Jewish History a New Star in Berlin

Jews in Germany. The image that comes to mind is of yellow stars and concentration camps, of exile and slaughter. For the 12 years of Nazi rule, to be a Jew in Germany was to be a victim.

But Jewish history here spans 2,000 years, most of it peaceful and productive, and the full story is one that a new museum attempts to capture in both its pain and its glory.

The Jewish Museum opening tonight with a gala dinner for an elite 850 has been four decades in the making and the subject of much debate about how large a role the Holocaust should play in presenting the full historical picture.

“We’re trying not to present Jews as a culture of victims,” project director Ken Gorbey told The Times in an interview as drilling and hammering continued in the final hours before the long-awaited unveiling. “We want to celebrate the achievements of German Jews--not just the artists, intellectuals and Nobel Prize winners but the whole culture. The 12 years of the Nazi regime have pulled a veil down over that history.”

He says the main message is about Germany as a multicultural nation--a fact both undeniable yet denied on a daily basis by those who put politics ahead of harmony and integration.

A New Zealand anthropologist who developed the much-acclaimed Te Papa museum in Wellington, Gorbey was brought in only 18 months ago to conceive, collect and present the history of German Jewry in a building that is a museum piece in itself.

“We never worked around the structure; we worked with it,” he said of the unique building designed by UCLA professor Daniel Libeskind. “I had to determine how, for the first time in my life, to install a museum in a masterwork. Most museums are just big amorphous warehouses where you just block the architecture out. But Daniel has given us a great architectural gem in which every room is a palace.”

Blending Exhibits With Architecture

Working with the building meant, at times, standing back and letting the architect’s intellectual ideas emanate without intrusion. But in most of the museum, the exhibits complement the architecture, Gorbey said.

Through the raw power of its architectural symbolism, the zinc-clad lightning bolt of a building pierced by horizontal slit windows served as a de facto Holocaust memorial until January, when it was closed to install the exhibits. Another site, near the Brandenburg Gate, has been designated for a national Holocaust monument, but politicians and planners have been squabbling over the project for years, and it will take at least another decade to be completed.

Libeskind, a naturalized American who has spent the past decade in Berlin, said in an interview with the weekly Die Zeit newspaper that the exhibits liberate his structure from its unintended role as a monument to murdered Jews.

“It is not a Holocaust museum after all. Up until now, the emptiness dominated, and in that way the effect of the building was to concentrate too much on the extinguishing of Jewish culture,” the architect observed.

Only one of 13 chronological sections of the museum is devoted to the Holocaust, Gorbey said, and the most compelling component of Libeskind’s building, the Holocaust Tower, will remain empty to encourage contemplation.

“The museum will be a milestone because it will for the first time in 50 years take Jewish history out of the very narrow context of the Holocaust,” said Deidre Berger, head of the American Jewish Committee in Berlin. “If German children visit a museum and see something besides concentration camps, they will see Jews not just as victims but as citizens who have made enormous contributions to the political and cultural life of this country.”

At its inception in the 1960s, the museum was expected to draw no more than 100,000 visitors a year and was to be just a section of the Berlin Museum it now neighbors. But after more than 350,000 people toured the empty Libeskind building in the two years it was open, projections have been raised exponentially.

“We know we have problems with throughput,” Gorbey said of the narrow, subterranean entry and bottlenecks that abound. “We hope and pray for success. But if we get five times what we planned for, there will be problems. The air conditioning won’t work. We won’t have enough toilets.”

Some modifications have already been made to accommodate as many as 6,000 visitors a day if their numbers are spread out over the 10 hours of daily operation. Curators and publicists have gone full speed ahead with programs encouraging school field trips and group tours, which can be booked to focus on 10 separate themes in German or English.

The museum is equipped with a learning center in which visitors can access multimedia services or participate in virtual reality presentations of German Jewish life through the ages--an incorporation of technology that some have objected to as unsuitable.

Spielberg Materials Are Behind Schedule

The Shoah Foundation, initiated by film director Steven Spielberg to record oral testimonies of 50,000 Holocaust survivors, wants to share its materials with the learning center but is behind in the cataloging and will have to wait a few months, said Cara Noble of the foundation’s Berlin office.

Although an array of projects is underway to present the history of German Jews and the Holocaust, the Jewish Museum is the only one to take such a broad sweep. The commitment to recognizing Jewish contributions from the likes of Albert Einstein and Henry A. Kissinger is commended by most, but some worry that the presentation is too focused on the prominent.

“Half the Jewish population today is very poor. They’re immigrants on social welfare. Yet most people have this image of German Jews as intellectuals--well-off, good-looking, educated Berliners,” said Irene Runge of the Jewish Cultural Assn. here. “If you told them 70% don’t speak German very well and that most of them are not religious, they wouldn’t believe it. That doesn’t fit in with the stereotypes.”

Germany’s Jewish community has mushroomed--from 30,000 in the early 1990s to more than 100,000--because of eased immigration for Jews from former Soviet republics and from Eastern Europe.

Like other Jewish groups in Germany, Runge’s association has donated letters, artwork and memorabilia for the museum’s displays. But how many of the personal mementos have been incorporated remains unknown to the donors because the exhibits have been shrouded in secrecy ahead of the opening.

“Either they’re not done yet, which is possible, or this is an advertising idea,” Runge said.

Museum director Michael Blumenthal, a former U.S. Treasury secretary whose family fled Nazi Germany when he was a child, has joked that the last workers will be leaving the building only as Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, President Johannes Rau and others arrive for tonight’s dinner.