Garden ensemble, Jewish Museum

Walter Benjamin Playground

The Paul Celan Courtyard

The Paul-Celan-Hof is reminiscent of the cobbled, narrow and often dark backyards of Berlin. In addition to the delivery of museum goods, the courtyard also served in the beginning to cross the building structure in a north-south direction and established a connection between the garden around the Libeskind Building and the garden of the Baroque-era part of the museum. The floor relief of the courtyard dedicated to the Jewish poet Paul Celan is based on a graphic of his wife, Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. Via the former passage through the building, the Paul Celan Courtyard was closely connected to the Voided Void, located to the south of the building and the only one to be realized, which commemorates the Holocaust. The floor relief, designed in reference to the graphic work of the artist and wife of Paul Celan, Gisèle Celan-Lestranges, spreads across the courtyard, as it were under the building in all directions. Beyond the building, it can be found again in various places on the grounds. In the transition of the relief at the Voided Void to the rose grove, a Paulownia, Paul Celan's favourite tree, is planted. Beneath the blue-blossoming deciduous tree is a monolithic sculpture made of black basalt. The visitor can rest on it. The garden-side entrance to the E.T.A Hoffmann Garden can be reached from here.

Rosenhain

The grove, an archetype of the garden, and the rose, the only plant that was allowed to grow within the walls of historic Jerusalem, form a rose garden in the center of the museum garden. Two squares, consisting of white and red roses, are planted in a grid 2.5 meters apart and twisted towards each other across a corner point of the axis of the Divestiture Void, which intersects the lines of the building's body. The white and the red rose as symbols of purity, love, passion, innocence, devotion, reconciliation and resistance "dance", as it were, in circular motion, forming a rose garden that encloses the building structure of the E.T.A. Hoffmann Garden. The surfaces of the "voided-void" and the lines of the reference system to Jewish addresses and places in the urban space, materialized as railroad tracks, stone bands, and fault lines on the grounds, traverse the grove of roses and escape into the distant proximity of the surrounding city.

Paradiesgarten

One of the ideas of the garden of paradise in mythology is the garden enclosed to the wilderness (hortus conclusus). The paradise of the deserts is the grove and garden of the oasis with cultivated plants in the midst of an inhospitable landscape. The paradise of the primeval forests represents the clearing cut into the dense wood and foliage of the forest. Guarded by a hedge, a fence, is the cultivated garden, at whose edge to the wilderness some imaginations suppose the place of the witch. The act of enclosing the first "garden paradises" defines the surrounding, wild nature as what it is: wilderness. Over the course of time, the view of wilderness changes and is perceived in a transfigured way. With the landscape gardens, a conception of the naturalness of the garden emerges that is based on the image of wild nature. The cultivated landscapes displaced the wilderness to the edges of the world, the perception of wilderness loses its original horror, the experience of the inhospitality of early being in the wild. The contemplation of the last wildernesses of the present, described as last paradises, turn around the forgotten origin in view of the anthropogenic overforming of the world. A transfiguration of wilderness leads to the notion of "poaching", of second-hand wilderness. The wilderness finds itself enclosed and protected from the antropogenically overformed landscape in the garden paradise.
The little robinia grove in the museum garden, surrounded by a ditch and rose bushes, which was created on the rubble of the war at this site, stands as a symbol for the constant transformation of ideas about nature and the garden. The image of the unbroken power of nature, the paradise of poaching. A stone spiral fountain in the shape of the double coiled serpent refers to the fabric of space and time, the spring rising at the foot of a tree to the mythical river that originates in paradise, flowing out into time and space. The "wild, unplanted" robinia grove
becomes, at a time when the earth is being transformed into a place subordinate to human use, a symbol of the concomitant reversal of a conception of paradise, as expressed in the slogan of the "last paradises of the world".

back to overview

1. Walter Benjamin Playground
2. The Paul Celan Courtyard
3. Rosenhain
4. Paradiesgarten