The Jewish Museum, Berlin, and architecture after Auschwitz
Terry Smith
To Theodor Adorno, architectural gestures toward transparent democracy such as the renovation of the Reichstag in Berlin by Sir Norman Foster would be, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, acts undertaken in the most perverse bad faith – or, at best, in an ignorance so profound that it would betoken a world that had lost its memory altogether.1 His declaration, that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” remains the most unequivocal challenge yet formulated to the possibility of art and culture in our time. In its absolute negativity, it draws, unambiguously, the line up to which art and ethics, if they wish to amount to anything more than delusory cowardice, must step, and, in doing so, face the improbability of their ever again merging to create culture. Furthermore, and crucially, it offers no exits from this standoff.
It did not, however, take the Holocaust to bring Adorno to a trenchant dismissal of Hegelian metaphysics, and of the role for art as the progressive realization of the geist of the times at a certain stage of its development that was the key to Hegel’s aesthetics. An aesthetics which remained, in Europe at least, perhaps the most elaborated and influential outline of how art might serve society.2 Yet the Holocaust drove Adorno, and later his parents, from Germany, and claimed the lives of many of his colleagues and friends – not least Walter Benjamin. It became, and remained, the signal most vivid instance of the quality that he found most hateful in modernity, yet most characteristic of it: its implacable drive to administer everything, and, in so doing, reduce all living beings to things.
In this context, Adorno’s statement joins the novels of Primo Levi, the photographs of Margaret Bourke-White and Lee Miller, and a delimited number of other efforts to express through art and criticism the specificity of the impact of the genocidal policies and practices of the Nazis. These latter were, in themselves, an extreme example of the redirection, through the twentieth century, of campaigns of terror and death-dealing away from soldiers battling in relatively defined theaters of war toward campaigns against selected, and largely civilian, populations, usually in the neighborhood or country of the murderers. Adorno’s remark channels these effects to the problem of what it takes, in such circumstances, to create works of art, and to construct civil culture between citizens. It would, he believes, take a denial that the Nazi barbarism was ever visited upon us – itself a barbarism. Any effort to create a high cultural artifact would, in these circumstances, be an act of the utmost complicity in murderous vandalism. As would be any generalized affirmation of art’s redemptive grace – which would be simple-minded, to boot. All artists can do is contemplate, in immobile silence, the enormity of the devastation that has been wrought. The same applies to critics, and to those seeking a radical critique of contemporary culture. Art, and criticism, have foregone their right to exist. The depth of Adorno’s pessimism is clear in his first statement of this proposition, made in 1951:
The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its efforts to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today.3
What of that art which takes Auschwitz as its subject, and which seeks to show its horror? In his subsequent writings, Adorno rejected most attempts at this, especially those – such as the operas of Schönberg, and Brecht’s plays – that took committed, engaged, transparently critical forms. Music and theater such as this risked, he thought, the danger that its very artistry might provide pleasures, however indirect and inadvertent, to those receiving the political messages, thus blunting the artists’ obligation to the victims of the Holocaust: to show that it was, above all, unthinkable, inconceivable.4 Only one work of art met his (impossible) demands: Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame.
Endgame trains the viewer for a condition where everyone involved expects – upon lifting the lid from the nearest trashcan – to find his own parents. The natural cohesion of life has become organic refuse. The national socialists irrecoverably overturned the taboo of old age. Beckett’s trashcans are the emblems of culture restored after Auschwitz.5
Adorno understood that Beckett had deliberately refused to represent the Holocaust directly, and that the post-apocalyptic dreamscapes in which his plays, especially Endgame, were set, was, in fact, its aftermath. His last comment on this topic, in his book Negative Dialectics, returns to this very point. In a major expansion of his ethical penumbra, he acknowledged that “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as one who is tortured has to scream; hence it may have been wrong [to have said] that after Auschwitz no more poems may be written.”6 He acknowledges, belatedly, that the survivors of the Holocaust deserve the compensations – or, at least, the companionship – of representation, as do, in varying degrees, those of us condemned to live in its infinite shadow. But these compensations are hard ones – indeed, they are the hardest imaginable: “Beckett has given us the only fitting reaction to the situation of the concentration camps – a situation he never calls by name, as if it were subject to a strict image ban. What is, is like a concentration camp.”7
The sequence of quite concrete, carefully circumscribed claims as to permitted aesthetic/ethical conjunctions in the aftermath of the Holocaust that we have just reviewed have had an enormous impact on cultural practice throughout the world, particularly since the 1970s. Gene Ray sums these up in a useful way:
Adorno’s very specific demands that art should refuse positive representation, aesthetic pleasure and the possibility that Auschwitz could be mastered or redeemed eventually attained the status of a dominant ethic of representation. Today we can recognize the decade following the mid-1980s as the period in which this ethic came to dominance and was gradually conventionalized. While artists who produced early responses to Adorno would include Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Christian Boltanski and, in film, Claude Lanzmann, this ethic would be elaborated more fully in the “ counter-monuments” developed by Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, Horst Hoheisel, Maya Lin and Daniel Libeskind. The more general and less rigorous demand that any aesthetic treatment of Auschwitz be handled with high seriousness, ethical rigor and scrupulous respect for the victims and their memory is a popularized legacy of Adorno’s reflections that critics such as Susan Sontag have sought to vigorously enforce.8
One question that most of these commentators seem not to ask is: what was Auschwitz, as architecture? This small Upper Silesian city was redesigned from 1942 as a model town, a Garden City surrounded by efficient industry, of a kind ideally suited to the New Germany, above all its Drag nach Osten. Many of those Germans who settled it (there being virtually none living there before this occupation) did so in the belief that they were contributing, in their modest way, to building the socius of the New Germany, its ordinary groundwork. This may explain part of their reluctance to recognize the perversion occurring both in the center and on the outskirts of town, in nearby Birkenau and the surrounding areas, the death industry that was booming there. Another factor might have been the dawning realization that they, too, had all along been cogs in the death-dealing machinery of the Final Solution, that its relentless evacuation of their sham morality had made them victims too. Yet, as van Pelt observes:
by the early summer of 1942 Auschwitz-Birkenau had become the site of mass-murder by means of two primitive gas chambers in adapted peasant houses. A year later the same camp contained four modern crematories with advanced killing installations and fourteen incinerators with a total of forty-six cubicles. For one million people these buildings proved, indeed, the end of the world.9
As the regional headquarters of the SS, the entrance to Auschwitz was intended to symbolize the power of the organization, a goal it achieved even more emphatically in the aftermath of the Nazi defeat, when it became iconic of the Holocaust itself. Its medievalizing style, chosen by Himmler, sought to root the new era in that of an earlier unifier, Heinrich I. Ye t, as architecture, the majority of the structures at Auschwitz, Birkenau (Auschwitz II) and the related camps were modern industrial structures, of no distinction as architecture, and certainly not modernist in any sense. Local and Berlin-based architects strove to relate the disposition and servicing of these camps to the urban plan of central Auschwitz. But their single-minded purpose – to extract the maximum labor power from the inmates and to dispose of them by the most minimal means when they became useless – was a reversal of the lifestyle hymned by the main city’s attractive, suburban variegation. Rows of barbed wire hemmed the camps in: they were, in this bizarre sense, the visible manifestation of the walls of war that surrounded Germany itself, and which its armies fought to extend outwards.
