Content area
Full Text
Lucky is the wanderer who finds the gate into the garden of the Royal Library in Copenhagen. Shielded behind high brick walls is one of the great oases of downtown Europe. Cool, wet weather gives the trees that extra shot of green. The traffic is sufficiently distant so that the gentle splash of water from a fountain dominates any urban noise. Nearby, a large bronze statue of the great Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard sits in (uncharacteristically) peaceful meditation. Rus in urbe--the countryside in town.
Along one side of this garden oasis, Studio Daniel Libeskind has shoehorned a small new museum into the brick Royal Boathouse built in the early 17th century. Originally part of the old Arsenal adjacent to the Royal Palace, the new Danish Jewish Museum barely ripples the tranquillity of the south side of the garden. Only six granite blocks splayed across a slanted apron with white strips along the pavement, plus a simple signpost and a massive bronze door inscribed with the word Mitzvah, mark the entrance.
Mitzvah means "a good deed" or "the duty to do the right thing" in Hebrew, and it is a surprising theme for a museum dedicated to the long and relatively peaceful history of the Jews in Denmark. Whose good deed and what right thing, one wonders? The reference is specifically to the events of October 1943, when thousands of Danish Jews crossed the narrow straits of the Oresund separating Denmark from Sweden to escape the Nazis. (Among those who fled were the young Arne Jacobsen, a Jew, and Jorn Utzon, who had Jewish family members.) Aided by local resistance leaders, alerted and protected in some cases by their Christian neighbors, this rescue represented the only instance in World War II when a national population collaborated systematically to help Jews escape. And, as Hannah Arendt famously noted in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), this was the only instance in which a Jewish population acted to save itself. More than 7,000 Danish Jews survived the war, more than 90 percent of the country's Jewish population. The mitzvah of the Danes in 1943 provided Daniel Libeskind with the thematic heart of the museum: The letters of the word not only form the logo at the door, but their...