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Daniel Among the Philosophers:

Terry Smith
Published online: 22 Jul 2009.

To cite this article: Terry Smith (2005) Daniel Among the Philosophers:, Architectural Theory
Review, 10:1, 105-124, DOI: 10.1080/13264820509478532

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 ATR in I 115

Daniel Among the Philosophers:

The Jewish Museum, Berlin, and
Architecture after Auschwitz
TERRY SMITH
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the importance of\\ alter Benjamin s thinking to Daniel libeskind's design pro-
cess as he developed the Jeirisb Museum. Berlin, has been noted by a number of
writers - not least Anthony Vidler and Naomi Stead — as welt as the architect
himself: Among the opening displays iras a room dedicated to the philosopher
of the city, who it as not only a great chronicler of Berlin itself, but perhaps the
outstanding thinker of the modem city as such. Benjamin and Libeshind are
connectedalmve all by the kilter's creative use of the concept now most associ-
ated with the former- the passage, or. more accurately, passaging as I he form
of modem being. But the two men are also connected at a deeper theoretical
level I will show in this paper lhal il was a set of Benjamin's core concepts thai
enabled iibeshind to find a solution, not only to the problem for architecture
net by Adomo. but also that sel by Heidegger. The philosophical and therefore
architectural originality of the Jewish Museum. Berlin — as Andrew Benjamin
has also recognized — lies here

Impossible Poetry
To Tlit/odor Adorno, architectural gestures towards transparent democrat.-) sui h .IN the renovation
oi the Reichstag in Berlin h\ Sir Norman Foster would be, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, acts
undertaken in die most perverse bad faith — or, at best, in an ignorance so profound that ii would
Iwtokcn a world that had lost its memory altogether.1 His declaration, thai "To write poetrj after
Auschwitz is barbaric." remains the mosi unequivocal challenge yei formulated to the possibility ol
an and i ulturc in our time. In its absolute negativity, it draws, unambiguously, the line up to which
art and ethics, if the) 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, n offers no exits From this standoff.

It did not, however, take the Holocaust tobringAdornotoatrenchantdLsmissalofHegelian metaphysics,

and of the role tor an as the progressive realization ofthe^m/ofthetimesat a certain stage of its

ins
 Smith

development thai was the key to Hegel's aesilietics. An aesthetics which remained, in Europe ai least,
perhaps the most elaborated and inllucntial outline of how an might serve society." Yet the Holocaust
drove Aclorno. and later his parents, from Germany, and claimed the lives of mam of his colleagues
and friends — not least Waller Benjamin. It became, and remained, the signal most vivid instance of
the c|ualit\ thai he found most hateful in modernity, yet most characteristic of it: its implacable drive
t(i administer everything. and. in si > doing, reduce all living beings t< > things.
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lnthiscontext.Adorno'sstatement joins the novels ofPrimoLevi the ])hotographsofMarg;tretBourke-

White and Lev Miller, ami a delimited number of other efforts lo 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 tenor and death-dealing away from soldiers battling in relatively, defined theatres of war toward
campaigns against selected, anil 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, m such
circumstances, to create works of art. and lo construct civil culture between citizens. It would, he
bcliev es. take a denial that the Nazi barbarism was ev er v isited 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 he any generalized affirmation of art's redemptive grace — which
would be simple-minded, to hoot. All artists can do is contemplate, in immobile silence, the enormity
of the devastation that has been wrought. The same applies to critics, anil to those seeking a radical
critique of contemporary culture. An. 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.";
What of that an which takes Auschwitz as its subject, and which seeks to show its horror? In his
subsequent w ritings. Adorno rejected most attempts at this, especially those — such as the < iperas of
Schdnbcrg. and Brecht's plays — that took committed, engaged, transparently critical forms MUM.
and theatre 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.
Only one work of an met his (impossible) demands: Samuel Beckett's play Erulgcime.

"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

Ki(,
 ATR ID: I (IS

emblems of i ullure restored after Auschwitz."

Vloi'iin understood thai Becketi hail deliberate!) refused to represent the Holocaust directly, ami
thai the posi-apocalyptk dreamscaj)es in which his plays, especially KiHlgciitii'. were .set. was. in fact.
it.s aftemiath. UK last comment on this topic, in his honk .\eii<iliiv Dialectics, returns in this verv
point. Ina major expansion ol his ethical penumbra, he acknowledged thai "Perennial suffering has
as nun h right i' i expressii in as one who is tortured has i< > scream: hence it ma) haw been wrong |to
have said] thai after Auschwitz no more poems mav he written.'*' He acknowledges, belatedly, that
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the survivors of the Holocausi deserve the compensations — or, at least, the companionship — of
representatkin, as do. in varying degrees, those ol us condemned to live in its infinite shadow. Bui
these compensations are hard ones — indeed, they are the hardest imaginable:

"Beckett has given us the only lining reaction to the situation of die concentration
camps - a situation he never calls b\ name, as if ii were subject to a strict image
ban. What is. is like a concentration camp.""
The sequence of quite concrete, carefully circumscribed claims as to permitted aesthetu ethical
conjunctions in the aftermath of the Holocaust thai we haw just reviewed have had an enormous
impact on cultural practice throughout the world, particularly since the 19"()s. Gene Ray sums these
up in a useful way:

"Adorno's very specific demands that an should refuse positive represenunion,

aestbeiic pleasure and the possibility thai Auschwitz could be mastered or
redeemed eventually attained the status of a dominant ethic of representation.
Today we tan recognize the decade following the mid-1980s as the period in
which this ethic came lo dominance ami was gradually conventionalized. While
artists who produced earl) responses to Adorno would include Beuys, Anselm
Kicler. Christian Boltanski ami. in film, Claude Lanzmann, this ethic would be
elaborated more fully in the counter-monuments' developed byjochen Gerz and
EstherShalev-Gerz, Horsl Hoheisel, Maya Lin and Daniel l.ibeskiml. The more
general and less rigorous demand that any aestbeiic 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 thai critics such
as Susan Soniag have soughi to vigorously enforce."1"

The Architecture of Auschwitz

One question that most of these commentators seem not toask is: what was Auschwitz, as architecture?
This small I Ipper Silesian citj was redesigned from 19 \1 as a model town, a Garden City surrounded
In efficient industry, of a kind ideall) suited to the New Gcrmanv. above all iis Drailg liacb Oslcn.
Manx ol thoseGcrmans who settled it i there being virtual") none living there before this occupation)
did so in the belief thai they were contributing, in their modest way. to building the socius of the

10"
 Smith

New Gammy. its ordinan groundwork. This ma\ explain pan of their reluctance to recognize ihc
perversion oo uning both in the center ami on the outskirts ol town in ncarbv liirkenau and the
surrounding ureas, the death indusin that was booming there Another lac tor might haw heen the
dawning realization that they, too, had all along heen cogs in the death-dealing mai hinerv ol the
Final Solution, thai iis relentless eva< nation of their sham moralit) had made them victims ton. Vet,
as van Pell observes,
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" . . . by the early, summer ol 1942 Aiischwitz-birkenau had become the site of
mass-murder b\ means of two primitive gas chambers in adapted peasant houses.
A year later the same camp contained lour modem 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.""