These camps fell short of their own presumptions of order and efficiency in ways that are at once devastating to recall and most revealing of the shortcomings of modernity as a social model. Many of these are, by now, well known, and were typical across the entire concentration camp system (it had begun in 1933, and had served many political and economic roles under the expanding Reich). Chief among them was the assignment of vastly more people – at first Russian prisoners of war, and then, after 1942, Jews – than could be accommodated, even when the death-dealing was at its most efficient and least disguised as the unfortunate by-product of an exhausted labor force. The imposition of internal discipline, often carried out by inmates, on the false promise of their survival, against their fellows. The arbitrary rule of camp commandants and other officers. The medical experiments on inmates that went beyond the limits imposed by the profession for research involving human “patients.” Less known, but in the event even more deadly, were its architectural shortcomings. Van Pelt presents in factual detail the nauseating miasma of organizational inefficiency, deliberate under-resourcing, official cowardice, design incompetence and bad judgment that attended every aspect of this ghastly industry of death. I confine myself to citing one example from this architecture of hell, the toilet and sewerage arrangements:
First, there is the spatial arrangement: the “privy” meant to serve 7,000 inmates is a shed with a single concrete open sewer, 118 ft. long by 3 ft. wide, without seats and with one long beam as a back support. The design was adapted from a model latrine for large units in winter quarters and was first published in a leaflet on wartime emergency construction. Like the model latrine, the camp latrine could be accessed from walkways at both sides. Neither in Auschwitz, nor in the model on which it was based, were the walkways connected; but in Auschwitz this proved catastrophic, for each of the walkways was 118 ft. long. Both in the built version and in the model, doors at each of the building’s short sides provided access to the walkways. Imagine 7,000 inmates at sunrise, suffering from diarrhea or dysentery, and trying to enter, find an unoccupied place, defecate, manage not to fall into the sewer, and get out in the ten minutes or so allocated by the camp’s regulations to such necessities. Assuming that 150 inmates could find a place at the one time, and also assuming that all 7,000 inmates were able to move their bowels with the requisite precision, it would require forty-six successive “seatings,” with all the traffic jams involved … One sewer, supplied with an anemic supply of water and a drop of only 1.6 percent, could never flush the discharge of 7,000 people in such a short time. The result was a secretory catastrophe. Added to that were the omissions in the Auschwitz version that made the whole experience considerably more unpleasant. First, there were no seats. Second, the system of support was based on the minimal design of the field latrine, only to be used at the front. Third, the “ shame-walls” were removed, which might have provided at least some physical privacy for those who had to defecate next to each other. Finally the separate aeration for the pit was omitted (it has become superfluous since the pits at Auschwitz were open), which meant an insufferable stench.10
Since 1967 the Berlin Museum has been housed in the Königlisches Collegienhaus, a former Baroque palace reconstructed in an elegant Rococo manner in 1753 that later housed a major Prussian courthouse. This building is located on one of the city’s main axial streets, Lindenstrasse, close to its intersection with the Wilhelmstrasse and the Friedrichstrasse – that is, in the Friedrichstadt area, since the late eighteenth century often touted as an alternative center for the city. Through the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century the Lindenstrasse sector was a focus of Jewish life. During the 1930s its southern sections became the spoke of the Nazi terror system that was managed from SS Headquarters and other local buildings. In 1988 the Museum trustees announced a competition for a design for an extension that would meet the institution’s needs for additional “exhibition space and storage and other functional space,” and “because the Jewish Museum Department has to be enlarged and fully integrated into the Berlin Museum.”11 The city was ready, at last, to take a further step in recognizing and repairing the barbarisms of its recent past.
In 1989, from among 50 entries, the jurors chose that of Daniel Libeskind, declaring it “an extraordinary, completely autonomous solution.”12 A decade of complex negotiations followed – no surprise given the conflicted nature of the project, the profound political transformation of Berlin itself and the radical nature of the architect’s proposal – before the building opened in January 1999. 13 Even then, it stood empty for two years while the architect was given the opportunity to allow his building to speak for itself.
What did it say? There is no shortage of statements on record as to the architect’s intentions. Let us review some of them before turning to his drawings, and then to the building itself. Libeskind stunned the judges by submitting as his competition entry a philosophical program typed onto music paper. Titling the entire project “Between the Lines,” he began by noting, “A Museum for the City of Berlin must be a place where all citizens, those of the past, of the present and of the future, must find their common heritage and individual home.” 14 So far, so platitudinous. But then, this radical architectural challenge: “To this end, the Museum form itself must be rethought in order to transcend the passive involvement of the viewer, actively confronting change.” To begin this rethinking he immediately goes to the nub of the philosophical problem that Adorno had highlighted:
The extension of the Berlin Museum with a special emphasis on housing the Jewish Museum Department is an attempt to give voice to a common fate: common both to being and what is other than being. The museum must serve to inspire poetry, music and drama, (etc.) and must give a home to the ordered/ disordered, chosen/not chosen, welcome/unwelcome, vocal/silent.
(We may take it that “etc.” includes architecture.) Libeskind’s language hints at the depth of his reading of German philosophy, especially Heidegger and Adorno. His ambition here is nothing less than to use aspects of Heidegger’s ontology to solve Adorno’s deontological impasse. In full awareness of the force of the impasse’s dialectical negativity, Libeskind sets out to create a post-Auschwitz architecture, and to do so poetically. He knew that he had to take on the presenting of unpresentability, the presencing of non-being, as the problem’s only solution, as the building’s only possible program. His hope was that, if he succeeded – that is to say, if his solution fails in a negatively dialectical way, if it enabled the world to be present to itself in perhaps the most extreme forms of its impossibility – the Jewish Museum would not only be a solution to the problem of making architecture after Auschwitz, it would inspire an after Aftermath kind of art. His ambition is signaled in the conclusion to his “Between the Lines” competition entry. After sketching the mobility of usages and spaces within the Museum to come, he says: “A Museum ensemble is thus always on the verge of Becoming – no longer suggestive of a final solution.” The moment when Berlin imagined itself without its Jews forever is pivotal in the history of Berlin, and is the core content of the Museum. It established history and contemporaneity as existing above all before and after it. Yet if the Museum was not to become stuck in an eternal return to this moment, it had to avoid being a Holocaust museum per se. Thus the necessity of building into the Museum open-endedness, a state of permanent incompletion, of always becoming. This is hopefulness beyond Adorno’s pessimistic imagination – or the wishful thinking of a (divine) fool. It might, of course, be both.
What chutzpah! To aspire to forge – in the design impulse for a Jewish Museum, in Berlin – the basic insights of the philosopher of Being who notoriously succumbed to Nazism and those of the Jewish philosopher who famously argued the impossibility of philosophy – indeed, of any kind of responsible being – after the propositional eradication of the Jews. But Libeskind did this consciously. If you re-read these preliminary statements, you will see that they turn the profound admonitions and prohibitions uttered, in turn, by Heidegger and Adorno, back on themselves, each of them separately, then as a pair. Heidegger’s insistence on the always-becoming of the world is set against the Nazi Final Solution. Building an artwork that embodies from its ground plan up the thrall of its own impossibility is to enact Adorno’s prohibition as a road map. This is the substantive content of the architect’s claim that he set out to complete Schönberg’s unfinishable opera Moses and Aaron (a work that could not, in its own and Adorno’s terms, find its resolution) “architecturally.” 15 Libeskind took these philosophical steps not only consciously, but also conscientiously. Heidegger’s and Adorno’s passage through their times was, for all its differences, contemporaneous. Libeskind saw this as consequential not only for Berlin but for the rest of humanity. Thus the double pathways, the doubling of void and “ not-void” throughout the Museum. Yet this contemporaneity was not adventitious, not for the philosophers, nor for any of us. Disjunctive parallelism just is what it is like to share, as the architect never tired of pointing out, “a common fate.”
