BERLIN – Up to two years ago, Kenneth Gorbey didn’t have a clue about what fortune was to bestow on him.
“Then a huge finger broke through the clouds and pointed at me,” he laughs, describing how W. Michael Blumenthal, director of the Jewish Museum of Berlin, chose him to design the museum’s permanent exhibition.
Gorbey, 59, had gained international acclaim as an innovative exhibition planner for his work at the national museum Te Papa in New Zealand. The anthropologist accepted Blumenthal’s offer, and together with his wife, museum curator Susan Foster, travelled to Berlin.
Over the past one and one half years Gorbey and his staff have been working on an exhibit to fit into the zig-zag structure created by architect Daniel Libeskind. It must show the high and low points of some 2,000 years of German-Jewish history.
Some 200 scholars and skilled tradesmen put the finishing touches to the exhibition during the past several weeks to get the show ready for the museum opening on September 9.
Gorbey has been provided the collection from the Jewish section of the Berlin Museum, as well as items sent in to him from Jews from around the world for the exhibition, covering 3,000 square metres.
“We are setting up a narrative museum,” the New Zealander says. Everyday items, letters containing personal reminiscences and documents are to portray Jewish life in Germany from the period dating back to the ancient Romans up to the present.
The show is comprised of 13 “topical islands”. One of them, focusing on financier Joseph Suess Oppenheimer, will portray the life of a so-called “court Jew” in the Middle Ages.
Another will show the deep influence of Jewish intellectuals, artists and businessmen in Berlin in the period between the turn of the 20th century and the Weimar Republic after World War One.
Be it with the aid of the eyeglasses of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) or Albert Einstein’s hand-written draft of the Theory of Relativity, Gorbey wants history to come alive and be an experience for museum visitors.
“Visitor experience” is how he describes the concept with which he turned the Te Papa Museum into a tourism magnet.
Gorbey shrugs off criticism that he aims to create a “Jewish Disneyland” at the museum in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district.
“The old museum is static, and always makes a point of showing that it knows everything better than does the visitor,” he said about conventional exhibits. Gorbey sees no contradiction in providing well-founded knowledge in an exciting manner. The word “entertainment” is not taboo in his vocabulary.
He regards the possible conflict between his concept and the at times grim-looking museum building with its Holocaust Tower and “Garden of Exile” as providing a positive tension.
“We are not a Holocaust museum,” he stresses, although of course the organized mass murder of Jews by the Nazi regime is an important theme in the exhibition.
The focus will not be on the Nazis’ machinery of organised murder but rather on the “reaction of German Jews” to their persecution. Up till 1933 Jewish life in Germany had been a “history of hope”, Gorbey said. The Holocaust then destroyed this.
Gorbey and museum director Blumenthal also aim to portray everyday Jewish life in Germany today, including the problems of communities coping with the arrival of Jews from Eastern Europe.
A sub-theme is how Germany, as a land of immigration, now gets along with “the others”, he said.
At the end of the exhibition, visitors are going to be asked to answer several questions. One of them will be: “Is it conceivable that a German Jew could become president in the near future?”
