de mémoire), as
Nora says, did not exsist, because memory was not
repressed by history. (Nora, 1989: 8). Every, and the
most ordinary gesture, would be experienced as the
ritual repetition of that what has always been done, in
body identifaction of acts and meaning. As soon as there
is a trace, distance, meditation, we no longer speak of memory, but of history.
Memory and history, far from being synonymous,
appear now to be in fundamental opposition. Memory
is a life, borne by living societies founded in its name. it
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remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic
of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and
appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and
periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the
reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of
what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history
is a representation of the past. (…) Memory installs remembrance within the sacred; history, always prosaic,
releases it again. Memory is blind to all but the group it
binds – which is to say, as Maurice Halbwachs has said,
that there are as many memories as there are groups,
that memory is by nature multiple and yet specific; collective, plural, and yet individual. History, on the other
hand, belongs to everyone and to no one, whence its
claim to universal authority (Nora, 1989: 9).
One of the most visible signs ‘of the split between
history and memory has been the emergence of a history of history’, that is ‘the awakening of a historiographic consciousness’ (in France) (Nora, 1989: 15).
Development of history, from medieval to modern
historians, was based on a thorough and accurate reconstruction of the past. Historiography, brings dilemma, becomes the blade of critics, introducing discourses and interpretations. This moment of transition
from totemic to critical history, is the moment of appearance and beginning of ‘places of memory’. In order
to explain the basic features of ‘places of memory’ as a
consequence of transformation of memory, Nora identifies three types of memory: archival memory, dutymemory and alienated memory.
Archival memory – memory that is entirely based on
that what is the most precise in traces, the most material in the remains, the most concrete in the record-
ings, and the most visible in the images. It is an ahistorical approach toward memory, where memory is
brought down to the context, archive or interpretative
practice of the investigation of unconnected facts of
the past without necessary reference to their historical
order or sense. Duty-memory – is memory that becomes the central part of individual identity. It implies
‘a decisive shift from the historical to the psychological, from the social to the individual, from the objective
message to its subjective reception, from repetition to
rememoration’ (Nora, 1989: 15). It is about memory as
a private matter and personal need of every individual
in order of discovering one’s own identity and affiliation. This memory builds different relation between
identity and one’s own ‘I’, between mechanism of
memory and relations toward past. Finally, alienated
memory (or distance-memory) – is memory that is offered by history. This kind of memory is something
entirely different from what we would expect from a
historical knowledge: ‘no longer a retrospective continuity but the illumination of discontinuity’ (Nora,
1989: 16). The history that is sought as an immersion
in the continuity of memory, becomes now memory
that is projected in discontinuity. The past has shown
to us as a radical other and we become completely cut
off from it.
‘Places of memory’, as Nora says, are places in all of
three sense of meaning: material, functional and symbolic
(Nora, 1989: 9). (but with different level of theirs presence), we could say, moveing between archival memory,
alienated memory and duty-memory. A purely material
place (like an archive) becomes a ‘place of memory’ only
‘if the imagination invests it with a symbolic aura’ (Nora,
1989: 10). A purely functional place (like a testament)
becomes a ‘place of memory’ if it is object of a ritual, and a
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purely symbolic place becomes a ‘place of memory’ if it
breaks a temporal continuity. (Nora, 1989: 19). A commemorative minute of silence, for an example, that looks
like an significant example of symbolic meaning, is in the
same time material (material segment of time) and functional (because ‘it serves as a concentrated appeal to
memory’).(Nora, 1989: 8). In terms of language of architecture, we could say that ‘places of memory’ are moving
between museum, monument and memorial.
