Abstract

It has been noted recently that Western culture, Australia included, is in the grip of an international museum-building boom which emerged in the early eighties and shows no sign of abating. Many of the most high-profile new institutions are art museums, but while the merits of expressionist buildings as a forum for the display of (usually modern) art could be debated endlessly, the question must be reframed to deal with the purpose-built history museum, and again in the case of museums which deal with contested or 'unsavoury' histories. Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum Extension to the Berlin Museum is one such building.

Opened in 1999 as an empty shell, naked of any museological objects or exhibits, the Jewish Museum will remain this way until its final installation and re-opening in September 2001, nearly three years after its practical completion. But rather than defeating a discussion of the building as a museum, this merely serves to underscore my starting point - that this building, as with many museums dealing with 'unsavoury' histories, is much more than a simple receptacle for objects, or space for their display. With its vertiginous spatial effects, its punctured zinc planes and gashed slits for windows, it is an austerely beautiful object, which is nevertheless designed to hold both the memory and the evidence of some of the most unspeakable historical events ever recorded, events which are commonly felt to 'defeat' representation. This paper undertakes an analysis of this building as an opening through which to explore the implications of unsavoury histories for the museum institution generally.

Unsavoury histories might be described as historical acts, attitudes, and policies which the shifting tide of moral and political opinion has either always found, or has come to find, unacceptable, criminally culpable, even simply embarrassing. Often such events have been supressed or excluded from accepted historical narratives, and especially from the museum, for just these reasons. The point of a museum working through such a difficult history would be, in part, a simple matter of redressing inaccuracies and omissions in the historical record. But the contested nature of such unsavoury histories reveals a deeper significance: they are an expression of the past as always, to some extent, unpresentable, and reveal the museum's inability to represent absence and loss as such. If the presentation of the past is impossible, however, its representation is made possible by metonymically substituting the enduring physical presence of historical objects for the intangibility of time passed, in the same way that a monument literally 'stands in' for the past.

In the Jewish Museum the commemorative element of monumentality is made explicit precisely through its role as a museum, an institution which encourages engagement with history rather than the traditional monument's passive contemplation. The building is a meditation on the museum's role in both embodying and containing memory, and resolves the tension between museum, monument, and memorial into three elements - the museum as archive, for the collection and display of historical objects, the museum as memorial, for the provocation of memory in its visitors, and the museum as monument, the physical embodiment of memory. The Jewish Museum is thus a particularly exaggerated, emotive, and politically fraught working-through of the issues of monumentality and memory which underlie the very concept of the history museum.

If the Jewish Museum represents a convergence of the discourses of historiography and museology represented through the aesthetic language of architecture, in the context of Germany this necessarily involves the unique problems of postwar historiography. The Jewish museum thus represents the state of social and cultural memory in contemporary Berlin, more than fifty years after the war's end. This paper examines some of the complexities of architectural history and context that condition the Jewish Museum project, particularly in terms of its redefinition of architectural monumentality. An analysis of the ways in which the museum addresses the particularly difficult and 'unpresentable' elements of German and Jewish history in Berlin leads to a conception of the Jewish Museum as a kind of constructed ruin, a monument which was always already 'ruined' by the events of history.

Date published: August 2000