“Looking forward without forgetting history”

The exhibition you curated is in the very building whose architecture it showcases. Was that a stroke of luck or a challenge?

It is very unusual to see an architectural exhibition in the building the show is about. We decided to do it for the museum’s twenty-fifth anniversary. And it is a challenge, but an incredibly fun one. Hopefully visitors will make the connection and realize that they can identify the exhibition space they are standing in within one of the three models on display.

What changed as a result of Libeskind’s approach?

Libeskind engaged deeply with German and Berlin history. He was born in Poland, lived in Israel, moved to the U.S. as a high school student, and was educated there and in England. In the 1980s, he also lived and worked in Milan. But he came from a family of Holocaust survivors. That means, of course, that he did not come to Germany without preconceptions, but he did come as an outsider.

And with his perceptive eye and his learned background, he turned his attention to Germany. The building was intended as an extension to the Berlin Museum, West Berlin’s museum of municipal history. So he incorporated many aspects of Berlin, and German history more broadly, into his architecture, which he inscribed in the building.

In other words, he was by no means exclusively focused on the Holocaust. But he saw to it that a museum of city history could not forget the Holocaust. The subject is massively inscribed into the architecture of this extension, which is today the main building of the Jewish Museum Berlin – and I do think that is an achievement, he had an impact in that way.

What perspective on Berlin and Jewish life in Germany is visible in Libeskind’s design?

Berlin was the nerve center where the murder of the European Jews was planned. That also reached Libeskind’s relatives in Poland. That is part of Berlin’s history, whether we like it or not. This idea was created, implemented, and planned here.

But Libeskind also engaged just as deeply with Berlin’s history and culture. That means he oriented himself around Berlin intellectual and cultural figures, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who contributed to the cultural and intellectual life of their times.

As for Jewish life in Berlin: I assume Libeskind had contact with the organized Jewish Community and with the Jewish community in Germany more broadly. He is, after all, a Jew who is aware of and open about his Jewishness. But it was not the only thing that interested him. Heinz Galinski, the head of the Jewish Community at the time, had to give up on his vision of a separate building for the Jewish Museum. But once he understood the ideas behind the building, he came to see what made it special and how important it was for Berlin and Germany. That is why he ultimately supported it.

Many things we take for granted today were anything but obvious in the late 1980s. And that was even before the Berlin Wall came down.

The base is lined with paper printed with pages from the memorial book of murdered German Jews, which had been published by the German Federal Archives. These are deportation lists: always including a name and a date – the deportation date – followed by the German words for “missing” or “declared dead.” This makes the Holocaust reference very strong.

In addition to the models for the Jewish Museum Berlin, the exhibition also displays another model that Libeskind submitted for another competition in 1993: the plan to develop the “Former SS Barracks Complex at Sachsenhausen.” Why did you decide to include this model in the exhibition as well?

Many years passed between Libeskind’s design winning the competition in 1989 and the opening of the Jewish Museum Berlin in 2001. During that time, in 1993, the city of Oranienburg announced a competition for the urban redevelopment of the former SS military complex near Sachsenhausen concentration camp, from where all European concentration camps were administered. There was apparently a housing shortage in Oranienburg, so the city considered building dense urban housing at this very centrally located site—and specifically invited Libeskind to submit a proposal.

Libeskind did so, but he was quite dismayed by the entire situation. The camp had been horrific, the site was terrible, and he found the whole concept difficult to understand. So he presented a design that was intended to give space to history. He wanted to put large parts of the site under water and plant trees, and then also build something – but not just conventional residential housing. Most of all, he proposed municipal buildings, based on the idea that the residents of Oranienburg somehow needed to engage with this history before thinking about the future.

As we know, we are haunted by what we do not say out loud. So it is wiser to engage with these things so we can reach a place where we can think ahead. Fundamentally, it is not in Libeskind’s nature to continually look back at negativity. His architecture is always future-facing too; it looks forward without forgetting history.

And did his idea succeed here as well?

The jury awarded the first prize to an Austrian architect who proposed massive development, with ten thousand housing units, including space for municipal uses. I think that would have amounted to one-fifth of Oranienburg’s population. But the city was taken with Libeskind’s idea and awarded him a special prize, bypassing the jury, so to speak.

