Voids, Rupture, and Ruins: Turn of the Century Museums and Memory in Berlin
1999 proved a decisive year for cultural memory in Berlin. In late January/early February,
the Jewish Museum opened as an ‘empty shell’, and in December Museum Island was
declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The turn of the century timing of these two
events is symbolically valuable given that these events straddle a conceptual divide in Berlin’s
memory culture. For this brief moment, two narratives of cultural memory hung together in
Berlin’s museal firmament: one about to make a blazing descent and the other about to
begin its unobtrusive rise. On the one hand, the Jewish Museum, which presented a
postmodern and deconstructivist 20th century narrative. On the other hand, the reinauguration of Museum Island, which as the dynamic hub of Berlin’s memory culture
appears to have signalled a (re)turn to various tropes of previous modernities. What is the
relationship between these two narratives?
The shift from one kind of museum to another is mirrored in the scholarly discourse. The
Jewish Museum occupies a fundamental place in the major post-1989 cultural studies of
Berlin undertaken in the 1990s and early 2000s including: Huyssen (2003), Young (2000), Till
(2005), and Webber (2008). Interestingly enough, these texts barely mention Museum Island
because at that time Museum Island was merely the place where one visited the Pergamon or
picnicked among the urban ruins. Much has changed since then.
In order to understand the shift in memory culture (both theory and practice), my paper
seeks to uncover what it meant to be contemporary for Berlin’s memory culture in the 1990s
and early 2000s in contrast with what it means to be contemporary now. I will therefore give
two close readings, the first of the Jewish Museum and the second of the Museum Island. I
will focus on responding to the following questions: What is the history embodied in these
museums? How to characterize these two museums’ takes on history? How do these
museum facilitate encounters with the past and help foster the development of the historical
consciousness of individual visitors within the context of national and international cultural
memory narratives?
I argue that whereas Berlin's Jewish Museum was emblematic of 1990s and early 2000s
memory culture because the post-Holocaust categorical imperative ‘never forget’ functions
as its foundational premise, Museum Island seems to embody the idea of ‘cultural
inheritance’ and the need to do something with this material.
Rebecca Clare Dolgoy (DPhil Student, Oxford, Faculty of Modern Languages): Abstract