Opened in 2001, the Jewish Museum Berlin is the largest Jewish museum in Europe, telling the story of Jews in Germany from the Middle Ages to the present. Its new building, by Daniel Libeskind, stands beside a baroque courthouse that once held the Berlin Museum.
Libeskind's design is a sharp, zigzag form, nicknamed "Blitz," or lightning. There is no visible link between old and new above ground, and visitors enter the new building only through an underground passage. A line of empty "voids," about 66 feet tall, cuts straight through it. These bare spaces stand for the absence left by the Holocaust in Berlin.
Libeskind created the design a year before the Berlin Wall fell. The museum has become one of the most visited in Germany, with more than eleven million visitors in its first 16 years.
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