As the regional headquarters of the SS. the entrance to Auschwitz was intended 10 symbolize the
power of the organization, a goal ii achieved even more emphatically in the aftermath of the Nazi
defeat, when it hecame iconic of the Holocaust itself, Its medievalizing style, chosen hv Himmler,
sought to root the new era in that of an earlier unifier. I leinrich I. Yet. as architecture, the maji iritv ol
the structures at Auschwitz, Birkenau iAuschwitz IIi and the related camps were modern industrial
structures, ol no distinction as architecture, and certainly not modernist in am sense. Local and
Berlin-based architects strove to relate the disposition and sen k ing of these c amps ic > ihe urban plan
of central Auschwitz. But their single-minded purpose — to extraci ihe maximum labor power from
the inmates and to dispose of than hv ihe most minimal means when thev became usclcs:, - 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, ihe visible manifestation of the walls of
war that surrounded Germany itself anil which its armies fought to extend outwards.

These camps fell short of their own presumptions of order and efficiency in ways thai are ai once
devastating to recall, and most revealing of ihe shortcomings of modernity as a sjx'ial model. Main
of these are. by now. well known, and were typical across the entire concentration camp swem ui
had begun in 1933. and had served mam political and economic roles under the expanding Reit In
Chief among them was ihe assignment of vastly more people — at lirsi Russian prisoners of war. and
then, after I9t2. Jews — than could he accommodated, even when ihe death-dealing was ai its mi isl
efficient and least disguised as the unfortunate by-product of an exhausted laborforce.The imposition
ol internal discipline, often carried out by inmates, on the false promise ol dieirsurviv.il, against their
fellows. The arbitrary rule of camp commandants and other officers. The medical experiments on
inmates that went beyond thelimits imposed by the profession for research involvinghuraan'patients.'
Less known, but in the event even more deadly, were its architectural shortcomings. Van Pell presents
in factual detail the nauseating miasma of organizational inefficiency, deliberate under-resourcing,
official cowardice, design incompetence and hail judgment thai attended even aspen of this ghastly
industry of death. I confine myself tociting one example from this architecture of hell, thetoilei and
sewerage arrangements:

His
 ATR 10 1 DS

"First, there is the spatial arrangement: the privy' meant to serve "*.00(l inmate* is
ashed with ;i single concrete open sewer. I IS It. longb; 3 ft. wide, without seats
and with one long beam as a back support. The design was adapted from a model
latrine lor large units in winter quarters and was first published in a leaflet on
wartime emergency construction. Like the model latrine, the camp lauine 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
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catastrophic, for each of the walkways was 118 ft, long. Both in the built version
anil in the model, access to the walkways was provided b\ doors at each of the
building's sin in sides. 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 lime, ami also assuming that all ",000 inmates were able to move their
bowels with the requisite precision, it would require forty-six successive searings,'
with all the traffic jams involved... One sewer, supplied with an anemic supply
of water and a drop of only Lb percent could never Hush 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. Thud, the shame-walls' were removed, which might have provided
at least si ime 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."1'

Building Being and Not-Being

Sim c |%7 the Berlin Museum has been housed in the Koniglisches Collegienhaus, a former Baroque
I lalacerec'i instructed in an elegant R< >c< in imanncrin I " 3 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 \\ ilhclm.siras.se and the Friedrich.srras.se - that is. in the Fricdrichstadt area, since the late
eighteenth century olicn touted as an alternative center for the city. Through the nineteenth and ind >
the earh twentieth eentun the Lindenstrasse sector was a focus of Jewish life. During the 1930s its
southern:sections Ixicame 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 lor an
extension that would meei the institution's needs for additional "exhibition space and storage and
other functional spate.'' and "because the Jewish Museum Department has to he enlarged and full}
integrated into the Berlin Museum."1 The city was ready, at last, to take a further step in recognizing

\w
 Smith

and repairing the harliarismsof U.s recent past.

In 19H9,lV(iniaiiiiMi,^^ii.'nirii-s.ilK'iiii-iii\ihiisi.'llial(iri)anii.'ll.il)okiiKl.(lalaiiiyil"an extraordinary,
completely autonomous solution."" A decade ol complex negotiations followed—no surprise given
the conllicted naunv of the project, llie profound political transformation ol Berlin itsell and the
radu al nature of the architect's pro|iusal — before the building opened injanmin 1999.' Kvcn then.
it stood cmpt\ for two years while the architect was given the opportunity to allow his building to
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speak for itself.

What did it say? There is no shortage ol statements on rei ord as in the an hitet t's intentions, Let us
review some of them before turning to his drawings, and then to the buildingitself. Libeskind stunned
the judges by submitting as his competition enm a philosophical prcigram typed onto mush paper.
Tilling die entire project "Between the ljiK's."heIx;gan by noting that."AMuseum fortheCityof 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."1 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, anivelj confronting change. "To begin this rethinking he immediateh goes
to the nub of the philosophical problem that Adomo 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 heinsand what is other than Ixang. The museum must serve
in 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 pliilosophy, especial!) Heidegger
and Adomo, His ambition here is nothing less than to use aspects of Heidegger's ontolog> to solve
Adorno deonotological impasse. In full awareness of the lone i if the impasses dialectical negativity,
Libeskind sets out to create a post-Auschwitzarchitecture, and to do so poetically, lie knew that he
had to lake on the presenting ol unpresentability. the presenting of non-being, as the problem's only
solution, as the building's onl\ possible program, His hope was that, if hesucceeded—that is to say. if
his solution fails in a negatively dialectical way. if it enabled the world to be present to itsell 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 alter Aftermath kind ol an. His
ambition is signaled in the conclusion to his "Between the Lines" competition entry. After sketching
the mohilitv of usages and spaces within the Museum to come, be s,i\s A Museum ensemble is thus
always on the verge ol Becoming — no longer suggestive ol a final .solution 'The moment when Berlin
imagined itself without its Jews forever is pivotal in the histon of Berlin, anil is the core content ol'
the Museum. It established history and contemporaneity as existing above all before anil alter it Vet
if the Museum was not to become stuck in an eternal return to this moment, it bad to avoid being a
Holocaust museum perse. Thus the necessity of building into the Museum open-endedness. a state
ol permanent incompletion, of always becoming, ibis is hopefulness beyond \dornos pessimistii
imagination- or the wishful thinking of a (divine) fool. It might, of course, he both.

