To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. — Walter Benjamin, Thesis on the Philosophy of History
There are now more than 150 museums all over the world dedicated to Jewish heritage and culture, if we include the large number that describe themselves as Holocaust Museums. These museums stress the traditions and contributions of Jewish people to societies past and present. Some are local in character — the Breman Museum in Atlanta, for example, tells the story of the history of Jews in the state of Georgia — while others tell stories that are more national and/or international in scope.
Holocaust museums and memorials concentrate on honoring the more than six million Jews killed by the Nazis and their sympathizers during World War II. They aim to teach potent lessons whose moral is “never again.” Some of these institutions are helping to define not only the latest design in museum architecture but also the most advanced ways of thinking about presenting exhibitions to the public. They afford a lively point of entry for discovering what’s going on in museums, as keepers re-think how to present objects, tell stories, and place events in larger contexts.
If we focus on just three of these new Holocaust museums, we can get a sense of the vibrancy of recent attempts to keep history alive, to engage the public, and to explore architecture in new ways, often allowing the buildings themselves to help in telling their stories. We are now a long way from the notion of the museum as mausoleum, a mere repository of relics from the past.
The Jewish Museum Berlin is one of the most extraordinary of these new centers; it is the space that has come to define the work of its architect, Daniel Libeskind. On its official website, Libeskind says, “I believe that this project joins Architecture to questions that are now relevant to all humanity. To this end, I have sought to create a new Architecture for a time which would reflect an understanding of history, a new understanding of Museums and a new realization of the relationship between program and architectural space. Therefore this Museum is not only a response to a particular program, but an emblem of Hope.” This stunning space, laid out in the shape of a shattered Star of David, is attached to the older Baroque-era Collegienhaus, originally used as a court of justice.
A Libeskind masterwork, the Jewish Museum Berlin attracted many, many visitors to walk through its evocative spaces even before there was anything on the walls. Among other things, the building itself is undoubtedly an extraordinary piece of sculpture, as well as being a dramatic place for telling the history of German Jews. Light, space, darkness, even the lack of heat and air conditioning in the museum’s Holocaust Tower, produce a powerful retelling of what happened during Hitler’s attempt to extinguish the entire Jewish community, as part of his plans for the Thousand-Year Reich.
This is a space with a voice; one that sings, even when the song is sometimes a dirge for what has been taken from us, what we have all lost.
The Museum of Jewish Heritage, in New York City, describes itself as “a living memorial to those who perished in the holocaust.” Located in Robert Wagner Park, just south of the World Financial Center on the Hudson River, the museum is also very close to Ground Zero, the site of the former World Trade Center. Nestled near the heart of old New Amsterdam, the original Dutch settlement in lower Manhattan, the MJH uses the same six-point architecture in its floor plan to invoke both the six points of the Star of David and the six million lost to Hitler’s (and the world’s) intolerance. In fact, the notion of tolerance — teaching tolerance, modeling tolerance, working for tolerance — is deeply embedded in the educational mission of the museum. As its website explains, the MJH tells its story by focusing on the life and contribution of Jews in the twentieth century before the Holocaust, and in a lively way stressing the story of Jewish renewal after the war.
Telling stories in the first person is becoming a key part of museum presentation, not just in this museum, but also in the revitalized understanding of how to present information that is currently sweeping the museum world. This is especially the case in history and culture museums which approach artifacts, people, and events through the medium of everyday material culture — what was left behind can make history present. Journals, diaries, letters, and other kinds of ephemera have become jumping off points for many museum presentations. Curators have realized that taking a didactic stand, telling only one story from one point of view, as if there were only one history, is less dynamic, relevant, and engaging than giving audiences multiple reference points and perspectives. New museum pedagogy understands that democratizing the information we have from the past makes us aware that history is not a monolith: there are many different stories, perspectives, and points of entry for the viewer who tries to come to terms with the past-in-the-present.
Questions about whose past, and what does that past have to do with a larger national identity, and how we are more alike than different, form the main subject matter for the newest Jewish Heritage Museum, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, set to open in 2010 on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto. Head of planning for the museum is Professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblet, who leads a team determined that the stories told on that hallowed ground will celebrate life and a rich cultural tradition, and not only death (90% of Poland’s Jews were annihilated in the Holocaust). Dr. Kirshenblatt-Gimblet has said that the museum “…starts with a story told in three dimensional space [but] that story will not be pre-determined by the architecture, (as is the case in Berlin).”
Planners are currently grappling with a range of questions for the exhibitions, including how to present Jewish Poles as integral to the history of Poland, and how to imagine what Poland and Polish Jewry would look like without the Holocaust. They are also asking about the effects of communism and Jewish culture, post-World War II. The process of working through the uses of material culture, selecting dynamic ways to involve the visitor, and re-thinking, reconstructing, and re-integrating nearly-lost customs, traditions, and even places, constitute the goals of the project.
When this museum opens it will not only be a landmark in telling the story of Jewish culture and tradition; it will be a landmark that raises the bar for many future museums of history and culture. Professor Kirshenblatt-Gimblet and her staff know that a museum such as theirs can help “animate democracy” in a country such as Poland, as it emerges from its post-communist era. Museums like this one can also help to set the agenda for all such spaces that take history as a basis for exhibitions. Museums can be about the past, but must not be relics themselves. The next generation is depending on them to keep the stories alive.
