One place that has been on "the list" for awhile is Berlin's Jewish Museum, a sprawling complex that encompasses 2000 years of Jewish history. On Saturday we decided to test the kids' patience walking through it.
An amazing aspect of the museum is the architecture, which is as noteworthy as many of the exhibits. Not because of the "art" of the building, but how it has been constructed to reflect the complex symbolism of Jewish history. Two key notions that architect Daniel Liebeskind sought to convey was the confusion of exile and the dead ends and triumphs of history encountered by the Jews since the Romans ejected them from Israel some 2000 years ago.
Clearly, the disasters overshadow the triumphs by sheer scale, so the strongest aspects of the museum building tend to address those feelings.
To do this, he utilized an ornate pre-war building as the main entrance. The main part of the museum is housed in a massive zig-zag metallic structure that looks like a huge lightning bolt when viewed from the air. It is accented with random diagonal lines that serve as the windows. He did not want an easy linkage between the past and the future, because he felt that would gloss over the effect of the Holocaust, so he built a tunnel from the basement of the entry building to the basement of the new building. From the outside therefore it looks like two distinct worlds.
Visitors descend a long and wide stairwell into the earth and then are confronted with three “Axes” which serve to set the scene for the rest of the museum. One is the Holocaust axis, which leads you along a slowly darkening corridor with exhibits on one side and the names of the concentration camps on the wall on the other. At the end of the corridor, you step through a heavy metal door into a cold, stone walled space with a thin strip of daylight at the top about 4 stories up. You can hear the noise of Berlin through that opening: busses, children at the nearby playground, but you otherwise have no connection to the city. It is a dead end from which there’s no escape. And there’s no interpretation about what happens next - you just stand there and form your own conclusions about what it means.
Throughout the other axes in the basement, the floor gently slopes upward while the ceiling height stays constant to give the impression of a dwindling set of options as you move deeper into each of the axes. One side side an exterior door leads to a garden that presents you with a labyrinth of vertical stone pillars set into cobblestoned ground tilted at a 12 degree angle. As you stumble around the cobbles, looking up at the sky between the pillars, while negotiating the strangely-canted floor, you do feel positively confused and nearly nauseous. It is designed to invoke the similar feelings of Jews as they confronted the reality of exile.
Within the shape of the lightning bolt main building he reserved certain places as “empty” zones where no exhibit will ever go. Here again the symbolism is at work: at once it conveys the setbacks in Jewish history as well as space where other people would have put their exhibits, if only they had survived.
The main exhibits guide you through 2000 years of Jewish history, which is understandably vast. Luckily for us, they also spaced kid-friendly bits here and there so the children usually had a tunnel to crawl through, an interactive game to work on or a a drawing station to create some pictures while us parents could read up on the exhibits. Here is where the positive stuff came through: the success of Jewish merchants in the Middle Ages, discussions of customs, relics from Biblical times.
The children did surprisingly well throughout the visit. Exhibits that tell stories in German and English on little telephone receivers will do that. Also, old movies are a perennial favorite for them.
At length we reached the end and went through one final exhibit, entitled “Shalechet” (Fallen Leaves). Ensconced at the far end of one of the empty areas is a narrow space with high walls called the “memory void." In front of you filling the space between narrow walls are thousands of iron disks with eyes, nose and mouth cut from them. Thousands of faces staring up at you, layered 6-8 deep.
The museum encourages visitors to actually walk on the faces, so most people venture out into the field. It is unnerving because when you first enter the space you drop your voice and feel like you should be silent and respectful. But then people walking on the faces create a terrific racket as the heavy disks shift and clang against each other. You’re left with this feeling of solemnity crossed with sudden discord as the clanging echoes loudly around the concrete space. At the end of the narrow corridor, the light fades to blackness. The visual is obviously sobering: thousands of faces on top of each other flowing like a river toward a dark oblivion.
So we walked out onto the faces and the kids asked why all the faces were in a huge pile on the floor. Try explaining the Holocaust to a 6 year old. All we could come up with was that the people who used to run Germany did not like certain other people, and there was a war, and this is in rememberance of the people that died.
The kids stood looking down at the “fallen leaves.” Jasper picked up a small face, exclaiming “Look, this was a baby that died!”
I do wonder what they will take away from days like this – whether it will just be that place with the big pile of metal faces or if there is anything else that will lodge in their heads. They are obviously too young for us to explain these things that, even for an adult, are incomprehensible. Generally speaking, as a parent taking kids on this expat experience you can't help but wonder what is rubbing off on them.
A block down from the Museum on Lindenstrasse is an older building that was here for the war. Still-fairly obvious involvement in that:
But the kids didn’t look up to notice, they were busy acting like airplanes shrieking and racing each other to the other end of the block.
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