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The Jewish Museum Berlin Between The Lines ~Daniel Libeskind

It is a project about two lines of thinking, organization and relationship. One is a straight line, but broken into many fragments; the other is a tortuous line, but continuing indefinitely.

There was an invisible matrix of connections, a connection of relationships between figures of Germans and Jews. The one binding feature which crossed East and West was the relationship of Germans to Jews. Certain people, workers, writers, composers, artists, scientists and poets formed the link between Jewish tradition and German culture. This connection and I plotted an irrational matrix which would yield reference to the emblematics of a compressed and distorted star: the yellow star that was so frequently worn on this very site. This is the 1st aspect of the project.

Music of Schönberg:
His greatest work is the opera called "Moses and Aaron", which could not be completed. For an important structural reason the logic of the libretto could not be completed by the musical score. At the end of the opera, Moses doesn't sing, he just speaks "oh word, thou word", addressing the absence of the Word, and one can understand it as a 'text', because when there is no more singing, the missing word which is uttered by Moses, the call for the Word, the call for the Deed, is understood clearly. I sought to complete that opera architecturally and that is the 2nd aspect of this project.

The 3rd aspect of this project was the names of those persons who were deported from Berlin during the fatal years of the Holocaust. I asked for and received from Bonn two very large volumes called the 'Gedenkbuch'. All they contain are just lists and lists of names, dates of birth, dates of deportation and presumed places where these people were murdered. I looked for the names of the Berliners and where they had died - in Riga, in the Lodz ghetto, in the concentration camps.

The 4th aspect of the project is formed by Walter Benjamin's One Way Street. This aspect is incorporated into the continuous sequence of 60 sections along the zigzag, each of which represents one of the 'Stations of the Star' described in the text of Walter Benjamin

The work is conceived as a museum for all Berliners, for all citizens. Not only those of the present, but those of the future who might find their heritage and hope in this particular place. With its special emphasis on the Jewish dimension of Berlin's history

this building gives voice to a common fate - to the contradictions of the ordered and disordered, the chosen and not chosen, the vocal and silent