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As soon as the project was announced, it came under fire from a number of quarters. Christian Democrats on the city council insisted that the undertaking be postponed because there were more pressing demands on the municipal budget, such as Berlin’s Olympic Games bid. Members of the board of the Berlin Museum questioned whether the city needed another Jewish center, since millions of marks had just been spent to restore the New Synagogue in former East Berlin. Some Jewish leaders, citing the city’s influx of impoverished Eastern European Jews, argued that the money could be better spent on social programs for the newcomers. “We need schools, apartments, teachers, assistance,” said Mario Offenberg, the leader of Berlin’s Conservative Adass Jisroel congregation. “Only then can we think of museums.” Bowing to these objections, the city council voted in 1991 to put off construction for five years, which many took to be a polite form of cancellation. Libeskind was among them: “I don’t think anyone believes this project will get built if there is a five-year delay,” he said.

By the mid-1990s construction had finally commenced on the Jewish Museum, but the project remained under fire, and it might not have been completed had not W. Michael Blumenthal come to the rescue in 1997 as the museum’s first director. In some ways Blumenthal seemed an unlikely choice. He was not a German citizen and he had no experience in museum administration. But in fact his background—and even more his personal skills—suited him perfectly for the job. Born in Oranienburg in 1926, he had grown up in Berlin and fled with his family to Shanghai in 1939 to escape Hitler’s persecution. Moving to America in 1947, he went on to become an adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and finance minister under President Jimmy Carter. This was a man who knew about money—how to raise it and how to spend it. As an American, he had a useful impatience with German pedantry and title-mania, telling astounded Germans not to call him “Dr. Blumenthal,” since he “didn’t know how to repair sick stomachs.” Most importantly, as a partial outsider who commuted between Berlin and Princeton, Blumenthal could more effectively mediate between the feuding factions in Berlin’s Jewish community than an insider.

On January 23, 1999, the Jewish Museum, though still empty, opened for inspection with a spectacular fund-raising dinner. One might have thought that few Germans, even well-heeled ones, would pay DM 25,000 ($14,800) a table to sit in an empty building. But many of Germany’s leaders, including Chancellor Schröder and three of his cabinet ministers, showed up, as did an array of bankers and corporation executives. This led one commentator to label the opening “the first glittering prelude to the Berlin Republic.” Blumenthal’s promotional skills undoubtedly had something to do with this. So, perhaps, did a desire on the part of the bankers and executives, whose organizations were facing charges of having exploited slave labor during the war, to polish their image. But it also seems probable that the bitter controversy surrounding the Holocaust memorial, with all its talk of “moving on” and being “neither better nor worse” than any other nation, prompted some soul-searching among Germany’s political and economic leaders. What better place than in a museum, and in a Jewish Museum at that, for the national elite to make manifest that the new Germany would not attempt to “draw a line under the past?”

Berlin 2000