The body of Daniel Libeskind's extension to the Jewish Museum in Berlin does not really lack limbs. However, it should be noted that the skin surrounding the body looks mutilated. The outer walls of the building are made of enormous zinc plates that are at some points ripped open, as if they were scratched or scarred skins. The building has no clearly defined form, it looks like a straight line that is interrupted and changes direction at some points. Libeskind himself claims that such a form represents a deconstructed Cross of David.
Traumatic history
This extension's architecture expresses one of the most physically oriented types of the uncanny. As a kind of compelling memory, the building tries to transfer feelings of disorientation and displacement to its public. Some corridors get increasingly narrow; others simply come to a dead end. Some staircases, too, fail to fulfil their primary function and lead to a blind wall. In his design, Libeskind strongly emphasises the museum's historically preservative function. But not in the way traditional museum functions, which stores within its walls some cultural inheritance for posterity. Rather, the Berlin Jewish Museum should function as an active memory in everyday Berlin consciousness. Libeskind says he had three main ideas in mind when he was designing this building:"first, the impossibility of understanding the history of Berlin without understanding the enormous intellectual, economic and cultural contribution made by its Jewish citizens; second, the necessity to integrate the meaning of the Holocaust, both ph[y]sically and spiritually, into the consciousness and memory of the city of Berlin; third, that only through acknowledging and incorporating this erasure and void of Berlin's Jewish life can the history of Berlin and Europe have a human future." (Daniel Libeskind at http://www.jmberlin.be/jmb_en.htm)
The Jewish Museum functions as a reverse repression mechanism, as a mechanism of liberation that should make sure that the Holocaust never disappears from collective Berlinian and western memory. Just like Eisenman's City of Excavations (which, quite significantly, was to be located in the same city), it stresses the historical imperative in architecture. Both spiritually and physically, Libeskind wants to render the persecution and emigration of the Jews present. Quite paradoxically, he does so by materialising absence. Essential to the Jewish Museum is the void, a large and empty space that visitors have to cross by means of bridges in order to get to the other side of the museum. The first room the visitors enter when accessing the museum is part of that void, which partly also extends underground. We have already pointed out the uncanny consequences of underground architecture and its references to tombs and crypts in the context of Eisenman's City of Excavations. From that void at the museum's entrance, three paths depart. The first path leads up to the exposition halls. The second path leads the visitors to the Holocaust void, where the cruelty of the Holocaust is expressed by the materialisation of emptiness. The third path symbolises the Jews' exile and emigration from Germany. It leads out of the building towards the E.T.A. Hoffmann-garden, hardly a coincidental reference to the writer of stories like "The Sandman" and "Councillor Krespel", which pre-eminently thematise the uncanny.
The building as experience
In the Jewish Museum, the uncanny manifests itself in the form of a physical and phenomenological "architectural experience", a form that has been convincingly described in Vidler's most recent book:"(...) when confronted by the withdrawn exteriors and disturbing interiors of the Jewish Museum (...) we find ourselves in a phenomenological world in which both Heidegger and Sartre would find themselves, if not exactly 'at home' (for that was not their preferred place), certainly in bodily and mental crisis, with any trite classical homologies between the body and the building upset by unstable axes, walls and skins torn, ripped and dangerously slashed, rooms empty of content and with uncertain or no exits or entrances. What Heidegger liked to call 'falling into' the uncanny, and what for Sartre was the dangerous instrumentality of objects in the world as they threatened the body and its extensions, is for Libeskind the stuff of architectural experience." (Vidler 2000: 238)
In its close connection to the Second World War trauma, to its conditions of diaspora and displacement, of homelessness and hopelessness, Libeskind's Jewish Museum is illustrative of the twentieth-century uncanny. Vidler argues that "the uncanny might be understood as a response to the real shock of the modern" (Vidler 1992: 9). A response to a war trauma that first occurred after the First World War, returned like a spectre after the Second World War and since then never again disappeared from contemporary imagination. "The uncanny," Vidler goes on, "has found its way as a place to think of the two 'postwars' after 1919 and 1945" (ibid.). Libeskind's deconstructionist building can therefore be read as an expression of an uncanny Polarerlebnis in which the whole world took part, an experience that, according to the architect, should not be forgotten by present and future generations.