What cbulzpclb! To aspire to forge—in the design impulse for a Jewish Museum, in Berlin — the basic

liu
 AIR 1(1:1 (IS

insights ni i IK- philosopher ol Being who notoriously succumbed to Nazism and those of the Jewish
philusophenvho famously argued the impossibility of philosophy—indeed, .of am kind of responsible
being siliei*lhepropusitionaler.KlicationoftheJe\\.s Butl.ilx\skinddidthisa>asuotisly.lfyou re-read
ihe.se preliminary statements, you will see thai they turn the profound admonitions and prohihilions
uttered, in turn. In Heidegger antl Adorno. hack on themselves, each of them separately, then as .1
pair, Heidegger's insistence on t he always-becoming of theftorldis set against the Nazi Final Solution.
Building an artwork th.it embodies from its ground plan up the thrall of its own impossibility is to
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enact Adorno'.s prohibition as a road map. This is the substantive content ol the architect's claim thai
lir set out to complete Schonberg's unhnishable opera UosesandAamn (a work ili.it could not, in
its own and Adorno'sieniK lind its resolution rarchiiecturally.'1 Libeskind took these philosophical
steps noi only consciously, but conscientiously. Heidegger's and Adorno's passage through their
times w;is. fur .ill us different es. contemporaneous, Libeskind saw this as consequential not only for
Berlin bin lor the resl of humanity. Thus the double pathways, the doubling of void and "not-void"
throughout the Museum. Yet this contemporaneity was not adventitious, not lor the philosophers.
inir fi ii' am i il us. I Jisjunctive parallelism just is what it is like ti> share, as the architect never tired of
pointing out. "a common kite.''

The references to "passage" here, and in Ubeskind's notes, alerts us to the presence of another
phili)s(i|)liei\iliei|uintessen(ialhi(iiilliiteink'i1iniM'wh()ih(isesuii'icleratlierthanlallintothehandsi)l'
fascists. Walter Benjamin. T()te«)lw;thetlialectk^ltuisi)nsl)etw,eeiiHeideggerandAilt>rn()'siiTt'ilucibIe
demands, Ubeskind's design thinking drew on four ol Benjamin's key concepts. The complexities
of modernity, the contending forces of modernization. Benjamin vividly showed, have created — in
rities and in the minds of men — mobile, contingent /K/.w/.ye.* 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. lust, as drock, then as melancholy, later as trauma, while lo 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 axa mechanical Marxismbut with aco//«j{econsciousness.""Libeskind made
his debt to Benjamin quite explicit by dividing the visitor's movement along the Zigzag of galleries
into sixty so t ions, representing each of the "Stations of the Star" described by Benjamin in his notes
about Berlin and modernity. One-Way Sireei}''

It is this set of existential ethical challenges that is at the core of Ubeskind'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 F.urope. Ii is to Ubeskind'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
nei cssarv ti > gel buildings built have meant that (he Museum does, ultimately, a\\ up as a mi mument
tOSUCh suit thought.

Ill
 Smith

Collage Consciousness
Theicndenc\ <>l LilKfskind.s trainingasa musician.:II ihe IJnl/ 0inservatory,anilaivhitec i. :ii (.<■ * >\ler
I niim. New York, was avant-garde modernist. As were his attitudes. An earh manifesto is his lvs~
'\\ivhiiceiuivlniemHnuliiini:An()pi.MH.cuciU()Ai\hiia'Un\ilI-\lucil(MSLiiulSiii(lnusiil:\rilii!aiiiiv
in which he asks:

"\\'h\ spend time tedioush applying gold leaf onto a pinnacleof a lower
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(impressive! i 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. Divisible disasters precede tin ise that can he seen... No aim Hint
of research, discussions on relevance.' or compiled information can disguise
the fact: Architecture as taught and practiced today is hut a grammatical fiction.
Enough losee the gulf that separates what is taught (and howl) from what is
built land why!) to understand thai somewhere a lie is being perpetrated. Onlj a
sophistic method could mask a situation where so many spend so much to do so
little — with such damaging results."'-'"

The Jewish Museum was his first major project, and the first ol many conceived during the 1980s,
to he actually built. Some of its architectural ideas had been first advanced in .1 raw form in a set of
28 drawings done in 1983 entitled Chamberworks. Architectural Meditations oil the Themes from
lleraclilns. and in such urban planning concepts as his (.'/'/r/iV/yc compel it ion entry of I'M".-'1 In 1989
lie proposed, unsuccessfully, an extension to the Edinburgh Museum ofAn thai would have consisted
1 if .1 complex (if radical, raking shapes erupting into the street beside the restrained ncoclassicisiii ol
the existing buildings—as if the ur-form of earh modernism had suddenh landed in this eighteenth
century cit\ center. During his decade of work on the Jewish Museum. Libcskind spun off a number of
other powerful projects and proposals, including the 199>98 Felix NussbaumHaus.a.small museumai
Osnahriick. Germany, which he entitled Museum Without Exit," In Berlin. Libcskind was dear about
"the three bask ideas thai formed the foundation" of his design:

"First, the impossibility o f understanding the historj of Berlin without

understanding the enormous intellectual, economic, ami 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 anil Europe have a human future."-'

There are gentle allusions here to various forces that were. then, in contention for the cultural
imaginary of Berlin's citizens, including those thatsought to redefine the cit\ — above all, and typicalh
for their moment, through spectacular architecture and related forms ol iconomic repositioning
— as the capital of the united Germany, as a powerhouse ol the European Community and as a kc\

11
 A I R in | i h

o onomii and ailiur.il vector of the new globalization. Thusthe great renovations ol major buildings
.ili ing I liter den linden, ol the entire Mitte district, antl [lie ic< hno-mall wonderland ai I'otzdammcr
Flat/. In pointed contrast. IJheskind is saying: ii you don't get the recent past right, these aspirations,
however worthy they may IK' MI themselves, would amount to nothing more than gold leal applique
over rotten foundations.

