Golem Exhibition at the Jewish Museum Berlin

Until the end of January 2017, the Jewish Museum in Berlin hosts a temporary exhibition dedicated to the frightening, mythical and often misunderstood figure of the Golem. Does this exhibition make justice to it, bringing more clarifications and countering the anti-Semitism associated to it?

To start with the news lead: during the wandering through the various artifacts and explanations, and some movies too, I hardly found anything that haven't been told about the Golem. In a bric-a-brac style I encountered in the case of other exhibitions hosted here, you are introduced to an enormous amount of information and objects. From Made in China plastic warriors to work of art playing with calligraphy and new-Age Kabbalistic visions and manga, the exhibition succeeded to cover almost everything.

But too much information, especially when presented in a quite uncritical and - maybe - shyly to assume some standpoints doesn't help too much, especially when your audience is not an expert and it is possibly expecting to understand more about a specific topic than to encounter various manifestations of the topic.

Obviously, there is never enough time to properly approach such a controversial topic, and eventually one can read more about the Golem before and after the exhibition. The first reference to the creation of such a being is mentioned in the secret Kabbalistic book of Sefer Yetzira - Book of Creation - attributed to Avraham Avinu. It is supposed that Maharal of Prague created the first Golem, in Prague - late 16th, beginning of the 17th century. In the 19th century, the legend was that a Golem may protect Jews from persecutions. The other meaning is that a Golem is a symbol of political crazes going amok, but by extension it can be applied to robotics, Artificial Intelligence or genetic engineering. The artists exploring the mysteries of creativity are supposed to brought to life powers that may be bigger than life and thus, dangerous if misused.

In the German-speaking realms, the predominant representation of the Golem was influenced by the movie with the same name, Paul Wagner, extensively presented at the exhibition. Without grasping the deep understanding of the legend and the meaning, the interpretations slightly entered the well-known register of anti-Semitism. This is, in my opinion, particularly the risk encountered by presenting too much information: everyone can pick up a single sentence and meaning, out of the original context, and play it in the unexpectedly wrong way. Call it the Golem's curse, maybe...

Despite the problematic part, if you plan to attend the exhibition with an open mind and a notebook for some further inspiration and documentation, there are things to learn about, especially when it comes to the works of art and the creative representations of the Golem. Shortly, this is one of the exhibitions it is snobbish to eff it, because everyone else in your group was there, but not necessarily the headline of the season, obviously for a good intellectual reason.