II. PLACES OF MEMORY: BETWEEN MUSEUM,
MONUMENT AND MEMORIAL
The primary function of traditional museums is materialization of memory. As architectural theorist
Quatremère de Quincy notices, (criticizing traditional
museums, that deals with the loss of cultural authenticity), ‘by removing the artefacts from their original places
and ‘reconstituting the debris’ in the space of the museum, their ‘network of ideas and relations’ has been forsaken. (Edge & Weiner 2006: 227) ‘Their essential merit’,
Quatremère says, ‘depended on the beliefs that created
them, on the ideas to which they were tied, to the circumstances that explained, to the community of thoughts
which gave them their unity. (De Quincy, 1989: 227) According to Quatremère, placing objects in the foreign
context of the museum, the objects become insignificant
caricatures, but not without meanings. Removed from
their ancient existence and from their contexts, artefacts
are made inactive, unauthentic and institutionalized in
the space of museum. They became material, almost ‘paper’ cuttings of the past times.
But, while traditional museums archive memory,
memorials ritualize remembrance (marking memory
as a duty of every indvidual) and monument embodies
the primeval myths (Plate, 2005: 133) (marking an
alienated memory).
Monuments are very close to Benjamin’s visual notion of contemplation on the auratic object, that retains a ’distance, no matter how close the object may
be’ (Benjamin, 1999: 133), not only in spatialn but also
in temporal context, playing the role of mythic event.
Monuments do not belong immanently to history: ‘being a monument is, paradoxically, being separated
from history’ (Didier, 1999: 58). The monument stands
equally distant from the past as from the present, celebrating the excess of irreducible, untranslatable past
which cannot be fully remembered (Ibid). They are
historical objects (historical artefacts) because they do
not succeed to be integrated into the present, because
they fail to participate in history as it unfolds. Being
separated from history as well as from the present,
they offer alienated memory.
Finally, memorials are something totally opposite.
They call for ‘participants’, they call for reading and
translation in a contemporary context, they call for
interpretations reducing the memory not on an acontextual, ahistorical or accustomed recollection of historical artefacts, but on theirs reactualization in the
present, building the need for memory – memory as a
duty of every individual.
As (traditional) museums archive the memory,
monuments embody memory, and memorials ritualize
remembrance, that is, produce the need for memory
(memory as a duty of every individual), we could say
that ‘places of memory’ are moving between museum,
monument and memorial. But, how does the concept
of ‘places of memory’ function on the level of architectural work? How can narrative of the past be inscribed
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in contemporary architecture and read in the present?
How does architecture play a role in building, representation and construction of (in this case) Jewish collective memory?
III. DANIEL LIBESKIND’S JEWISH MUSEUM IN BERLIN
AS PLACE OF MEMORY
The Jewish Museum in Berlin is the work designed
by Polish-Jewish architect Daniel Libeskind. Conceptual design is a winning project of architectural and
urban competition, which was announced by the Berlin Senate in 1989. Program of the competition required a few design considerations: (1) a connection
with the existing baroque building – the Berlin Museum, formerly the object of the Supreme Court; (2) a
connection with ‘the Jewish religion, customs and ritual objects’, (3) a connection with ‘the history of the Jewish community in Germany, its rise and terrible destruction at the hands of the Nazis’, and (4) a connection with ‘the lives and works of the Jews who left their
mark on the face and the history of Berlin over the
centuries’ (Edge and Weiner, 2006:235). Due to the
political upheaval around the fall of the Berlin Wall
(1989) and the controversy surrounding the appointment of the new curatorial staff, the project was implemented only in 1999.
Libeskind developed project around a three key
concepts: (1) highlighting the importance of intellectual, cultural and economic contributions of the Jewish
citizens of Berlin; (2) the necessity of integration the
meaning of the Holocaust into the consciousness and
memory of the city of Berlin; (3) and acknowledging
and incorporating the 'erasure' of Berlin’s Jewish life.
(Libeskind, 1999: 10).
Namely, the history of the Jewish people is inextricable
from the history of Germany, such as the ethnic identity
of Jews is inseparable from the events of the Holocaust,
the biggest genocide carried out in the history of the Jews.
The position of the entrance to the facility suggests this
connection, that is, intertwining links of these historical
lines. The entrance to the Jewish Museum is only possible
through the existing baroque building of German National Museum.