The references to “passage” here, and in Libeskind’s notes, alerts us to the presence of another philosopher, the quintessentially conflicted Berliner who chose suicide rather than fall into the hands of fascists, Walter Benjamin. To resolve the dialectical tensions between Heidegger and Adorno’s irreducible demands, Libeskind’s design thinking drew on four of Benjamin’s key concepts. The complexities of modernity, the contending forces of modernization, Benjamin vividly showed, have created – in cities and in the minds of men – mobile, contingent passages of connection and disconnection. The conflicts of modernity, including the incessantly accumulating history of these conflicts, constantly transform these passages into ruins, and memory into ruination. The experience of this passaging is felt, first, as shock, then as melancholy, later as trauma, while to some it serves as an inspiration to revolt. Finally, if one is to grasp what it is to live, critically, in modernity, it is necessary to apply dialectical materialism not as a mechanical Marxism but with a collage consciousness.16 Libeskind made his debt to Benjamin quite explicit by dividing the visitor’s movement along the zigzag of galleries into 60 sections, representing each of the “Stations of the Star” described by Benjamin in his notes about Berlin and modernity, One-Way Street.17
It is this set of existential/ethical challenges that is at the core of Libeskind’s response to the idea of a Jewish Museum in Berlin in the aftermath of the Holocaust. While the philosophers, as we have seen, expressed them in philosophical terms, the challenges themselves were fundamental to what it was to exist in mid-twentieth century Europe. It is to Libeskind’s enormous credit that he did not begin from convenient softenings of these challenges, those that have become the liberal ideology of post-World War II German officialdom, but took them on at their most intractable. A hard question to ask of the Museum, then, is whether, despite the best intentions of its architect, the compromises necessary to get buildings built have meant that the Museum does, ultimately, end up as a monument to such soft thought.
The tendency of Libeskind’s training as a musician, at the Lodz Conservatory, and architect, at Cooper Union, New York, was avant-garde modernist. As were his attitudes. An early manifesto is his 1987 “Architecture Intermundium: an open letter to architectural educators and students of architecture,” in which he asks:
Why spend time tediously applying gold leaf onto a pinnacle of a tower (impressive!) when the foundations are rotten? Before that delicate task will have been completed, the entire edifice will collapse, destroying both the work and the worker. Invisible disasters precede those that can be seen … No amount of research, discussions on “relevance,” or compiled information can disguise the fact: Architecture as taught and practiced today is but a grammatical fiction. Enough to see the gulf that separates what is taught (and how!) from what is built (and why!) to understand that somewhere a lie is being perpetrated. Only a sophistic method could mask a situation where so many spend so much to do so little – with such damaging results.18
The Jewish Museum was his first major project, and the first of many conceived during the 1980s, to be actually built. Some of its architectural ideas had been first advanced in a raw form in a set of 28 drawings done in 1983 entitled Chamberworks: architectural meditations on the themes from Heraclitus, and in such urban planning concepts as his City Edge competition entry of 1987.19 In 1989 he proposed, unsuccessfully, an extension to the Edinburgh Museum of Art that would have consisted of a complex of radical, raking shapes erupting into the street beside the restrained neoclassicism of the existing buildings – as if the ur-form of early modernism had suddenly landed in this eighteenth century city center. During his decade of work on the Jewish Museum, Libeskind spun off a number of other powerful projects and proposals, including the 1995–8 Felix Nussbaum Haus, a small museum at Osnabrück, Germany, which he entitled Museum Without Exit.20 In Berlin, Libeskind was clear about “the three basic ideas that formed the foundation” of his design:
First, the impossibility of understanding the history of Berlin without understanding the enormous intellectual, economic, and cultural contribution made by its Jewish citizens. Second, the necessity to integrate physically and spiritually the meaning of the Holocaust into the consciousness and memory of the city of Berlin. Third, that only through the acknowledgement and incorporation of this erasure and void of Jewish life in Berlin, can the history of Berlin and Europe have a human future.21
There are gentle allusions here to various forces that were, then, in contention for the cultural imaginary of Berlin’s citizens, including those that sought to redefine the city – above all, and typically for their moment, through spectacular architecture and related forms of iconomic repositioning – as the capital of the united Germany, as a powerhouse of the European Community and as a key economic and cultural vector of the new globalization. Thus the great renovations of major buildings along Unter den Linden, of the entire Mitte district, and the techno-mall wonderland at Potzdammer Platz. In pointed contrast, Libeskind is saying: if you don’t get the recent past right, these aspirations, however worthy they may be in themselves, would amount to nothing more than gold leaf appliqué over rotten foundations.
Libeskind’s very first sketches for the Museum show him to be contemplating different kinds of human movement through a four-story building. These include the shuttering of film frames related to distinct times and distances. He quickly breaks the profile of this structure into disaggregated units of distinct sizes and planes, à la Malevich, or Rodchenko. Another early idea shows steps leading up to a closed wall – presumably the Berlin Wall (which will reappear in stronger form later).22 These turn into a series of drawings of volumes standing erect, leaning toward and away, as if they were an ensemble of Minimal sculptures – those with the symbolic presencing of a Tony Smith rather than the withheld muteness of a Donald Judd. The goal here seems to be an exploration of the external massing of a possible building, or pair of buildings.23 But it was the ground plan, as always (because it moves the user through the building and is, therefore, the shape of their social contract), that was pivotal. Libeskind, rightly, named the entire project for his core insight:
The official name of the project is the “Jewish Museum,” but I have called it “Between the Lines.” I call it this because it is a project about two lines of thinking, organization and relationship. One is a straight line, but broken into many fragments, the other is a tortuous line, but continuing indefinitely.24
To his credit, he never nominates one of these lines “German” and the other “Jewish.” Instead, the internal multiplicity of both cultural formations swarms between the two forms.
It is here that we start to see the deepest relationships between this Museum and the theme of contemporary architecture’s implication in the iconomy. The Museum’s external gestalt is deliberately broken and odd in outline, too well disguised by its cladding, and so bunker-like and tangential in its address to its neighborhood that it resists every attempt to read it as iconic. Indeed, despite its moments of attractiveness, its striking beauty when seen from certain angles, the design refuses to settle for spectacle. Its exterior, at least, is anything but “overweight, overdone, and overwhelming” – Kurt
Forster’s admiring first impression of the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao.25 The “zigzag” shape of the underground passageways, shaded by a broken straight line, is foregrounded in Museum publicity as its signature logo – but we have seen that Libeskind explicitly refutes this as an iconic reduction: yes, it is precisely this “ German-Jewish” coupling that is to be emphasized, but only in its implicated, open-ended ambiguity. However distinctive the penetrated zigzag may be as an architectural form, and as a gestalt, it is, to him, an anti-icon, at best. After all, it symbolizes movement into darkness, into death, and the invisible connections between Germanness and Jewishness. This is the underside of the iconomy, a tracing within its spectral unconscious. Very hard to trap in a stereotypical image, to render as an iconotype. If the spectacle pervades the Getty as a Hollywood style pastness, and shiny, techno-organic complexity is the newly won logo-style of Gehry’s cultural creations, then the iconomy enters the Jewish Museum in a different, and deeper, way. It does so, not by rejecting iconomy as such, but its contemporary, spectacle array. Instead, the architect resists consumer spectacle from a long-term perspective, through constant recourse, in developing his design thinking, to the symbols of regimes past and recent, to their logos, their icons.
