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Abstract
This essay considers the rhetoric of space in a rapidly transforming culture. Using Michel Foucault's concept of “heterotopias” to understand the rhetorical power of a building's disposition, it is argued that the Jewish Museum Berlin contains two heterotopias, one within the other. The first is Daniel Libeskind's original building design in relation to the surrounding city, but the second is the placement of an art installation, Menashe Kadishman's Shalechet, in a central location within the museum. The doubling of heterotopian space uses dialectical–rhetorical transcendence to build identification with the museum's message for an increasingly international audience.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks the Getty Research Institute and the Jewish Museum Berlin for aiding the research, including access to special collections. The author also thanks Lester Olson, Barbara Warnick, Takuzo Konishi, Editor Raymie McKerrow, and the anonymous reviewers for helping to shape the content of the essay
Notes
1. “Darüber hinaus wollen wir vermitteln, dass in einer multikulturellen Gesellschaft die verschiedensten Minoritäten, ob religiöser oder kultureller Art, friedlich miteinander zusammenleben können und als Staatsbürger anerkannt werden müssen.” Claudia Becker, “Erinnerungen an Juden in Deutschland,” Berliner Morgenpost, September 9, 2001.
2. Based upon the visitor statistics compiled by the Jewish Museum Berlin for the years 2005 and 2006. Stiftung Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Annual Report 2005–2006 (Berlin: Jüdisches Museum Berlin, 2007), 34–35.
3. This essay provides a concrete example of how processes of globalization (in this case global tourism) intersect with the rhetorical practices of cultural self-presentation. For work outlining this concern within communication, see Peter Monge, “Communication Structures and Processes in Globalization,” Journal of Communication 48 (1998): 142–53; and Raka Shome and Radha S. Hegde, “Culture, Communication, and the Challenge of Globalization,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 172–89.
4. James E. Young, “Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin: The Uncanny Arts of Memorial Architecture,” Jewish Social Studies 6 (2000): 8.
5. Rolf Bothe and Vera Bendt, “4.1: Autonomous Jewish Museum as a Department of the Berlin Museum,” in Competition for an Extension to the Berlin Museum to Include the Jewish Museum (Project to be Built)—Invitation to Compete, 1988, Daniel Libeskind Papers 1968–1992, Accession No. 920061, Box 1, Folder 2, p. 88, Getty Research Institute Library. The coordinators of the design competition implicitly invoked the rhetorical capacity of architecture, its ability to act as a “type of environmental language which sends out meaningful messages.” Charles Jencks, “Rhetoric and Architecture,” Architectural Association Quarterly 4 (1972): 6.
6. James S. Russell, “Project Diary: Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin Speaks to a History that is Both Rich and Tragic,” Architectural Record 187 (1999): 76.
7. Daniel Libeskind, “Untergeschoss,” architectural print, 1 August 1989, Daniel Libeskind Papers 920061, Roll 52.
8. Daniel Libeskind, “Between the Lines,” in Gedenkbuch: Berlin, competition entry book, 1989, Daniel Libeskind Papers 920061, Box 1, Folder 5, p. 2.
9. Young, “Daniel Libeskind,” 8–9.
10. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16 (1986): 24. The French term suspendent is better rendered as “suspend,” rather than the translator's choice of “suspect.” Thanks to one of the anonymous reviewers for calling attention to this issue.
11. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24–27.
12. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24.
13. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24.
14. Kevin Hetherington, The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering (New York: Routledge, 1997), 141.
15. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), xxi. Foucault's preface suggests that spatial arrangements can be read, like a text, in order to trace historical changes in a culture.