Libeskind's very first sketches lor the Museum slum him to he contemplating different kinds of
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human movement through a four-story building, These include the shuttering of film frames related
to distinct times ami distance*. He quickly breaks the profile of this structure into disaggregated units
of distinct sizes and planes, a la Malevich, orRodchenko. Another early idea shows steps leading up
to a closed wall - presumably the Berlin Wall (which will reappear in stronger form later)/ These
i urn into a series ol drawings of volumes standing erect, leaning toward and away, as il the; were an
ensemble of Minimal sculptures — those with the symbolic presenting of a Tony Smith rather than
the withheld muteness ol a Donald Iudd. The goal here seems to he an exploration of the external
massing ol a passible building, or pair of buildings.-'' 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. Ltbeskind. rightly, named the enure project for his core insight: "The official name of the
project is the Jewish Museum.' hut I haw called ii Between the Lines.' I eall it this because it is a
projei t about two lines of thinking, organization and relationship. One is a straight line, hut broken
into many fragments, the other is al< >rtu< HIS line, but continuing indefinitely." To his credit, he never
nominates one of these lines "German" and the other'Jewish ' Instead, the internal multiplicity ol
both cultural formations swarms between the two forms,

It is heiv thai we start to see the deepest relationships between this Museum and the theme of
contemporary architcctua'*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 hunker-like and tangential in
its address to its neighborhood that it resists even, 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.- The 'zigzag' shape ol
the underground passageways, shaded by a broken straight line, is foregrounded in Museum publicity
as its signature logo —but we haw seen that l.iheskind explicitly refutes this as an iconic reduction:
yes, it is precisely this 'German-Jewish' coupling that is to he emphasized, but only in its implicated.
open-ended ambiguity. I lowever distinctive the penetrated zigzag may be as an architectural form,
and as a gestalt. u is. u > him. an anti-icon, at best. After all. it symbolizes mi ivement inn > darkness, into
death, and the invisible connections between (iermanness and Jewishness. This is the underside of
the iconomy; tl tracing within its spectral unconscious. Ven hard to trap in a stereotypical image, to
render as an ii i mi >type. 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 m a different, and deeper, way. It does so, not b\ rejecting iconomy as
such, bin Us contemporary, spectacle array. Instead, the architect resists consumer spectacle from a

I l.-i
 Miinh

long-term pers|)ectivc. ihrough constant recourse, in developing his design thinking. u> the symbols
ofreginies pasi and recent, in iheir logos, ihcini mis.

The ground plan of the Museum lus been frec|uently read as an exploded Star of David. This seems
a simple two-step. absolutcl; appropriate m a Jewish Museum in Berlin- die symbol ofjewishncss,
used by Imih Jewish communities ihroughoui history and die Nazis io identify those the\ held lo he
Jewish, is registered as shattered, emblematizing the Nazi's prodigious but ultimately failed attempt to
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eradicate Jews from the world as they saw ii. I he implicatii in here is thai fragments. In ivvever ruined.
can lie reconnected: and a broken culture restored, however slowh and painfully. Ai such a level of
generalit). this would he a liberal aivhiieciure. Yet I haw argued thai l.ibeskind did ni il lake this si >li
option. I low did he use ibis well-know Ti.sieivoivpical image, specifically? In the publk'iiy surrounding the
project Iiheskiud employed a "compressedand distorted "Starof David as a graphic device to conneci
the two lines mentioned above, creating a "Star Matrix" thai joined those German Jews - "Certain
people, workers, writers, composers, artists, scientists, and poets who formed the link betweenjewish
tradition and German culture" — who lived and worked in what was. when he began on the project,
Hast and West Berlin/" 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, die lines between
which he then used ti >generate the dispositii in i>l the slatted w indows 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 unliuman. is now a place where this sign
has expanded oui to draw in the possibility of a culture of integration and growth.

One page offelt lipped pen drawings stands out for the intensity of its exploration of the possibilities ot
ibis one mot if.-"'We can follow Libcskiiid'smind-cyc-lianda.slie\vorksovcrilieba.sieshapc:ca]iphasi/ing
some parts, lading others out, subtracting sections, turning them differeni ways, adding others of the
same type, turning the figure in space, rotating it. separating its parts, reconfiguringthemwithinaframe
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, forthe kinds of connotative|iower it might retain.
or surprise, when put to work channeling human movemeni through space. Shape is being reshaped
intonricntatk in (in it yet entries, passage, obstruction, exit). He isclearly 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 die Star of Davids 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 dimensii HIS. making ii a
set of interlocking walls. Then, at page center, doubles it into a quasi-Construetivisi figure, echoing El
Uzzitsky's famous collage The New Man, an image on the cusp of revolution in Russia.'Hie 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 undergn tund passageways in the Jewish
Museum. In the most elegantly rendered of these drawings, entitled Void-voidedI'QidCjewisl} Dep'l')
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 spac e.
 ATR in I n

<.f ►IJ.iiM.n tlic incompatible in generate synthetii meaning is typical ol the way iconk images arc
treated throughout Libeskind's drawings. Not as isolated cmblemata. nor as place-holding .signs.
Rather, they aretlin)\vntt);4ethcr.iniivac()llaget)t'cuiiiendinganilsytiibi()tii forces, and made to work
against their narrowness, their exclusionary powers. Another related drawing shows him rendering
the hammer anil sickle, symbol of Communism, anil of workers' power in general, then separating
the two elements before hivaking them up in the ways he did the Star of David.'" Ai this point one
feels thai he is testing his bash design for its capacity'to absorb every ideologically loaded image that
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human Ixangs have ever dreamt up. The most extraordinary of these is .1 draw ins; thai configures the
Museum ground plan, across a double page spread, into cursive Arabic script hinting ai the famous,
and sacred, phrase "Allah is merciful!"^

Not only symbols, but also architectural forms that have themselves acquired a symbolh lone, are
grist to his incnrpi name mill. A number of drawings show him contemplating the interplay between
open anil closed spaces, and between different kinds of enclosure and escape. In one sketch the
eni tie ;ib( ive and I iel( >w gn tund pr< >}cci is imagined as if made fr< >m sect u >ns 1>f 1 he dismant lei I Berlin
\\ .ill Ty 1 HI ally. these are linked w ith 1 ithers in which the stacked shapes of the Museum are thought
ol as seis nl MIII imes of the Torah. lied together, and penetrated by shafts." In another drawing, the
ground plan is projected into three dimensions and imagined as a mini-history of architectural styles,
In 11111 lassical colonnades to a skyscraper and an angular projection labeled "Cloud Breaker.""

In these draw ings we can trace hi ra Lihcskind mi ibilized die almost unimaginably negative elements
that came, during the 19.ii is and 1940s, very close toexpunging not just Jewishnexs from Berlin but also
histi iry itself. The vi tiding of Berlin's Jews is registered as si imething that is irredeemable, a statement
made architect urally 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 us exhibition Spaces. The menu HA ol
Berlin's Jeu s. however, is regarded as recoverable, as is the return of Jews to Berlin, not least in the
form of this Museum. Visitors pass from thcCollegicnhaus into an abyssal entrance, down steep steps
to a space thai has no externally anticipated layout, and is. in this sense, unbuilt. You stand lacing a
1 In HI e between a set of three underground streets: none marked lor preference, and in i-one insisting
on your follow in» an official itinerary. As \ i m gradually discover, each one does have a single — indeed,
singular - destination, Turning right up a short passage, the I lolocaust void is entered only through
a heavy HUH ivtcdoor. which is then closed.The unheated. uncooled space inside is shaped in the
shai'|i wedge In 1~ feel 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?" Another passage, signed with the names
of places lo which Jews were exiled or emigrated, leads out into the E.T.A. Hoffmann Garden. Set
on a sloping surface, fi irty-cighl raked, minimal rectangular concrete columns contain Berlin earth,
and signify the birth of the state of Israel in I1) 18. 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 (vartofthe building, allowing access to the exhibition spaces on different floors of the

1 is
 smith

Museum. Ahi >vc yi HI. as you climb, die building seems in < tumble d< m n, There are in i wintlc >ws uniil
you reach the platform ai the top: light Hotxls in through;! narrow,rakingslit, and you can look mil
across die low sk\linc nl die c iu.

