The Military History Museum in Dresden: Between Forum and Temple Author(s): Cristian Cercel Source: History and Memory, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2018), pp. 3-39 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/histmemo.30.1.02 Accessed: 19-06-2018 08:16 UTC

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This content downloaded from 78.48.172.3 on Tue, 19 Jun 2018 08:16:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Military History Museum in Dresden

Between Forum and Temple

Cristian Cercel

This article analyzes the Military History Museum (MHM) in Dresden against the backdrop of recent theoretical elaborations on agonistic memory, as opposed to the cosmopolitan and antagonistic modes of remembering. It argues that the MHM attempts to combine two functions of the museum: the museum as forum and the museum as temple. By examining the concept underpinning the reor- ganization of the permanent exhibition of the MHM, and by bringing examples from both the permanent and temporary exhibitions, the article shows that the discourse of the MHM presents some relevant compatibilities with the principles of agonistic memory, yet does not embrace agonism to the full. The article also suggests that the agonistic mode of remembering requires rejecting the notion of the museum as temple.

Keywords: Military History Museum, Dresden; agonistic memory; agonism; critical museology; war museums

With its new exhibition inaugurated in October 2011, after a lengthy and expensive renovation bearing the signature of starchitect Daniel Libeskind, the Military History Museum (MHM) in Dresden has emphasized from the start an attempt to propose a fundamentally new way of presenting military history in a museum. The programmatic documents and advertis- ing material stress its unconventionality, its pluriperspectivism, its focus on the human being and its emphasis on violence as a constant of human history. Considering the ambitious scope of the project and its location in Dresden, the paradigmatic German victim-city, an in-depth critical engage-

History & Memory, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2018) 3 DOI: 10.2979/histmemo.30.1.02 3 This content downloaded from 78.48.172.3 on Tue, 19 Jun 2018 08:16:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Cristian Cercel ment with the renewed MHM has the potential to produce insights of significance for both memory studies and museum studies, two in effect tightly interconnected research areas. Actors involved in the reopening of the museum emphasized its official role in the education of officers and soldiers of the Bundeswehr (German Army), as well as its understanding of itself as a cultural history museum. The latter is related to the endeavor to connect the discourse of the MHM with that of the cultural history of violence.1 Even before the 2011 reinauguration, scholarship had pointed out some conceptual affinities between the MHM and several other war museums in Western Europe, particularly the anthropological turn which places the individual at the core of the museum, the aforementioned influence of cultural his- tory, and the centrality of suffering, typical of museal discourses in the so-called “post-heroic society.”2 Following the reopening of the museum, reviews on the whole welcomed the surprising and unconventional manner in which it displays military history, although some found fault with the tendency toward a sanitized presentation of the contemporary Bundeswehr.3 Susanne Vees- Gulani and Stephan Jaeger state that the MHM introduces “the question of whether the relationship between politics and force truly develops cul- turally, or reappears in similar constellations, but new forms” and that it “consciously avoids taking sides in the discussion of whether war should be circumvented at all costs or whether military force and war are neces- sary in certain situations.”4 In other contributions, Jaeger emphasizes the interconnectedness of the different historical and conceptual perspectives on violence presented in the museum, as well as its lack of didacticism, understood as a form of “presentism.”5 Jaeger also briefly comments on the use in the MHM of “a clip from a Wehrmacht film showing a cat dying painfully after being exposed to chemical weapons,” arguing that “the film cannot immerse the visitor in the perspective of the cat.”6 Throughout her extensive examination of the mediation of memory in museums, Silke Arnold-de Simine on the whole commends MHM’s approach, noting the invitation toward “critical self-reflection” and the “shock of ruptures” “echoed” in the exhibition, yet also remarking that the latter does not touch upon “the more complex political and economic reasons for wars.”7 In a recent contribution, Elke Heckner argues that the curatorial approach underpinning the new exhibition of the MHM tends

