To learn from the mistakes of the past
By Jeff Barak

It's not a Holocaust museum, says Michael Blumenthal, the director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. "It was never intended as a Holocaust museum... it was clear that what this was to be was a history museum whose principal mission is to trace the 2,000 year history of the presence of Jews on German soil." The aim, he continues, is to look at the impact of these people "on every aspect, not just of German life, but of Western culture.

"That obviously includes the Holocaust because how can you tell the history without this terrible event, but it's only one event in a long, long history which begins about the time of the birth of Jesus Christ. We are trying to show it [German-Jewish history] with all its ups and downs, with all its setbacks as well as contributions, advances that were made."

Unlike other European Jewish communities that were completely destroyed by the Nazis, two-thirds of Germany's Jews managed to escape the Holocaust, including Blumenthal's own family, who ran away to Shanghai from Berlin when Blumenthal was 13, finally settling in the United States after the war.

And so, the part of the museum that deals with the Holocaust (one out of 13 separate exhibitions) does so in a way that is different from Yad Vashem or the Holocaust Museum in Washington. "We don't show the photographs of Auschwitz particularly. We concentrate on the reactions of German Jews to the increasingly deadly pressure on them and, in some senses, the reactions of non-Jewish Germans and the much too few Germans who had the guts to speak out against and do something... The Holocaust is clearly part of the museum but it is not a Holocaust museum."

Aside from the telling of the German-Jewish story, the museum has two other central missions: To remind the non-Jewish Germans - for, as Blumenthal notes, this is a museum aimed at non-Jews, not Jews - of what they lost because of the Holocaust in terms of the contribution to Germany on the one hand, the terrible consequences of intolerance on the other. The idea, he says, is to teach the lesson that it's to a society's advantage to find a way to live in peace with its minorities. "That's a lesson that's very important to Germany today as they argue about immigration policy and all of these things."

Blumenthal himself has an amazingly varied career by anyone's standards. He not only taught economics at Princeton University, he also worked as a businessman (president and then chairman of the board of Bendix International), as well as serving as an advisor to presidents Kennedy and Johnson on trade during a stint at the State Department, and a public service career topped off by his appointment under Jimmy Carter as treasury secretary in 1977. At the time, his father told him: "In Germany, the country of your birth, you could never have achieved this as a Jew."

Resigning from the treasury in 1979, Blumenthal returned to the business sector and joined Burroughs Corporation in 1980 as vice chairman, then chairman of the board a year later. After a merger into the Unisys Corporation in 1986, he became chairman and CEO of Unisys.

At the same time, he turned his attention towards the history of German Jews. Researching the life stories of his ancestors - among them Rachel Varnhagen, famous for her "Berliner Salons," the opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer and literary critic Arthur Eloesser - he merged their biographies into the larger historical framework in his book The Invisible Wall: 300 Years of a German-Jewish Family, published in 1998. He was appointed to the post of museum director in December 1997.

THE IDEA to establish a Jewish museum in post-war Germany - for a short time, Berlin did in fact have a museum charting the history of its Jewish community: established shortly before Hitler's rise to power in 1933, it was closed down by the Gestapo in 1938, with its holdings confiscated - was first raised in 1971, the 300th anniversary of Berlin's Jewish community, and an "association for a Jewish museum" was founded in 1975. Three years later, the Berlin Museum first displayed an exhibition of new acquisitions for a future Jewish Museum and a decade later, an architectural competition was launched for an extension of the Berlin Museum, which would house a Jewish department - in its basement.

Indeed, until the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the change in Berlin's status to that of the capital of the new Germany, the idea had been that the city's Jewish museum would be a department of the municipal museum and not a separate museum in its own right.

With the fall of the Wall, and the creation of the new Germany, arguments raged over the direction the Jewish museum should take, with its then-director, Amnon Barzel, arguing strongly that the museum should become independent of the city museum. With Barzel's contract not being renewed by the city, due in no small part to the heated arguments over the museum's status, Blumenthal took over the post and, in essence, succeeded where Barzel failed, establishing an autonomous, independent German-Jewish Museum, covering the 2,000 years of German-Jewish history.

One of the reasons for the slow progress of the museum's establishment, from the genesis of the idea 30 years ago, was the expense involved. Unlike the pre-war museum, which was funded by Berlin's Jewish community, the small, post-war community did not have the funds to build and run such an institution, and so outside municipal and federal funding was needed.

The municipality provided the money for the building - some DM 120 million (around NIS 240m.), with a further DNM 10m. (NIS 5m.) for technical refurbishment. The museum's budget, independent of the Berlin Museum, was DM 10m in 1999 (with DM 6 coming from the municipality and DM 4 from the federal government), increased to DM 24m. this year, with all the funding coming from the federal government.

The federal government's assumption of financial responsibility has turned the museum into a "national task," reflecting the impossibility of understanding German history without an understanding of the German-Jewish contribution to the country and how that relationship ended with the Holocaust six decades ago. The museum's educational program is particularly aimed at a young audience, with the hope that a visit to the museum will become a regular part of school class trips to Berlin. The focus of these educational programs, both for schoolchildren and academic scholars, Blumenthal stresses, "is that there is no aspect of German life, whether it's culture or business or science or whatever in which Jewish-German citizens did not carry an active part."

