The Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden

Secondary Experientiality

5.1 The Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden

The Bundeswehr Military History Museum (MHM) is a model museum for the cre-ation of historical structures, allowing for the active visitor to potentially explore and experience the possibilities stemming from secondary experientiality. The museum reopened with a new permanent exhibition, designed by H.G. Merz and Holzer Kobler, in a redesigned building on October 15, 2011.² A wedge by ar-chitect Daniel Libeskind cuts into the 1897 classicist arsenal building construct-ed in the Albertstadt military quarter³ and disrupts its complex history in order to

On the sliding scale of experientiality, one could argue that the Oskar Schindler Factory and the Imperial War Museum North use similar distantiation techniques to express a multitude of heterogeneous collective perspectives; but whereas the museum in Kraków lures the visitor into feeling present in a space of the past, the museum in Manchester ensures that the visitor feels like they are having a structural memory experience in the present.

The museum had about half a million visitors in the year following the re-opening.

See Pieken 2013, 63–64; Rogg 2012a (2011). See for a more detailed description of the history of the arsenal building and the status of the collection around 2000 Scheerer 2003a, 4–27 (Scheerer 2003b; Kunz 2003; Beßer 2003a; Fleischer 2003). First, the main building housed the Royal Arsenal Collection (Königliche Arsenal-Sammlung) and Royal Saxon Army Museum (Königlich-Sächsische Armee-Museum). From 1923 to 1924, it became the Saxon Army Museum (Sächsische Armeemuseum), before becoming the Army Museum of the Wehrmacht (Heeresseum; after 1942 Armeemuseum) under National Socialism from 1938 to 1945. In 1972, the mu-seum reopened as the Army Mumu-seum of the GDR, which continued to shape the collection and permanent exhibition until the closure of the permanent exhibition in 2010. Shortly before German reunification in 1990, it was renamed Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr. I am grateful to Gorch Pieken, former Project Lead (2006–2011) and Research Director (2011–2017) of the MHM for explaining the original concept of the MHM to me, in several meetings and guided tours between 2012 and 2014.

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fragment and complicate the memory of the past (see fig. 14).⁴On June 14, 1994, the MHM was officially designated the leading museum in the Bundeswehr net-work, making it Germany’s de facto principal army and military history muse-um.⁵By interweaving military history with political, social, and cultural history Fig. 14Front façade of main museum building with Libeskind wedge. Militärhistorisches Mu-seum der Bundeswehr (Bundeswehr Military History MuMu-seum), Dresden (Photo: Author, 2012).

 Matthias Rogg 2012b (2011), 15–19. See also chapter 8 below for the discussion of the top floor and the wedge regarding the MHM’s representation of the Air War. For the detailed planning process, the architectural competition, the architectural concept of Studio Daniel Libeskind, and the interior design concept by HG Merz / Barbara Holzer, see also Beßer 2003b, Studio Dan-iel Libeskind 2003; HG Merz and Holzer 2003. Cercel has noted that“Libeskind’s penetrative ar-chitectural reinvention of the museum is an authoritative gesture in itself”(2018, 28) that risks over-symbolizing the deconstructive temple characteristic of the museum and consequently, los-ing its potential for agonism or critical debate (2018, 16). See also Weiser 2017, 52–55, who in-terprets Libeskind’s architecture as“interrupted chronology,”while at best scratching the sur-face of the rhetoric and representational style of the permanent exhibition.

 The MHM is publicly funded through the budget of the German Ministry of Defense.Within the hierarchy of the Bundeswehr, the MHM is supervised by the Center for Military History and So-cial Sciences of the Bundeswehr in Potsdam (formerly the Military History Research Office, in German: Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, MGFA). For a detailed description of its institu-130 5 Secondary Experientiality

