Memory Museum and Museum Text Simine, Silke Arnold-de
Theory, culture & society,
01/2012, Volume:
29, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In the last 20 years the institution of the museum has gone through a period of redefining its role and its functions in society, its forms of representation, its authority in discourses on the past ...and its objects. The stated aim of many of the ‘memory museums’ which were established during this period is to invite reflection on the aestheticization of memory and on the fact that the exhibition is seen as a narrative which is challenging conventional codes of perception. By granting a voice to what has been left out of the dominant discourses of history and of everyday experience, they try to integrate diversified and sometimes even incompatible narratives – a mode of representation that has so far been the domain of art and specifically literature. This contribution argues that it is not only between the museum and the memorial that distinctions between different memory media are getting blurred: examples such as Libeskind's Jewish Museum, which wants to be read as a text, and W.G. Sebald's novel Austerlitz, which he described as an alternative Holocaust museum, indicate that aspects of intermediality gain importance in the contemporary memorial landscape.
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This essay considers the rhetoric of space in a rapidly transforming culture. Using Michel Foucault's concept of "heterotopias" to understand the rhetorical power of a building's disposition, it is ...argued that the Jewish Museum Berlin contains two heterotopias, one within the other. The first is Daniel Libeskind's original building design in relation to the surrounding city, but the second is the placement of an art installation, Menashe Kadishman's Shalechet, in a central location within the museum. The doubling of heterotopian space uses dialectical-rhetorical transcendence to build identification with the museum's message for an increasingly international audience.
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Daniel Libeskind's concept and design for the Jewish Museum Berlin attempts to move beyond the conventional purpose that has long been assigned to history in European culture--a purpose that Hannah ...Arendt traces back to Homer. Can there be a different form of history that confronts rather than turns away from suffering and death? This question has animated a range of thinkers, historians, and artists since the late 19th century. Among them is Daniel Libeskind, whose concept and design for the Berlin Jewish Museum represents an ambitious attempt to nourish a different relationship to the catastrophes of the past, a relationship that seeks to reflect on the suffering of the victims. This chapter explores Libeskind's notion of history in three parts. The first outlines in some depth the "conventional" approach of history to the issues of suffering and death. The second examines Libeskind's writings on his museum concept, discerning the basic content and purpose of his approach to history. The final part situates Libeskind within the "postcatastrophic" moment of the postwar era. Specifically, it contextualizes his project in light of Theodor W. Adorno's enduring concern with the issue of suffering and history. Like Libeskind, Adorno seeks to develop a philosophical-historical approach to the past that reflects on the suffering and catastrophe of the Holocaust. Although the work of Adorno and Libeskind has received extensive scholarly attention, the originality of the chapter lies in bringing out the broader implications of their focus on suffering in regards to the conventions of writing history in European thought and culture.
This chapter explores Libeskind's notion of history in three parts. The first outlines in some depth the "conventional" approach of history to the issues of suffering and death. The second examines Libeskind's writings on his museum concept, discerning the basic content and purpose of his approach to history. The final part situates Libeskind within the "postcatastrophic" moment of the postwar era. Although the work of Adorno and Libeskind has received extensive scholarly attention, the originality of the chapter lies in bringing out the broader implications of their focus on suffering in regards to the conventions of writing history in European thought and culture. In Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur succinctly captures one of the basic purposes that has long shaped the narrative impulse to tell stories about the past, reaching back to the ancient world. At the center of Libeskind's project lies an attempt to represent absence, to represent the lives of those who suffered and died during the Holocaust.
The year 1999 marked the culmination of long debates about the appropriate strategies for (re)building Germany's new capital. In its engagement with Jewish history, Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum's ...celebrated archietural design contributed to the ongoing rewriting of the German-Jewish relationship. As Kligerman points out, Libeskind's success in giving material shape to trauma was in many ways prefigured in the writings of Paul Celan.
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Provider: - Institution: - Data provided by Europeana Collections- All metadata published by Europeana are available free of restriction under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain ...Dedication. However, Europeana requests that you actively acknowledge and give attribution to all metadata sources including Europeana