The ground plan of the Museum has been frequently read as an exploded Star of David. This seems a simple two-step, absolutely appropriate to a Jewish Museum in Berlin: the symbol of Jewishness, used by both Jewish communities throughout history and the Nazis to identify those they held to be Jewish, is registered as shattered, emblematizing the Nazi’s prodigious but ultimately failed attempt to eradicate Jews from the world as they saw it. The implication here is that fragments, however ruined, can be reconnected; and a broken culture restored, however slowly and painfully. At such a level of generality, this would be a liberal architecture. Yet I have argued that Libeskind did not take this soft option. How did he use this well-known, stereotypical image, specifically? In the publicity surrounding the project Libeskind employed a “compressed and distorted” Star of David as a graphic device to connect the two lines mentioned above, creating a “Star Matrix” that joined those German Jews – “Certain people, workers, writers, composers, artists, scientists, and poets who formed the link between Jewish tradition and German culture” – who lived and worked in what was, when he began on the project, East and West Berlin.26 Exploding the Star triggered the idea of plotting an “irrational matrix” based on the addresses of these people, the locations of their houses on a map of Berlin, the lines between which he then used to generate the disposition of the slatted windows and other tears in the exterior walls of the Museum. So the streets in Berlin where Jews were made to wear the identifying insignia, one that separated them, marked them out for exile to the unhuman, are now a place where this sign has expanded out to draw in the possibility of a culture of integration and growth.
One page of felt-tipped pen drawings stands out for the intensity of its exploration of the possibilities of this one motif.27 We can follow Libeskind’s mind-eye-hand as he works over the basic shape: emphasizing some parts, fading others out, subtracting sections, turning them different ways, adding others of the same type, turning the figure in space, rotating it, separating its parts, reconfiguring them within a frame or in space. These are no mechanical set of formal exercises, nor have they a mathematical character. He is searching the shape for its expressive potential, for the kinds of connotative power it might retain, or surprise, when put to work channeling human movement through space. Shape is being reshaped into orientation (not yet entries, passage, obstruction, exit). He is clearly attracted to unfolded versions of the form: these predominate on the page. As he pursues this unpacking, however, he seems careful to avoid a shape that hovers as the Star of David’s other: the swastika. In some, it seems almost as if one has become the other, but the swastika never emerges as a distinct figure. Instead, the designs cluster near the top center, where he stretches the loosened form into three dimensions, making it a set of interlocking walls. Then, at page center, doubles it into a quasi-Constructivist figure, echoing El Lizzitsky’s famous collage The New Man, an image on the cusp of revolution in Russia. The joining of the “two lines” – a zigzag cut by a straight line, both of them broken – with the Star of David and the absent swastika, is the moment that generates the plan of the underground passageways in the Jewish Museum. In the most elegantly rendered of these drawings, entitled Void-voided void (Jewish Dep’t) a number of axonometric projections of the volumes generated by the underground passageways, the galleries and the voids between them are disposed as shards in space.28
Collaging the incompatible to generate synthetic meaning is typical of the way iconic images are treated throughout Libeskind’s drawings. Not as isolated emblemata, nor as place-holding signs. Rather, they are thrown together, into a collage of contending and symbiotic forces, and made to work against their narrowness, their exclusionary powers. Another related drawing shows him rendering the hammer and sickle, symbol of Communism, and of workers’ power in general, then separating the two elements before breaking them up in the ways he did the Star of David.29 At this point one feels that he is testing his basic design for its capacity to absorb every ideologically loaded image that human beings have ever dreamed up. The most extraordinary of these is a drawing that configures the Museum ground plan, across a double page spread, into cursive Arabic script hinting at the famous, and sacred, phrase “Allah is merciful!”30
Not only symbols, but also architectural forms that have themselves acquired a symbolic force, are grist to his incorporative mill. A number of drawings show him contemplating the interplay between open and closed spaces, and between different kinds of enclosure and escape. In one sketch the entire above and below ground project is imagined as if made from sections of the dismantled Berlin Wall.31 Typically, these are linked with others in which the stacked shapes of the Museum are thought of as sets of volumes of the Torah, tied together, and penetrated by shafts.32 In another drawing, the ground plan is projected into three dimensions and imagined as a mini-history of architectural styles, from classical colonnades to a skyscraper and an angular projection labeled “Cloud Breaker.”33
In these drawings we can trace how Libeskind mobilized the almost unimaginably negative elements that came, during the 1930s and 1940s, very close to expunging not just Jewishness from Berlin but also history itself. The voiding of Berlin’s Jews is registered as something that is irredeemable, a statement made architecturally in the straight but broken line formed by a series of actual voids that pierce the center of the zigzagging Museum building, intruding into all its exhibition spaces. The memory of Berlin’s Jews, however, is regarded as recoverable, as is the return of Jews to Berlin, not least in the form of this Museum. Visitors pass from the Collegienhaus into an abyssal entrance, down steep steps to a space that has no externally anticipated layout, and is, in this sense, unbuilt. You stand facing a choice between a set of three underground streets; none marked for preference, and no one insisting on your following an official itinerary. As you gradually discover, each one does have a single – indeed, singular – destination. Turning right up a short passage, the Holocaust void is entered only through a heavy concrete door, which is then closed. The unheated, uncooled space inside is shaped in the sharp wedge by 27 feet high unadorned concrete walls. You can just make out the sounds of the city outside as it goes about its business. Above, a thin strip of white light, reflected from some unseeable source, rims the top of one wall. An air vent? Divine Light?34 Another passage, signed with the names of places to which Jews were exiled or emigrated, leads out into the E. T. A. Hoffmann Garden. Set on a sloping surface, 48 raked, minimal rectangular concrete columns contain Berlin earth, and signify the birth of the state of Israel in 1948, while one isolated column, filled with earth from Jerusalem, signifies Berlin. From the top of each a pomegranate tree grows. Divided cities, joined here, in this Jewish Museum in Berlin. The third passage is a Stair of Continuity that rises high into the uppermost part of the building, allowing access to the exhibition spaces on different floors of the Museum. Above you, as you climb, the building seems to crumble down. There are no windows until you reach the platform at the top: light floods in through a narrow, raking slit, and you can look out across the low skyline of the city.
Responding to Libeskind’s ambition, architectural writers from all over the world celebrate the Museum as meeting the most serious contemporary standards of meaning and beauty. Let me illustrate this by drawing on the comments of Anthony Vidler. His immediate reaction was one that should be, by now, familiar from our accounts of the impact of aftermath architecture:
… as a work and as an experience it stands as testimony to the power of a certain kind of phenomenological stance before the world, a spatial evocation that, through brilliant and deeply thought out moves, resonates with an aura of the terrifying sublime, and that, perhaps more than any modern work of architecture I have ever seen, manages to hold the visitor in spatio-psychological suspense, the closest experience to what I imagine religious experience of architecture might be.35
Awe, to be sure, but something is different here from similar-sounding reactions to other recent architecture. Vidler contrasts the Museum to projects such as Richard Meier’s Getty Center, and many other museum renovations and heritage reconstructions (including the Reichstag dome), with their generalized evocation of pastness, their allusions to what was once an order of immense, concentrated and civilized power but is now tamed for manipulated consumption as mass entertainment. Ignasi de Solà-Morales labels this preoccupation with architecture’s past glory a “weak architecture,” one that induces delighted recollection, mild historical fantasy and, perhaps, bemused rumination on time’s passing and the follies of human aspiration.36 It trades on a sense of resonance from the past; it offers an imaginary proscenium for the spectral replay of events of consequence that happen to have happened beyond some fabled horizon. It does not take up history in its actuality as part of its working materials. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, and especially in a museum in which the Holocaust is at the core of its program, “after architecture” simply would not do.
