Berlin's moving Jewish Museum

Jewish history is a whole lot more than just the distress of the Holocaust, and Berlin’s Jewish Museum makes sure that visitors remember this. One of the best museums I’ve ever visited, the combination of displays showing some two thousand years of Jewish history and the incredible design and architecture of the museum made it something I’ll never forget.

It’s one of those amazing places where it’s not just the exhibits that are important, but every aspect of the building itself. The Jewish Museum building that opened in 2001 (when the museum moved from another location) was designed by Daniel Libeskind and has many interesting symbolic aspects. From above, the building is created in the shape of a lightning bolt, and inside it includes three hallways: the Axis of Death, the Axis of Exile and the Axis of Continuity. Some parts are deliberately dark; others let in light through strangely shaped windows that were designed by joining significant points on a map of Berlin.

Within this design are both floors of multimedia displays about Jewish culture and history over the centuries, and other architectural features designed to make a deeper impression than your average museum. For example, the Axis of Death leads to a tall concrete tower with nothing inside, called the Holocaust Tower. Museum visitors can get “closed in” to this tower and look up into near darkness; after seeing holocaust-related displays there’s plenty of food for thought while you stand in this tower. Just outside the building, the Garden of Exile is formed from numerous concrete towers of varying heights, arranged in a grid pattern but with an unnerving slope. It’s a quiet place of contemplation and the towers are arranged closely enough that even if other visitors are nearby, you won’t often see them.

One of the most moving parts of the museum for me was the tower called the Memory Void. It’s another tall concrete tower with just a little light coming in, and the installation of “Shalachet” (Fallen Leaves) has thousands of rough human faces made of iron dumped across the floor. You can walk over these faces and the clinks and clunks that this makes echo around the tower – it’s eerie and chilling, but something that’s imprinted on my memory forever.

The bookshop of the Jewish Museum also deserves a mention – it’s really well-stocked with not only the usual museum-related paraphernalia, but also a great selection of novels, biographies and history books about and by Jewish people. Make sure you leave enough time at the end of your visit to indulge in a bookshop browse.