Design scenes enliven Berlin for Berliners and its visitors

The next part of the journey through the Jewish Museum takes you down a long, winding, charcoal gray staircase. The very air seems to turn colder. By the time you reach the bottom, you are also underground, and faced with a choice of three paths: the Axis of the Holocaust, the Axis of Exile, and the Axis of Continuity. Each has a dramatic culmination.

The Axis of the Holocaust ends in a bare, unheated, concrete tower into which visitors are shut for a few minutes that seem much longer. It is not a contemplative, chapel-like space; it feels more like a trap, with a sliver of light and a metal ladder cruelly positioned, so high that no one could reach them.

At the end of the Axis of Exile is a "garden" that is also unsettling. Forty-eight tall concrete pillars are filled with earth from Berlin, a 49th with earth from Jerusalem. The numbers refer to the birth and infancy of the State of Israel in 1948--49. The stone floor slopes; the pillars tilt and trees grow out of them. Making no connection to the ground, they symbolize an uprooted people.

The Axis of Continuity, the most optimistic of the three, leads to a pomegranate tree. In Jewish tradition the pomegranate stands for fertility and abundance. Finally, there are the museum's galleries, which use many media and artifacts to tell the story of Jews in Germany since medieval times.

Libeskind's axes are a grand metaphor for a horrifying period in the history of Berlin, a period not completely put to rest. I had a guide in the city who said he didn't understand why before World War II Jews had to have so many synagogues. Why couldn't they have kept a lower profile? He proved to be an equal-opportunity bigot who was just as resentful of the Turkish Muslims immigrating to Berlin and building mosques. He so objected to cultural mixing that he even complained about a Chinese restaurant in the city that also served Arab food. He was the only person I encountered who expressed such reactionary views; everyone else was warm and welcoming. That this man was only in his early 30s made his opinions all the scarier.

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