Abstract
The Jewish Museum in Berlin is devoted to telling the 2,000-year history of Jews in Germany in a stunning building designed by Daniel Libeskind. It is Germany’s premier museum devoted to Jewish history and memory, but it is expressly not a Holocaust museum and most reference to the Holocaust is architectural. In its interactive and sophisticated exhibitions, the Jewish Museum represents contemporary international trends in museology and in many ways resembles the many Holocaust and other memorial museums around the world, one of the most prominent and striking international museological trends. However, in rejecting the categorization as a memorial museum and in focusing on a celebration of German–Jewish culture and history rather than the tragedy of the Holocaust, the Jewish Museum is what we might call a countermemorial museum. As such, it challenges the new norms around the creation of memorial museums and other sites of memory to be self-reflexive meditations on the negative past and its trauma. If memorial museums emerge from a particular orientation toward the past that Jeffrey Olick calls the “politics of regret” and claims is a major characteristic of our age, then the Jewish Museum might represent a parallel trend that we can call a “politics of nostalgia.” The museum serves, in many ways, as a screen upon which present-day Germany can project an idealized image of its past, masking some of the present tensions around German national identity and ideas of German multiculturalism. At the same time, the museum often seems to be in conflict with Libeskind’s building, which is infused with Holocaust symbolism and meaning.
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Notes
Libeskind’s master plan won a design competition to lead the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site in New York City; its most famous component is the Freedom Tower, the 1,776 foot tower anchoring the site.
The countermonument movement was an effort to challenge traditional notions of monumental commemoration that German artists and activists believed had been polluted by the fascist and communist totalitarian regimes. The problem they faced was to commemorate those who suffered or died without using the forms used by the regimes that killed them and the kind of closure those forms implied; thus, the artists of the countermonument movement created memorials like Harburg’s Monument against Fascism, an obelisk that invited visitors to write on it and then slowly sank into the ground and Kassel’s “negative form monument,” a white tower that was buried, inverted in the ground (Young 1993, pp. 27–48).
The film, “I-Witness: A 4-D Time Travel Adventure,” uses not only 3-D visual effects seen through special glasses but also “4-D” physical effects like moving seats. As an example, perhaps the most effective 4-D moment comes as the film describes the investigative journalism of Nelly Bly who uncovered terrible conditions inside a nineteenth century insane asylum; as the film describes the rats running underfoot in the asylum, a puff of air at the visitors’ feet draws from the crowd a collective startled leap and gasp of terror.
Dark tourism, also sometimes called to as thanatourism, refers to tourism to sites of grief, death, and suffering and has been receiving increased scholarly attention in recent years (Lennon and Foley 2000).
Some examples of memorial museums include Yad Vashem in Israel, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Simon Wiesenthal Center for Tolerance, and many others in the USA, the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile, Peru’s Memory Museum, the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center in Rwanda, the Apartheid Museum and District Six Museum in South Africa, and many, many others.
See especially Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (2006) and Human Rights and Memory (2010); John Torpey, ed. Politics and the Past (2003); also Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts (2003); Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in the Historical Discourse” (2000); Marita Sturkin, Tangled Memories (1997); Robin Wagner-Pacifici, “Memories in the Making: The Shape of Things that Went” (1996); et al.
This approach was developed by Rolf Bothe, director of the Berlin Museum since 1981, and Vera Bendt, chief curator of the Jewish Museum (Jewish Museum Berlin 2013, p. 3).
Eisenman is perhaps best known as the designer of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, the other most prominent site of Jewish memory in Berlin.
Http://www.jmberlin.de/main/EN/04-About-The-Museum/01-Architecture/01-libeskind-Building.php [Accessed 7 January 2012].
Also, with the trees growing up out of stone, it seems to have directly inspired Andrew Goldsworthy’s Garden of Stones at the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York City.
See, for example, a recent Pew Research Global Attitudes Project study (2011) that found that both Muslims and Westerners in Europe and the USA overwhelmingly see relations between the two as bad. See http://www.pewglobal.org/2011/07/21/muslim-western-tensions-persist/ [Accessed 10 January 2013]
Thus, truth commissions, official apologies, and memorial museums and other forms of “regretful” memorialization are becoming the norm around the world in almost any place emerging from conflict, most recently in places as diverse as Democratic Republic of Congo, East Timor, Guatemala, Kenya, Nepal, USA, among many, many others.
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This paper is part of a collaborative research project, “Collective Memory and the Transformation of Urban Space,” that is housed in the Center for Cultural Sociology at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic and supported by the Czech Science Foundation. The first version of this paper was presented at the conference “Identities in Conflict/Conflict in Identities” organized by the Center for Cultural Sociology and Department of Sociology at Masaryk University in October 2012. I thank the conference organizers and participants for their valuable comments and suggestions.
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Sodaro, A. Memory, History, and Nostalgia in Berlin’s Jewish Museum. Int J Polit Cult Soc 26, 77–91 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-013-9139-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-013-9139-6