Words and things of the Cold War – Weekend
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The Military History Museum of Dresden has opened the exhibition “Multiple Destruction. Army, technology, culture in the Cold War,” suggesting looking at the past as current, and seeing the current from an archaeological distance.
“Drones are nothing new” – the first thing you will read at the exhibition will be the words of the famous American military journalist Hanson Baldwin, spoken at the very beginning of the Cold War. A quote from Baldwin’s article, published in The New York Times on August 25, 1946, accompanies the first exhibit, a nondescript grayish drone from the same era with a nondescript grayish bomb under its belly. Nearby there will be a more spectacular bomb, more precisely, a dented and in places rusty bomb shell: B43, an American aviation nuclear, produced since the late 1950s, stored in American bunkers on West German territory in case of nuclear war and, fortunately, never used in combat conditions . Drones and tactical nuclear weapons – of course, this exhibition, like many other exhibitions about the Cold War that have opened over the past year and a half around the world, when talking about the past, means the present. But since the Dresden Military History Museum of the Bundeswehr is a completely special one, not so much a military museum as a radically anti-war museum, its exhibition turned out to be different from all the others.
The Dresden Museum, like many military museums in different countries, is located in the arsenal building. The pompous neo-Renaissance palazzo was the compositional and semantic center of the entire district of Dresden – Albertstadt, a military town built after the Franco-Prussian War with the money of the vanquished: the French then paid a huge indemnity, the military victory was for Prussia, the moral victory was for France, which was sympathized with by half the world, in addition Later, the triumph of Prussian militarism began to be seen as the source of both world wars of the next century. The first weapons exhibition appeared in the arsenal at the end of the 19th century, then the museum changed many times, expanded, remodeled, closed and reopened, reflecting in its life and fate all the vicissitudes of the great German history, in 1990 it came under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Defense of the united Germany, and in the fall In 2011, it opened in its current form, rebuilt by Daniel Libeskind – the choice of the architect, for whom the Jewish Museum in Berlin has established a reputation as the main deconstructor of German historical traumas, was sniper-like accurate. Libeskind delivered a deconstructivist blow to neo-Renaissance harmony: the classical facade is cut by a colossal wedge of glass and metal, like the body of a wounded man – by a shell fragment. The expressive architectural image prepares the viewer for the fact that this is not so much a military museum as an art museum – not in the sense of aestheticizing the war and not because the exhibitions contain a lot of art authorized to comment on the material and humanize the subject. Although there is indeed a lot of art – the museum, for example, acquired two works by the Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan: in 2014 – “The Treatment Room”, a series of souvenir plates on which scenes of police torture are depicted in the protocol style of medical manuals, and in 2023 – “Gostomel sculpture”, a banner made from the crumpled roofing iron of a bombed building in Gostomel.
In the part of the museum that is located in the remains of the historical arsenal building, more or less familiar exhibitions on military history are deployed – from the Teutonic Knights to the Bundeswehr of the Merkel era. But this story is told not as a story of victories and defeats, but as a story of the total loss of humanity – archaeological monuments make a less strong impression on the modern viewer than documents of oral history; it is not swords and spears that are etched in the memory, but the stories of people, no matter military or civilian , who was blown up by a mine and lost his legs. In the part of the museum that is located inside the Libeskind wedge, the exhibitions are arranged according to a thematic principle. The themes range from broad ones, such as “Army and Technology,” to narrow ones, such as “Animals in the Army,” with a spectacular taxidermy installation starting with war elephants and ending with geese, which, as we know, saved Rome. However, all together, narrow and broad themes add up to a story about how war and military affairs shape human culture, and it’s not just about fashion or music: everyday life (you use a thermos, right? – say thanks to the inventor Adolf Ferdinand Weinhold and the modernization of the field kitchen) , language, the human body itself – all these are partly products of the military. Memory is also largely predetermined by wars, both private memory and the memory of a place. Those who conquer all four floors of the exhibition will be in for a surprise: at the top, at the sharp-angled end of the wedge that cuts the arsenal building, there is an observation deck. If you look into the distance, then from the core of Albertstadt, which was not particularly damaged during the war, you can see Altstadt, which was completely destroyed during the bombing of February 1945 – and this is not only the trauma of “Florence on the Elbe”, this is an all-German trauma. If you have the courage to look down, somewhere far below your feet there will be earth – this is probably how the British bomber pilots saw the city. Choose your point of view – for Coventry or for Dresden, for forgiveness or for retribution.
