Jewish Museum In Berlin Research Articles

Generational translation in the Jewish Museum, Berlin

Abstract This paper addresses the challenge museums of catastrophic history face, striving to translate between history and memory in creating a meaningful and sensitive experience for individual visitors, not only evoking the past but also impacting the present and future. This study focuses on the Jewish Museum Berlin and asks how the museum can impact individual visitor journeys and concurrently address the public demand for memory, the contradictions between museum mission and public perception, and the perceived distance of visitors from historical events. The study builds on memory and translation studies research and the concepts of history, story, and identity. An analysis of entangled memory (Feindt et al. 2014), here applied as an inspiration for generational translation, shows how the crossover between memory and translation studies provides insight into the work of memory museums. Previous research and the history, mission, identity, architecture, and conflicts of the Jewish Museum Berlin show that museums – as (unfinished) collective memories – allow the creation of space for individual reflection and the interpretation of past and present to create a narrative. The work of memory museums is complex, but the concepts of generational translation and entangled memory are valuable tools in provoking and enabling meaningful experience and reflection.

Emotionally-oriented design in museums: a case study of the Jewish Museum Berlin.

This study examines the intricate interplay between architectural design and visitor emotional responses at the Jewish Museum Berlin, focusing on how specific spatial elements such as the Holocaust Tower, Garden of Exile, The Voids, and The Axis elicit varied affective experiences. The research aims to extend the discourse on environmental psychology and architectural empathy, particularly within the context of memorial museums. Employing a non-intrusive approach, the study gathered emotional response data using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) from 113 museum visitors, with 102 valid responses analyzed. Environmental conditions such as light, sound, and spatial design were quantitatively measured to correlate with emotional responses captured at the end of visitors' tours across the designated museum spaces. Findings revealed that architectural elements significantly influence emotional responses. High levels of negative emotions like fear and anxiety were markedly evident in the Holocaust Tower due to its minimal lighting and stark concrete structure. Conversely, the Garden of Exile induced more positive emotions through its use of natural light and greenery, emphasizing the role of biophilic design in enhancing emotional well-being. Statistical analysis supported these observations, with variations in emotional impact across different spaces demonstrating the profound effect of architectural design on visitor experiences. This study confirms that a variety of design elements and spatial strategies not only facilitate the presentation of historical narratives but also actively sculpt the emotional involvement and experiences of visitors. Our findings highlight the efficacy of emotionally-oriented architectural design in deepening the impact and engagement of museum visitors, emphasizing the transformative power of these environments in shaping visitor perceptions and interactions.

Syberiada Żydów polskich: Losy uchodźców z Zagłady [The Siberian odyssey of Polish Jews: The fates of the refugees from the Shoah

<i>Syberiada Żydów polskich: Losy uchodźców z Zagłady</i> [The Siberian odyssey of Polish Jews: The fates of the refugees from the Shoah

Altering the Meaning of Remembrance: The Influence of Resurgent Nazi Perpetrators on the Jewish Museum Berlin

Altering the Meaning of Remembrance: The Influence of Resurgent Nazi Perpetrators on the Jewish Museum Berlin

Whose Museum Is It? Jewish Museums and Indigenous Theory

AbstractAre museums places about a community or for the community? This article addresses this question by bringing into conversation Jewish museums and Indigenous museum theory, with special attention paid to two major institutions: the Jewish Museum Berlin and the National Museum of the American Indian. The JMB’s exhibitions and the controversies surrounding them, I contend, allow us to see the limits of rhetorical sovereignty, namely the ability and right of a community to determine the narrative. The comparison between Indigenous and Jewish museal practices is grounded in the idea of multidirectional memory. Stories of origins in museums, foundational to a community’s self-understanding, are analyzed as expressions of rhetorical sovereignty. The last section expands the discussion to the public sphere by looking at the debates that led to the resignation of Peter Schäfer, the JMB’s former director, following a series of events that were construed as anti-Israeli and hence, so was the argument, anti-Jewish. These claims are based on two narrow conceptions: First, that of the source community that makes a claim for the museum. Second, on the equation of Jewishness with a pro-Israeli stance. Taken together, the presentation of origins and the public debate show the limits of rhetorical sovereignty by exposing the contested dynamics of community claims. Ultimately, I suggest, museums should be seen not only as a site for contestation about communal voice, but as a space for constituting the community.