as well as with the history of what the French Annales historians have termed mentalités,the museum claims to approach military exhibitions in a new way.⁶ This method, according to the museum makers, allows for the expression of two distinct models of time: first, evolutionary time, in which violence and force are inherent to human behavior (here they display anthropological consis-tency across the human species); second, the time of cultural change, in which violence depends on its cultural, historical, and social surroundings (see Pieken 2012 [2011], 22). Hans-Ulrich Thamer notes in his conceptual review of the MHM that it surpasses the concepts of traditional military history museums, which pri-marily exhibit military artifacts and weapons, by radically exploring how the vi-olence of war can be depicted and reflected in a museum (2012). To fulfill its goal of representing the history and anthropology of violence, the MHM takes a two-fold approach: first, it presents the traditional story of German warfare from 1300 to the present as a chronological exhibition in the original arsenal building of about 5,000 square meters. Second, a thematic exhibition in Libeskind’s wedge–in German,Themenparcours,literally a‘tour’of different themes over about 3,000 square meters of exhibition space–confronts the visitor with the violent effects of war as ideas and themes.⁷ To visit the different sections of the chronological exhibition, the visitor must walk through the thematic exhibi-tion in the wedge; the architectural design ensures that the chronological and thematic exhibitions are necessarily intertwined. As the chief museum of the Bundeswehr, the MHM’s perspective is clearly German, although this perspective is interspersed throughout the museum with that of a more universal anthropol-ogy of violence.⁸

tional and organizational structure, see Kraus 2011. See also Rauchensteiner 2011 for the advi-sory process that took place during the planning of the new building.

See the exhibition guide, Pieken and Rogg 2012 (2011), especially Pieken 2012 (2011) and Rogg 2012b (2011). See also the summary of the early development of the museum concept by its first research director in 2004–2005, Siegfried Müller (2006).

See also the detailed concept of the expert commission, Konzeptgruppe/Expertenkommission 2003 (“Das Militärhistorische Museum Dresden 2006 [Konzeption]).”Cercel et al. argue the an-thropological approach of the museum almost equates war with nature (2019, 208), but this seems to underestimate the fact that‘violence’is a much more encompassing concept than war and that the open style of the museum only documents war and violence, but allows the visitor to decide whether there are ways to overcome it. Consequently, the close relationship be-tween nature and war is present in many museums discussed in this study. However, for exam-ple, the teleological dimension of the Canadian War Museum (see also chapter 3.1), is nowhere to be found in the MHM.

In 2017–2018, with the departure of both director Matthias Rogg (2010–2017) and research director / main curator Gorch Pieken (2006–2017), a debate about the mission of a Bundeswehr 5.1 The Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden 131

The five floors of Libeskind’s wedge house a thematic tour of war and vio-lence spread across twelve sections, starting at the top with the “Dresden View,”with“War and Memory”directly below.⁹Level 2 addresses the relation-ship between society and violence/war in five sections:“Politics and the Use of Force,” “Language and the Military,” “Fashion and the Military,” “Music and the Military,”and“War and Play.”Visitors–unless they take the elevator– use the original stairwell of the arsenal building to enter the first and ground floors of the wedge. Level 1 focuses on the mentality of war in the section enti-tled “The Formation of the Bodies,”and on the effects of war in the sections

“War and Suffering”and “Animals and the Military.”Finally, the ground floor is divided into the sections“Protection and Destruction”and “Technology and the Military”; the latter again emphasizes the links between civil society and war. The wedge also creates six“vertical showcases,”¹⁰shafts or voids at the in-tersection of the old arsenal building and the wedge, which are used to display large objects and a number of thematically overlapping installations, such as the shell of a V2 rocket.¹¹

In the wings of the old arsenal building, the MHM houses its chronological exhibition, a history of the German military divided into three temporally distinct sections:“1300–1914”(ground floor west), “1914–1945”(first floor west), and

“1945–Present”(first floor east). All three sections of the chronological

exhibi-museum emerged. On the one hand, this debate originated in struggles relating to internal quar-rels and organizational structures within the institution. On the other, it related to the cost and contents of the MHM’s 2018 special exhibitionGender and Violence: War is for Men–Peace is for Women?(originally planned for 2017) and the cancelled exhibitionClash of Future: Myths of the Nations 1914–1945.Even if the MHM denied any change in its mission, the press debated wheth-er the museum still aimed to be a cultural history museum that should compete with large mili-tary history museums and general history museums world-wide, or whether it was aiming for the softer educational mission of its military personnel as seen in more traditional military history museums (see also Richter 2017 and Locke 2017). It remains to be seen how the MHM will devel-op without Rogg and Pieken. With the exception of theGender and Violenceexhibition , which was still curated by Pieken, the museum has only presented a minor exhibitionThe Führer Adolf Hitler is Dead: Attempted Assassination and Coup d’Ètat on 20 July 1944since Pieken left (fall of 2017). This seems meagre for a museum that describes itself as a leading history museum in Eu-rope (https://www.mhmbw.de/dauerausstellung, accessed 13 October 2019). The search for a new research director was ongoing in the fall of 2019. Albeit on a smaller scale than the Second World War Museum in Gdańsk, this debate demonstrates that political and institutional pres-sures can threaten or possibly change the missions and orientations of war museums.