The Libeskind wedge tilts, gets out from under your feet, drives you into corners that open with gaps and wells along the entire height of the building—in these hidden lopsided shafts are hidden particularly large exhibits, a helicopter, a bouquet of missiles with warheads, or cute little tanks and fighter planes for the race track (section children’s war games and toys look scarier than James Nachtwey’s pictures from Iraq). In general, in the Dresden Military History Museum, some kind of ideal proportion was found between exhibits and labels, image and text, this is always difficult, but especially in a museum that traces its lineage to the arsenal, the temptation is too great to boast about all the weapons of destruction in stock. At times, these riches – guns, swords, bullets, drums and trumpets of regimental bands – are put together in an installation, but not at all for us to admire their functional form and non-functional decor. Weapon installations immediately bring to mind another museum, on the Quai Branly in Paris, opened in 2006 and immediately causing a barrage of decolonial criticism: installations of drums and pipes, torn out of the historical and cultural context, looked like trophies of European colonialist aesthetes, obtained in Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. Dresden installations of rifles and missiles with warheads take us from a military history museum to an ethnographic one and invite us to look at the culture of Europe as barbaric and savage – given the nature of the material, this point of view is quite justified. And if the arsenal in which the museum is housed symbolized the moral defeat of Prussia, the museum reconstructed by Libeskind could symbolize the moral victory of Germany. However, both the departmental, Ministry of Defense museum and the exhibition about the Cold War were made by the side that emerged from the conflict: the party of cultural criticism named after Theodor Adorno does not participate in battles for moral superiority.
The race of nuclear and not only nuclear arms, the conquest of space and the development of computer technology – at the exhibition “Multiple Destruction. Army, technology, culture in the Cold War,” the history of the era comes down to these three big stories. Military equipment, weapons, ammunition, uniforms – no, this is not a children’s raincoat, this is the equipment of a Viet Cong fighter. Educational films, posters, visual aids – a beautiful wax model of a human head from the Dresden Hygiene Museum, demonstrating the effects of radiation damage on the skin. Personal documents – photographs taken somewhere near Leningrad, from the photo album of optical engineer Franz Seldner, who worked at the Carl Zeiss plant in Jena and was taken with his family to the USSR in 1946 as part of Operation Osoaviakhim. Reportage photographs, newspaper editorials, a roll call of quotes, where Goethe – how could we be without him – talks with some unknown American general, who, having learned that the Soviets had launched Sputnik into space, quipped: “We captured the wrong Germans.” Of course, everyone has their own history of the Cold War, but only in Germany – a fragment of the Berlin Wall in graffiti contributes a lot to the decoration of the exhibition – the front line ran right in the middle of the country.
Politics, the army, technology – we see all this with our own eyes. What about culture? Where is her high humanistic pathos, the revolutionary youth of 1968 and anti-war masterpieces? Where’s all the cosmic neo-futurism of 1960s design? Where, finally, is Joseph Beuys with the song “We want sun instead of Reagan” (in the original – an untranslatable play on words: “rain” in German is almost a homonym for the name of the American president)? There is little culture in its popular sense at the exhibition, and the West German poster for “Doctor Strangelove, or How I Stopped Being Afraid and Loved the Bomb” reminds us that Stanley Kubrick’s film was immediately released in Germany, but was banned in the GDR, just like in USSR. A souvenir plate with Belka and Strelka, a painting “Venus-8” by cosmonaut Alexei Leonov and artist Andrei Sokolov – that, it seems, is all. But there is a large collection of ancient 1980s joysticks on display: video game fans are reminded that their hobby is a by-product of the Cold War. The Military History Museum of Dresden insists on an archaeological – named after Theodor Adorno – approach to culture: when archaeologists from some distant Venus fly to Earth, they will find joysticks in the cultural layers of radioactive ash and will wonder for a long time why these barbarians needed such strange sticks -diggers.
“Overkill. Militaer. Technik. Kultur im Kalten Krieg.” Dresden, Military History Museum, until June 30, 2024
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