Jewish Museum
Jüdisches Museum Berlin (Lindenstraße 9-14 ,10969 Berlin)
The Jewish Museum is one of the few examples of deconstructivist architecture in Berlin. Construction took place between 1993 and 1999 to designs by Daniel Libeskind.
The exterior walls are marked by ribbons of windows that zig-zag across the zinc-clad façade, oblivious of storeys or rooms. From a bird's eye perspective the ground plan suggests a torn Star of David.
Five empty rooms symbolize the rifts torn through German society by the Holocaust. Only one "void" is accessible. Even the course of the passageways in three axes underscores the building as half museum, half memorial. The longest axis leads to the main staircase of the museum and thus to an uncertain tomorrow; the second directs the way to the open air and the Garden of Exile; the third and shortest axis ends in the empty Holocaust tower.
Long before the exhibits were mounted, the interest in the building itself led to a huge attendance: 350,000 people visited the empty museum building.
The Jewish Museum was planned as an extension of the main Baroque building of the adjacent Berlin Museum. The entrance to this striking new building, which can only be accessed by an underground passageway, is located there. However, the Jewish Museum has been an independent foundation since 1998.
The permanent exhibition bears testimony to German Jewish history and culture from its inception to the present day.
Two buildings, a classical Kollegienhaus and a modern structure hailed as an architectural masterpiece, house the exhibitions, collections, and several offices of the Jewish Museum Berlin.
The new building is full of artistic expression: the architect Daniel Libeskind named it “Between the Lines” on account of two linear shapes which form its structure. The “Line of Connectedness” expressed in the window design symbolizes the cultural exchange between Jews and non-Jews and the ways in which they influenced each other. The “Line of the Voids” is a series of empty rooms, which runs in a straight but disrupted line through the building. These empty rooms represent the cultural gaps left in Germany after the Holocaust.
The groundplan has been interpreted in many different ways. Some see it as a lightning bolt striking the city of Berlin. Daniel Libeskind, the architect, likens it to a deconstructed star of David.
The Libeskind building is formed of two main lines: the line of connection, tortuous and infinite, symbolises the cultural exchange between Jews and Gentiles and their mutual influences; a second line, straight but broken into discrete fragments, runs through the length of the house - it is the line of the void.