Topography of Violence: Considerations for Ethical and Collaborative Visualization Design

AbstractBased on a collaborative visualization design process involving sensitive historical data and historiographical expertise, we investigate the relevance of ethical principles in visualization design. While fundamental ethical norms like truthfulness and accuracy are already well‐described and common goals in visualization design, datasets that are accompanied by specific ethical concerns need to be processed and visualized with an additional level of carefulness and thought. There has been little research on adequate visualization design incorporating such considerations. To address this gap we present insights from Topography of Violence, a visualization project with the Jewish Museum Berlin that focuses on a dataset of more than 4,500 acts of violence against Jews in Germany between 1930 and 1938. Drawing from the joint project, we develop an approach to the visualization of sensitive data, which features both conceptual and procedural considerations for visualization design. Our findings provide value for both visualization researchers and practitioners by highlighting challenges and opportunities for ethical data visualization.

The Libeskind Jewish Museum in Berlin, the unpresentable and experience

This paper is an attempt to interpret the design or spatial modulation of an important work of architecture in Berlin, Germany, namely Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum. This is done by activating the heuristic potential of a number of relevant concepts from a variety of thinkers. After a brief introduction on modern architecture in Berlin, the focus shifts to this specific building, which is briefly described before interpretively introducing the notions of the ‘real’ in the work of Jacques Lacan – which denotes that which surpasses symbolisation, and is encountered in traumatic experiences – and correlatively, of ‘earth’ in that of Heidegger, which suggests something that only manifests itself in so far as it withdraws from scrutiny. The hermeneutic significance of these concepts for the Jewish Museum is explored, followed by a similar examination of the interpretive relevance of the notions of the ‘unpresentable’, ‘unsayable’ and sublime (Lyotard, Kant) for Libeskind’s building. Given the enormity and unpresentable horror of the event (the Holocaust) indexed by the Jewish Museum, any analysis of the meaning of this building would be incomplete without focusing specifically on the experience(s) afforded to visitors. In this regard the work of Arleen Ionescu on the Jewish Museum – on the significance of its ‘voids’, for example – and the (written) work of Libeskind himself (on the relevance of light, for instance) prove to be invaluable. Finally, Karsten Harries’s insights concerning the ‘ethical function of architecture’, ‘a sense of place’ and ‘community’ are employed to draw together the strands of the present interpretive essay

Curating Conflict

This article compares four Jerusalem exhibits in different geographical and political contexts: at the Tower of David Museum in Jerusalem, the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Jewish Museum Berlin. It examines the role of heritage narrative, focusing specifically on the question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is either openly engaged or alternatively avoided. In this regard, we specifically highlight the asymmetric power dynamics as a result of Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem, and how this political reality is addressed or avoided in the respective exhibits. Finally, we explore the agency of curators in shaping knowledge and perspective and study the role of the visitors community. We argue that the differences in approaches to exhibiting the city’s cultural heritage reveals how museums are central sites for the politics of the human gaze, where significant decisions are made regarding inclusion and exclusion of conflict.

Visitor perceptions of European Holocaust Heritage: A social media analysis

This study presents a netnographic discourse analysis of social media content generated around three high profile European Holocaust heritage sites: Ann Frank's House in Amsterdam, The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland, and the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Germany. It identifies four salient discourses under the headings of Holocaust heritage as social memory, reactions to Holocaust heritage, obligation and ritual, and transgressive visitor behaviour which frame the values, existential anxieties, emotions, priorities and expectations of visitors. The findings will be of interest to stakeholders involved in the planning and management of Holocaust heritage since they provide unique access to a synthesis of unmediated visitor feedback on European Holocaust heritage experiences.

The Kabbalistic Alphabet of Libeskind: The Motif of Letter-shaped Windows in the Design of the Jewish Museum in Berlin

The present article attempts to analyse and interpret the structure of windows in the Jewish Museum in Berlin, designed by Daniel Libeskind and constructed in 1989–1999. Elongated, narrow, irregular window openings arranged at different angles like a tangle of cuts and grooves span the entire structure and resemble Hebrew letters and the kabbalistic notion of the “scattered alphabet”, which functions in Jewish tradition as a visual metaphor. The assumption of such a perspective of interpretation, based on the visual form of the building which was, in its principle, meant to partially refer to the Holocaust, leads to the hypothesis that the chosen motifs of letter-shaped windows (the scattered alphabet) is connected to the kabbalistic postulate of the “repair of the world”, known in Jewish tradition as tikkun olam. The characteristic chaotic arrangement of the window openings is not, as it might be assumed, simply a symbol of the civilisational “fragmentation” resulting from the Holocaust. On the contrary, the design manifestly embodies the nostalgia for the mythical (and messianic) times of harmony, order and regularity, as well as the longing for clear structure and symbiosis. This manifests in the kabbalistic interpretation of the motif of letter-windows understood as a mystical (or even theurgical) element of restoration. Concentration, contemplation, perception and consideration of the forms and shapes of the letters is a notion known from the Kabbalah; in this case architectural references to Jewish mysticism are more than just a strategy for interpretation, but a declarative assumption made by the architect himself. Libeskind’s design in Berlin, therefore, involves the matter of language as the elementary material and instrument of salvation, while the context of the Kabbalah ought to be regarded as a certain symptom or a specific modality shaping new meanings manifested by the work of art that this museum undoubtedly is.

