Daniel Libeskind: building places from memories

A&E talks to the architect of Berlin's Jewish Museum and reviews his 'Two Museums and a Garden.'

By Benjamin Ewing and Sam Frank

On Mon., Nov. 8 and Tues., Nov. 9, Daniel Libeskind, the inaugural Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professor of Architecture, spoke to packed houses about his recent work. Robert A. M. Stern, ARC '65, Dean of the School of Architecture, termed his Jewish Museum in Berlin—the largest of its kind in the world—a "work of compelling power carved out of the obdurate circumstances of politics and human tragedy. "The museum's architecture attracts thousands of visitors a week despite remaining empty of exhibits until next year. An exhibition of Libeskind's work on the Jewish Museum and its E.T.A. Hoffman Garden, as well as Osnabrück, Germany's Felix Nussbaum Haus, is on display at the main gallery of the Art and Architecture building through Sat., Nov. 20. The Herald sat down with Libeskind to discuss his work.

The Yale Herald: The Jewish Museum of Berlin—I have heard it casually referred to as the Berlin Holocaust Museum. Is that accurate?

Daniel Libeskind: No. Mostly Americans refer to it like that. To them it is something sort of faraway and it must be about the Holocaust, but it is not a Holocaust museum. It's not a memorial either. Although there are aspects of the Holocaust, and there are aspects of the memorial in there as well, it is a museum devoted to showing the Jewish dimension of history of Germany. And it's a very major one because Jews were very much integrated, assimilated, and great contributors to the success of the city. It will probably become the Jewish Museum of Germany once the government really moves to Berlin from Bonn.

YH: When you started the project, it wasn't at all clear that Berlin would be the capital and that Berlin would be the center.

DL: Surely not. The competition was before the Berlin Wall came down and it was judged just around that time. The building itself was very controversial and at one time it was even scrapped by a Parliament vote. But the Jewish history of Berlin goes on. That's what the Jewish Museum addresses.

YH: Were there any specific ideas you were working with in the Jewish Museum?

DL: Many. It's a building that in every way refers to the specific site on which it's located: it refers to the Jews and German citizens who lived there on that site, what it is to show the erasures of the history, what does the destruction of Jewish culture mean in terms of the Holocaust, and what does the city mean after that? So the building is based on ideas of spiritual topography, not only urban topography.

YH: The Felix Nussbaum Haus seems almost a narrative.

DL: It's a narrative that leads to dead ends. These are not museums that are just neutral boxes to hold objects. They are themselves participating in the process of communicating the significance of what they hold. So it's not about just aesthetic enjoyment, it's to see that dimension of what the museum really deals with, in the context of history.

My projects make it clear that you can't just bridge that abyss created by the destruction of Jewish culture. You can't just nostalgically retrieve that culture. One of the things that both museums show is that you cannot do it, no matter if you want to...Of course, there is hope—otherwise one would not build a museum.

YH: So, what is the aim of a memorial? If you can't do everything, what exactly do you want to do?

DL: These are not memorials. They are living museums for the public to see things; they are not places where you lay a wreath once a year, pay your respects, and go home and go about your life. They are part of city spaces, which are encountered in everyday life, and are part of the contemporary. They are not really memorials in that sense.

I don't think it's advisable simply to build a memorial as an aesthetic statement addressing this issue, for a simple reason: a memorial is something special, and the Holocaust was not. It was something of everyday life. So whatever is addressing everyday life is really the authentic encounter with the event, and not the specialized cut-out which most people believe would be the sign of going on into the future.

YH: Can you talk a little bit about your installation at Yale? I know it's a reworking of the E.T.A Hoffman Garden.

DL: The actual Garden is much bigger than this. The columns in the actual Garden are at right angles to a diagonal plane. So you are on a ship, so to speak. It gives a different view of the building and the building around the building.

The actual Garden contains 49 columns. Inside the columns is earth, which goes all the way down, which you don't see—you only see the concrete. Under the earth, there is an irrigation system that pumps water into these columns, and there are roots of the willow oak tree, which grows diagonally across these tops. Forty-eight of these columns are filled with the land of Berlin and stand for 1948, foundation of the state of Israel. The middle one is filled with the earth of Israel and stands for Berlin.

YH: Is it a coincidence that you're speaking at Yale on the anniversary of Kristallnacht?

DL: Not at all, it is not coincidental. It is a very important date—it is not only the Kristallnacht, it is also the fall of the Berlin Wall, one of the most self-effacing dates in German history. But it is also, in practice, the date that was the groundbreaking for my first building, which was the Jewish Museum. The museum broke ground in 1992. You have to understand that this is a project that was built in the midst of German unification, in the midst of a time where no public building could be built, so the process of building the Museum was very attenuated. It's not like I had built a lot of buildings before. I had built none—this was my first building. That was part of the challenge.

Photos and blueprint from Jewish Museum courtesy of G + B Arts International. Photo of Daniel Libeskind courtesy of Architects in Cyberspace.

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