16. Scholarship testifies to this variation of functions and outcomes. See Meiling Cheng, “Highways, L.A.: Multiple Communities in a Heterolocus,” Theatre Journal 53 (2001): 429–54; Josh D. Kun, “The Aural Border,” Theatre Journal 52 (2000): 1–21; Joost van Loon, “Chronotopes: Of/in the Televisualization of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots,” Theory, Culture & Society 14 (1997): 89–104; and Andrew Wood, “The Middletons, Futurama, and Progressland: Disciplinary Technology and Temporal Heterotopia in Two New York World's Fairs,” New Jersey Journal of Communication 11 (2003): 63–75.
17. Barbara Biesecker, “Michel Foucault and the Question of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (1992): 356. Biesecker's explanation of agency in Foucault's work has heavily informed this essay's interpretation of heterotopian spaces.
18. Raymie McKerrow, “Space and Time in the Postmodern Polity,” Western Journal of Communication 63 (1999): 272.
19. Antonio A. Arantes, “The War of Places: Symbolic Boundaries and Liminalities in Urban Space,” Theory, Culture & Society 13, no. 4 (1996): 81–92; Sonia Liff and Fred Steward, “Shaping E-Access in the Cybercafé: Networks, Boundaries and Heterotopian Innovation,” New Media and Society 5 (2003): 313–34; Daniel Makagon, “Sonic Earthquakes,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (2006): 223–39; Wood, “Middletons,” 63–75; and Wood, “A Rhetoric of Ubiquity: Terminal Space as Omnitopia,” Communication Theory 13 (2003): 324–44.
20. For treatments of kairos in communication, see Mark Montesano, “Kairos and Kerygma: The Rhetoric of Christian Proclamation,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 25 (1995): 164–78; Garth E. Pauley, “Rhetoric and Timeliness: An Analysis of Lyndon B. Johnson's Voting Rights Address,” Western Journal of Communication 62 (1998): 26–53; and J. Blake Scott, “Kairos as Indeterminate Risk Management: The Pharmaceutical Industry's Response to Bioterrorism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92 (2006): 115–43.
21. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 26. For time as figuration in public address scholarship, see Randall A. Lake, “Between Myth and History: Enacting Time in Native American Protest Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (1991): 123–51; Michael Leff, “Dimensions of Temporality in Lincoln's Second Inaugural,” Communication Reports 1 (1988): 26–31; Allan Megill and Donald N. McCloskey, “The Rhetoric of History,” in The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs, ed. John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and Donald N. McCloskey (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 221–38; and Margaret D. Zulick and Michael Leff, “Time and the ‘True Light’ in Lucretia Coffin Mott's ‘Discourse on Woman,’” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 25 (1995): 20–31.
22. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 25. Public memory studies provide insight about the influence of time on rhetorical objects. See Marouf Hasain, Jr., “Anne Frank, Bergen-Belsen, and the Polysemic Nature of Holocaust Memories,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 4 (2001): 349–74; Beverly James, “Envisioning Postcommunism: Budapest's Stalin Monument,” in Rhetorics of Display, ed. Lawrence J. Prelli (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 157–76; and Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History,” in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. 1, Conflicts and Divisions, ed. Pierre Nora, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 1–20.
23. For treatments of temporal disposition in heterotopias, see van Loon, “Chronotopes,” 89–104; and Wood, “Middletons,” 63–75.
24. “Climate of opinion” refers to the set of background assumptions, beliefs, and practices that make a rhetorical appeal intelligible. Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 1–31.
25. Michael Spens, “Berlin Phoenix,” Architectural Review, 205, no. 1226 (1999): 40–47.
26. Jeff Barak, “To Learn from the Mistakes of the Past,” Jerusalem Post, September 17, 2001; Stephen Erlanger, “A Memory-Strewn Celebration of Germany's Jews,” New York Times, September 10, 2001; Dieter J. Optitz, “Haus des Erinnerns,” Berliner Morgenpost, September 10, 2001; and Natan Sznaider, “Wem gehört das Jüdische Museum?” Die Tageszeitung (Berlin), September 8, 2001.
