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Paradoxes of War Critique on Display: The Dresden Bundeswehr Museum of Military History

Although the Dresden Bundeswehr Museum of Military History reopened in 2011, dedicated to a ‘critical, differentiated and honest confrontation with military, war and violence’, the conflicting readings of Daniel Libeskind’s aggressive architectural addition, and the exhibitions installed within, call into question the ability of any museum to mount an effective critique of war. The enormous perforated steel wedge penetrates the old neoclassical building, disrupting its traditional symmetry and adding open, light spaces by breaking through and splitting open the host structure. The transparent new building was intended as a symbolic foil to the opacity of the older one, which dates to Germany’s authoritarian past, thereby signifying democratic openness and the new role of the military in contemporary, unified Germany. In this way, the building plays upon familiar symbolic tropes active in West Germany since 1949 and in unified Germany since 1990 that set openness, accessibility, and transparency against exclusivity, closed plan, and opacity. The addition intentionally deals in such oppositions, pitting the dynamic new architecture against the static existing structure. The tension between the aesthetically beautiful architectural gesture and the design’s violent intentions highlights the challenges facing the museum: how to portray war and violence in the aestheticised museum environment, how to engage the museumgoing public in contemplative responses to serious questions in an era of short attention spans, and how to create exhibitions that provoke thought rather than dictate opinion. The challenges are complicated by the decision to build a museum rather than a memorial. While both deal with the past, the memorial commemorates past events and appeals to emotion, in contrast to the museum, which attempts to appeal to the intellect by preserving and presenting history through collections, archives, and exhibitions. There are memorial installations in the Dresden museum, but its larger function is museological. In the end, double