One statement by the jury is especially astonishing, that they had not awarded Libeskind a prize in part because implementing his plan would have “retraumatized the people of Oranienburg.” That is another indication of the range of attitudes that were still very common in Germany, and the level of resistance to engaging with this history. Of course no one, certainly not Libeskind, would claim that all the people of Oranienburg were personally involved in planning concentration camps or murdering Jews. But it happened right before their eyes, and presumably some locals were involved with these concentration camps in various ways.

The impasse in awarding the prize was complicated by the fact that Brandenburg’s state monument preservation authorities and the emerging memorial group also had a say. Incredibly, Daniel Libeskind and the manager of his firm, the architect Matthias Reese, invested an enormous amount of time in talking with the city and the monument preservation office to find more viable solutions. But ultimately, the project failed because of the financing.

And what is on the site today?

There have been no major structural changes. As far as I know, the tax office of Oranienburg is now located in the “T-Building.” And then there are barracks, accommodations for the SS troops, which were largely built by concentration camp prisoners like most buildings on the site. Some of these buildings are used by the Brandenburg Police Academy. But the academy works closely with the memorial, which incorporates the subject extensively during police training. Despite this reflective approach, it is bizarre that the site is still being used.

You said earlier that Libeskind also builds for the future. His building has now been in place for twenty-five years. In a sense, we are the future people were imagining back then. In your experience with visitors, has the building retained its fascination?

The building is still working very well after twenty-five years, especially its basic idea of making the absent visible and present in the building. Form and content simply come together particularly well here.

As a curator who regularly creates exciting exhibitions in this building, what do you say to people who still insist the Libeskind building was most impressive when it was empty?

I can understand that, because architecture can be extraordinarily fascinating, and we all experience large, empty, but well-designed spaces far too rarely. I know this from very small children who have only just become able to move around freely. When you take them into large spaces, it has an effect: they sometimes run off, shouting with joy. And we do that too, in a more moderate form. Spaces excite us too.

In the past, these spaces might have been churches, which often have beautiful architecture and attracted people not only as communal and religious spaces but perhaps also because they were good places – with comforting proportions and design. What are the large spaces today? Perhaps libraries, public spaces, airports, which are usually not very beautiful and very rarely have interesting architecture. And, of course, museums.

So I understand the idea that it was at its most beautiful empty. But that was not the purpose of this building. Neither the Senate nor the federal government wanted the building to remain empty, nor did the architect. And of course the people running the museum did not, because we have entirely different things in mind. Libeskind does indulge in the luxury of space, and there are nooks and crannies that are difficult to use. But by and large, the building functions well as a museum.

Which of the items on display fascinated or surprised you most during your research for the exhibition?

It is a tightly focused, clearly structured exhibition, with everything revolving around this building. What did surprise me, and what I greatly enjoyed, was looking closely at Libeskind’s design drawing, because he wrote and distilled so much into it. For me, it has a poetic quality. He draws on a rich store of knowledge, and that is also evident in these plans. For example, there is a long Hebrew quotation from Jeremiah that he wrote out himself, very precisely, over a length of three meters.

At the time, the city was very surprised that Libeskind inserted the Holocaust so prominently into his design, and a culture of remembrance was only just emerging, often from the bottom up through citizens’ initiatives. Today, there seems to be a discrepancy between an apparent oversaturation of Holocaust remembrance and a factual lack of knowledge about its history. What can we as a museum, and what can you as a curator, do to ensure that engagement with this subject does not remain formulaic or seem like a top-down imposition?

We have been talking about this subject for a very long time, but new generations are always growing up. And it is not about being able to recite the dates somehow. It is more about the understanding behind them. And the basic lesson that can perhaps be drawn from the Holocaust – namely, granting all people the same right to live freely and pursue their personal choices – may have to be learned afresh by every generation. Museums can participate in this process.

The Jewish Museum Berlin is concerned with the history and present of Jews in Germany, but visitors can experience and learn something here that is generally human and can also be applied elsewhere. We have the opportunity to work through the subject of human diversity again and again using different topics and areas of life. We can create understanding for other people and for their right to be different from ourselves. Many museums can do that, not only the Jewish Museum. I see that as extremely important for preserving and nurturing the capacity for empathy.

Thank you very much for this fascinating conversation. 

The interview was conducted by Mirjam Bitter, Online Editor.