Language:
English
Year of publication:
2000
Titel der Quelle:
At Memory's Edge
Angaben zur Quelle:
(2000) 152-183
Keywords:
Libeskind, Daniel,
;
Jüdisches Museum Berlin (1999-)
;
Jewish museums
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Museums
;
Holocaust memorials
Abstract:
In the 1980s the idea was raised to establish a Jewish division of the Berlin Museum or, possibly, a separate Jewish museum. The question was how to memorialize Jews in a place that had driven them from what most of them considered home. Following Freud's definition of "unheimlich" (uncanny, not at home) as relating to the repression of the familiar, shows how the architect Libeskind (born in Łódź in 1946 to Holocaust survivors) developed an uncanny design for Berlin's Jewish museum. In Libeskind's building, which at first appeared unbuildable, absences and voids express the void in Berlin caused by the elimination of its Jews under the Nazis. Concludes that Jewish memory will not be returned to the house of Berlin history, but rather that Berlin history will find its place in a separate haunted ("uncanny") house of Jewish memory.
Note:
Appeared also in "Jewish Social Studies" 6,2 (2000) 1-23, and in "Visual Culture and the Holocaust" (2001).
URL:
Click here for fulltext (may be restricted to subscribers)
URL:
Locate this publication in Israeli libraries
Permalink