Here is some background to the extension of the Berlin Museum and its Jewish wing mentioned in this this text:
"According to planners, the Jewish wing would be both autonomous and integrative, the difficulty being to link a museum of civic history with the altogether uncivil treatment of that city's Jews. The questions such a museum raises are as daunting as they are potentially paralyzing: How to do this in a form that would not suggest reconciliation and continuity? How to reunite Berlin and its Jewish part without suggesting a seamless rapprochement? How to show Jewish history and culture as part of German history without subsuming it altogether? How to show Jewish culture as part of and separate from German culture without recirculating all the old canards of "a people apart"?"
The text goes on to say that rather than skirting these questions, the planners confronted them unflinchingly in conceptual brief for the competition that put such questions at the heart of the design process.:
"According to the text by Rolf Bothe (then director of the Berlin Museum) and Vera Bendt (then director of the Jewish Museum Department of the Berlin Museum), a Jewish museum in Berlin would have to comprise three primary areas of consideration: (1) the Jewish religion, customs, and ritual objects; (2) the history of the Jewish community in Germany, its rise and terrible destruction at the hands of the Nazis; and (3) the lives and works of Jews who left their mark on the face and the history of Berlin over the centuries.16 But in elaborating these areas, the authors of the conceptual brief also challenged potential designers to acknowledge the terrible void that made this museum necessary. If part of the aim here had been the reinscription of Jewish memory and the memory of the Jews' murder into Berlin's otherwise indifferent civic culture, then another part would be to reveal the absence in postwar German culture demanding this reinscription."
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at October 7, 2004 11:43 PM | TrackBack