Reconfiguring Absence: Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin and the Rhetorical Negotiation of Cultural Display

This study traces the development of the Jewish Museum Berlin from its inception as the winning entry in a competition for an extension to the Berlin Museum in the summer of 1989 to 2005. Tracking Daniel Libeskind’s design inspirations, public arguments over continuation of the building and its eventual use, I argue that a consistent argumentative trope, characterized by Ernst Bloch’s concept of anticipatory illumination, shows up in these various conversations and influences the building’s eventual use as the Jewish Museum Berlin. The rhetoric of anticipatory illumination, in this case, shifts over time, first emphasizing Jewish cultural absence in Berlin and the need to make that absence visible, but later pushing cultural absence to the background in favor of expressing the need for multicultural tolerance in Germany and beyond. The resulting museum, the Jewish Museum Berlin, combined the specificity of the history of the former in its curatorial design with injunctions for wider concern about intolerance in contemporary societies around the world. The author argues that the shift produces a “doubled heterotopia” in the arrangement of the museum that ultimately is effective for addressing the diverse audiences for the Jewish Museum Berlin. The case study emphasizes that public art and architecture projects can be rich sites of rhetorical invention worthy of close study over the time of their development