Tikkun Olam and Architecture: Daniel Libeskind`s Jewish Museum in Berlin

The inner and outer structure of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, built in 1999 on the basis of Daniel Libeskind’s project provides a point of departure for a complex analysis encompassing intertextual and interdisciplinary methodological scope. The building, which consists of cubes covered with tin sheet metal and is arranged on a zig-zag like plan, refers to symbolic motifs and visual metaphors, with the idea of restitution, described as tikkun olam. For example, the zigzag form of the Museum consists of ten ‘broken’ elements and refers to a cabbalistic motif of the ten Sefirot (‘Tree of Life’). The main invisible axis of the building, named by Libeskind as ‘Void’, as well as the empty rooms on the sides of it symbolically correspond to the spatial arrangement of the Temple, cabbalistic vision of the world (tzimtzum the idea of ‘contraction’). What is more, the elongated windows that bend in various directions and run across all floors resemble forms of Hebrew letters and allude to the notion of the ‘scattered alphabet’. “Experiencing” the building evokes a number of other symbols and meanings hidden in its structure which I will attempt to explain in my presentation. The main postulate of my paper states that the system of visual metaphors hidden in the building`s structure evokes the idea of post-Holocaust restitution of Jewish-German relations - becoming a vehicle for symbiosis and reconciliation. This analytic perspective is the subject of my postdoctoral dissertation (habilitation) which I published as a book (in Polish) in 2015