Stung by such criticism, Schröder quickly declared that he would subject the Holocaust memorial to further review. In January 1999 he approved yet another design, which combined Eisenman’s toned-down maze with a research center for scholars and a “House of Remembrance” featuring a 65-foot-high “Wall of Books.” The books, a million tomes in all, would be open to consultation by scholars, thereby accommodating the idea that the Holocaust memorial should not be just a thing to gaze at, or to get lost in, but an “interactive” center of education and research. Michael Naumann, Schröder’s minister of culture, declared himself satisfied with the new arrangement. “All statements pro and con have been taken care of,” he said. “This is a superb synthesis. It is not a compromise.”
Of course, this solution was a compromise, like virtually everything else in the new Berlin. Final approval awaited a vote in the Bundestag, which came on June 25, 1999. After more than a decade of debate, Germany had finally agreed to build a memorial in Berlin to the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust. “We are not building this monument solely for the Jews,” said Wolfgang Thierse, the speaker of the parliament. “We are building it for ourselves. It will help us confront a chapter in our history.”
A memorial devoted to the Holocaust is not the same thing as a museum devoted to the Holocaust. Some people thought that Germany ought to have such a museum, but this need had already been brilliantly addressed by the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Instead of a museum focusing specifically on the Holocaust, Germany’s new capital ended up getting the “Jewish Museum,” which examines the role of Jews in German life, particularly in Berlin. Yet in many ways this institution is really about the Holocaust, too; its design is as discomforting as the original Eisenman/Serra Holocaust memorial proposal, and its principal purpose is to get people to reflect on the tortuous relationship between Germans and Jews that culminated in Auschwitz. Moreover, like the Holocaust memorial, it stimulated great controversy, and it very nearly did not get built at all.
The idea for a museum devoted to Germany’s and Berlin’s Jews was first floated in the late 1980s, and a design competition was held in 1988, the year before the Wall came down. According to the specifications, the building in question was to be an extension of the existing Berlin Museum on Lindenstrasse in Kreuzberg. The competition was won by the Polish-born American architect Daniel Libe-skind, who shortly thereafter moved his practice from Berlin to Los Angeles out of frustration over Hans Stimmann’s conservative building codes. Libeskind’s winning design, which with a few modifications was the one that actually got built, proposed a zigzag structure resembling a lightning bolt, or a distorted Star of David. Its interior contains a main passageway leading to a Chamber of Reflection resembling a chimney, as well as Caligari-like slanted walls, vertigo-inducing shafts, and empty spaces that the architect calls “voids,” which are meant to draw attention to the vacuum in Berlin left by the disappearance of tens of thousands of its Jews.
Garden of Exiles at the Jewish Museum, 1999
As soon as the project was announced, it came under fire from a number of quarters. Christian Democrats on the city council insisted that the undertaking be postponed because there were more pressing demands on the municipal budget, such as Berlin’s Olympic Games bid. Members of the board of the Berlin Museum questioned whether the city needed another Jewish center, since millions of marks had just been spent to restore the New Synagogue in former East Berlin. Some Jewish leaders, citing the city’s influx of impoverished Eastern European Jews, argued that the money could be better spent on social programs for the newcomers. “We need schools, apartments, teachers, assistance,” said Mario Offenberg, the leader of Berlin’s Conservative Adass Jisroel congregation. “Only then can we think of museums.” Bowing to these objections, the city council voted in 1991 to put off construction for five years, which many took to be a polite form of cancellation. Libeskind was among them: “I don’t think anyone believes this project will get built if there is a five-year delay,” he said.
By the mid-1990s construction had finally commenced on the Jewish Museum, but the project remained under fire, and it might not have been completed had not W. Michael Blumenthal come to the rescue in 1997 as the museum’s first director. In some ways Blumenthal seemed an unlikely choice. He was not a German citizen and he had no experience in museum administration. But in fact his background—and even more his personal skills—suited him perfectly for the job. Born in Oranienburg in 1926, he had grown up in Berlin and fled with his family to Shanghai in 1939 to escape Hitler’s persecution. Moving to America in 1947, he went on to become an adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and finance minister under President Jimmy Carter. This was a man who knew about money—how to raise it and how to spend it. As an American, he had a useful impatience with German pedantry and title-mania, telling astounded Germans not to call him “Dr. Blumenthal,” since he “didn’t know how to repair sick stomachs.” Most importantly, as a partial outsider who commuted between Berlin and Princeton, Blumenthal could more effectively mediate between the feuding factions in Berlin’s Jewish community than an insider.
On January 23, 1999, the Jewish Museum, though still empty, opened for inspection with a spectacular fund-raising dinner. One might have thought that few Germans, even well-heeled ones, would pay DM 25,000 ($14,800) a table to sit in an empty building. But many of Germany’s leaders, including Chancellor Schröder and three of his cabinet ministers, showed up, as did an array of bankers and corporation executives. This led one commentator to label the opening “the first glittering prelude to the Berlin Republic.” Blumenthal’s promotional skills undoubtedly had something to do with this. So, perhaps, did a desire on the part of the bankers and executives, whose organizations were facing charges of having exploited slave labor during the war, to polish their image. But it also seems probable that the bitter controversy surrounding the Holocaust memorial, with all its talk of “moving on” and being “neither better nor worse” than any other nation, prompted some soul-searching among Germany’s political and economic leaders. What better place than in a museum, and in a Jewish Museum at that, for the national elite to make manifest that the new Germany would not attempt to “draw a line under the past?”
Berlin 2000
The agonizing debate about how to deal with Germany’s past in the new capital reflected a deeper quandary about national identity in the late 1990s—two-thirds of a century after the founding of the Third Reich, a half-century since the German division, and a decade since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Although many Germans worried about how the transfer of their capital from Bonn to Berlin would be perceived abroad, the move was actually more unsettling at home than outside Germany, for it made the question of the new nation’s “normality” all the more pressing. The shift to Berlin signaled the final end of the Federal Republic’s provisionality and limited sovereignty. Did this mean that Germany could act just like any other nation when it came to matters of national pride and the articulation of national interests? Assessing the predicament of the impending “Berlin Republic” in 1997, the American scholars Andrei Markovits and Simon Reich were confident that the country would remain democratic, but were less certain that it would find a way to act responsibly and consistently on the world stage. “In the context of national power,” they wrote, “Germany’s self-understanding remains murky. Germany vacillates between an overbearing projection of power (mainly, though not exclusively, in the realm of the economy) and a reticence about admitting that power; the country’s identity remains uncertain and ill-defined in the area of power as it is crystal clear in the domain of democracy.”