 For a detailed description of the thematic tour, see also Pieken 2013, 66–74, and Pieken and Rogg 2012 (2011), 52–113.

 This is Libeskind’s terminology; see also Pieken 2013, 66.

 See also chapter 8 for further discussion of the V2 installation.

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tion are sub-divided into three informational layers: introductory symbolic dis-play cases;¹² disdis-play cases for the main chronological exhibition; and in-depth sections or“knowledge chambers,”in which structures or topics specific to a his-torical period are represented (Pieken 2013, 74–81; Pieken and Rogg 2012 [2011], 117–192). Generally, the chronological exhibition uses traditional curatorial tech-niques, wherein most objects are installed in glass display cases and medium-sized military equipment is set on stages between cases. Survey panels, educa-tional experience stations, media stations, and short tabular biographies com-plement this approach.¹³

The context of twentieth-century German history, particularly the history of the Third Reich, has led to a museum that is explicitly anti-heroic and extremely wary about creating master narratives or immersing the visitor in pre-conceived experiences of the past. The Second World War is represented throughout the museum; it is relevant to all of the thematic tour’s sections as well as of the chro-nological tour in the“1914–1945”gallery and at the beginning of the “1945–Pre-sent”section in particular. The MHM’s exhibition is carried by three theoretical anchors, which challenge the visitor, open up interpretative gaps for visitors to fill, and create secondary experientiality: networking, its open documentary style that avoids explicit interpretation, and temporality. Arnold-de Simine reads this as putting visitors outside of their comfort zones (2013, 50). Similarly, Cristian Cercel emphasizes the open-endedness of the MHM (2018, 26–28), which allows it to be read as an“agonistic forum museum”with certain limita-tions:“Pluriperspectivism and openness to contestation are not fully unfolded”

(Cercel 2018, 28). The MHM creates a temporal museum space in which the vis-itor’s present merges with the represented historical past. Visitors are constantly challenged to find their own links between artifacts and make their own interpre-tive choices regarding how to think about the impact of war. Instead of simulat-ing individual or collective experiences, the MHM generates experientiality by simulating abstract effects of war, whereby“[t]he combination of thematic/ab-stract concepts and historicity in a temporalized setting offers a way of represent-ing ideas with implications for the future while maintainrepresent-ing their historical spe-cificity”(Jaeger 2015b, 242).

One of the MHM’s signature installations can be found in the section “Pro-tection and Destruction,”and further illustrates the explicit use of structurally staging violence. The MHM utilizes one of the Libeskind voids to install a

 For example the fragments of a GermanPanzer Itank symbolizing the beginnings of mobile warfare in the Second World War.

 See also chapters 7 and 8 for further details on the contrasting pairs of tabular biographies, spread through the chronological exhibition.

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‘bomb hail’of fifteen aerial bombs, missiles, and shells of various sizes, posi-tioned as if they are raining down directly on the visitor from the upper floors (see Pieken and Rogg 2012 [2011], 111; see also the book cover). Next to the visitor on the bottom floor, there are seven large protection artifacts, which are arranged in two circles. The‘bomb hail’seems to point at the first circle, which is made from three air raid shelters made for one to three people, simulating the destruc-tion of aerial warfare and the desire for sufficient protecdestruc-tion. There is no specific war, event, personal memory, or collective memory simulated through this instal-lation. Instead, the visitor is led to understand and possibly experience the vio-lence and emotions of warfare.¹⁴

The permanent exhibition of the MHM is a prime example of secondary ex-perientiality. Nowhere does the museum simulate historical perspectives of indi-viduals or collectives or pretend to immerse the visitor in an unmediated past.¹⁵ Neither does it recreate historical scenes or sets. Consequently, if emotional em-pathy, understood as a prerogative to empathize with victim groups, and pre-de-signed ideological expectations from the museum become normative, one can easily miss the dynamic potential of the exhibition to create critical reflection.¹⁶ The MHM uses the arrangement of objects, the cross-referencing of sections throughout the museum, art, and architecture to create a complex network of inter-woven objects and data to which the visitor must react, so that they do not become detached from the exhibition. In both the chronological exhibition and the thematic tour, the MHM highlights historical artifacts over narrative.¹⁷ To understand how the MHM creates secondary experientiality, I will first analyze level two of the Libeskind wedge. Its main message is that war, force, and violence are closely linked to society and civil life. War influences civil life through language, fashion, music, and games, and vice versa. The centerpiece of this floor is the section“Politics and the Use of Force.”It reflects upon the use of legitimate and illegitimate force in nineteen double-sided panels with thir-ty-three display walls, which spread in three directions and in doing so undercut any potential chronological aspect. At first glance the headers of the panels seem

