The Uncanny Jewish Museum Berlin

To understand a little about the nature of the Jewish Museum Berlin as a representation of the uncanny, it may be useful to look at the way that Daniel Libeskind uses the concept in his design. There are two ways into the notion of the uncanny that Libeskind uses architecturally as manifested in the E. T. A. Hoffman Garden of Exile and Emigration and in the Paul Celan Court.

The E.T.A. Hoffman Garden gains its name from a writer that Sigmund Freud discusses in his definitive essay on the uncanny. Here he explains the concept. “[T]he central factor in the production of the feeling of uncanniness [is] intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one’s way about in. The better oriented in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it” (Young, Jewish Museum, 194).

E.T.A Hoffman Garden of Exile and Emigration

 This garden bench shows the use of the uncanny perceptually.

This garden seems upside down with willow oak trees planted on top of the columns.

The Paul Celan Court explores the holocaustal uncanny instead of Freud’s uncanny where its “representation of presence shifts to that of absence” (Kligerman). In this courtyard Libeskind asked Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, Celan’s widow, to design the paving of the space. She used images to represent Kristallsplitter or crystal fragments to memorialize Kristallnacht.

Celan Court

Celan Court. Windows as slashes of light also resemble glass shards from Kristallnacht. This courtyard capture the sense of absence of the Voids within the museum. At the same time, these windows replicate the lines of connection motif within the context of the uncanny.

Originally, in the design of Celan Court two stones were to be engraved with the words Tod and Meister reference Celan’s line in his poem “Todesfuge” or “Deathfugue.”

Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland

Death is a master of Germany

The entire poem works from a sense of the uncanny that Libeskind adopts for the museum. Throughout there is a sense of working through trauma, of moving through the shock itself.

Inside the museum itself, we can see Libeskind’s development of architectural uncanny. He uses voids, slanted halls, claustrophobic spaces, and disorientation in general much the way that Celan does in his poetry. It is difficult for viewers to orient themselves, to find themselves, as it were, at home.

Eric Kligerman in his essay “Ghostly Demarcations: Translating Paul Celan’s Poetics into Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin explains that holocaust uncanny works in a different way from Freud’s uncanny. “Whereas for Freud it is the uncanny figure of the phantom that crosses the line between the living and the dead to approach the individual, this direction is reversed in the holocaustal uncanny: The artists lure the viewer into the space of the dead” (35).  Kligerman goes on to discuss the ways that terror  and estrangement result when this sense of the uncanny is brought into play and the viewer crosses into that alternative space.

Libeskind explains a little about this sense of the uncanny that he incorporates into his design. “I always remember the words of St. Augustine ‘Everyone is permanently leaving but some are leaving with their ankles and feet, and others are leaving with their hearts and souls’”(58).