Kendzia, Victoria Bishop (2017), &lt;em&gt;Visitors tot he House of Memory. Identity and the Political Education at the Jewish Museum Berlin.&lt;/em&gt; Col. “Museum and Collections”, 9. New York-Oxford: Berghahn, 174 pp. ISBN: 978-1-78533-639-3.

Kendzia, Victoria Bishop (2017), Visitors tot he House of Memory. Identity and the Political Education at the Jewish Museum Berlin. Col. “Museum and Collections”, 9. New York-Oxford: Berghahn, 174 pp. ISBN: 978-1-78533-639-3. 978-1-78533-640-9 (eBook).

El museo judío de Berlín: El espacio, el acontecimiento y el Vacío

&lt;p&gt;En este artículo se estudia el Museo Judío de Berlín, de Daniel Libeskind –en particular la Torre del Holocausto– desde la idea del “acontecimiento” del filósofo francés Jean-François Lyotard y su discusión con la categoría estética de lo sublime del empirista Edmund Burke. Se trata de analizar las afectaciones sensibles que provocan ciertas experiencias en los sujetos y sus implicaciones políticas y sociales.&lt;/p&gt;

Experiencing memory museums in Berlin. The Otto Weidt Workshop for the Blind Museum and the Jewish Museum Berlin

This article explores memory studies from the audience’s perspective, focusing on the perception of Holocaust narratives in two museums in Berlin. This research builds on and contributes to a number of emerging issues on memory studies, tourism perception and museum design: the debate on experiential authenticity, Dark Tourism, as well as the analysis of memory studies from the perspective of the user. The main data facilitating the analysis is based on responses shared on TripAdvisor; the case studies being the Otto Weidt Workshop for the Blind Museum and the Jewish Museum Berlin. The analysis of these museums, focusing on their narratives, design features and comments from visitors, will highlight a potential shift from the traditional object-focused museum, to a phenomenological subject-focused one. It will be argued, then, that the understanding and consumption of authenticity encompasses a very flexible definition, not only based on the nature of the objects exhibited, but on the production of authentic experiences.

Visitors to the House of Memory: Identity and Political Education at the Jewish Museum Berlin by Victoria Bishop Kendzia

Reviewed by: Visitors to the House of Memory: Identity and Political Education at the Jewish Museum Berlin by Victoria Bishop Kendzia Johannes Zechner Visitors to the House of Memory: Identity and Political Education at the Jewish Museum Berlin. By Victoria Bishop Kendzia. New York: Berghahn, 2018. Pp. xi + 161. Cloth $110.00. ISBN 978-1785336393. Since museums began to appeal to ever broader audiences, the intellectual clout of university-based researchers has diminished. Institutions such as the Jewish Museum Berlin are attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors each year; the readers of academic books and journal articles clearly pale in comparison with that figure. Especially in the fields of history and culture, these museums also function as important arenas for debates over identity and belonging. Whereas previously many publications about the Jewish Museum were issued by the institution itself, Victoria Bishop Kendzia's book promises to offer a welcome external and critical perspective on its activities. Visitors to the House of Memory focuses on processes of "choreographed remembrance" (7) through which young people interact with the Jewish Museum's permanent exhibition and architecture. To that end, Bishop Kendzia analyzed group visits by classes in history and/or political science from seven Berlin high schools. [End Page 682] Combining methods drawn from European ethnology and museum studies, she acted as a participant-observer and conducted qualitative interviews informed by questionnaires completed by the students before and after their visits. True to the disciplinary spirit of self-reflexivity, she early on reveals her Canadian-British-Jewish family background and her move to Berlin some years ago. In theoretical terms, the study is clearly influenced by approaches from the "new museology," which has expanded the scope of interest from technical questions of collecting and exhibiting to the broader spheres of politics and society. Thus, Bishop Kendzia conceptualizes the Jewish Museum as "a site of political education" (19) somewhere between museum and memorial, where manifold understandings of the past and lessons for the future are negotiated. Visits to the Jewish Museum are understood by her as situational and spatial performances in which the participants are actively engaging with the exhibits instead of merely passively absorbing information. The major results of the study lend further support to a finding now almost universally accepted in the scholarship: memory and remembrance are necessarily fragmented and versatile, not—as some politicians or propagandists might wish to be the case—monolithic and constant. Based on a notion of "flexible, shifting identity" (x), Bishop Kendzia reveals sometimes glaring differences in attitude and behavior between the various groups of visitors to the Jewish Museum under observation. This is especially striking because all grew up in Germany after 1989 and were educated within the same school system. As an interesting case in point, most high school students from West Berlin expressed a much deeper Betroffenheit in relation to the Holocaust—which is not, however, the main focus of the Jewish Museum—than their counterparts from the East. In the same vein, they expressed more seriousness and rigidity while displaying a "moved Germanness" (97), perceptible, for example, in body language and volume of voice. As for the underlying reasons for this phenomenon, Bishop Kendzia dares only to speculate: she convincingly mentions the influence of teachers and parents, who were socialized in separate cultures of remembrance, but also the importance of Christian ideas of atonement. An informative comparison can be made with a control group from the Neukölln district, comprising a large number of immigrants, mostly from Turkish or Arab backgrounds. Those high school students from West Berlin seemed less familiar with the "performative guilt trope" (134) mentioned above, which is why they behaved less confidently in their interactions and were more alert to the watchful gaze of the museum staff. Bishop Kendzia uses this example to argue for a different educational approach in which the Jewish Museum—and other museums, one might add—should pay greater attention to cultural inclusivity and controversial multiperspectivity. Visitors to the House of Memory clearly benefits from the author's standpoint between outsider and insider and from repeated reflections about her own positioning [End Page 683] vis-à-vis students, teachers, and staff of the Jewish Museum. In...