The internal structure of the space of the Jewish
Museum is organized around a concept of three axes,
three lines, or three courses that overlap and forcely
intersect each other. The primary one, is the Axis of
Continuity, which is intersected with two others: the
Axis of Exile and the Axis of Holocaust (Coleman, 2005:
261). The first leads to a long steep flight of stairs, the
second to a Garden of Exile, and the third to the Holocaust Tower. All of the paths are marked with black
floor, bright white walls and fluorescent ceiling lights,
and each of the axis creates a feeling ‘of a long corridor
to nowhere’ (Coleman, 2005: 262).
The Axis of Holocaust and the Holocaust Tower. The
Axis of the Holocaust leads to the Holocaust Tower, a
vertical dark void, that as Libeskind states has a role to
establish the allegorical analogy with the past experience of being in jail before and during deportation to
concentration camps (Coleman, 2005: 264). The experience of being inside the Tower, is the experience of
uninhabitance and instability, the experience of being
still within the world, but out of its reach (Ibid). ‘Certainly, the Holocaust Tower can not analogize’ the real
feelings and ‘the experience of being hunted, captured,
transported, selected and murdered’ (Ibid). Anyway,
the Holocaust Tower is successful attempt of turning
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minds of visitors to thoughts of disappeared persons
(Jews), the city's inhabitans once elected and captured.
The Axis of Exile and the Garden of Exile. The Axis of Exile leads to the Garden of Exile, ‘notable for its slanting
ground and the forty-nine columns rising from it, each
with a tree growing out of it’ (Coleman, 2005: 265). ‘Forty-eight of the columns contain earth from Berlin, signifying 1948, the year Israel became an independent state.
The forty-nine column, at the centre, contains earth from
Israel and represents Berlin’ (Coleman, 2005: 265-266),
or precisely non-occupancy, extermination of Jewish life
from Berlin during the Second World War. Intentionally,
Libeskind's aim was to produce a feeling of strangeness,
disorientation, weakness and confusion articulated with
a noise of trees, slanting pillars and slanting platform that
make a moving uphill even more difficult. Moreover, the
city nearby can be seen, its sounds and smells can be
heard and felt, but unfortunately, it can not be accessed
from this location. From this location, the entrance to the
city and vice versa is disabled.
The Axis of Continuity. ‘Before elevators and escalators replaced stairs as the primary means of accessing
upper levels, stairways were often the most important
symbolic element (Coleman, 2005: 266)’ in this building. ‘Achieving the goal of access to the temple, courthouse or museum was made understandable to the
body through the act of climbing. Upward climbs have
correlates in the Bible as well, including in the story of
Jacob's ladder. 'Up' there is the enlightenment of wisdom, but getting at it requires effort…’ (Ibid). But the
stairway at the Jewish Museum, does not end at the
top with any temple, palace, courthouse or holy place,
but with a blank white wall. The blank wall signifies
nothing more than endless climbing with dead end.
Climbing stairs require effort, which involves all parts
of the body from the feet to the head, including breathing, but their very long and steep setting, particularly
the increased height of theirs risers from the expected
standard, makes the climb even more valuable and
strenuous. This effort is further made difficult with variations in lighting which enters the hall through slots
in the ceiling and uncomfortable breaks up and interrupt the climb. Hardly anyone remains indifferent by
the drama of 'delayed' entry. The Axis of Continuity
still continues very steeply to the entrance of the venues
of the exhibitions, marking the movement from the space
of collective toward the space of individual memory.
Spaces of exhibition. Finally visitors come to the
spaces for exhibitions, or to the permanent gallery
settings – historical artefacts. Architectural structure
at times seems to disappear behind the objects on display, but it does not lose its impact or its effect. Libeskind clearly wanted this part of the area of the Jewish
Museum to be functionally useful, ‘to be engaged and
to engage’ (Coleman, 2005: 268) (supporting encounter of fiction and faction). The structure of the room is
not just linear, as in the traditionally classical exhibition (which closely follows the chronology that is the causal chain of events). Gallery spaces, specially designed for the exhibition, are violently intersected with
horizontal walkways and paths, and with huge vertical
concrete openings or empty towers. Dialectical play of
full and empty, functional and non-functional, clearly
plays with body feelings and emotions of visitors. However, in addition to archival materiality, in this building, materiality of tower's voids is present too. Namely,
the empty towers can be read as a kind of materializations of the absence of lives and fear of oblivion, but
also as the absence of historical facts and events of the
Holocaust as a moral imperative of every Jew.
