A note for pocket knife owners . . .

Don't bring your pocket knives to the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

I went to see the museum, which is supposed to be one of Berlin's must-sees, on Wednesday afternoon after school. At the entrance, there's a security system reminiscent of an airport, where you put your bag and jacket on a conveyer belt and then go through a metal detector. When my bag cam through the belt, one of the security guards told me that I would need to take the pocket knife out of my bag (I'd actually forgotten I had it with me - I don't usually carry it around, but I'd stuck it in my messenger bag for the fall break trip and simply never taken it out) and leave it at the front. They put my knife in a little plastic bag and gave me a claim ticket. When I left, I had to go back to security, where they gave me my knife and then had me go out through the entrace, so I wouldn't have the opportunity to go back into the museum.

The museum is, in fact, really impressive; it shows all sorts of different facets of Jewish life in Germany since the Roman period. The new building was designed by Daniel Liebeskind, whom Americans know because of his involvement with the WTC memorial site. His design includes a Garden of Exile, which has a set of columns erected on uneven ground, so you feel a bit disoriented going through it, and a Holocaust Tower, which is almost completely dark, except for a small slit high up in the wall that lets in light and sound. The exhibits were very interesting, too, and very multimedia, and I learned a lot.

As I went through the museum, though, I couldn't help thinking that the security system at the front, even though it's not part of the exhibits on German-Jewish history, has its own comment to make on the uneasy state of modern Germany's take on its past. I guess you always have the risk that some maniac is going to destroy or deface a work of art - look at the guy who hacked off one of Mary's hands in Michaelangelo's Pieta - but if a German uses a pocket knife to slash at an exhibit about Jews, it's a political statement, and maybe not such an unthinkable one when the NPD, the extreme right political party in Germany, won an unsettling number of votes in the last local election.

I was also thinking of all this yesterday, when I made a trip to Nollendorfplatz, the center of the gay area of the city. Right outside the U-Bahn station, there's a pink granite triangle dedicated to the homosexual victims of the Holocaust. The inscription includes the word "totgeschwiegen," which means something like "silenced to death." The gay victims of the Holocaust have really only gotten press in the last few decades; I think the dedication itself only dates from the 80s.

Anyway, right underneath the inscription, someone had scrawed in black marker the word "Lügner": Liars.