27. Carl Abbott, “Washington and Berlin: National Capitals in a Networked World,” in Berlin—Washington, 1800–2000: Capital Cities, Cultural Representation, and National Identities, ed. Andreas W. Daum and Christof Mauch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 101–24; and Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 72–84.
28. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969), 20–23.
29. “Dialectical–rhetorical transcendence” is synthesized from various parts of Kenneth Burke's work, cultivating forms of shared interest across identities and nationalities. “This dialectical–rhetorical transcendence is significant for rhetorical theory because it challenges rhetoric as a socially responsible endeavor to view … individual discourses in relation to each other, to act as well as to study these discourses, and thus to intervene by seeking not only to persuade others in their own best interest but also to create larger communities of interest that transcend individual and group ideologies and interests.” James P. Zappen, “Kenneth Burke on Dialectical–Rhetorical Transcendence,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 42 (2009): 281.
30. “Ergebnissprotokoll,” meeting minutes compiled by Darius Cierpiatkowski and Carina Keil, 22–23 June 1989, Daniel Libeskind Papers 920061, Box 26, Folder 4, pp. 1–8.
31. Rolf Bothe to Volker Hassemer, 10 November 1988, in Das Jüdische Museum im Stadtmuseum Berlin: Eine Dokumentation, ed. Martina Weinland and Kurt Winkler (Berlin: Nicolai, 1997), 288.
32. Rolf Bothe, “Ein eigenständiges Jüdisches Museum als Abteilung des Berlin Museums” (working paper, 1988), in Das Jüdische Museum im Stadtmuseum Berlin (see note 31), 226–33.
33. Young, “Daniel Libeskind,” 9–10. The estimated Jewish population in West Berlin in 1989, prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, was approximately 6000, a small number compared to the approximately 160,000 Jews living in Berlin in 1933. John Borneman, “Identity, Exile, and Division: Disjunctures of Culture, Nationality, and Citizenship in German-Jewish Selfhood in East and West Berlin,” in Jews, Germans, Memory: Reconstructions of Jewish Life in Germany, ed. Y. Michael Bodemann (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 145–46; and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Berlin,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005450#related.
34. Competition for an Extension, 30–54.
35. Peter Monteath, “A Day to Remember: East Germany's Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Fascism,” German History 26 (2008): 195–218.
36. Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 138–45; and Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, 2nd ed., trans. E. B. Ashton (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2001), esp. 3–20.
37. Siobhan Kattago, “Ambiguous Memory: The Legacy of the Nazi Past in Postwar Germany” (PhD diss., New School for Social Research, 1997), 32; and Robert G. Moeller, “The Politics of the Past in the 1950s: Rhetorics of Victimization in East and West Germany,” in Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany, ed. Bill Niven (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 31.
38. Gerd Knischewski and Ulla Spittler, “Memories of the Second World War and National Identity in Germany,” in War and Memory in the Twentieth Century, ed. Martin Evans and Ken Lunn (Oxford, UK: Berg, 1997), 240–43.
39. Keith Bullivant and C. Jane Rice, “Reconstruction and Integration: The Culture of West German Stabilization 1945 to 1968,” in German Cultural Studies, ed. Rob Burns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 250–53.
40. Paul Cooke, “The Continually Suffering Nation? Cinematic Representations of German Victimhood,” in Germans as Victims (see note 37), 76–92.
41. Bullivant and Rice, “Reconstruction,” 210; 235.
42. Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 1.
43. Maier, The Unmasterable Past, 8; 35; 121.
44. Harold James, A German Identity, 1770–1990 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), 204. For a rhetorical treatment of Bitburg, see M. Lane Bruner, Strategies of Remembrance: The Rhetorical Dimensions of National Identity Construction (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 12–31.
45. Caroline A. Wiedmer, The Claims of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Germany and France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 106–07.
46. Alan Balfour, Berlin: The Politics of Order (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), 154–90.
47. Balfour, Berlin, 205–10.
48. Balfour, Berlin, 213–44.
49. Atina Grossmann, “Home and Displacement in a City of Border Crossers: Jews in Berlin 1945–1948,” in Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis, 1945–2000, ed. Leslie Morris and Jack Zipes (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 63–99.