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This content downloaded from 78.48.172.3 on Tue, 19 Jun 2018 08:16:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Military History Museum in Dresden to depoliticize military history and to shy away from critically addressing processes of othering.8 Taking into account these already existing partial examinations of the MHM, this article elaborates a critical analysis of the museum. It therefore adds to the rich body of literature studying museums, exhibitions and memorials in Germany.9 Moreover, the conceptual framework used by this article, connecting “agonistic memory” with elaborations on museums as temples and fora, allows for broader considerations on the possibilities of museum and memory discourses beyond cosmopolitanism. My approach is configured as a case study investigation, underpinned by what Thomas Thiemeyer identifies as the “two pillars” of museum exhibition analysis: the study of existing sources and field research.10

“AGONISTIC” MEMORY AND MOUFFE’S “AGONISM”

The need for theoretical refinements of “memory” has become pressing, lest the field of memory studies turn into “an additive empirical exercise without much theoretical improvement.”11 Implicitly responding to this challenge, Anna Cento Bull and Hans Lauge Hansen have recently argued in favor of an agonistic mode of remembering. The two scholars drew on Chantal Mouffe’s elaborations regarding the need for an agonistic type of politics, which accepts that democratic pluralism is based upon conflict between adversaries with different interests and that reconciling all points of view is fundamentally impossible. In a similar vein, Berthold Molden has delineated the contours of a mnemonic hegemony theory, related conceptually to agonistic memory.12 Mouffe, to which both the aforementioned elaborations refer, albeit to different extents, pleads for a recognition of the relevance of collective identifications and of the related antagonisms in the configuration of the “political,” understood as “the very way society is instituted,” together with the passions and emotions such identifications entail. According to her, antagonism is a feature of human sociability. Hence, “the ineradicabil- ity of the conflictual dimension in social life” should be acknowledged in a way allowing for the energization of the “democratic confrontation.”13 Agonism is thus meant to provide legitimate political channels for dis- senting voices and for the enunciation of opposing passions and affect.

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This content downloaded from 78.48.172.3 on Tue, 19 Jun 2018 08:16:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Cristian Cercel

Without such acknowledgments and provisions, passions can lead to the exclusive strengthening of various nationalist, religious or ethnic forms of identification that would then hijack and dominate the political. Mouffe also stresses the need to recognize the hegemonic nature of social orders, and the fact that “every hegemonic order is susceptible of being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices.”14 Her conceptualization of agonistic democracy is a response to “the emergence of a new hegemonic project, that of liberal-conservative discourse,” which attempts to “legitimize inequalities and restore the hierarchical relations which the struggles of previous decades had destroyed.”15 Mouffe’s argumentation for agonism does not include significant references to memory. Nevertheless, the emergence of neoliberalism start- ing in the 1970s, the dismantling of the welfare state and the breakdown of social-democratic ideas have been processes linked with the dissolution of the antifascist “postwar consensus” in memory politics. Challenging the tenets of the postwar antifascist settlement entailed shedding light on societal division during the Second World War, on collaboration with Nazism, and on participation in the Holocaust throughout Europe, all issues to a large extent taboo until toward the end of the Cold War in both the western and eastern parts of the continent, albeit for different reasons.16 This phenomenon is also connected with the transformation of the Holocaust into a “moral and historiographic starting point” of the postwar, a “foundational past,” while its memory has become a central reference point “in the global age.”17 Moreover, the reconsideration of the antifascist “postwar consensus” has led to a growing historiographic revisionism implicitly or explicitly equating Nazism and Communism, and to a significant increase of the appeal of anti-antifascism. Thus, changes and reconfigurations related to war memories have eased “the far right’s re-emergence.”18 Against this backdrop, linking Mouffe’s theorizations to elaborations in the field of memory studies appears legitimate. Cento Bull and Hansen distinguish between antagonistic, cosmopolitan and agonistic memory. Whereas the antagonistic mode of remembering is typical of nationalistic discourses emphasizing mainly a putative former glory and heroism, the cosmopolitan mode presents the Holocaust as a mnemonic benchmark of universal value and focuses on the victim perspective.19 Yet contemporary cosmopolitan memory discourses stressing victimhood, transnationalism

