Jewish Museum Berlin

The Jewish Museum Berlin opened in 2001 as the largest Jewish museum in Europe, presenting the history of Jews in Germany from the Middle Ages to the present across about 3,500 square meters. The museum comprises an older baroque building, the Kollegienhaus, connected underground to a new zigzag-shaped structure designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind, whose sharply angled plan is nicknamed the Blitz, or lightning bolt, for its shape. Libeskind's building is punctuated by a series of tall, empty concrete Voids running vertically through the structure, left deliberately inaccessible and unfurnished to represent what the architect described as the history that can never be exhibited when it comes to Jewish life in Berlin, and it culminates in the Holocaust Tower, a 24-meter unheated concrete silo lit only by a narrow slit near its top. Outside, the Garden of Exile consists of 49 tall concrete pillars set on a tilted ground plane, 48 of them filled with earth from Berlin and one filled with earth from Jerusalem. Between its 2001 opening and December 2017 the museum drew more than eleven million visitors, making it one of Germany's most visited museums.