50. Young, “Daniel Libeskind,” 6.
51. Competition for an Extension, 15–16.
52. Competition for an Extension, 36.
53. Competition jurists, quoted in Russell, “Project Diary,” 76.
54. Daniel Libeskind, Breaking Ground: Adventures in Life and Architecture (New York: Riverhead, 2004), 82.
55. Rolf Bothe, quoted in Young, “Daniel Libeskind,” 13.
56. Libeskind, “Between the Lines,” in Gedenkbuch: Berlin, p. 2.
57. Libeskind, “Between the Lines: The Jewish Museum, Berlin,” Research in Phenomenology 22 (1992): 84.
58. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 21.
59. Noah Isenberg, “Reading ‘Between the Lines’: Daniel Libeskind's Berlin Jewish Museum and the Shattered Symbiosis,” in Unlikely History (see note 49), 155–79.
60. Libeskind, “Between the Lines,” in Gedenkbuch: Berlin, p. 3.
61. For a discussion of presence and absence as properties of architecture, see Peter Eisenman, “Architecture and the Problem of the Rhetorical Figure,” in Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture, ed. Kate Nesbitt (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 176–81.
62. Libeskind, “Between the Lines,” Research in Phenomenology, 82.
63. Libeskind, “Between the Lines,” 83.
64. “The ‘doing’ that is made possible by the arrangement of lines of making sense both marks a point of their positive deployment and, in opening up a virtual space or anticipatory structure, ‘renders [those lines or force relations] fragile,’ ‘mak[ing] it possible to thwart them.’” Biesecker, “Michel Foucault,” 356. Heterotopias operate as a “virtual space or anticipatory structure” that makes available a new way of thinking about the relationship between spaces, inverts the value of knowledge between old and new lines of making sense, and consequently, opens up possibilities for human action.
65. Libeskind, Breaking Ground, 79.
66. Libeskind, “Between the Lines,” in Gedenkbuch: Berlin, p. 4.
67. Young, “Daniel Libeskind,” 13. The reception of the design in West Berlin papers was similarly positive. Jan Draeger, “Zick-Zack-Bau für jüdische Geschichte,” Berliner Morgenpost, June 27, 1989; and Falk Jaeger, “Ein Chance und eine Provokation für Berlin,” Tagesspiegel, June 25, 1989.
68. Peter Chametzky, “Not What We Expected: The Jewish Museum Berlin in Practice,” Museum and Society 6 (2008): 216. Advertisements were produced in five different languages: German, English, Hebrew, Russian, and Turkish. Helene Stolzenberg, “Case Study: The Jewish Museum Berlin. Can a Jewish Museum NOT be a Holocaust Memorial?” (unpublished manuscript, Department of Arts Administration, Indiana University, 2003), p. 23, Accession No: XIV Stolz 68, Research Library, Jewish Museum Berlin.
69. Libeskind, Breaking Ground, 140–46.
70. Daniel Libeskind, architectural prints, 3 June 1990; 1 September 1990, Daniel Libeskind Papers 920061, Rolls 92; 129.
71. Russell, “Project Diary,” 76.
72. Huyssen, Present Pasts, 138–57.
73. Daniel Libeskind, in Daniel Libeskind, et al., “Discussion,” Research in Phenomenology 22 (1992): 98.
74. Daniel Libeskind, Countersign (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 94–95; Kristin Feireiss, ed., Extension to the Berlin Museum with the Jewish Museum Department (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1992), 74–75.