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This content downloaded from 78.48.172.3 on Tue, 19 Jun 2018 08:16:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Military History Museum in Dresden and the universality of human rights have not managed to restrain the emergence of antagonistic, nationally bounded memory discourses. In this context, the two scholars suggest that an agonistic mode of remember- ing can more adequately prepare emotions for democratic institutions.20 In a similar vein, Berthold Molden develops a mnemonic hegemony theory capturing the “power relations inherent in collective memory.” His theory also indicates that social divisions, struggles, conflict and tensions between different groups play a key role in “memory cultures.”21 Cento Bull and Hansen’s agonistic memory and Molden’s mnemonic hege- mony theory emphasize multiperspectivity, heterogeneity and open-ended polyphony and engage with the power relations underlying hegemonic memory discourses. Agonistic memory work and mnemonic hegemony theory acknowledge the existence of emotions and passions underpinning the political and at the same time recognize the role of antagonism in the shaping of memory discourses. Their plea for inserting conflict and sociopolitical struggles into the fabric of memory is not meant to lead to the presentation of “simple binary relations between the powerful and the marginal” or between opposing sides in general.22 The two theoretical elaborations account for conflict and struggle and existing social and political antagonisms, but at the same time they provide room for “contingency,” “undecidability” and “silent memory cultures,” whilst aiming to include the voices of “bystanders, spies” and other “ambivalent figures.”23

MUSEUMS AS AGONISTIC SPACES? WAR IN MUSEUMS

One of the key roles of both national museums and history museums has been to disseminate and reinforce state-sponsored identity and memory narratives.24 Appearing throughout nineteenth-century Europe, “national museums” attempted to “claim, articulate and represent dominant national values and myths.”25 With a function closer to that of the church, the initial role of the museum was authoritative and canon-producing. Nonetheless, post-1945 reformist attempts led to the conceptualiza- tion of the forum as a social function of the museum, alongside that of the museum as temple: “the forum is where the battles are fought, the temple is where the victors rest. The former is process, the latter is product.”26 In this context, Duncan Cameron, who coined this distinction, also warned

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This content downloaded from 78.48.172.3 on Tue, 19 Jun 2018 08:16:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Cristian Cercel against the danger of the forum being absorbed by the temple, as this would in effect “inhibit” and “castrate the performance in the forum,” understood as “the place for confrontation and experimentation” and debate.27 Incorporating anti-establishment claims within an established institution can be an effective way of neutralizing them. The understanding of museums as fora appears compatible with the agonistic mode of remembering. It allows for the presentation of a multitude of discourses, without necessarily privileging a particular one. It enables the confrontation with and the questioning of hegemonic narratives: fora should “accept without reservation the most radical inno- vations in art forms, the most controversial interpretations of history, of our own society, of the nature of man, or, for that matter, of the nature of our world.”28 Thus, the museum’s forum function ties in with agonism’s predisposition toward counter-hegemonies, undecidability, contingency and open-endedness. This reconceptualization of museums is also related to the transition from the First to the Second Modernity.29 Comprehensively addressing this crossover would be too lengthy a detour, yet it should be emphasized that it refers to a process of globalization informed by the dissolution of the nation-state, an accumulation of perspectives and the disappearance of unambiguous interpretations of history. Nevertheless, the shift is not complete: features of the First Modernity continue to exist in the Second Modernity. This coexistence is also visible in museum exhibitions, where for example nationally situated approaches can be interwoven with cos- mopolitanism.30 Considering their focus, war/military museums are similar to history museums and hence prone to function rather as temples where national identities are produced and reinforced, and antagonistic discourses dis- seminated.31 Most war museums established after the First World War “were intended to be tributes to the men and women who endured the tests of war.”32 A rather similar discourse continued to be prevalent in the decades following the Second World War. Nonetheless, toward the end of the twentieth century, against the background of the transformation of the Holocaust into the central element of the history and memory of the Second World War, war museums increasingly began to acquire critical memorialistic functions.33 Furthermore, in the past decades the so-called “cultural turn” left a robust imprint upon historiography. Its focus on