Voiding t h e Labyrinth
Ke.NjK >iulin.Lit<) l.ihc-^kiiu! .^anibition.ariTiitci iui";il \\ liters Iromullowrthcw* >rkkck-br:ttc the Museum
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as meeting die most serious contemporary standards of meaning and beaun Lei me illustrate this
by drawing on die comments ofAnthom Vitller. His immediate reaction was one dun should be. In
now. familiar from our accounts of the impact of aftermath architecture:

' . . . as a work and as an experience ii stands as testimony to die power of a

certain kind ol phenomenological stance before the- world, a spatial evocation
thai, through brilliant and deeply though I oui moves, resonates will) an aura
of the terrifying sublime, and that, perhaps more than am modern work of
architecture I have ever seen, manages to hold the visitor in spatio-psychological
suspense, the closest experience to whai I imagine religious experience of
architecture might be."

Awe. to be sure, but something is different here from similar-sounding reactions to oilier recent
architecture. Vidler contrasts the Museum to projects such as Richard Meier's Getty Center, and many
oilier museum renovations and heritage reconstructions (including the Reichstag dome), with their
generalized evocation ofpastness. their allusions to what was oncean order of immense, concentrated
and civilized power but is now tamed for manipulated c< insumptii in as mass entertainment. Ignasi de
Sola-Morales labels this preoccupation with architecture's past glory a weak architecture."one thai
induces delighted recollection, mild historical fantasy and. perhaps, bemused rumination on time's
passing and the follies of human aspiration. * I t trades on a sense of resonance from the past; it offers an
imagmarv proscenium for the spectral replav of events of consequence thai happen to have happened
beyond sonic fabled horizon. It docs not take up lliston in its aclualih as pan <ifitswiirking 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 simph would not do.

What were the "brilliant and deep!) thought out moves" b\ means of which Libeskind achieved "an
aura of the terrifying sublime" and brought the visitor to a "religious experience of architecture" ol
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 no!

hide its pretensions behind weak struct lire... Its routes of passage are firm.

I I-
 A'l'R Mi. I ns

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 b\ background spaces lor foregrounding exhibits is more
or less contemptuous; its ignoring of spatial economy —the prolific insertion
of meaningful voids—absolute. There is no effort ai all to 'fit into' its context
as n denies completely through scale mass and surface the Baroque pavilion
to which ii is nominal!) an extension, bin which is turned into nothing more
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than a traditional portico to the new structure. Yet this strength holds nothing
of the "miserable monstrosity' decried by Weber; pan fragment of city wall, part
bunker, pan storehouse, ii retains its own identity in the face of the wasteland thai
surrounds n."

Defining die strengths of Ijbt^kind's "moves'by what the} do not do. Vidier highlights the architeefs
refusals ofhotluonvcntionalcxpcctatiot^ as to the briefsol such buildings and the (in contrast leas)
solutions in similar problems adopted h\ his contemporaries. Functionality, legibility, a spectacular
external gestalt. deference ti i the higher arts, coniextualism — all are rejected, emphatically. Invoking
Heidegger and Sartre. Vidier argues that, instead, the Jewish Museum plunges us into "bodily and
mental crisis, w iih an\ trite classical homologies between thebody and the building upset h; unstable
axes, walls and skins torn, ripped and dangerous!} slashed, rooms empty of content and uncertain
or no exits and entrances.""

Is die building, then, an induction into chaos, to the traumatic, nightmare scenarios so characteristic
of life in the twentieth eentun — never pursual more grotesc|uely andrationally,nor on such a scale,
iban dining the Holocaust? Ii is ibis, but even more precise!) it draws us into a tactile and emotional
awareness of the incessant, incoherent interplay between irrationality and the pursuit of order that
represents, in Vidlcr's words again, "the fundament ol contemporaneity, its reason for being. "M He
glosses ibis iasighl 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 lo endure the vertigo experience of die labyrinths that, as Nietzsche
had it over a century ago. make up the form of our modernity ,",J
I would make a disimi lion between mi idernityand contemporaneity: it is the aftermath of the former
that constitutes much of the substance of the latter. It is this constitution that l.ibeskind was striving
lo represent. This emerges when Vidier argues that, to l.ibeskind. the void is not a way out of die
labyrinth (thai being impossible) bin
a provisional path ... which through habitual and piecemeal encounters. b\
unexpected and suddenly revealed shocks, and through touch and feel in die dark
as much as h) clear vision in the light, might in some way domesticate what for
 Smiili

Pascal, as For us. has been a rather stern, uncompromising and certainly terrifying
"horror vaeui' (horror of iIK- void) in a world ol appaivmK uulk-ss span.- and no
place.*'1

Modernity would frame this kind ol experience with myths of progress, or with attacks on their
rtttuctiveness. The deepest program of the Museum responds to this definitively modernist doublet.
11 rc%'<$nizes the vacuity of dreams ol progress and the relative ineffectiveness of radical act ion against
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it. It aims to concretize a hope-filled negativity, the small consciousness of surviving in the void. One
way of measuring l.ihesknid's success or failure would he mask: is the Museum's ncgativit) of a kind
that would havesecured Adorno'sappiovall'Thec|uesiii in that has heen piiscd and tested throughmt
this chapter is one step harder. It asks: does Libeskind succeed in creating an architecture thai takes
us beyond Adorno's question, that succeeds in transforming the architecture of aftermath into an
architecture of hope, and docs so. furthermore, without lapsing into liberal sympathizing?

The Jewish Question

Libeskind's answer is a peculiarly but also panicularh Jewish one. It occurs on two levels: that of overt
contestation and that of subliminal negotiation. The first is evident in the 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 (iermanness andJewishness as the
seining point. Their combined effect is to vanquish the Museum of Berlin, leaving us to take the entire
ensemble. Collegienhaus included, as. now, theJewish Museum Berlin. This latter certainly seems to be
theexperienceof 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 Bcrlin'Museum. one which included
expansion of the Jewish Department, it became an Extension to the Berlin Museum with the Jewish
Museum, to die entire project being one of the Jewish Department of the Stadtmuscum, then the
Jewish Museum in the Stadtmuscum until finally it became the Jewish Museum Berlin. A new kind
ol 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 oft he rinal solution.

