{"id":366,"date":"2017-01-30T06:43:44","date_gmt":"2017-01-30T06:43:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/?p=366"},"modified":"2017-01-30T06:44:58","modified_gmt":"2017-01-30T06:44:58","slug":"jewish-museum-berlin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/2017\/01\/30\/jewish-museum-berlin\/","title":{"rendered":"Jewish Museum Berlin"},"content":{"rendered":"

This summer, I was able to visit Berlin, known for its many museums located on what’s dubbed “Museum Island.” However, not located on this island gathering of museums was the Jewish Museum (J\u00fcdisches Museum Berlin). The first iteration of this museum was founded in 1933, but was closed by the Nazis in 1938, a clear erasure of Jewish ethnographic knowledge.\u00a0It was reconstituted with a new construction design and mission statement in 2001.<\/p>\n

As shown in the maps below, the museum first descends into an underground space where you walk along the “Axis of Continuity,” which intersects with the “Axis of the Holocaust” and the “Axis of Exile.” Here you deviate from the clear, straight path of the museum to witness relics and read stories of families who were able to flea, and from those who were captured by a Fascist regime, and killed. The experience of this underground portion is haunting, and creates a space where historical memory is engrained in the architecture design. At the end of the Axis of the Holocaust, there is a dark, cold space with only a slit of light opening up to the street above called the Holocaust Tower, which creates a sense of isolation and pause, where one may contemplate and consider the weight of the atrocities. These Axes that deviate from the Axis of Continuity are meant to disturb and disrupt the architectural flow that usually guides one into a museum. Thus the museum does not only serve as instructional and educational, but serves as a facilitator for thought-processes, that access a historical consciousness.\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

To continue to the rest of the museum, you must walk back along the Axis of Continuity to re-initiate yourself into the educational space. Ascending to the top floor, the rest of the museum guides one through the cultural history of the Jewish-German people. In what I consider the most impressionable spaces, called the Memory Void, 10,000 steel faces are placed on the ground. As people walk over these faces, you hear the echoing clang of each footstep – a prescient reminder of the violence, which precedes and exists as we walk through our own “continuity.” The museum tasks itself not so much with rationalization of an irrational and “barbaric” document of history (as Benjamin might say) but leaves the museum patron to consider the extreme form that categorization can take.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Interior of Memory Void room of Jewish Museum or Judisches Museum designed by Daniel Liebskind in Kreuzberg Germany<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This summer, I was able to visit Berlin, known for its many museums located on what’s dubbed “Museum Island.” However,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":89,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/89"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}