What were the “brilliant and deeply thought out moves” by means of which Libeskind achieved “an aura of the terrifying sublime” and brought the visitor to a “religious experience of architecture” of a kind that is present in the great destination buildings of the past but missing from the work of his Past Modern contemporaries? Vidler summarizes them as the result of the architect’s careful reading of the most advanced thinking around the issues involved, results which expressed themselves, above all, in concrete design decisions:
Its materiality is powerful in metal-clad reinforced concrete and does not hide its pretensions behind weak structure … Its routes of passage are firm, defined by the darkest darks and the most brilliant lights: its disregard for the “normal” functions of museums, for the requirements of exhibitions spaces, the modesty demanded by background spaces for foregrounding exhibits is more or less contemptuous; its ignoring of spatial economy – the prolific insertion of meaningful voids – absolute. There is no effort at all to “fit into” its context as it denies completely through scale, mass and surface the Baroque pavilion to which it is nominally an extension, but which is turned into nothing more than a traditional portico to the new structure. Yet this strength holds nothing of the “miserable monstrosity” decried by Weber; part fragment of city wall, part bunker, part storehouse, it retains its own identity in the face of the wasteland that surrounds it. 37
Defining the strengths of Libeskind’s “moves” by what they do not do, Vidler highlights the architect’s refusals of both conventional expectations as to the briefs of such buildings and the (in contrast) easy solutions to similar problems adopted by his contemporaries. Functionality, legibility, a spectacular external gestalt, deference to the higher arts, contextualism – all are rejected, emphatically. Invoking Heidegger and Sartre, Vidler argues that, instead, the Jewish Museum plunges us into “bodily and mental crisis, with any trite classical homologies between the body and the building upset by unstable axes, walls and skins torn, ripped and dangerously slashed, rooms empty of content and uncertain or no exits and entrances.”38
Is the building, then, an induction into chaos, to the traumatic, nightmare scenarios so characteristic of life in the twentieth century – never pursued more grotesquely and rationally, or on such a scale, than during the Holocaust? It is this, but even more precisely it draws us into a tactile and emotional awareness of the incessant, incoherent interplay between irrationality and the pursuit of order that represents, in Vidler’s words again, “the fundament of contemporaneity, its reason for being.”39 He glosses this insight as follows:
In such a world, Libeskind’s ellipses, his wandering paths and warped spaces without perspective and ending blindly, can only be seen as so many tests of our own abilities to endure the vertigo experience of the labyrinths that, as Nietzsche had it over a century ago, make up the form of our modernity.40
I would make a distinction between modernity and contemporaneity: it is the aftermath of the former that constitutes much of the substance of the latter. It is this constitution that Libeskind was striving to represent. This emerges when Vidler argues that, to Libeskind, the void is not a way out of the labyrinth (that being impossible) but
a provisional path … which through habitual and piecemeal encounters, by unexpected and suddenly revealed shocks, and through touch and feel in the dark as much as by clear vision in the light, might in some way domesticate what for Pascal, as for us, has been a rather stern, uncompromising and certainly terrifying “horror vacui” (horror of the void) in a world of apparently endless space and no place.41
Modernity would frame this kind of experience with myths of progress, or with attacks on their reductiveness. The deepest program of the Museum responds to this definitively modernist doublet. It recognizes the vacuity of dreams of progress and the relative ineffectiveness of radical action against it. It aims to concretize a hope-filled negativity, the small consciousness of surviving in the void. One way of measuring Libeskind’s success or failure would be to ask: is the Museum’s negativity of a kind that would have secured Adorno’s approval? The question that has been posed and tested throughout this chapter is one step harder. It asks: does Libeskind succeed in creating an architecture that takes us beyond Adorno’s question, that succeeds in transforming the architecture of aftermath into an architecture of hope, and does so, furthermore, without lapsing into liberal sympathizing?
Libeskind’s answer is a peculiarly but also particularly Jewish one. It occurs on two levels: that of overt contestation and that of subliminal negotiation. The first is evident in forced contingency of the two aboveground buildings, the Collegienhaus and the Jewish Museum, and in the initial shift of the visitor through the older building to the underground passageway into the new one. Both of these initial orientations seem to announce the sharp division between Germanness and Jewishness as the starting point. Their combined effect is to vanquish the Museum of Berlin, leaving us to take the entire ensemble, Collegienhaus included, as, now, the Jewish Museum Berlin. This latter certainly seems to be the experience of the visitor: the rococo structure functions as no more than an elaborated entrance. In fact, in the course of planning and construction, the project underwent a succession of name changes that seem to reflect these shifts: beginning as an Extension to the Berlin Museum, one which included expansion of the Jewish Department, it became an Extension to the Berlin Museum with the Jewish Museum, to the entire project being one of the Jewish Department of the Stadtmuseum, then the Jewish Museum in the Stadtmuseum until finally it became the Jewish Museum Berlin. A new kind of museum, a Jewish kind, has, it seems, not only gained autonomy from its parent, the Museum of Berlin, it has eclipsed, even absorbed, its progenitor. This is some reversal of the final solution.