Archival Art and Open Wounds: From Hofmannsthal to Installation Art

This article explores the “archival impulse” (Hal Foster) in the work of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and several installation artists. Revisiting Hofmannsthal’s dramatizations of archival landscapes in his fictive travel report Augenblicke in Griechenland, I show how topographies of wounds introduce an aesthetics and ethics of participation. The article also explores striking parallels between topographies of wounds and contemporary archival art, in particular Thomas Hirschhorns’s video installation Touching Reality (2004), and Saskia Boddeke’s and Peter Greenaway’s exhibition installation Obedience (2015, Jewish Museum Berlin). These topographies expose the potential of archival art to engage with memory as a form of inscription, that is, with the archival impulse as an act of (re)inscribing inscriptions in an event of wounding.

Poetics of Memory: Aesthetics and Experience of Holocaust Remembrance in Museums

This essay offers a comparative analysis of Holocaust commemoration in three museums: The Jewish Museum Berlin; Yad Vashem: The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. In particular, the essay examines exhibition techniques, architecture and the visceral, physical experience of the visitor in each museum. My argument focuses on the way that museums draw on aesthetic technique, design and the manipulation of visitor experience to create Holocaust narratives that resonate with and reflect each country’s dominant Holocaust discourse. In Yad Vashem, this narrative is a distinctly Zionist one that relies on the symbolism of autochthony and redemption in contrast to Jewish suffering in exile. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust narrative, in contrast, is rooted in the idea of American exceptionalism and democracy as the antidote to Fascism and anti-Semitism, while the Holocaust narrative of the Jewish Museum Berlin, as developed in its architecture, memorial spaces and select exhibits, draws on the symbolism of the void to emphasize the loss of Germany’s Jewish communities as irreparable rupture and self-inflicted wound.

Libeskind’s Museum in Berlin as a toppled tower

In the article the author will attempt to interpret the architectural structure of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, designed in 1989 by Daniel Libeskind. The context of deliberations presented here will rely on a broadly understood idea of tower, an entity identical with the Judaic as well as Christian vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem. However, the key to the metaphor is the assumption that the structure symbolizes a toppled tower, which in its turn is a meaningful analogy to the concepts derived from the issues of the Holocaust.

Study on Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin viewed from critical theory

It is not easy to clarify the historical perspective of architect through his architecture. Exceptional cases, it will be the time to design a history museum. As an institution, a Museum already became an apparatus to represent the history to it itself. Libeskind`s Jewish museum Berlin has been presented as the controversial case most of all. In particular, in that it instead of dealing with history positive, that contains a tragic history, this building is a building that history a unique interpretation of the architect has been a problem. Therefore, it is difficult to find a suitable example to Libeskind`s Jewish museum in Berlin to try and look at the problem of the history of contemporary history and interpretation of the architect. In this paper, I am trying to interpret Libeskind`s Jewish Museum Berlin through the aesthetics and history philosophy of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. They are Jewish and the central figures of the Frankfurt School, known as `critical theorists`. Their critical theory was formed based on the experience of the Jewish genocide and war.

