Jewish Museum Berlin

Light is an essential element for the sustenance of life. It aids vision and thus functionality to the living creatures. Along with the functional aspects of Light, there are psychological and spiritual connotations of light and its counterpart darkness. People perceive light and darkness in many ways but commonly as positive and negative components respectively. In Architecture lighting is used for the functional purposes, however, in few cases it is also used for psychological reasons. Jewish Musuem Berlin is one such example where light and darkness is employed to convey the misery of historical past. This paper discusses the interpretation of light and dark on the psychological and spiritual dimensions across various cultures and subsequently narrates the design elements of Jewish Museum and psychological employment of light in its architecture in detail. The paper is based on the Authors visit to Germany in an DAAD aided exchange program in the year 2008. All the photographs are taken by the Author himself.

Emptiness acts as a method of communication in itself; an unorthodox approach to the relaying of narrative, even by contemporary standards. The spaces entirely represent the history of Jews in Europe: ruptured, dark, disorienting, but ultimately continuing.

The paper presents matters of contemporary Jewish architecture in relation with the works of one of its most important creators – architect Daniel Libeskind. In times when identity, continuity of life and traditions, and community values are estranged due to globalization, cultural consumerism, and financial power and interests, people cherish significantly less the hidden significances and the sacred aspects of life, of the objects around them, and of the human milieu in which they live. In this context, sometimes, architecture has a role of purification – for the mind, for the soul, and even for the body – but only for those who understand and believe its message, and in this way, learn how to detach themselves from the profane in which they live, leaving behind the secular and entering the sacred: the fascinating, pure, and complex architectural space. This means in both literally, as well as metaphorically terms, passing through architecture, as an intermediary space between the profane and the sacred, in a place that sometimes exists out of the time. Analysing Libeskind's buildings and their symbolic meanings we identify three models of creation, in Jewish contemporary architecture, using memory as an identitary source and resource.

The present article attempts to analyse and interpret the structure of windows in the Jewish Museum in Berlin, designed by Daniel Libeskind and constructed in 1989–1999. Elongated, narrow, irregular window openings arranged at different angles like a tangle of cuts and grooves span the entire structure and resemble Hebrew letters and the kabbalistic notion of the “scattered alphabet”, which functions in Jewish tradition as a visual metaphor.
The assumption of such a perspective of interpretation, based on the visual form of the building which was, in its principle, meant to partially refer to the Holocaust, leads to the hypothesis that the chosen motifs of letter-shaped windows (the scattered alphabet) is connected to the kabbalistic postulate of the “repair of the world”, known in Jewish tradition as tikkun olam. The characteristic chaotic arrangement of the window openings is not, as it might be assumed, simply a symbol of the civilisational “fragmentation” resulting from the Holocaust. On the contrary, the design manifestly embodies the nostalgia for the mythical (and messianic) times of harmony, order and regularity, as well as the longing for clear structure and symbiosis. This manifests in the kabbalistic interpretation of the motif of letter-windows understood as a mystical (or even theurgical) element of restoration. Concentration, contemplation, perception and consideration of the forms and shapes of the letters is a notion known from the Kabbalah; in this case architectural references to Jewish Artur Kamczycki
mysticism are more than just a strategy for interpretation, but a declarative assumption made by the architect himself. Libeskind’s design in Berlin, therefore, involves the matter of language as the elementary material and instrument of salvation, while the context of the Kabbalah ought to be regarded as a certain symptom or a specific modality shaping new meanings manifested by the work of art that this museum undoubtedly is.

As a theoretician of history looking for avant-garde, unconventional, and non-or ahistorical approaches to and representations of the past, I was intrigued by Naomi Stead's comment on the Jewish Museum in Berlin designed by Daniel Libeskind [photo 1]:

This essay explores the relationship between the textual features of popular cultural artifacts pertaining to the Holocaust and the circumstances of their reception. Comparative cultural studies methods are deployed in analyzing a film, Life is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1997); a children's book, Dr. Seuss' The Sneetches (1961); and the Jewish Museum Berlin, designed by Daniel Libeskind.