BUT EVEN before the museum had any objects to exhibit, it had already become a must-visit location for any tour of Berlin, with almost 400,000 people having passed through its doors since the unique building was completed in 1998. US-Israeli architect Daniel Libeskind has described the zig-zag, zinc-covered construction as "my biography." Born to Holocaust survivors in post-war Poland, Libeskind has insisted that the building should not be seen as a memorial: "The museum deals with the living - a living history which isn't just a tragedy," he told The Jerusalem Post in a past interview.

Before the exhibits were introduced, the building was noted for the space Libeskind referred to as "voids," an emptiness meant to illustrate the abyss of the Holocaust. Even with the different exhibitions in place, with some 3,900 objects on display, the starkness of the Holocaust Tower, an empty space in the basement at the end of a large, dark corridor, neither heated nor air-conditioned, and lit only by a shaft of natural light at the top, still remains the building's most striking feature. As Blumenthal acknowledges, about half the people who visited Libeskind's building came away feeling it was so striking that it should just be left empty. "It became part of the conventional wisdom to say 'It's so beautiful, how can it be any better when you have something in it' but that was only conventional wisdom."

However, when the late Shaike Weinberg, the museum's original designer who tragically collapsed in Berlin while working on the museum two years ago, first toured Libeskind's building, he too said it was an impossible place for a museum. "I said to him: 'Shaike, that's not an option for me. Do me a favor, have a scotch, have two, get some sleep, take another walk through tomorrow and we'll meet at lunch and if you still feel you can't do it, then I'll understand.'"

The two men met for lunch the next day "and he looked at me sadly," Blumenthal reminisces, "and he said, 'Well, I'll tell you, it's almost impossible,' and I said: 'Good, now let's go to work. If it's almost impossible, we'll do it.'"

In the end, says Blumenthal, Weinberg came to the conclusion that "this building, when you work with it, has very, very interesting possibilities and it lends itself to doing very exciting things. What you have to do is not fight against the architecture, or try to destroy its symbolism or meaning. The areas that need to be left empty we left empty... We use the 'voids,' which signify the break in the relationship and the absence of certain things due to the terrible events, to create exhibits like the Gallery of the Missing by the artist Via Lewandowsky," a highly symbolic work of art with black glass sculptures and showcases in which visitors can't look into, but which contain acoustic descriptions of missing objects. The idea is that with the help of these various sound bites the missing objects will be presented to the visitor's inner eye.

IN THE main, however, the museum looks to present the chronological history of German-speaking Jews in a simple and clear fashion. The first exhibit in the museum's entrance is a 10th-century copy of a decree from the year 321, issued by the Roman emperor Constantine to the Cologne municipal authorities. In it, Constantine pronounces that the Jews there can be summoned to the Curia, the town council - "in other words, they can pay taxes," notes Blumenthal - and this is the first reference to Jewish settlers in the Rhine area, although there is non-documentary evidence to suggest Jews did travel to this area along with the Roman legionnaires at around the time of Christ. This copy of the decree has been lent to the museum by the Vatican Apostolic Library.

Another of the objects on display of which Blumenthal is particularly proud is a letter from Ludwig Ehard, a post-war German chancellor and the economics minister under Konrad Adenauer, widely credited for the post-war German "economic miracle" to his Jewish professor, in which one can see that Ehard got some of his ideas for his social market system from this professor. "What we're always trying to do is to show the interconnection" between Germany and German Jews, says Blumenthal. Another of the museum's goals is to explain what it means to be Jewish - most of today's Germans do not know any Jews. "What is Shabbat? What is circumcision? What is eating kosher? What does it mean to have been a German Jew? What does it mean to be a German Jew today? These are the questions we try and explain."

Blumenthal, himself, does not live in today's Germany. "It's not a country in which I would ever consider living. It is an assignment I took on with my eyes open because it occurred to me that it is important for Germany that Jews are not considered merely victims, that the people are reminded that the Jews are people and that the Jews were normal citizens - they weren't all Einsteins either - just normal citizens like everybody else.

"This seems like a banal statement, and it is a banal statement, but it's a statement that needs to be made because when you talk to a German, I assure you, he thinks of a Jew as a victim. He's very embarrassed, can't understand what his father or grandfather did, but that's the way it is."

Blumenthal adds that every time he speaks to a German group, he says "I come to this country as an American and I leave as a Jew because everybody reminds me of how terrible it was that the Jews were killed. I tell them I agree that that was terrible, but that's not all that a Jew is.

"I can't change the past, it is what it is and they [the Germans] have to live with it. That doesn't mean they have to feel guilty about it, they weren't even born most of them, but they have to accept the national responsibility for it and they will forever. This will not be forgotten. Some Germans think 'well maybe we can pay restitution and then it will all be over.' It will never be over. It will be like the Crusades, people will always remember it. It's too big, the Holocaust. I want people to develop a national responsibility of dealing with it in a responsible way, with the memory being a constructive memory, to learn from the mistakes of the past."