20 years of Berlin's Jewish Museum

It took a long time before everyone involved agreed on what the new Jewish Museum should look like. The baroque city palace was to be extended by a new building. Star architect Daniel Libeskind submitted a very extravagant design in 1989. Construction work began in 1992. Nine years and a few disagreements later, the new building was inaugurated.

Originally, Libeskind's extension was only supposed to be a section of the museum. But then things turned out differently, and the pretty Baroque palace became the designated entrance, complete with a ticket counter, shop and café.

With the museum, Daniel Libeskind created a new landmark for Berlin. The zinc-clad building's façade is punctuated by seemingly randomly distributed columns, and its jagged ground plan is like a broken Star of David. The building's architecture symbolizes the difficult process of dealing with the Holocaust, and the gap it tore in German-Jewish history.

Two years before the opening, visitors were invited to tour the building at Lindenstrasse 9-14 in Berlin's Kreuzberg district. Almost 350,000 people visited the empty new building and marveled at the architecture.

Often enough, museum buildings are very straightforward structures; even if the architecture is magnificent, they're mainly designed to highlight the exhibits. Libeskind took the radical approach of creating spaces and axes that tell stories on their own. The above photo shows the intersecting axes of exile and the Holocaust.

The architecture stands for itself: dark stairwells, empty spaces, crooked walls. Paths fork and lead outside to freedom, on shaky ground to foreign lands, exile. The Holocaust axis ends in a tower. Light shines from a narrow slit high above. Visitors who stand there in the dark feel as if they are in a dungeon. Such a space needs no furnishings.

49 stone monuments planted with trees stand on sloping ground in a garden that is not visible from the outside. The stele in the middle is filled with soil from Jerusalem, the others with soil from Berlin. The garden is meant to let visitors experience exile: Visitors can feel unsteady because of its sloping ground, and the concrete pillars limit people's view.

The light-flooded glass courtyard, also designed by Daniel Libeskind, was added to the baroque palace in 2007. The roof spans the courtyard of the U-shaped old building and rests on steel girders. They are representative of real trees and meant to recall the Hebrew "sukkah" (leaf hut) where Jews found shelter from the cold, wind and rain in the desert during their flight from Egypt.