Berlin Attractions

Venue: Jewish Museum    When: Daily

The Jewish Museum in Berlin is a unique combination of exhibition and architecture. American architect Daniel Liebeskind's outstanding building drew worldwide interest when completed in 1998, with its highly symbolic form designed to evoke central aspects of the Jewish experience in Europe.

The museum's ground-plan evokes a broken Star of David, while different corridors symbolise both the long history of cultural exchange between Jews and non-Jews and the cultural void left in Europe by the destruction of European Jewry. Other powerful elements of the design include a difficult climb to a "garden of exile" and a dead-end corridor leading to a "Holocaust tower", an unheated space of bare concrete.

The permanent exhibition, Two Thousand Years of German-Jewish History, awaits the visitor at the end of the "axe of continuity" on top of the stairs and tells Jewish-German history in 14 chapters, with exhibits ranging from visual to audio material and films.

The old part of the museum originates from 1735, originally the Berlin Museum, with the Jewish Museum founded in 1971. The museum also organises changing exhibitions, symposia, concerts, readings and kids' workshops, and is a vivid centre of Jewish and German culture and history.