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Equally evocative is the exterior of the Jewish Museum, with its zinc cladding and eccentric windows.
Each window has a different shape and a different size.
Their number corresponds to the number of victims of
the Holocaust. The uniqueness of the each window is
analogous to the individuality of each victim (Edge
&Weiner, 2006: 237). Scattered positions and trajectories of the windows, which usually offer a fragmentary
images of the external environment, are not connected
to the internal spatial organization of the building.
They resist the modernist maxim 'form that follows
function'. Also outside the zigzag form of the object
(symbolic representation of the broken Star of David,
arguably the form which is also inspired by an orthographic trajectory that emerged from linking former
places of residence of the famous Jews on the map of
Berlin), defies the conventional setting of objects into
the orthogonal grid of the city, by which the Jewish
Museum becomes a kind of permanent cut or open
wound of Berlin.
Namely, the concept of the void, is a key architectural concept of this museum which determines Jewish
ethnic identity. The void is, as Libeskind says, the section, ‘the cut through the history of Germany’, it is the
history of Jews (Berlin`s Jewish Museum, A Personal
Tour ...). It is the extermination of Jews and the deportation of Jews’ during the Second World War, not only
from Berlin but also from Germany and from Europe
(Ivid). Emptied of any content in the physical, historical and emotional context, it reflects disoriented, fragmented, decentered, uninhabited personality, that is,
ethnic identity of Jews. But, what makes ethnic identity
different from other forms of collective identity (national or political)? It is the fact that it is oriented toward the past and that it relies on the supposed com-
mon origin (however, this past is not one that is the
subject of historical sciences, but that which collective
memory presents itself). Thus, collective memory is
that which builds and shapes ethnic identity, and that
which is evoked by moving of this building between
museum, monument and memorial.
Gallery spaces with permanent settings undoubtedly place this building in the museum edifice that display historical artefacts and somehow archive memory. Drawing from the discourse of analytic philosophy
of language of John Austin, we could say that these
settings are kind of traces, information, constative
speech acts, media recording, which do not reconstruct
history but locate moment in history. They are thus
ahistorical and antidialectical. But, Libeskind knows
very well what are the contrast and how to use contradictions. Full spaces are brought into conflict with
empty volumes defying the traditional metanarrative
history of traditional museum.
Architectural edifice, thus is not only museum edifice, but a museum object also - exhibit/display. It is
not only the form but also the part of a content. Drawing from the discourse of semiology of Roland Barthes,
we can say that it embodies many myths (including the
myth of Jews as the 'chosen people', in which religion
plays a central role in the construction of ethnic specificity), that is, numerous speeches that are selected by
history, speeches that represent a particular message
and that are made of materials already processed for
the purpose of an accepted communication. It is woven
into many meanings, many symbols and significations
that are related to mythical history of Jews (broken
star of David – the Jewish national and religious symbol, symbolic number of windows that corresponds to
the alleged number of victims of Jews, symbolic num-
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ber of columns in the Garden of Exile, and others above
mentioned symbols). The museum also functions as a
monument without conventional monumentality, offering an alienated memory.
Finally, looking at this edifice from the discourse of
cultural anthropology of Victor Turner, this edifice is
and memorial object/building that ritualize memory,
the space that calls for the act of commemoration
building memory as a duty of every individual. The
empty spaces along the Axes of the Holocaust together
with the Holocaust Tower, the Axis of Exile together
with the Garden of Exile and the Axis of Continuity, are
ritual spaces, liminal spaces, 'spaces of between', that
produce a state that is neither positively passed, nor
positively articulated future physical state of museum
visitors. These spaces separates profane space from
religious space (where the leaving, according to Arnold
van Gennep’s nomenclature, marks the first phase of
the 'ritual' of transition – phase of separation (Turner,
1989). But it is not just about entering in the Jewish
Museum, it is a 'rite' which also changes the value of
time and creates a cultural space that is determined
'out of time'. It includes symbolic behavior, especially
the reversal of things, relations and secular processes,
that presents the separation of museum visitors from
theirs previous social status. Therefore, these areas are
a kind of collective socio-cultural developments from
the previous state toward a new state. At the same
time they are crossing areas, margins or limens' (that
records second phase of ritual – phase of transition), in
which visitors pass through time and space of ambiguity, a kind of social limbo which has several attributes
or previous and recent social statuses or cultural situations, and that will take them to the new situation (to
the third phase of ritual – phase of incorporation), the
new solid and favorable position in the society at large.
