The memorial ethics of Libeskind's Berlin Jewish museum

Ionescu Arleen

Repository | Series | Book

Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke

2017

305 Pages

ISBN 978-1-137-53830-7

The Holocaust and its Contexts

The memorial ethics of Libeskind's Berlin Jewish museum

Arleen Ionescu

This book is a detailed critical study of Libeskind's Berlin Jewish Museum in its historical, architectural and philosophical context. Emphasizing how the Holocaust changed our perception of history, memory, witnessing and representation, it develops the notion of "memorial ethics' to explore the Museum's difference from more conventional post-World War Two commemorative sites. The main focus is on the Museum as an experience of the materiality of trauma which engages the visitor in a performative duty to remember. Arleen Ionescu buildson Levinas's idea of "ethics as optics' to show how Libeskind's Museum becomes a testimony to the unpresentable Other. Ionescu also extends the Museum's experiential dimension by proposing her own subjective walk through Libeskind's space reimagined as a "literary museum". Featuring reflections on texts by Beckett, Celan, Derrida, Kafka, Blanchot, Wiesel and Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger (Celan's cousin), this virtual tour concludes with a brief account of Libeskind's analogous "healing project" for Ground Zero.

Publication details

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-53831-4

Full citation:

Ionescu, A. (2017). The memorial ethics of Libeskind's Berlin Jewish museum, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Ionescu Arleen

1-9