Yet there is a more profound, and lilting, 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." The first is an
imposed Jewishness. never more thoroughly pursued than by the Nazis. While developing his thinking
Ii ii" the Museum. Libeskind was permitted to see the Gedeiikbucb, a two vi ilume listing oft he names,
addresses, dates of birth, dates of deportation, and presumed destinations of all those sent to their

I l,s
 A I R ! H : | (IS

deaths during the l.n.il years of tin.- Holocaust. Benjamin points tun thai these people were listed,
in this hook, in awn thai thc\ asmosth secularjcws who believed that tliey were assimilated into
the fosmopoli.s around them — would rarely have thought of themselves and would never before
have been associated, liol even In Jewish organizations. Thcv became Jews because of "a special
ixi urrence .. in IK- named in a bonk that marks their mass death.'1 In this form ol identification,
identity amounts to closures of an increasing!) honific and ultimate!; terminal kind: submission to
administration, rcificaiion into a cipher, reduction in a name and some dates on a list ofthosetobe
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executed. Jew Lsh being, on thei »ther hand — as die phili isi iphers cited in this chapter amply attest — is
a matierof putting identit; intociuestion.ofopeningittotheprodiKnivitiesofperpeiualinterrogation.
Neither oneself, nor the others, can alone decide the question of who one is. die matierof whai ii
is 10 be. In i he face of the forces of closure, this is the offering, to all. from the experience of being
Jewish: ihe unanswerabilitv oflx'ing, its decisive undecidcahihtv. Benjamin sees precisely this as die
deepesi inspiration and the most powerful effect of the Jewish Museum Berlin:

"... here is a building dial guards the question of representation, refusing ii

hnalit; and thus necessitating its retention as a problem to be investigated, while
allowing ai the same time for presentations: a building thai questions display while
allowing for display; a building that, in it s effectuation as a building, holds open
die question of remembrance as a question, enjoining humility while providing
- because of ibe question - the necessity for a vigilance that can be identified as
preseni remembrance... in being an architecture of the question, the Museum
allows identit} to endure as a question: ibis is a wa\ of interpreting what Libeskind
ma\ have meant by hope."1

Warring between museum and exhibit

During the two years ii was opened prior to the staging of exhibitions within it. the Museum attracted
3^0.000 paying visitors. Mam were architects, and those interested in architecture as such. Since
then, some have (Ejected to the exhibitions as a distraction, as a lesser experience than the building
itself, the exhibits have been devoted to a broad narrative of die history ol Jews in Berlin, and to
some spei ial individuals — including, as we noted. Waller Benjamin. When I visited in Ma\ Jnuj. ii
was bursting its seams wiih tokens of memory, each a.small, poignani monument. So many, however.
that the implacable negativity of the Museum was obscured and its equally trenchant yet demanding
hopewas returned toa more easily-accessible hopefulness. Who could blame the curators? Vi ben you
have been silemed torso long, a visual cacophony on first outing is to be expected. But this was no
natural outpouring: it fell subject to thecurrent most fashionable style of general-purpose museum
exhibiting. I >csigncr Ken Corby was also responsible lor die Tin Pan Alley populism of the opening
displays at the Te Papa National Museum in Wellington. New Zealand.'"

Reversing the positive response b; architecture professionals, mam visitors have complained that
the building is unfunctional. frustrating to curators of exhibitions, and confusing to the public. The

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opening exhibitions were overloaded to the point thai a feeling of quid chaos and des|>enuion MIS
induced, but this sense oftcxi much is not a consequence ol the architectural design itself lilxskind.
as we have seen, created a memorial museum, thai is. a building with a complex, always doulrfing,
set nf purposes. And within these two goals, a myriad ol pathways.. Each in iheir own way. the
aRliitaiureandtheexhibitH)nstellasti)iTofintegntti()n.f()ivalreni(A;il:HHiiuk;nipti(jnthat is both
hard ID take and then profoundly moving. This is the classic narrative oi a memorial to the dead, to
loss of any kind. The exhibitions did this by means of image and text, objects and explanations, The
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architecture, as we haw seen, and have heard attested, did so In means ol a series ol extraordinary
spaiial sequences.

II a scries 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 mock-up 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 dial towering over ones path are collapsing supports, rubble, further voids
ami splits of light, who needs to walk through a mock-up concent ration camp? Nor do you need the
visage of a smiling survivor when you reach the outside, and enter a garden'that consists of gigantii
boxed columns, each enclosing a pomegranate tree that nevertheless grows wildly from its upper
iipening. the win ile pitched at an unearthly angle. 1 lere is a fascinating paradox: a building that fulfils
not only the purpose of being an appropriate house lor. in this case, a museum ol Jewish history bin
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 ibut not. of course, alike).'"

Is the Museum, despite its architect's consciousness ol the relativity of time, and the complexity ol
the movement back and forward in time necessitated by its core purpose, nevertheless marked In its
own time of conception anil creation, and its position within the history of archiic< lure? Of course ii
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:

i f we cannot characterize ibis building as either ■posthistorical' or yel fully

historical, we can nevertheless understand ii as a kind of terminal suite of
space, a millennial closure so to speak, that stands as a paradoxical statement
of the twentieth century problem of monumentality: bow. without history (the
clothing of which afforded such security in the nineteenth century i. and without
ostentatious pretension and empty theatricality, can an architectural object imply
a strong stains, while constructing itself out of space - the one medium that, as
the high modernists perceived, was opposed to monumentality from the outset."*

Ii does so. he suggests, by capturing space, holding ii hostage by its 'impermeable walls." thus it
"preserves space, as a traditional museum would preserve art.'' In this sense, he ((includes, "it is a
museum of and in architecture." This is a conclusion that echoes our account of the Geny Center.
but with a difference, one that goes back to the distinction between weak' and strong' architecture

120
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niilnle;ii1ia.A>\1Jlerh;i>dNO\liere^iM\\iiihjiiiHkM"iKiivliitcaiirjUp;KV\\;hlhiii^hl with anxieties

oldie musi Freudian kind. ' \i the same lime, for nuxlcrnists. space was opposed to monumentally,
because they wished lor its purity, its potential as the domain in which a Utopian future might he
lived. After \ust hwitz, this is refilled to be what it always was: an impossible naivete. Spaa- in the
Jew ish Museum, espei talk ft hen its n»nns are emptied i >l displays, is filled, palpabh .with the anxiety
indui ed by the questii >n: In i\\ is it possible t< i be human alter the enactment oi sy stemk inhumanity?
These spaces are also split by shafts ol lighi that shine back on the questioner— who is. alter all. the
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only hopeol an answer

Aesthetic O c c u p a t i o n
The bailies for Jerusalem, anil 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
i lie perkxlofits 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
(il fundamentalism, Is the human way forward—is one that has to be the basis for any hopeol peace
in thai region.

