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attraction · Berlin
The Core Exhibition Is Free, and the Building Is Half the Argument
Review of Jewish Museum Berlin
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Share your experienceAdmission to the core exhibition at the Jewish Museum Berlin is free of charge for everyone. That is unusual for a museum of this scale and it removes the main reason people talk themselves out of going. The building is by Daniel Libeskind and it is not a container for the exhibition, it is part of it. Sharp angles, slanting floors, voids cut through the full height of the structure and a Holocaust Tower that is an unheated concrete shaft with a single slit of daylight. Whether that architecture is moving or manipulative is an argument people have, and having the argument is part of visiting. The core exhibition itself covers two millennia of German Jewish life, and is careful to be a history of a people rather than only a history of their destruction.
What was great
The core exhibition is free for everyone, which for a national-scale museum is remarkable. It tells German Jewish history as a whole rather than collapsing it into 1933 to 1945. The building is a genuine work in its own right and the Holocaust Tower is unlike anything else in a museum.
What nearly ruined the trip
The architecture is deliberately disorienting, with slanting floors and dead ends, which some visitors find powerful and others find exhausting. Certain temporary exhibitions are charged despite the free core. It is a heavy visit and there is no light way to do it.
Value for money
★★★★★ BargainSafety
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