6/21/26

Sunday and I have just returned from traveling in Europe whose weather is more like early spring now, cool days and chilly nights. You need a cover of sorts so I went into ---and bought a light denim jacket. The most intriguing, scary, emotionally disturbing place I visited was the Jewish Museum, in Berlin to be accurate.

My husband wanted to see the Jewish Museum since he had worked on the model for the grant to build this extraordinary, unnerving piece of architecture. The shape of the building belongs in a Captain Kirk - Star Trek sort of state. You know like when he/Kirk is stranded on another planet and he is about to enter an alien structure. The building is entered from a traditional, recreated 18th century structure of "the Germany" before the bombing. Then---- you enter what appears to be a maze of columns reaching up to the sky. They are closely put together and gives you a feeling that the sides are going to move inward, inward toward you and crush you - a very Captain Kirk-e kind of thing. The columns are angular and shoot up towards/into an empty roofless space that is the sky where all that is visible are the limbs of tall trees growing outside, around the columns, beyond which is the sky. There is a somber stillness and emptiness here, and you want to move on to see the rest of the work. So you step into what is "the building". To be honest with you I need to go back into that place and saturate myself with it some more so I can explain better. The stone walls move onto a grade going uphill - a slight but obviously felt grade with heavy looking stone walls on either side not far from your body - that you feel could close in unexpectedly at any moment. You notice a slight feeling of shifting from side to side - you are out of balance not enough to fall, hardly noticeable, but enough to make you feel a bit wierd, the way you feel after you have had a lot of alcohol to drink - several shots of scotch, vodka, whatever is your pleassure. It is not uncomfortable just wari-ish. There is a huge box table with an exhibition ahead of you. You glance at it but you are coming to the top of the hill and you feel like you need touch a wall so you move in that direction. Images on the wall, this is the beginning of the permanent exhibition. I remember reading somewhere that Libeskind did not want any exhibitions and for a few years it had been empty but the amount of paraphenalia the museum was recieving from families of the victims, of the "halocaust", I despise that word and hate saying it.....the museum decided to create exhibitions. The exhibitions probably helped with funding as well. So I am on the top of the first hill/grade and I move left into a space with items on the wall. There are windows looking onto the outrside world but they are cut in diagonal shapes and the thickness of the stone building is visible and you end up seeing the sky. A freedom you cannot acquire. It took us half a day to go thru the entire museum, working our way, hour after hour, examining photos of horror as well as photos of faces before the madness began. Items worn by Jews at the time. The entire museum is a meandering tunnel of rock occasionally opening to an exhibition space. It is unexplicable. There are about 200,000 Jews living in Berlin. I cannot imagine their lives knowing this history, being the children of those who suffered this horrible fate. This is not a place that one can truly write about, speak of, explain, describe - it is a place to be experienced. But Berlin is a sad, sad city, beautiful, beautiful, but to me it was sad.