Jüdisches Museum

Anonymous Today we visited the Jüdisches Museum (Jewish Museum) here in Berlin. This museum discusses and deals with Jewish history in Germany dating from ancient times to present. We had a tour guide for the first couple hours. He took us to see the Holocaust Tower, the Garden of Exile, and the Memory Void. All of these monuments/memorials/works of art were very moving, although I personally found the memory void to be the most moving of the three. What happens is that you walk accross this "field" of faces. The faces look like they are screaming, and you walk on them across to the other side and back. However when you step on the faces the metal scrapes back and forth against each other and makes a screeching sound that sounds like screams. It just made a total impact on all the senses which is why I found it to make more of an impact for me than the other two which were more visual.

Our tour guide also walked us through the part of the museum dealing with ancient to middle ages Jewish history in Germany. I found it very interesting to hear about the Anti-Judaism, or totally religiously based prejudice against Jews, of the middle ages in comparison with the Anti-Semitism, or "racially" based prejudices, of today. This is a time period in Jewish history that I do not know much about other than a paper I wrote last semester for my religion class. The tour guide left us after the middle ages section so the modern Jewish history I explored on my own. The rest of the exhibit was very good and I took many pictures.

I also visited the special exhibit (at the museum through the end of this month) about forced laborers used by the Third Reich before and during the war. I spent a lot of time here. The exhibit starts out with how work was portrayed in Germany during the Nazi era. By this I mean the concept of work in general, for all living in Germany at the time. Then the exhibit starts to move into focusing on the groups of people who were forced to work against their will because for whatever reason they were either political and/or ideological opponents to the Nazis or they did not fit the right racial stereotypes.

The content of the exhibit started out fairly mild (topic considering) with simple public humiliation and small jobs... then it very rapidly moved to far more gruesome topics and details which I choose to leave out of this blog. However, I will say that I generally can handle reading about many of the things the Nazis did to people, but there were a couple times during this exhibit when I had to just walk away from stuff because it was a little too much for me.

Being in a museum reading about things that happened only a few miles from here in places like Sachsenhausen (which we are visiting later in the month) or even in the city of Berlin itself makes the same information hit me in a different way. If I were in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum reading about the same exact topic I am feeling emotion about it, but it is different than when I am standing where it actually happened and reading the exact same thing. For me, at least, the emotion I experienced today was stronger. In the US I can read about the Holocaust and it happened in a whole different place and seems far away, but here it isn't far away. It is right here and in my face because I can walk out the door and be right where it happened about 70 years ago. While the exhibit was quite sobering and sad, I still found it to have been well worth my time and I learned a lot. Tomorrow we are going to the big holocaust memorial near Brandenburg Gate and I am very interested to see that as well.