The National Museums' Archeticture between Designers Vision and National Cultural Objectives , A Case Study of both the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the Grand Egyptian Museum

This study focused on a common phenomenon, which is that the architecture of national museums and their internal spaces are designed according to the viewpoint of the architects of those museums and their own vision, based on personal ideas and concepts only, without being compatible with the national cultural goals of the nations and peoples who own those museums. The study used the descriptive and analytical method to study how cultural national goals can govern museum architecture as an alternative to the individual formulations of the designer with limited viewpoints. The study begins with defining the concept of the museum, the scientific definition as a cultural, educational and entertainment center, with an indication of its various functions of preserving, maintaining, and disseminating archaeological awareness, information and others, then discussing what is known as the museum system and its three elements, namely the human being, the museum’s holdings and the museum’s architecture, and from there it proceeds to study the common link between the elements of the symbolic system. The three, which is the symbol as an alphabetical unit of expression and dialogue between the visitor, the museum display and the museum architecture, and through it the national cultural goals of the National Museum and its nation are presented, with an explanation of what the expression and meaning are, and the clarification of the expression mechanisms in architecture in general between direct frankness and hidden symbolism, and then exposure in detail to The foundations of the science of "semiotics" as the science concerned with symbol and the various mechanisms of expression, especially in architecture and pictorial works of art. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the foundations of "hermeneutics", which is the science of reading and interpreting the meanings of different symbols. Through these foundations, the subject was analyzed and read the meanings of the architecture of the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the Grand Egyptian Museum to determine the extent to which the design of their architecture and their internal spaces are compatible with the national cultural goals of their two nations through the museum system, as it appears after the discussion that the architecture of the Jewish Museum in Berlin "is a symbolic embodiment of the journey of the diaspora of the Jewish people, starting from the event of their exit from ancient Egypt to the event of their ordeal in Europe with Nazi Germany during World War II, which came in line with the national cultural goals and the actual purpose of establishing the museum. As for the architecture of the" Grand Egyptian "museum, it is A symbolic embodiment of the journey of the ancient Jews exiting from ancient Egypt to their new home in the land of "Palestine" and their construction there their sacred temple after their construction is the greatest features of ancient Egypt’s civilization, considering the event of the exodus and the forced labor of the ancient Jews in ancient Egypt the most important event in all ancient Egyptian history from the point of view of designers The museum is what qualifies it to be represented in the architecture of the "Great Egyptian" Museum, which contradicts in total and detail the national cultural goals of the Egyptian nation that the museum was built for approval. Then the results came The research decides to follow the designers of the architecture of the Jewish Museum in "Berlin" to the cultural national goals of the nation that owns this museum. As for the designers of the architecture of the "Great Egyptian" museum, they steered far from the cultural national goals of the nation that owns this museum. Rather, their design for the museum and its cultural mission contradicts the established historical and scientific facts.

Holocaust memory reframed: museums and the challenges of representation

Holocaust memorials and museums face a difficult task as their staff strive to commemorate and document horror. On the one hand, the events museums represent are beyond most people's experiences. At the same time they are often portrayed by theologians, artists and philosophers in ways that are already known by the public. Museumadministrators and curators have the challenging role of finding a creative way to present Holocaust exhibits to avoid cliched or dehumanising portrayals of victims and theirsuffering. In Holocaust Memory Reframed, Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich examines representations in three museums: Israel's Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Germany's Jewish Museum in Berlin and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She describes a variety of visually striking media, including architecture, photography exhibits, artifact displays and video installations in order to explain the aesthetic techniques that the museums employ. As she interprets the exhibits, Hansen-Glucklich clarifies how museums communicate Holocaust narratives within the historical and cultural contexts specific to Germany, Israel and the United States. In Yad Vashem, architect Moshe Safdie developed a narrative suited for Israel, rooted in a redemptive, Zionist story of homecoming to a place of mythic geography andrenewal, in contrast to death and suffering in exile. In the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Daniel Libeskind's architecture, broken lines and voids emphasise absence. Here exhibitscommunicate a conflicted ideology, torn between the loss of a Jewish past and the country's current multicultural ethos. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museumpresents yet another lens, conveying through its exhibits a sense of sacrifice that is part of the civil values of American democracy and trying to overcome geographic andtemporal distance. One well-know example, the pile of thousands of shoes plundered from concentration camp victims encourages the visitor to bridge the gap betweenviewer and victim. Hansen-Glucklich explores how each museum's concept of the sacred shapes the design and choreography of visitors' experiences within museum spaces. These spaces are sites of pilgrimage that can in turn lead to rites of passage.