Yet there is a more profound, and fitting, sense in which this is a Jewish Museum. The idea that we all share, like it or not, a “common fate,” in which the obliteration of one type of those among us has been contemplated, has often been systematically pursued, and may well be again, is, in a special sense, a Jewish idea embodied in this Museum, yet one offered to humanity. In his interpretation of this Museum, Andrew Benjamin draws attention to an important distinction, underlying the project at its deepest levels, between the identity of being a Jew and Jewish being as such.42 The first is an imposed Jewishness, never more thoroughly pursued than by the Nazis. While developing his thinking for the Museum, Libeskind was permitted to see the Gedenkbuch, a two volume listing of the names, addresses, dates of birth, dates of deportation, and presumed destinations of all those sent to their deaths during the fatal years of the Holocaust.43 Benjamin points out that these people were listed, in this book, in a way that they – as mostly secular Jews who believed that they were assimilated into the cosmopolis around them – would rarely have thought of themselves and would never before have been associated, not even by Jewish organizations. They became Jews because of “a special occurrence … to be named in a book that marks their mass death.”44 In this form of identification, identity amounts to closures of an increasingly horrific and ultimately terminal kind: submission to administration, reification into a cipher, reduction to a name and some dates on a list of those to be executed. Jewish being, on the other hand – as the philosophers cited in this chapter amply attest – is a matter of putting identity into question, of opening it to the productivities of perpetual interrogation. Neither oneself, nor the others, can alone decide the question of who one is, the matter of what it is to be. In the face of the forces of closure, this is the offering, to all, from the experience of being Jewish: the unanswerability of being, its decisive undecidability. Benjamin sees precisely this as the deepest inspiration and the most powerful effect of the Jewish Museum Berlin:
… here is a building that guards the question of representation, refusing it finality and thus necessitating its retention as a problem to be investigated, while allowing at the same time for presentations; a building that questions display while allowing for display; a building that, in its effectuation as a building, holds open the question of remembrance as a question, enjoining humility while providing – because of the question – the necessity for a vigilance that can be identified as present remembrance … in being an architecture of the question, the Museum allows identity to endure as a question; this is a way of interpreting what Libeskind may have meant by hope.45
During the two years it was opened prior to the staging of exhibitions within it, the Museum attracted 350,000 paying visitors. Many were architects, and those interested in architecture as such. Since then, some have objected to the exhibitions as a distraction, as a lesser experience than the building itself. The exhibits have been devoted to a broad narrative of the history of Jews in Berlin, and to some special individuals – including, as we noted, Walter Benjamin. When I visited in May 2002, it was bursting its seams with tokens of memory, each a small, poignant monument. So many, however, that the implacable negativity of the Museum was obscured and its equally trenchant yet demanding hope was returned to a more easily accessible hopefulness. Who could blame the curators? When you have been silenced for so long, a visual cacophony on first outing is to be expected. But this was no natural outpouring: it fell subject to the current most fashionable style of general-purpose museum exhibiting. Designer Ken Gorbey was also responsible for the Tin Pan Alley populism of the opening displays at the Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand in Wellington.46
Reversing the positive response by architecture professionals, many visitors have complained that the building is unfunctional, frustrating to curators of exhibitions, and confusing to the public. The opening exhibitions were overloaded to the point that a feeling of quiet chaos and desperation was induced. But this sense of too much is not a consequence of the architectural design itself. Libeskind, as we have seen, created a memorial/museum, that is, a building with a complex, always doubling, set of purposes. And within these two goals, a myriad of pathways … Each in their own way, the architecture and the exhibitions tell a story of integration, forced removal and redemption that is both hard to take and then profoundly moving. This is the classic narrative of a memorial to the dead, to loss of any kind. The exhibitions did this by means of image and text, objects and explanations. The architecture, as we have seen, and have heard attested, did so by means of a series of extraordinary spatial sequences.
If a series of raking corridors culminating in a heavily concrete void transports you into a sense of being a victim of the Holocaust, who needs to be directed into a mockup freight-train to trigger the same emotions? When seemingly endless staircases lead to nowhere, to the blank walls around from which one turns to see that towering over one’s path are collapsing supports, rubble, further voids and splits of light, who needs to walk through a mock-up concentration camp? Nor do you need the visage of a smiling survivor when you reach the outside, and enter a “garden” that consists of gigantic boxed columns, each enclosing a pomegranate tree that nevertheless grows wildly from its upper opening, the whole pitched at an unearthly angle. Here is a fascinating paradox: a building that fulfills not only the purpose of being an appropriate house for, in this case, a museum of Jewish history but one that became, in itself, in its shapes and spaces, a site of Jewish experience. An architecture that induces this experience in all of its users, Jews and others at once (but not, of course, alike).47
Is the Museum, despite its architect’s consciousness of the relativity of time, and the complexity of the movement back and forward in time necessitated by its core purpose, nevertheless marked by its own time of conception and creation, and its position within the history of architecture? Of course it is, as much as, in its exceptionality, it pushes, partly, past those constraints. Vidler is, again, the best guide to this aspect of the building:
If we cannot characterize this building as either “posthistorical” or yet fully historical, we can nevertheless understand it as a kind of terminal state of space, a millennial closure so to speak, that stands as a paradoxical statement of the twentieth century problem of monumentality: how, without history (the clothing of which afforded such security in the nineteenth century), and without ostentatious pretension and empty theatricality, can an architectural object imply a strong status, while constructing itself out of space – the one medium that, as the high modernists perceived, was opposed to monumentality from the outset.48
It does so, he suggests, by capturing space, holding it hostage by its “impermeable walls,” thus it “preserves space, as a traditional museum would preserve art.” In this sense, he concludes, “it is a museum of and in architecture.” This is a conclusion that echoes our account of the Getty Center, but with a difference, one that goes back to the distinction between “weak” and “strong” architecture noted earlier. As Vidler has elsewhere shown us, modern architectural space was fraught with anxieties of the most Freudian kind.49 At the same time, for modernists, space was opposed to monumentality, because they wished for its purity, its potential as the domain in which a utopian future might be lived. After Auschwitz, this is revealed to be what it always was: an impossible naïveté. Space in the Jewish Museum, especially when its rooms are emptied of displays, is filled, palpably, with the anxiety induced by the question: how is it possible to be human after the enactment of systemic inhumanity? These spaces are also split by shafts of light that shine back on the questioner – who is, after all, the only hope of an answer.
The battles for Jerusalem, and the systematic unbuilding of Palestine by the Israeli army, were specters accompanying the building of the Jewish Museum Berlin. They continue to do so, during the period of its reception. Nevertheless, the core message of the Museum, as we have interpreted it – that the labyrinthine openness of perpetual self-questioning, rather than the citadel-like closures of fundamentalism, is the human way forward – is one that has to be the basis for any hope of peace in that region.
Indian architect Romi Khosla has imagined an architectural “solution” to the Palestine-Israel problem: one structured around a train that performs transportation, socializing and museum functions as it travels incessantly along a water pipe that connects a proposed new sovereign state of New Canaan. 50 This kind of quasi-fanciful proposal would, perhaps, infuriate those, such as Daniel Monk, who, in connection with the current warring over religious sites in Jerusalem, raise the important issue of whether the very identification of architecture with a non-architectural value – that of nationality, for example, or of spirituality – is not itself a violent fusing of elements that reason, if it is to be achieved, must keep separate.51 This is a timely warning against the kind of conflation to which humans are so prone, and that is at the heart of racist stereotyping of the Other. On the other hand, if the shapes of peace and reconciliation are to be discerned within the visual cacophony that is the contemporary iconomy, all involved must be prepared for symbolic contestation. As we have seen in the case of the Jewish Museum, Berlin, this requires the mobilization, through architectural form, of meanings that go far beyond the limits of an autonomous architecture, that sets the terms for architecture after Auschwitz, architecture of contemporaneity.
In the years following the completion of the Jewish Museum, Libeskind was drawn to a number of projects that made him, for a time, the architect of choice when it came to building up hope within the aftermath of modernity. Prominent among these was his role in the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site, after the destruction of its key buildings on 11 September 2001. I have explored this in detail elsewhere.52 Some points are relevant to this discussion. The invitation to Libeskind to participate, the choice of his “Innovative Design” proposal in the 2002 competition and his appointment as “Master Design Architect” of the site in that year, seemed to follow naturally from his success in Berlin. He seemed to be the one architect capable of grasping the complexity of what had occurred, and of offering an architectural passage through its aftermath. The developer, the politicians, the city authorities, the bereaved, and the interested public (including many other architects) – all concurred in this judgement. Soon, however, the “business as usual” priorities that have for decades stinted architecture in Manhattan began to exert their stranglehold. By 2005, Libeskind Studios were present only as a name on a site plan stacked up with illusions and deferrals. Late modernity refused to accept its ruination; preferring to hold out, instead, for the return of future brightness – and if it does not come, to build it anyway.
Walter Benjamin could have predicted all of this. Although he wrote before the specific fact of Auschwitz itself, Benjamin saw the world of which it was just one monstrous component coming into being. He also saw how it would affect him, in the most direct way possible. There is an architectural element at the heart of this moment, an element fundamental to architecture: its capacity to provide shelter.