Pieta as an Artistic response to the Holocaust in the Works of Jewish and Non-Jewish Female Artists The paper I would like to read out today was written on the basis of a chapter from my book about the Jewish Museum Berlin, which I wrote for my postdoctoral degree obtained at the University of Warsaw. The book was published in Polish in 2015 by the Adam Mickiewicz University Press and I have high hopes of it being translated into English. 2 In 1988 Berlin authorities held a contest for the project of the Jewish Museum commemorating 2000 years of the German-Jewish history, with Daniel Libeskind being selected as the winner.

Die Dokumentation der eigenen Sammlung fürs Publikum im WWW online zu stellen, bringt einige Herausforderungen mit sich, denn der Zweck der Sammlungsdokumentation ist zumeist Nachweis und Arbeitsgrundlage. Für die öffentliche Präsentation und – wenn möglich – Weiterverwendbarkeit der Daten sind konzeptionell einige Schritte zu bedenken, um den Daten eine optimale Zukunft im Web zu verschaffen. Diese Fragen haben sowohl mit dem Verständnis von Dokumentation, als auch mit dem von Online-Technologien und Online-Strategien zu tun – sollten also idealerweise interdisziplinär diskutiert werden. Bei den gemeinsamen Überlegungen, wie digitale Daten in unterschiedlichen Kontexten genutzt werden können, gilt es, sowohl interne Workflows wie auch externe Nutzungsinteressen (auf der eigenen Website wie auch im Verbund) einzubeziehen. Einleitung Informationen aus Museen – über die reine Bewerbung von Onsite-Aktivitäten hinaus – online verfügbar zu machen, ist inzwischen eine allgegenwärtige und berechtigte Erwartung an Museen. Zu diesen Informationen gehören auch die Daten der Sammlungsdokumentation, die zum einen Auskunft darüber geben können, was ein Museum sammelt, zum anderen was ein Museum zu den gesammelten Beständen für Informationen generiert.

Im Jahr 2005 hat das Jüdische Museum Berlin eine Befragung von Expertinnen und Experten zum Thema „digitale Medien und Museen in 10 Jahren“ zur Abschätzung von Trends und Perspektiven unternommen. Angesichts der langjährigen Erfahrungen mit digitalen Online- und Offline-Medien lohnt sich – ausgehend von früheren Erwartungen und Hoffnungen – eine Bewertung der Veränderungen für die Institution Museum und ein Blick auf künftige Perspektiven digitaler Vermittlungs- und Kommunikationsstrategien.
Nicht nur für die Nutzerinnen und Nutzer digitaler Medien, auch im Innern der Organisationen haben sich auf verschiedenen Ebenen Herausforderungen ergeben: Sie betreffen die Interaktion zwischen Institution und Zielgruppe, die Instrumente interner Wissensorganisation, das Zusammenspiel neuer Medien mit dem Repertoire klassischer musealer Medien, Kooperationsmöglichkeiten und Austausch mit museumsfernen Ideengebern, überkommene Projektstrukturen und die Skills der musealen Vermittlungs- und Bewahrungsexpertinnen und -experten.

Vorrei organizzare l'intervento in questo modo: in una prima parte cercherò di delineare la concezione della memoria nell'Ebraismo in alcuni suoi tratti fondamentali. Nella seconda parte passerò dalla memoria in sé alle varie modalità della sua trasmissione, valutando, per ognuna di esse, l'adeguatezza alle caratteristiche prettamente ebraiche emerse nella prima parte. In particolare prenderò in considerazione: la trasmissione attraverso immagini, quella attraverso la parola e, infine, quella attraverso la produzione di un'atmosfera, intesa come dimensione emozionale. Nella terza e ultima parte tratterò di alcuni casi concreti che, secondo me, esemplificano le considerazioni delle prime due parti.

This exhibition catalog is produced in the context of METU Department of Architecture course "Arch524 Architecture and Different Modes of Representation" conducted by Prof. Dr. Ayşen Savaş, as part of an ongoing exhibition series: "Representing Itself - METU - Faculty of Architecture Building" and is focusing on the challenging endeavor: "HOW TO REPRESENT VOLUME?"