75. Russell, “Project Diary,” 76.
76. Abbott, “Washington and Berlin,” 101–24; and Huyssen, Present Pasts, 72–84.
77. Competition for an Extension, 68–69.
78. Discovering the Jewish Museum Berlin (Berlin: Stiftung Jüdisches Museum Berlin, 2001). For a visual layout of the exhibitions, see Stiftung Jüdisches Museum Berlin, “Floor Plan,” Jewish Museum Berlin [official website], http://www.jmberlin.de/main/EN/Pdfs-en/Visitor-Information/Museumsplan_engl_2009.pdf?id=292.
79. I visited the Jewish Museum Berlin again in September 2009, and by that time, the curators changed the description of the installation slightly, no longer explicitly inviting visitors to walk upon Kadishman's work. However, after asking a museum employee stationed in the room, I learned that visitors are still allowed to do so.
80. Ulrich Schneider, “Shalechet (Fallen Leaves) 1997–1999,” in Menashe Kadishman: Shalechet; Haupter und Opfer, ed. Maike Sternberg and Harlow Tigue (Milano, Italy: Charta, 1999), 35.
81. Arturo Schwarz, “Menashe Kadishman,” in Menashe Kadishman (see note 80), 21.
82. Tom Freudenheim, speaking while still designing the museum displays, made it clear that the museum was interested in incorporating the work of contemporary Jewish artists. Tom Freudenheim, “Berlin's New Jewish Museum,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 22, no. 2 (2000): 44.
83. Zappen, “Kenneth Burke,” 295.
84. Zappen, “Kenneth Burke,” 295–97.
85. Some commentators notice only this primary purpose. See Helen Bain, “World Within Journey from Te Papa to Berlin,” Dominion (Wellington, Australia), September 27, 2001; Phyllis Meras, “Ever a Berlin Presence,” Washington Times, September 21, 2002; and Derek Scally, “Deconstructing History,” Irish Times, September 11, 2001.
86. Marc Scheps, “Falling Leaves as Dialogue,” in Menashe Kadishman (see note 80), 51–53.
87. Schneider, “Shalechet,” 35.
88. Arturo Schwarz, “Shalechet,” in Menashe Kadishman (see note 80), 45.
89. Christiane Birkert, interviews with visitors of Jewish Museum Berlin, 2002, Accession. No. 1.9.Kontr 108 Bd. 2, Research Library, Jewish Museum Berlin; and Tracy Sullivan, “Noted Architect of Jewish Museum Berlin Discusses the Meaning Behind his Thought-Provoking Design,” Jewish Ledger, May 2002, 18–19.
90. Schwarz, “Shalechet,” 45.
91. Freudenheim, “Berlin's New Jewish Museum,” 39–40.
92. Visitor statistics from the Jewish Museum Berlin bear out this necessity. During 2001 and 2002, 943,927 people visited the museum. Of those, twenty six percent came from other countries. Stiftung Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Annual Report 2001–2002 (Berlin: Jüdisches Museum Berlin, 2003), 44; 46. From the 707,000 visitors 2005 and 2006, fifty seven percent came from other countries. Stiftung Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Annual Report 2005–2006, 34–35.
93. Ken Gorbey, “The Making of the Museum: Highest Demands from the Very Beginning,” in Annual Report 2001–2002, 24.
94. Robert Stein's review provides evidence of the message's success in both his commentary on Shalechet and his closing lines about the museum. Robert A. Stein, “The Berlin Jewish Museum,” Western Humanities Review 58, no. 2 (2004): 92–93.
95. Shome and Hegde, “Culture,” 173–74.
96. Stephen B. Crofts Wiley, “Rethinking Nationality in the Context of Globalization,” Communication Theory 14 (2004): 78–96.
97. Phaedra Pezzullo, “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month’: The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and their Cultural Performances,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 361.
98. Layla Dawson, “Heart of Glass,” Architectural Review, 222 (November 2007): 26–27.
99. An estimated one hundred thousand Jews from the former Soviet Union fled to Germany, most concentrated in cities such as Berlin, Frankfurt, and Munich. Carol Williams, “Germany as a Haven for Fleeing Jews,” Jerusalem Post, February 16, 1999.