The idea of home occurs in the ninth of Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history, his last substantial text, written from February to May 1940 while he was on the run – as he feared, and as it turned out – for his life. It begins with a passage from a poem, “Greetings from Angelus” written by his friend the Talmudic scholar Gershom Scholem on 15 July 1921, Benjamin’s twenty-ninth birthday.
My wing is poised to beat
but I would gladly return home;
were I to stay to the end of days
I would still be this forlorn.53
Another translation of the end of line two is, simply, “turn back,” and of the end of line four “unfortunate” (colloquially, “out of luck”). Either way, this raises the question of where, and what, home might be for an angel, quintessentially (although of course not entirely) a figure of passage for others. These lines are a direct response to a watercolor by Paul Klee, which Benjamin goes on immediately to evoke:
There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees only single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. This storm is what we call progress.54
The watercolor was painted in 1920, transposed from a drawing via an oil tracing. Benjamin bought it from its first exhibition in 1921, and owned it for a number of years, displaying it in his Munich apartment and loaning – or perhaps gifting it – to Scholem for a time. (It was resold in a 1929 auction.) During this period, he attempted, unsuccessfully, to launch a critical journal named Angelus Novus. In his verse Scholem, who takes the angel to be Jewish, has it voice its subjective mood, which he sees as terminally pessimistic. At the time, however, Benjamin might have warmed to the openness, perhaps deliberate guilelessness, and thus ultimate optimism, that not only fits the time-honored task of being an angel but also still seems, at face value, the image’s most evident quality.
For Klee, whose thinking during this period sought to balance actual historical experience and the abstractions of spiritual transcendence, this image was one of a pair. Its partner was the watercolor Airplane Crash, a cluster of flag, spore and dart-like forms descending from a spotted space, all of which converge on a plummeting German fighter aircraft. It is an image of implosive destruction, drawn from memories of the artist’s wartime job: photographing wreckages. Angelus Novus also contrasts to Klee’s earlier treatment of this theme: The Hero with the Wing, an etching of 1905, in which a single-winged Icarus figure stands stubbornly, bearing the breakages of his insistent but always doomed attempts to fly. (Incidentally, Scholem’s passage works better as a description of this work.) In his diaries in 1915 Klee noted his reactions to the world shattered by war: “in the great pit of forms lie broken fragments.” 55
The body of the angel in the 1920 watercolor is an elaboration of an inverted airplane figure, its wings turned upward into arms with five open fingers on each, its tail into a large head made up of a very fresh, open face topped with whirling, scroll-like locks. Light pinks and warm yellows suffuse the image, making these locks almost golden. The angel looks youthful, as suspended between genders as it hesitates between childhood and maturity. Yet, being an angel, it is ready to depart from human time, to lift up and move out, taking, perhaps, human souls with it.
In 1920, Benjamin may well have perceived all this. He may also have seen Airplane Crash, hanging in the same gallery, perhaps opposite or beside Angelus Novus. His remarks written in 1940 may have been shaped by memories – long distant, tenuous yet tenacious – of this pairing. (This is not implausible, given his acute eye, his prodigious visual memory and his self-description, in a 1939 curriculum vitae, as having as “my primary interest … the philosophy of language and the theory of art.” 56 ) His comments were even more shaped by his own sensitivity to what he named “the dialectical image,” the necessary mutuality between representation and reality, one that, occurring disjunctively, exposes the operations of the dialectic in history. In this scenario (of course imaginary), the wreckage generated by the barbarism of the most modern, mechanized war in history (to date) is exactly, literally, what the artist, and following him, his admiring collector, might have imagined his angel to be looking at.
Meanwhile, in between the two images, stands their imagined spectator. In 1921, this meant, among others, Benjamin and perhaps Scholem. In 1940, it meant Benjamin imagining all mankind as that viewer. Or, at least, as toilers who cannot save ourselves from generating the destruction that we lay – as our impossible offering, seeking an intercession that this offering itself makes impossible – at its feet. No wonder he saw the angel as shrinking back in confusion.
Now, however, after 1989, after 2001, we might see this figure less as Modernity’s spectral mirror, less as the Angel of the New, more as a new angel, a novice at the business of passaging, wondering whether that indeed should be its role, anxiously and perhaps naively facing … what? The storm of progress continues to blow through us, and, although it seems to be abating, remains dangerous. New storms offer to sweep us all, together, globalized at last, up into better worlds, yet have succeeded only in making more of us more aware of our disparities. Old storms, arisen from earlier visions of paradise, have returned, often as tornados, yet they are joining into vast currents that seek to blow us all backwards, to their sources. The planet itself is generating its own storms, well-known ones and new kinds, both occurring with, it seems, a fury unprecedented in human histories.
We might be this angel now, opening ourselves to the kinds of question that, I believe, urgently need to be asked now. Not new questions, but old ones, newly configured:
What is it to be human, or an animal these days? What is it to be a thing, an artifact, a structure, an organizational form or a planetary process? What is it to be each and all of these, distinctively yet together, contemporaneously?
This essay is drawn from a chapter in Terry Smith (2006), The Architecture of Aftermath, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1 See Sebastian Redecke and Andreas Kernbach (2001), Das Reichstagsgebäude: architektur und kunst, Berlin: Deutsche Bundestag.
2 Adorno’s doubts about Hegel are set out in his 1931 inaugural lecture at the University of Frankfurt. See (1977), “The Actuality of philosophy”, Telos, 31: 120–33. They are amplified throughout his work, notably in (1973) Negative Dialectics, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (first published 1966) and (1984); Aesthetic Theory, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (first published 1970).
3 (1981), “Art, Culture and Society” in Prisms, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, pp. 17–34; in Brian O’Connor ed. (2000), The Adorno Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 210.
4 See “Commitment” in Adorno (1992), Notes to Literature, vol. 2, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 85–6.
5 (1982) “Trying to understand Endgame” 1961, New German Critique, 26 ( Spring-Summer): 119–50; in O’Connor ed. (2000) The Adorno Reader, p. 343.
6 Adorno (1973), Negative Dialectics, p. 335/362.
7 Ibid., p. 373/380. To Adorno, the effects of Auschwitz were almost infinite in range, and in their recursive negativity. They are pursued in detail in Rolf Tiedemann, ed. (2003), Theodor W. Adorno: can one live after Auschwitz? Stanford: Stanford University Press.
8 Gene Ray (2003), “Mirroring evil: Auschwitz, art and the ‘War on Terror’”, Third Text, 17(2): 119. This essay is an excellent application of Adorno’s admonitions to the 2002 exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York, Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art. On the more general setting of post-Holocaust visual art, see James E. Young (2000), At Memory’s Edge: after-images of the Holocaust in contemporary art and architecture, New Haven: Yale University Press. There are important special studies as well, such as Lisa Salzmann (1999), Anselm Kiefer and Art After Auschwitz, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
9 Robert Jan van Pelt (1994), “Auschwitz: from architect’s promise to inmate’s perdition”, Modernism/ Modernity, 1(1): 82.
10 Ibid., pp. 106–7. A thorough history of the city up to and including its infamy is given in D. Dwork and R. J. van Pelt (1996), Auschwitz: 1270 to the present, New York: Norton. For an account of the direct links between the concentration camp system and the Nazi architectural program – above all through the production of building materials – see Paul B. Jaskot (2000), The Architecture of Oppression: the SS, forced labor and the Nazi monumental building economy, London and New York: Routledge.
