Staging a Vanished Community: Daniel Libeskind’s Scenography in the Berlin Jewish Museum

Abstract

When Daniel Libeskind’s Jüdisches Museum (Jewish Museum) opened in Berlin in 1999, it was the result of a ten-year battle between two competing visions of community: on the one hand, Berlin’s political elite and city officials who thought of the project as a supplement to the existing Berlin Museum and who gave the project the insensitive title ‘Jüdische Abteilung’ or ‘Jewish Department’, a designation originally coined by Adolf Eichmann and given to the section in the Gestapo that carried out deportations during the Shoah; and, on the other hand, the architect Libeskind whose award-winning design envisioned the construction site as a historic opportunity for a powerful narrative. Libeskind noted, ‘when the Jews were exiled from Berlin, at that moment, Berlin was exiled from its past, its present, and — until this tragic relationship is resolved — its future’ (Ground: 83). Libeskind, who had won the design competition for the museum in 1990 against all odds, faced multiple schemes by city officials barring him, the ‘Jewish architect’, from actually carrying out his design: the mayor, the senate, and powerful city officials regularly questioned its rationale, demanded redesigns, and then Mayor Eberhard Diepgen attempted to bribe Libeskind into building a more lucrative skyscraper in exchange for agreeing to abandon the museum (Libeskind Ground: 145).