A museum that has been hailed as one of the greatest architectural achievements of the past 100 years is to be opened officially tomorrow in a blaze of razzmatazz and controversy. The most heated debate has been over whether it should have anything in it.
The Jewish Museum in Berlin is the master work of the Polish-born musician-turned-architect Daniel Libeskind. It is one of several buildings and sites dedicated to the city's Jewish past being created in the new German capital in an attempt to atone for its central role in the Holocaust.
Libeskind's structure was not intended primarily as a memorial to the extermination of Europe's Jews, but as a celebration of 2,000 years of Jewish culture in Germany. It will be the biggest such museum in Europe. But it has been so subtly successful in conveying the horrors of persecution that critics have described other Holocaust memorial projects in Berlin as redundant. In the three years since it was completed, the empty museum has become one of the city's top tourist attractions, attracting 350,000 people.
The zinc-clad structure is designed to create a sense of disorientation, interspersed with feelings of claustrophobia and panic. Corridors tilt, cross and funnel to nothingness. Rooms eerily distort sound. And the world outside is glimpsed only occasionally through slit windows.
Next to the main building is a Garden of Exile with pillars emerging at improbable angles along a path set at a slant. The most disconcerting area for most visitors, though, is the Holocaust Tower: on entering, a massive door clangs shut and those inside are left to focus on a tiny shaft of light coming in from high on one wall. The tower's single window is not only hopelessly beyond reach; it also lets in street sounds distorted into wails.
Libeskind has expressed the hope that his creation would "communicate memory across receding distances and erasures, across a landscape both vivid and imaginary, across light, both dim and exhilarating".
His inventiveness, though, has set a tough challenge for the museum's director, the former US treasury secretary, Michael Blumenthal: how to ensure that the exhibits hold their own in such an overpoweringly evocative setting. Many architectural critics and ordinary visitors, as well as Jewish organisations, have protested that the building should remain empty.
Mr Blumenthal, who fled Berlin with his family at the age of 13, ruled out that option. "We want to show German Jews as part of German history, as living, creative, contributing members of this society and not only as victims," he said.
More than 3,900 artefacts will be on display. Ken Gorbey, 59, a New Zealander, is the project director and the man directly responsible for assembling them. He was provided with the collection from the Jewish section of the Berlin museum. But many of the exhibits were sent to him from Jews around the world.
"We are setting up a narrative museum," he has said. The exhibition will be rich in everyday artefacts, personal documents and letters containing reminiscences. It is made up of 13 "topical islands".
One, for example, focuses on a member of the Oppenheimer family, and will portray the life of a so-called "court Jew" in the Middle Ages. Among the exhibits, visitors will be able to see after the museum opens to the public on Tuesday night are a pair of Levi's, denoting the German origins of the tailor who first made jeans.
There will be film clips from the Babels berg movie studios near Berlin where Fritz Lang and other Jewish directors first made their mark and a 10th century copy of the Roman decree first mentioning Jews in Germany. Also on display are the dust protection glasses worn by the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn who earned his living in a silk factory, and a gold cup and lid, which was given to Abraham Oppenheim in 1847 for his commitment "to the emancipation of the Rhenish Jews".
The museum can accommodate up to 6,000 visitors a day. They will have an opportunity to sample Jewish cuisine at a restaurant within the building.
The last of the museum's 13 sections celebrates the rebirth of the Jewish community in Germany. Since the fall of the Berlin wall, it has expanded rapidly due to the arrival of tens of thousands of immigrants fleeing discrimination in the former Soviet Union. Indeed, Germany today has the world's fastest-growing Jewish population.
The German authorities have issued a special stamp to commemorate Sunday's gala opening which will be attended by the German president and chancellor, and prominent Jews from around the world including the former US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra will open the proceedings with a performance of Gustav Mahler's 7th symphony. They will be under the baton of the Israeli conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim, who played alongside Libeskind when the future architect was a 12-year-old musical prodigy.
In addition to the Jewish museum, two sites will specifically recall the Holocaust and the horrors of the Nazi regime. A vast memorial site recalling the annihilation of Europe's Jews is taking shape near the Brandenburg Gate. Elsewhere in the centre there is already a permanent exhibition, known as the Topography of Terror, depicting Gestapo torture.
Life and times of Daniel Libeskind
Libeskind was born in 1946 in Lodz, Poland
His parents were captured and sent to camps and gulags in the Soviet Union. Most of his family perished in the Holocaust
He studied music in Israel and the US and was hailed a child prodigy, playing the piano in international concerts alongside Daniel Barenboim and other top musicians
In his twenties he gave up music for architecture, graduating in 1970 from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York. His musical background, however, has stayed with him: how his buildings 'sound' is integral to their creation
He became an American citizen in 1965 and now lives in Berlin with his wife Nina
His temporary structure, the futuristic Eighteen Turns, was unveiled in June this year in Kensington Gardens, London, a sort of snaking hall-of-mirrors pavilion. It is open to visitors until tomorrow
His Imperial War Museum North, in Salford, designed as a shattered sphere, is due to open next year