11 Berlin Museum (1988), Architect’s Competition Brief, Berlin: Berlin Museum, n.p.
12 Michael Spens (1999), “Berlin phoenix”, Architectural Review, 1226: 40. In a lecture delivered in Berlin in 1997, Libeskind relates the story of his interview with key members of the Berlin Senate, including his astonishment and delight that their questioning was confined to matters to do with music: see “Chamberworks: architectural meditations on the themes from Heraclitus” in Daniel Libeskind (2000), The Space of Encounter, New York: Universe, p. 54.
13 Other complications included controversy around the curatorial appointments and direction, and the massive budget reduction part way through – from DM 178.5 million to DM 77 million. See James Russell (1999), “Project diary: Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin”, Architectural Record, 287(1): 76–98. See also Daniel Libeskind (1999), Jewish Museum Berlin: between the lines, Munich, New York: Prestel.
14 Daniel Libeskind, “Between the Lines”, manuscript in Commemorative Book, Daniel Libeskind Papers, 1970–92, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Special Collections, 920061: 1.5. Reproduced in Libeskind (2000), The Space of Encounter, p. 29. All subsequent citations in this paragraph are from this source, this page.
15 “Between the Lines, Jewish Museum, Berlin, 1988–99”, in Libeskind (2000), The Space of Encounter, p. 26.
16 The relevant key text is Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project ( Das Passagen-Werk), volume V of the Gesammalte Schriften, Rolf Tiedemann and Herman Schweppenhäuser eds. (1982), Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag; in English as (1999) The Arcades Project, Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. See also the useful introduction by Susan Buck-Morss (1989), The Dialectics of Seeing: Wa lter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
17 Walter Benjamin (1979), One-Way Street and Other Writings, London: New Left Books.
18 “Architecture Intermundium: an open letter to architectural educators and students of architecture,” in Libeskind (2000), The Space of Encounter, p. 20.
19 Libeskind (2000), The Space of Encounter, pp. 49–55 and 55–7 respectively.
20 Ibid., pp. 92–6. Another compilation is Daniel Libeskind (1997), Radix-Matrix: architecture and writings, Munich, New York: Prestel.
21 “Between the Lines, Jewish Museum, Berlin, 1988–9”, Libeskind (2000), The Space of Encounter, p. 23.
22 Both sheets in Daniel Libeskind Papers, 1970–92, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Special Collections, 920061: FF 16. Libeskind would devote an entire notebook to sketches in which a falling stack of books – Torahs, burned books – are abstracted into a variety of Malevich-style Suprematist images. See the notebook entitled Uncertainty in Special Collections, 920061–5.
23 Ink on tracing paper, Libeskind Papers, 1970–92, Getty Research Institute, Special Collections, 920061: FF 15.
24 “Between the Lines, Jewish Museum, Berlin, 1988–9”, Libeskind (2000), The Space of Encounter, p. 23.
25 Kurt W. Forster (1999), “Frank O. Gehry Guggenheim Museum” in Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani and Angeli Sachs eds., Museums for a New Millennium: concepts projects buildings, Munich, London, New York: Prestel, p. 129.
26 Remarks in Libeskind (2000), The Space of Encounter, p. 26; diagram p. 23. There is a drawing in a sketchbook at GRI Special Collections 920061–6 that shows six major Berlin landmarks – the Brandenburg Gate, the Angel, the Bismarck memorial, etc. – forming all but one of the points of a Star of David with the word “Jude” inscribed inside it. One of the points may be a standing man.
27 GRI Special Collections 920061, box 31.3.
28 GRI, Special Collections, 920061, FF 15. This is the sketch for the diagram in the Commemorative Book, GRI, Special Collections, 9260061, 1.5.
29 GRI, Special Collections, 920061, box 31.3.
30 GRI, Special Collections, 920061–9.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 GRI, Special Collections, 920061–8.
34 Libeskind cites a survivor: “‘What do you suppose that white light you saw from the crack in the cattle car on your way to Stutthof really was?’ the interviewer asked Elaine some thirty years later in her Brooklyn home. ‘You see in order to survive you must believe in something, you need a source of inspiration, of courage, of something bigger than yourself, something to overcome reality. The line was my source of inspiration, my sign from Heaven. Many years later, after liberation, when my children were growing up, I realized that the white line might have been fume from a passing airplane’s exhaust pipe, but does it really matter?’” from Yaffa Eliach (1982), Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, New York: Oxford University Press, in Libeskind (2000), The Spaces of Encounter, p. 49.
35 Anthony Vidler (2001), “Warped space: architectural anxiety in digital culture”, in Terry Smith ed., Impossible Presence: surface and screen in the photogenic era, Sydney: Power Publications, and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 294–5. These ideas are developed further in his (2000) Warped Space: art, architecture and anxiety in modern culture, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
36 Ignasi de Solà-Morales (1997), Differences: topographies of contemporary architecture, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, pp. 56–70.
37 Vidler (2001), “Warped space,” p. 296.
38 Ibid., p. 297.
39 Ibid., p. 298.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.
42 Andrew Benjamin (1997), “The architecture of hope, Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum” in his Present Hope: philosophy, architecture, Judaism, London: Routledge, pp. 103–18.
43 Libeskind (2000), The Space of Encounter, p. 26.
44 Benjamin (1997), Present Hope, p. 112.
45 Ibid., pp. 115–16, 118.
46 See Ken Gorbey (2001), Discovering the Jewish Museum Berlin, Berlin: Stiftung Jüdisches Museum Berlin.
47 Is this over-determination? Some have thought so. In a provocative analysis, artist Adam Geszy (2000), Der Knabentanz, Berlin: Künstlerhaus Bethanien, compares the Jewish Museum to a Nazi-era official building by Heinrich Tessenow. On this and related issues in connection with the Washington Holocaust Museum, see Naomi Miller (1999), “Building the unbuildable: the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum” in Wessel Reinink and Jeroen Stumpel eds., Memory and Oblivion: Proceedings of the XXIXth International Congress of the History of Art, Dordrecht: Kluver, pp. 1091–1101.
48 Vidler (2001), “Warped space”, p. 299.
49 See Anthony Vidler (1992), The Architectural Uncanny: essays in the modern unhomely, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
50 Romi Khosla (2002), The Loneliness of a Long Distant Future; dilemmas of contemporary architecture, New Delhi: Tulika Books.
51 See Daniel Bertrand Monk (2002), An Aesthetic Occupation: the immediacy of architecture and the Palestinian conflict, Durham: Duke University Press, introduction and passim.
52 See Smith (2006), The Architecture of Aftermath, ch. 7.
53 Gershom Scholem (2002), The Fullness of Time: poems, trans. Richard Sieburth, Jerusalem: Ibis Editions.
54 Walter Benjamin (1974), “On the concept of history”, Gesammelte Schriften I, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, first published 1940, pp. 691–704. This trans. Harry Zohn, from (2003) Walter Benjamin: selected writings, Vol. 4: 1938–1940, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, pp. 392–3.
55 These works are placed in their context by O. K. Werckmeister (1984), The Making of Paul Klee’s Career 1914–20, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 237–42. Werckmeister argues strongly for Klee’s movement away, during these years, from his earlier overtly political orientations.
56 “Curriculum Vitae (VI): Dr Walter Benjamin,” in (2003), Walter Benjamin: selected writings, volume 4, 1938–1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott and others, Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, p. 381.