A powerful enigma that is a museum to the Jews

Like a great, silver bolt of lightning that has fallen to earth, Daniel Libeskind's new Jewish Museum stretches out incongruously amid the plain, post-war housing projects of central Berlin. From the outside, it is impossible to tell how many floors it has and its pattern of broken window shapes gives the impression it has just been hit by a bomb.

After more than a decade of planning and controversy, the museum will open this week, but its curators still have no idea what to put on its walls.

"Museums are the cathedrals of our time," according to Mr Libeskind, who was one of the world's most talkedabout architects long before he built his first building. In fact, it was not until last year that the first Libeskind building was completed - a museum in the northern German city of Osnabruck.

Conceived before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Jewish Museum is an extension of the baroque Berlin Museum, which is devoted to municipal history. For much of the past decade, museum officials and civil servants have clashed with the Jewish community over how autonomous the new museum should be.

Museum officials originally hoped to use most of the extension for the municipal collection, making the Jewish Museum no more than one of many departments within the Berlin Museum.

"We had to play the Jewish card to get the money," one official said.

Another museum executive argued that, since there were more hairdressers than Jews in Berlin, the city would be more justified in opening a hairdressing museum than a Jewish museum.

But the Jewish community and the Jewish Museum's first director, Mr Amnon Barzel, were adamant they wanted a museum of their own and that they would occupy the entire Libeskind building. Mr Barzel, an Israeli curator with a background in contemporary art, was sacked when his demands became too much for Berlin's city government.

Most of the arguments have now been settled and the new building will be a dedicated Jewish Museum. But it will not host an exhibition until next year and its curators are still trying to work out what the first show should be.

In the meantime, the building itself will provide much room for debate. Among its many peculiarities is the fact that the museum has no entrance or exit and visitors must enter through an underground passage from the Berlin Museum.

The dark, concrete corridor with its slanted floor divides into three paths, one of which is the "axis of extermination". This leads into a tall, concrete dungeon into which a single shaft of light falls.

The "axis of exile" takes the visitor into the "E.T.A. Hoffmann Garden", which is filled with 34 precarious-looking concrete columns filled with plants and trees.

The final path is that of "continuity" and leads into the interior of the museum, where the visitor follows the zig-zag shape of the building but must walk around five "voids", empty spaces enclosed in concrete. Mr Libeskind has decreed that no pictures or exhibits should be displayed on the walls of these voids, which run unbroken from the basement to the roof of the building.

"Modernism is old-fashioned," according to Mr Libeskind, who maintains that buildings must generate emotion in the people who enter them. He is dismissive of much of the architecture that has come to the German capital since reunification and describes Renzo Piano's massive development at Potsdamer Platz as mediocre.

"Disneyland is better," he says.

Yet Mr Libeskind may be bracing himself for harsher criticism of his own buildings now that they are starting to function as museums. The remarkable symbolic power of the Jewish Museum has prompted some politicians to suggest that, with a building like this, Berlin has no need of a Holocaust Memorial. The Bundestag is expected to decide in April on a design for a memorial near the Brandenburg Gate, but the idea is unpopular with the public.

Mr Libeskind resists any attempt to suggest that his museum could serve as a memorial, insisting that the building was designed to fulfil a specific function. But museum curators are puzzled that the Jewish Museum has no auditorium and the delay in finding a suitable exhibition has raised doubts about how flexible the building will be.

As they stream through the empty museum this weekend, past blank, concrete walls, many Berliners may reflect that they are seeing their new museum at its very best.