Tommaso Speccher (FU Berlin): ‘The Hole in Space’

The archival dimensions of German-Jewish conceptions of temporality, history, catastrophe and crisis has recently found a new declension in a diverse array of architectural projects which came into being in different cities of Central Europe. The Jewish Museum in Berlin by Architect Daniel Libeskind offers a crucial representation of this spatial revisiting of the concept of archive in contemporary German-Jewish culture. This paper sets out to read the main features of this architectural work against Benjamin’s notion of the archive as spatiality and harking back to the relationship between archive and writing, as in the deconstructionist tradition.

Benjamin’s concept of the archive is often understood as related to the idea historical temporality as Messianic interruption (Messianische Unterbrechung) and therefore against the grain of the classic Hegelian universalistic notion of archive. While this take on Benjamian’s archive is extracted by his thesis on the concept of history, and righteously so, I would like to suggest that in those same theses the ideal of Archive as spatiality can also be encountered. In particular, the (contro)revolutionary force of the archive resides in a topographic actualization of this Messianic interruption, both in the topographies of the cities and in the topography of writing. The idea of a relationship between the archive and writing resonates as the core of Benjamin’s legacy and its particular understanding positions itself in opposition to other classic positions in German-Jewish culture (Rosenzweig, Buber). The writing of the Archive in contemporary cityscapes thus represents a topographic determination of specific organic relationships between political, historical and philosophical plans. My endeavor will be to interpret the mutuality of the dialectics between Archive and Writing in German-Jewish culture in the urban material manifestation of the Jewish Museum in Berlin.