The Never-Ending Story.(Jews of Berlin)(Brief Article)

My family and I arrived in Berlin on a memorable day: July 4, 1989, four months and five days before the fall of the Berlin wall. For me, the very name Berlin evoked deeply ambiguous emotions. I had come to be formally recognized as the winner of an international design competition to build what was then to be called the Jewish Department of the Berlin Museum. The story of the Jews of Berlin, compartmentalized into a "department"? Throughout the city's history, Jews were inseparably both German and Berliners. They were one culture. I proposed to create a Jewish museum that would manifest that fact, clear across the abyss created by the Holocaust.

It was to be a very personal journey, for the spirit in which I designed the museum is very much me as a person, as a Jew, born to survivors of the Holocaust. My family was decimated by the Nazis--85 of them murdered. From my birth in postwar Poland, in Lodz, I immigrated to Tel Aviv, then to New York, where I became an American. And now, Berlin. An odd Jewish geography, which ends up in the most unlikely of cities.

This particular project was more than a license to erect a building. It required a leap of enormous faith to cancel all future plans on the spur of the moment, to remain in Berlin rather than work from afar. We were crossing one of the major avenues of Berlin when my wife, Nina, who has since become my collaborator and partner, turned to me and, in between the whizzing cars, said the fateful words: "Libeskind, if you want to build this building, we have to stay." And so we did, with two medium-size suitcases, three children dressed in shorts, and a deep belief: that to build a Jewish museum in Berlin was perhaps the greatest challenge we could ever embark upon. We knew no one. As we checked into a modest hotel, the concierge asked how long we were staying. I answered: "As long as it takes to build the Jewish Museum of Berlin."

For the past 12 years that has been my mission--through seven governments, six name changes, five senators of culture, four museum directors, three window companies, two sides of a wall, one unification and zero regret. At the Immigration office, a German visa was inscribed into my American passport in red ink, handwritten by a patient border official, stating that Herr Libeskind is allowed to remain in Germany in order to "plan and realize the Jewish Museum of Berlin." What did those words so personally inscribed really mean? This indefinite manifesto commanded me to realize a singular building, as if a charge from above to honor and fulfill what sometimes seemed an impossible task. Whenever I traveled, ...