209doesn’t form a “monument” to the Holocaust—a monument with a clearly defined
fixed meaning that may give our memories an excuse for forgetting rather than in-
stigating an unending chain of shifts of meaning.
Libeskind himself rejects this interpretation, and I am inclined to agree with
him. Two arguments may be stated here. In the first place, there is the fact that the
architectural experience of the building can by no means be called unambiguous: the
effect of the light, the abundance of different forms of space, the physical impres-
sion created by the sloping floor, and the zigzag trajectory of the building are not
subject to a single interpretation. A second consideration is the overdetermined char-
acter of the voids. These refer at the same time to the Jews who were eliminated,
to the unfathomable truth of the revelation, to the voids that are fundamental to the
identity of Berlin—that of the Wall and that of the Holocaust—to the confrontation
with the groundlessness of every culture, and to the silence that unspeakably com-
prises all the rest. This overdetermined character means that the voids escape any
simple definition. It is not the end of the story once one realizes that the voids have
something to do with the Holocaust. Additional meanings continue to resound, and
as long as this process continues, one does not incur any risk of a hasty “monu-
mentalizing” of the Holocaust.
In my eyes this quality of endless resonance is inherent in the mimetic opera-
tions on which the design is based. Mimesis raises the question of repressed as-
pects—those aspects that cannot be contained in a clear-cut logic and which do not
lend themselves to a definite meaning. Mimesis creates transitions between differ-
ent registers and these transitions are rarely unambiguous. To the degree that mime-
sis “works,” a signifying process is generated that has no end. According to Adorno,
the mimetic impulse is rooted in a gesture of negativity that does not have any pos-
itive goal. It is this negativity that is responsible for the never-ending chain of signi-
fying. Mimesis does not render any positive image of reality, let alone a positive
image of what a utopian, ideal reality might be. Rather, it produces negative images,
and art is thus the best and most appropriate means to mimetically expose the neg-
ative qualities of reality.
This is how Libeskind’s design for the extension of the Berlin Museum can be
understood. No direct image of utopia is offered us here, but the idea of utopia is pre-
served because we see clearly how great a distance separates our present reality
from a utopian condition of reconciliation. The broken lines of the design testify to a
broken reality. They do not succeed in achieving any synthesis because reality does
not lend itself to be conceived as healed and complete. Libeskind is therefore correct
in claiming that the problem of the Jewish Museum in Berlin should be seen as em-
blematic of the problem of “culture” as such.208