The Jewish Museum Berlin, exhibits the social, political and cultural history of the Jews in Germany from the 4th century to the present. The museum explicitly presents and integrates, for the first time in postwar Germany, the repercussions of the Holocaust. The new extension is housed on the site of the original Prussian Court of Justice building which was completed in 1735 and renovated in the 1960s to become a museum for the city of Berlin. The new design, which was created a year before the Berlin Wall came down, started with the identification of a common feature that bound together both East and West Berlin: the relationship of Germans to Jews. This connection was used to plot an irrational matrix that makes reference to the image of a compressed and distorted star — the yellow star that had historically been worn by Jews on the same site.