Indian architect Ki imi Khosla has imagined an architectural 'solution' to the Palestine-Israel problem:
one structured around a train that perfonns transportation, socializing and museum functions as it
travels incessantly along a water pipe that connects a proposed new sovereign state of New Canaan.*1
This kind ol quasi-lain iliil proposal would, perhaps, infuriate those, such as Daniel Monk. who. in
connei tion with the current warring over religious sites in Jerusalem, raise the important issue ol
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 ii is tube achieved.
must keep separate. This is a timely warning against the kind of conflation to which humans are so
prone, and that isat 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 invoked niiisi be prepared for symbolic contestation. As we have seen in the case ol
the Jewish Museum. Berlin, this requires the mobilization, through architectural form, of meanings
thai go Par beyond the limits of an autonomous architecture, that set the terms for architecture after
Auschwitz, for the architecture of contemporaneity,

Endnotes
This essay is drawn from a chapter in The Architecture of Aftermath, forthcoming from the University
of Chicago Press. 2005.
I See Daniel l.ilx-skhul. "Between the Lines.Jewish Museum. Berlin. 1988-99," lie Space of'Encounter. New
York: I nivense. 2000. p. 2(>: Anthony Vidler. "Afterword, in \Aye/kmii Jpace ofEncmnter. pp. 222-24; and
Naomi Stead, The Ruins of History: allegories ol destruction in Daniel Lilieskincl's Jewish Museum. Open
Museum Journal, special issue mi "I Insavory Histories.' vol.2 (August, 2000). 1-1"

121
 Nniili

I \iuhx-\\ Benjamin. "The Architecture of Hope. Daniel lilxrhkiiul'ti JvwLsli Museum, in lib I'n^scul Hope
Philosophy. Arcbitivluii'. Judaism. London: Routledgc. 199". pp. lu>l 18.
5 Set Sebastian Redecke and \ndreas Kernlxtch. Das Reicbstagsgcltfiude: Arcbiiektiii and Kinisi. Berlin:
IX-ubchc Bundestag. 2001
i Adorno'.s doubts about Hegel are set out in Ins 1931 inaugural let Hire at the I ntvcrsit\ "I Frankfurt. See
The Actuality of Philosophy.Tefc«.51 (Spring I'' ' pp 120-33-Thej are amplified throughout his work.
notabh in Negatire Dialectics. I9M>. London: Routlcdge& Kegan Paul I9"3. andAsrfM/t Theory. I970.
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London: Routledgc \ Kegan Paul. l9Si

i Theodor Adomo. "Art, Culture and Society," in Prisms. Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press. I9K1. pp. r s i . m
Brian O'ConiKit \<3\).'fheAtlanta Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. 211011. p. 210,
'i See "Commitment." in TlKnxlorAtlorn(i.A'oto/oi//ew/Hn', vol. 2. New Vork: Columbiii I iiivcrMiv Press.
|992.pp.8>o
Trying t<> Understand Endgame." I%1, New Herman Critique, Ik (Spring-Summer, 1982). II9-S0; m
O'Connor.. Won/o/fcWer. p.3n3.
8 Aclt irrn i. Negative Dialectics, pp. 33!> 3i »2.
9 k.faow.Ne!{aiii'eDialeClics,[>p.y} 380 lbAtkinic).thetfffetTS(tfAifcdi\vir/.vveiealnK«tinliniieiiir;m}{e.
and in their recursive negativity, They are pursued in detail in Rolf Tiedcmauu ted). Ibeotlur \\ Adorno.
t.tw One Lire After AuschttHz' ^i.inUial. Stanford I Diversity Pros, 2003.
10 Gene Ray. "Mirroring Evil: Auschwitz. An and the'V£'ar on Terror." 7fe/»r/7t'.\V. I". 2 (2003) p II'' Tins
essay is an excellent application ofAdorno"s ad monitions to the 2002 exhibition at the Jewish Museum. New
Yfrrk. Minwinglivil A/^/»)^?w3yiftViwMr/.OHthenKiregeiieiij|«tting(if|T(Vit-H(>l(K~tastvLsu;ilan set
lames E, Young..-to Memory's &lge; After-images of the Holocaust in < 'outemporary Art and'Architecture
New Haven: Yale I niversity Press, 2000 There tire important special studies as well, such as Lisa Salzman,
Anselm Kiefer and Art After Auschwitz. Cambridge: Cambridge Universitj Press. 1999
II Robert Jan van Pelt. "Auschwitz: Emm Architect's Promise to Inmate's fen\hkm~.M<)eleriiisi))/\liHlentiiy.
I. I (199-0:p.82.
\l Van Pelt. "Auschwitz." pp. I06-". A thorough historj ofthecin up to and including its infann is given in D.
DworkandRJ \.u)M\.Aitscbwii::IJiii<iil.h-l'resciti.\c\\\nrk:\\\\ \<<\un\\<.tK. 1996.Foranaccount
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. The Architecture ofOppression. The V\,
forcedLabor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy. London and New York: Routledgc, 2000
13 Berlin Museum. Architect's Competition Brief. Berlin: Berlin Museum. 1988. n.p.
U Michael Speas. "Berlin Phoenix," Architectural Renew. 1226 (April 1999): p. MI In a lecture delivered
in Berlin in 1997. Libeskind relates the ston of his Interview with kev members of the Berlin Senate.
including his astonishment and delight that their questioning was confined to matters to do with musk
six "Chamberworks: Architectural Medications on tin- Themes from Heraclitus." in Daniel Lilieskind. The
Space of Encounter. New York: I inverse. 2000. p. S-t.
IS Other complications included controversj around the curatorial appointments and direction, and the
massive budget rediu tion pan wa\ through — from DM P8 5 million to DM ~~ million. See James Russell.
"Project Diary; Daniel Libeskind'sjewlsh Museum in Berlin,"ArchitecturalRecord. 1*~. 111999): pp. "6-98
See also Daniel Libeskind. leu isb Museum Berlin Between thel.iney MIIIIK h. New York: Prestel. 1999.
 ATR IDI US