This liminal space is a boundary place, a place that is
neither here nor there, a place that is ‘in between’,
between one context of meaning and action and other a place when visitors are no longer what they were
once, nor what they will soon become.
IV. CONCLUSION
The Jewish Museum in Berlin, like many contemporary history museums, establishes a new balance between history and experience, history and memory.
While in other museums this balance has led to an
increasing reliance on interactive devices, new media
and new technology, in Libeskind's museum, it is
manifested in the deliberate manipulation of aesthetic
affect of architecture, employed here as a kind of mediator between unknowable historical truth and contingent historical inerpretations.
Opposing spatial syntax of traditional museums,
based mostly on linear succession of spaces that carefully follow causal, chronological development of historical events, Libeskind builds disconnected, incomplete, fragmentary spatial forms and structures, interrupting linear – narrative flows of gallery spaces with
empty affective volumes. The affective power of the
museum’s void spaces lies in their ability to provoke a
crisis of subjectivity, referring to the crisis of ethnic
identity of Jews. The subject/visitor is not putted in a
stable, passive, static position. He/she does not lose a
vital relationship with historical and cultural artefacts,
but interacts with them. Namely, the experience of
each individual visitor, their sudden awareness of presence, is juxtaposed with that which is missing, with those
others 'individuals' whose absence suddenly becomes
palpable. Replacing the monolithic monumental building
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with an empty volume, the act of commemoration becomes unavoidable, internalized and enacted by each
subject. The museum thus functions as a memorial too,
without conventional monumentality, and each visitor as
a performer, performing the act of commemoration by
passing through the spaces of the museum.
Through the evocation of absence, with dialectical
play of full and empty, Libeskind subverts ‘metanarrative’ history of traditional museums, emphasizing the
impossibility of locating the events of the Holocaust in
historiographic terms. Its role is not to discover the
fundamental metaphysical truth, but to interpret and
evoke the past through the present by reviving the
collective memory. In it life and death, time and eternity are intimately intertwined, in a continuous spiral of
the collective and the individual, the sacred and the
profane, the immutable and the mobile. It clearly has a
double identity, one that refers to the events of the
Holocaust, and the consequent ethnic Jewish identity,
and the other which is subject to a number of readings
through different texts of society, culture and arts.
Architecture of the Jewish Museum thus offers a different view on history, on history that is:
less interested in causes than in effects; less interested in actions remembered or even commmemorated than in the traces left by those actions and in the
interaction of those commemorations; less interested
in events themselves than in the construction of events
over time, in the disappearance and reemergence of
their significations; less interested in “what actually
happened” than in its perpetual reuse and misuse, its
influence on successive presents; less interested in
traditions than in the way in which traditions are constituted and passed on. In short, a history that is neither a ressurrection nor reconstitution nor a recon-
struction nor even a representation but, in the strongest possible sense, a “rememoration” – a history that is
interested in memory not as remembrance but as the
overall structure of the past within the present (De
Quincy, 1989).
In other words, the Jewish Museum is always open
to interpretations and significant engagements with
the past. Meanings that this museum produces are
never finished, but, primary directed toward humanization of mankind and unrepeatability of suffering.
Moving between the museum as an archive, for collection of historical artifacts/objects, the museum as a
memorial, for the provocation of collective memory,
and the museum as a monument, that is, the physical
embodiment of memory, this museum is not transcendent nor transcendental, but interventional social
practice in culture. It is the 'place of memory', the
place of interaction and intervention of the past and
the present.
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