 For the MHM’s representation of aerial warfare, see also chapter 8.

 Barring a couple of the educational stations in the chronological exhibition.

 This happens in the reading by Heckner 2016, 365–368. Elke Heckner is so intent on arguing that the MHM cannot prevent contemporary right wing developments in the city of Dresden that she misses the political and critical potential of the exhibition and the fact that empathetic un-derstanding and emotional engagement can be produced structurally, not only mimetically.

Heckner’s methodology would criticize any open documentary museum approach (without a cosmopolitan master narrative) that leaves an active visitor space for ethical interpretation.

 See Jaeger 2015b, 231–240, for further details. See also Jaeger 2017a, 33–37.

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to imply a clear linear progression. The first prong leads the visitor from a display case with a historical publication on the use of force to historical paintings re-flecting government rule by military force, the role of rulers and states, and the emergence of the nation-state. The second prong focuses on the degeneration of violence in the two world wars, and the third one is entitled“From Utopia to Reason: Peace as a Goal of Politics.”Thus, the structure seems to indicate a pro-gressive development from the law of force, to state control of military force, to degeneration of state power, to peace. To read the exhibition as a linear progres-sion toward peace, however, misses its fairly balanced approach regarding the traditions of war and the military, the advancement of technology, and the prag-matic functions of war– aside from its relative pessimism about the ability of any utopian vision of peace to eliminate violence as such.

For example, the portrait of West German Defense minister Kai Uwe von Has-sel, who abandoned the use of military insignia in contrast to former politicians, seems to indicate such a development. At the same time, since every panel is ei-ther a painting or an object in a display case, the visitor is invited to perceive the obvious contrasts and use the constellations to find new similarities and differen-ces. For example, the third prong branches off again in two further prongs; in one of these, a panel displays two eighteenth-century allegorical paintings on the sub-ject of good government and on a peace agreement; in the other prong, there is a panel showing the infamous advertising poster of the security firm Blackwater, en-titled “The Mission Continues,” expressing old and new forms of military life.

Thus, the historical development, a narration moving from no rules over state con-trol and state abuse of power and toward reason and peace collapses in two ways.

First, the allegories point back to the earlier phase of the Enlightenment, destabi-lizing the idea of progress: despite Enlightenment ideals of reason and peace, the degeneration of the use of force in the first half of the twentieth century neverthe-less occurred. Second, the exhibition maintains some ambiguity regarding forms of military force in relation to who controls them. The visitor is able to perceive that the allegories might express hope more than reality. The question of whether the relationship between politics and force truly evolves on a cultural level, or re-appears in similar constellations (albeit in new forms) as an anthropological uni-versal, thus remains unresolved.

The museum’s website describes this section as follows:“The visitor moves in a kind of stage setting. Images of power and powerlessness are not simply ex-hibited but performed as in a play. The stage covers the whole floor and gazes 5.1 The Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden 135

upon the other large theme on this level: the military and society.”¹⁸The MHM chooses a symbolic stage that is – unlike the stage settings in New Orleans and Kraków¹⁹ – abstracted from real history through paintings and objects that require interpretation. The section introduces each new theme with a long paragraph explaining the principle behind it. In the first prong of the section, the visitor finds two very similar, colorful oil paintings indicating destruction, chaos, death, and the effect of state force. The first one,Self-Destruction²⁰by Gus-tav Alfred Mueller (1928–1929), points to political self-destruction through vio-lence during the Weimar Republic. The second one, The Duty of a Citizen – Use of Military Force against Civilians during the Berlin Uprisings in March 1848 by GDR artist Bernard Heisig (1977), indicates how, according to the MHM, de-mands for freedom and justice are often violently suppressed by state powers.

Im Dokument Stephan Jaeger The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum (Seite 143-164)