Id Daniel Uheskind. "Between die LiiK-v manusi ripi in Commemorative Hunk, Daniel Lik-skind Papers.
Prn-|992.Geit\ Kesean h Institute, kis Angeles, Special* cilkviKIIIN.**2l«X»-l 11 Rt-pnxhifctlinUlx>kiiul.
The Sluice oj''-Hi owner. 11 29, \ll subsequent citations in this paragraph are from this source, this page.
I" Between 11 it- lines, Jewish Museum. Berlin. l9H8r99.~ in Lilieskind. The Sjwce of Encounter, p. 26,
is Tin- relevant ki-\ text is Benjamin's unfinished ircade* Project I/></S Passagea-Weii'i. volume V of Rolf
TiwIemaimamlHernian.Sehweppenliiuisei teiLs).(iesw//»;K///c'-xbriflt•//.l;r;nikliin:SuhrkampVeriag, 1982;
in Knglish as Tlie .SrvcukvProject, Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard I ni\ci>it\ Press. 1(W9, Sir also
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11 ic useful intnxluctkin In Susin Bm k-Murss, The Dialectics oj Swing Waller Benjamin and the Arcades
Project,Cambridge.Mass.: Mil Press. 1989
l'i waller Benjamin. One-Wnv street and Other U r///;;#s. London: New Ix-ft Bulks. 19"9.
.'ii Vri hitei ture Intermundiuni; \n Open Lctterto fovhiieetural Educators and Students of Architecture." in
Lilieskind. Ihe Sl>ace of Encounter, p. 2n
21 Libeskind. TheS/>aceofEncounter, pp I9OTand*i>™respective!}
11 Lilx-skind, ihe S/xice of Encounter, pp 92-96 Another compilation is Daniel Libeskind. Radix-Matrix
architecture anil uritin^. Munich. New York: Prestel. 199",
23 "Between the Lines.Jewish Museum. Berlin, 1988-9." Libeskind. Ihe SjKtce of'Riiconiiler. p. 23.
11 Boihsheets in Daniel I.ilK'.skimlP:i|«;rs. I9"0-1992. Gem Research Institute. Los Angeles. Spei ial Collet! ions,
''.'i mill IT- Hi Libeskind would devote an entire notelxxik to sketches in which a falling Mark of bonks
- Torahs. burned books — arc abstracted into a varietj of Malevich-style Suprematist images Sec the
notelxxik entitled ' ncerkihity in S|iecial Collections. 9200111-5,
2S Ink on tracing paper, Uheskind I'.ipers. I9D-1992. Get!} Resean Ii Institute, special Collections. 920061:
l-l- IS
iii "Between die fines. Jewish Museum. Berlin. 1988-9." Libeskind. The Space of Encounter, p. 23.
1~ KiiriW Porsiei.'l-'r.iiikD.tieliiyCiiiggenheiinMuseiini."inYiiiorio.M.ignagoLainpugnani.nnlAngeliSachs.
Museumsfor a New Millennium Concepts Pntjecls Buildings, Munich, London. New York: Prestel. I1'''1'.
p. 129.
2.S Ken larks in l.ibokind. Ihe s/></< eofEtlCOttnter. p. -(': diagram, 23, There is ,i draw ing in a sken bin K ik .u GRI
Spec ial Collections 92006 1-6 that show>six ma jor Berlin landmarks—the Brandenburg Gate, the Angel, the
Bismarck memorial, etc.—fonningallbutoneofthepointsofaStarofDavidwidithewonl'Jude'inscribeil
inside ii. One of the |xiints maj IK- a standing man.
29 lIRI Special Colkrtions l)2i«ii>l.lx.x.i1.3.
3n GR1. Spec ml Colin lions. 920061.1-T-" IS. This is the skeicli lor die diagram in the Qmnnemoralive Hook.
GRI.SpecialCollcctfcins.9260061. I.S.
VI GRi.S|)ecialCollenions.920(Kil.box3t.3
32 GRI. Special Collections. 920061-9
« (iR|. Special Collections. 920061-9
•■i GRI. Special < ollections. 920061-9
>s GRI. Special Collections. 920061-8
sii Libeskind ciiesasuruvor: "Whai do sou suppose that white lighl con saw Irom the crack in the cattle car on
\' 'in w.n toSmtthofrealh was?" iheinterviewerasfeed Elaine some thirt\ vears later in her BrookKn home.

123
 Smith

'You see in order to survive, urn must helieu- in something. \ou need a source ol inspiration. olYouragc.
of something bigger than yourself, something to overcome reality.'IIK* line wasm; source of inspiration.
m\ sign from Heaven. Mam years later, alter liberation, when im diiklren were griming up. I realized thai
the white line might have been fume from a passing airplane's exhaust pipe, but does it realh matter?'
From ValTa Kliach. /lasidiclatestftheHolocaust. New York: Oxford I mversm Press. 19*52. in l.ik-skiiul.
'//'(■ Spaces oj''Encounter, p. il>.
5" Antliom Vidler. Warped Space: Arcliiteetur.il Anxiety in Digital Culture." in Tern Smith ted). Impossible
Presence: Surface and Screen inthe PhotogenicEra. Sydney: l\ mer Publications, and Chicago: l niversityol
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(ihieagi i Press. 2(Kt I. pp. 29-i-S. These ideas are d o eli tped in further in his \\ arped Space: Art. Architecture
and Anxiety In Modem Culture. Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press. 2000,

is Ignasi de Sola-Morales, Differences: Tojiograpbies of Contemporary Archilectuix', Cambridge, Mass.: MIT

Press. IW~. pp. %-70.
39 Vidler. "Warped Space.'' p. 2%,
id Vidler. "Warped Space.'' p. 29".
11 Vidler. "'Warped SpaaV p. 298,
t2 Vidler. "Warped Space." p. 298.
ii Vidler, "WarpedSpace." p. 29s.
-it Andrew Benjamin. "The Architecture ol Hope. Daniel l.ilx'skind'sJewisll Museum." in hisPresent llo/K':
Philosophy, Architecture.Judaism, London: Routledge. 199". pp. lo.vlis.
P l.iheskmd. The Space ofEncounter, p. 2(>.
i<> Benjamin. Present Hope. p. 112.
r Benjamin. Present Hope. pp. 11>16, I IS
iS See Ken Corny. Discovering the Jewish Museum Berlin. Berlin: Stiliungjiidischcs Museum Berlin, 2001.
il) Is this over-determination? Some have thought so. In a provocative analysis, artist Adam Geszy. Mr
Knabentanz. Berlin: Kiinstlerhaus Bethanien. 2000. compares the Jewish Museum to a Nazi-era official
building by Heinrich Tessenow. On this and related issues in connection with the Washington Holm MUM
Museum, see Naomi Miller. "Building the I 'nbuildahle: The I I.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum." in W'essel
RdninkandJeroenStumpel(eclsl,;U(»nOJy«W/rf0M/r^
o/the History ojArt. Dordrecht: Kluver, 1999, pp. 1091-1101.
SO Vidler. "Warped Space." p. 299.
T| See Anthony Vidler. The Architectural t inanity: Essays in the Modem I nhomely. Cambridge. Mass.: MIT
Press. 1992.
S2 Romi Khosla. The loneliness of a long Distant Future: Dilemmas of Contemporary Architecture. New
Delhi: Tulib Books, 2002.
v See Daniel Bertrand Monk. An Aesthetic Occupation. The Immediacy of Architecture and the Palestinian
Outjlict. Durham: Duke I Iniversity Press. 201)2. introduction and passim.

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