Emotive and Symbolic Spaces

By Abbie Gentry

The architecture of Berlin, Germany, has transformed greatly in the past century. Monumentality, which acted as a physical representation of Germany’s political dominance and leadership within the world, led to partial obliteration by the Great War. This then opened doors for reconstruction, renovation, and reconsolidation of its damaged past to a brighter, more peaceful future. However, there are still emotional scars that will take a long time to heal. Berlin’s emotional history, where pride, power, prejudice, and pain coexisted, can be expressed through architecture that can have a profound impact upon visitors. Two architects in particular, Daniel Libeskind and Peter Eisenman, strove to design in a way that portrayed the anguish and dehumanization that were felt by, and to honor, the victims of World War II.

Because of his Polish and Jewish heritage, Daniel Libeskind felt a strong connection to those who had suffered from Nazi oppression. When he designed the Jüdisches Museum in 1998, he aimed to create a space that was emotionally stirring and extremely metaphorical. More specifically, he “wanted to express the feelings of absence, emptiness, and invisibility” (Kroll). Symbolism is manifested through every detail, beginning with the zigzag shape of the building, which is arranged to create an abstraction of the Star of David (Krull). Its zinc façade displays thin lines of windows that slash through the building in a violent and seemingly random manner but are not, however, without reason. The contours are derived from the relationship of “addresses of prominent Jewish and German citizens on a map of pre-war Berlin” (Lenhardt). These connections form “an “irrational and invisible matrix on which he based the language of form, geometry and shape of the building” (Lenhardt). Within the museum, there are three main axes for visitors to choose a path: the Axis of Continuity, the Axis of Emigration, and the Axis of the Holocaust. The first axis represents the history of Berlin and the continuum of time. The second comprises of an increasingly tight and enclosing staircase that leads to the Garden of Exile. The garden was designed to disorient visitors so that they can understand the how lost those cast out of Germany felt. The last axis is a dead-end, a disturbingly accurate metaphor for the lives that lost (Lenhardt). Furthermore, five deep Voids occur throughout the building to represent how empty, hopeless, and lost in despair the victims felt during the Holocaust. They feature “concrete walls [that] add a cold, overwhelming atmosphere to the space where the only light emanates from a small slit at the top of the space” (Kroll). The building in its entirety is psychologically unsettling. Its sharp angles, voids, and darkness, all of which allude to the horrors and cruelty endured during the Holocaust, invoke a keen sense of sadness and empathy. I can only imagine how incredibly moved one would feel to personally experience the building because simply viewing photographs makes me cringe.

Peter Eisenman also sought to illustrate the abhorrent narrative of the Holocaust in his Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe. On a large scale, the memorial is symbolic because its “grid… can be read as both an extension of the streets that surround the site and an unnerving evocation of the rigid discipline and bureaucratic order that kept the killing machine grinding along” (Ouroussoff). A graveyard of rectangular masses, the site is comprised of “ 2,711 pillars, planted close together in undulating waves, [that] represent the 6 million murdered Jews” (Quigley). Visitors experience a range of emotions while traveling through the monument. They may walk in between the rows and sit on the lower blocks that lay on the perimeters. However, when one wanders further into the maze, the blocks grow taller and soon tower far above the human scale where tallest blocks are 4.7 meters high and block all views of the cityscape and vegetation (Quigley). This severance from the city creates feelings of confinement, insignificance, and loneliness that echo the emotional experiences of those who were persecuted during the World Wars. One of Eisenman’s key concept was to “speak to one of the Holocaust's most tragic lessons: the ability of human beings to numb themselves to all sorts of suffering - a feeling that only intensifies as you descend into the site” (Ouroussoff). Furthermore, he wanted the memorial to be just that, memorable. He did not “want people to weep and then walk away with a clear conscience” but to remember and reflect on the reality of what occurred only a few decades past. It speaks to “those who looked the other way, [those who] continued with their work, [those who] refused to bear witness,” and especially those who allowed themselves to become numbed and apathetic to the truth of the situation (Ouroussoff).

These buildings have begun to pave the way to allow Germany to move on from its guilt for its involvement in the World Wars without disrespecting or forgetting those who lost their lives in the great tragedy. It acts as an educational resource and is, and will continue to be, successful because of its powerful symbolism and strong, psychological effects on the human spirit. 

Sources Cited

Kroll, Andrew. “AD Classics: Jewish Museum, Berlin/Daniel Libeskind.” ArchDaily.  25 November 2010. Web. 01 September 2012. <http://www.archdaily.com/91273/ad-classics-jewish-museum-berlin-daniel-libeskind/>

Lenhardt, Maja, Lubrich, Naomi, and Tesche, Doreen. “The Libeskind Building.” Stiftung Jüdisches Museum Berlin. Web. 31 August 2012.

<http://www.jmberlin.de/main/EN/04-About-The-Museum/01-Architecture/01-libeskind-Building.php>

Ouroussoff, Nicolai. “A Forest of Pillars, Recalling the Unimaginable.” The New York Times. 9 May 2005. Web. 31 August 2012. <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/09/arts/design/09holo.html?pagewanted=all>

Quigley, Sarah. “Holocaust Memorial: Architect Peter Eisenman, Berlin 2005.” The Polynational War Memorial. 21 September 2005. Web. 1 September 2012. <http://www.war-memorial.net/Holocaust-Memorial--Architect-Peter-Eisenman,-Berlin-2005-2.66>