Menashe Kadishman Shalekhet (Fallen Leaves) at the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

The Jewish Museum in Berlin isn’t a Holocaust museum; it’s a museum of German Jewish history, telling a complex story about the contribution of German Jews to German life and of the relationship between the Jewish and German identities of German Jews. However, of course, the Holocaust is always present and the Museum is a solemn, sad and reverential place. It is a very quiet place, people hardly talk and when they do, they talk in whispers.

The permanent exhibition is on the second floor, the first floor contains a temporary exhibition space and access to one of the architectural voids that pierce the building. There are five voids, angular holes rising up through the floors, they represent “what can never be exhibited”, the history and humanity lost with the murder of the Jews. Three of the voids are inaccessible, you look into them through slit-like windows, the other two you can walk into; they are the Void of Voidness, a disquieting unheated tower with a heavy metal door, lit only though a narrow window near the roof and the Void of Memory, which you enter through the first floor temporary exhibition space. 

There is an art work in the Void of Memory: Menashe Kadishman’s Shalekhet (Fallen Leaves). I think it is the most effective and shocking piece of public memorial art I have seen. The first part of the art work you experience is the noise, a loud clanging, like heavy chains, that fills the exhibition space you walk through to get to the void. After the quiet of the museum’s permanent exhibition the noise is violent, disturbing and foreboding. As you enter the void, you see the floor is covered with metal faces, crudely sculpted faces made from flat heavy disks of iron. The features are cut out: two eyes, a nose and an open, horrified mouth. There are ten thousand of them, piled four or five deep.

Amazingly, people walk on the faces. The surface is very uneven and the faces shift as they are stepped on so walking is obviously difficult and the walking people are hunched, stumbling as they trample on the faces. As the faces shift about under foot they clang one off the other causing the noise that echoes off the high concrete walls of the void.

The effect is devastating: the shuffling figures of people walking on a multitude of screaming metal faces.

[Picture from http://www.jmberlin.de © Jewish Museum Berlin, photo: Marion Roßner]