August 6, 2009

Jewish Museum Berlin: “Hey Victor…” (06.08.2009)

 I was calculating how much a cold beer would cost on Friedrichstraße and trying to give Joe a flat tire when the Jewish Museum came into view. It looked large yet featureless from the outside, kind of like a concrete airline hangar.  Hopefully the museum wouldn't be a gallery of dingy photos and 8” x 8” monitors playing looped mini-movies—a “seen one, seen ‘em all”-type museum. It didn’t help that I was sweating through my shirt and worried that my deodorant would break like a pane of glass; I wasn’t in the best of moods.

 The caress of air conditioning inside the museum's turbine doors brightened my spirits a bit. My group followed Victor the tour guide. He resembled a shrew in almost every way: close, beady eyes behind spectacles, thick beard, unibrow, and remarkably small, circular ears. He led us downstairs to the basement, past some exhibits and through throngs of people, to a dark room in the corner of an ell. The room looked up to the roof of the building through a chasm in the architecture. I took pictures. 

Victor explained the design of the museum as broken lines, with one lateral line cutting through the jagged structure to create the gaps. I liked Victor’s accent: a mix of Chantilly tone and London articulation. I guessed that he studied abroad as a kid. He finished up his spiel as Lauren and I started saying Hey Victor! like that guy from “Smoke Signals.” Lauren said Sherman Alexie’s movie was made where she lives, and I called her out for living in Buttfucknowhere, Idaho—I pretended like the dead-arm she gave me didn’t hurt.

 My favorite part of the museum tour was the discussion on why Jewish Berliners were so successful, especially in entrepreneurship. Victor said that Jews constituted about 60% of department store owners, though they were only 1.5% of the city’s population, and we spent a good 15 minutes discussing why. Victor’s hypothesis (widely accepted by the group) was that Jews worked their butts off, stressed education, and found new avenues for business out of necessity. They were in a lower social stratum and therefore had to dominate their field in order to merit some respect. They didn’t just reach the ceiling of prejudice, they busted through it like Willy Wonka in his glass elevator.

 After taking some pictures in the Garden of Exile, Molly and I took off with Sam. He explained why he loves Berlin so much—a story that makes you want to hug someone, if you ever get the chance to hear it—and then we parted ways. Molly creeped on a little boy wearing adidas shoes at the bus stop, and I thought about sitting down with my book and having a beer or two before checking out a museum. Hey, I justified the idea to myself, when in Rome…