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With some fanfare, the first Jewish Museum in Berlin opened its collection to the public in newly designed rooms in the Oranienburgerstrasse on January 24, 1933, six days before Hitler came to power. Plans for a Jewish Museum in Berlin go back to the art collection left to the Jewish community in 1907 by Albert Wohl, a Dresden jeweler. By 1917, the community had opened an “Art Collection of the Jewish Community in Berlin” in the Oranienburgerstrasse, near the main synagogue. During the Weimar Republic, the collection expanded from twenty to eighty paintings and included more Modernist Jewish artists, for example, Lesser Ury. In 1927, acting on the prewar idea of Salli Kirschstein, a Society for the Friends of the Jewish Museum was formed with Max Liebermann as its honorary president. During the Nazi period, the museum initially remained open and functioned as an important site for attempts by the community to continue its cultural existence, even though the developing Nazi purge of the civil service and cultural institutions increasingly excluded German Jews. Exhibitions included a retrospective of Liebermann after his death in 1936 and the 1937 show 100 Years of Jewish Art. The museum was closed on November 10, 1938, after the so-called Kristallnacht pogrom, and the Reichskulturkammer confiscated the collection for its own planned museum meant to mark the end of Jewish influence on German life.1 When construction on a new Jewish Museum finally began after German reunification, the fate of the collection and its new building seemed far away from the earlier project’s disastrous demise in the Nazi period. But the lingering influence of the war and the continued resonance of the Nazi past made any such thinking pure fantasy. While generational conflict or 127 4 DANIEL LIBESKIND AND THE NEO-NAZI SPECTER THE RESURGENCE OF THE PERPETRATOR the continuity of the perpetrator in postwar West Germany seemed less urgent as themes, the cultural and ideological response to the past through state-sponsored memorialization of victims continued apace.2 Still, at the moment of reunification, these established interests ceded ground to a new concern. The early 1990s began with the frightful specter of the reconstitution of radical right-wing parties and a concomitant resurgence in antisemitic and racist attacks on German Jews, people perceived as Jews, foreign workers, and asylum seekers. Although such right-wing tendencies had existed prior to reunification (even making some headway in the authoritarian context of the German Democratic Republic in the eighties), the nationalist euphoria as well as the economic strain of the moment revealed new and deep fissures in sections of German society. From these fissures emerged a possibility that reunification had released both the political and social conditions that allowed the neo-Nazi revival of some National Socialist policies and beliefs. Right-wing movements could use the strategic alignment of their present positions with the Nazi past to take advantage of the changing conditions and concerns of this volatile social period. For those in charge of the Jewish Museum, this strategy signaled how the Nazi perpetrator seemed to be taking a very real if new form. Such a specter also haunted Helmut Kohl and the Christian Democratic Union’s project of “normalization.” The volatile cocktail of an emergent contemporary racism that was constantly reflected off the Nazi past—embodied in a new kind of perpetrator —had a strong impact on major policy initiatives and ideological debates , particularly in the immediate post-reunification period. Racist attacks and right-wing electioneering both in the west and the east overlapped and intersected with a number of competing political–economic conditions and interests that had come to the fore with reunification. Culture was also subject to this dense matrix of ideological and material conditions and concerns , particularly in media such as architecture. A variety of interested parties could easily instrumentalize and manipulate architecture because of the political regulation of the built environment and its reliance on largescale resources and labor. The high-profile construction projects of the once and future capital, Berlin, exemplified this process. Attempting to pull apart and analyze the interwoven skeins of architectural production, racism, economic growth, and government policy clarifies how the political debates concerning a resurgent Nazi perpetrator influenced cultural decisions in part or in whole in reunification Berlin. Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in the Berlin Municipal Museum embodies this interconnection of political and cultural conditions (see Plate 9...

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