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This content downloaded from 78.48.172.3 on Tue, 19 Jun 2018 08:16:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Military History Museum in Dresden the suffering, actions, feelings and thoughts of individuals instead of on abstract structures, also influenced the representation of twentieth-century wars in museums, as examples from Germany, France, England, and New Zealand demonstrate.34 At the same time, war museums which tell “tales of glorious martial victories and tragic defeats that contribute to the nar- ration’s coming into being” still continue to exist.35 Understanding museums as sites of conflict and spaces of continuous cultural and political struggles means that they can be conceptualized as what Clelia Pozzi terms “agonistic spaces.”36 The multiplicity of past histori- cal experiences and the controversies they provoke are prime examples of “polyvocality” and “interpretive incongruities.”37 This is precisely the raw material agonistic memory is supposed to work with, as well as the basis of the museum’s forum function. Proceeding “from the assumption that the total consensus postulated by deliberative democracy is conceptually impossible,” elaborations on museums as agonistic spaces fundamentally look for ways in which “contingent, provisional” agreements can be exhibited as “ongoing” conversations.38 Such conversations are paradig- matically open-ended, allowing museums to stage confrontations “between conflicting positions,” ideally providing opportunities for the imagination and cultivation of “radical democratic alternatives to neoliberalism.”39 The transformation of national history museums into agonistic spaces entails the recasting of the nation beyond its traditional hegemonic narratives, yet without rejecting them entirely, instead destabilizing them through a multilayered and multiperspectival approach.40 Thus, agonistic museum experiences are bound to take place “at confounding intersections,” and to bring to the fore dissonances and clashes, in “the absence of definitive criteria for the making of judgments.”41 If they attempt to embrace agonism, war and history museums should also refuse the “humanitarian righteous, yet powerless pity” which underlies the cosmopolitan mode of remembering and at the same time undermines the constitution of a “critical practice.”42 Replacing antago- nism, cosmopolitan memory indeed draws attention to the “nonsense of nationalistic hatreds,” yet it does that without shedding light upon how “hatred is produced,” “folklorising, indeed refusing political life,” as Sophie Wahnich indicates in her analysis of the Mémorial in Caen and of the Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne.43 Consequently, cosmopolitan museums run the risk of producing apolitical and hence sterile pacifistic

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This content downloaded from 78.48.172.3 on Tue, 19 Jun 2018 08:16:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Cristian Cercel discourses, which, like the contemporary “politics of regret,” are likely to lead to “a retreat from the idea of social self-transformation through collective action.”44 Making “the global present of market globalization” both “the precondition and horizon of memorial representation” is also a way of dismissing the different political agendas of the victims and of the vanquished.45 The quest for consensus when exhibiting war can easily lead to sterile compromises, as the fate of the 1995 Enola Gay exhibition at the Smith- sonian demonstrates, canceled because of fierce disagreements between those involved.46 The mounting of “a temporary exhibition on the history of Yugoslavia ... curated by a team of historians from several of the suc- cessor states” offers a similar example. Unable to reach an agreement on how to present the Second World War, the latter “was basically omitted from the exhibition.”47 The theoretical scene now set, I can turn to the analysis of the MHM. I first consider the concept behind its reopening and discuss the similarities and dissimilarities with agonistic memory. I refer throughout this article to “agonistic memory” and not to “history” as I regard museums as producers of cultural memory. My analysis of the MHM is less concerned with the past as such, but rather with particular representations of the past (and, as we shall see, also of the present).48 Subsequently, I examine the implementation of the concept, first by critically looking at the new architecture of the MHM and then by exploring diverse aspects of the museum, using examples from the permanent exhibition as well as from various temporary exhibitions.

THE MILITARY HISTORY MUSEUM IN DRESDEN: BACKGROUND AND CONCEPT

Erected in the 1870s in Dresden’s newly built military quarter, the museum building initially functioned as an arsenal. It was opened to the public in 1897.49 A “heroic image of the military” was the “central point of reference” for Saxon royal and public self-identification. In 1939, the Saxon Army Museum (Sächsisches Armeemuseum) was renamed the Army Museum Dresden (Heeresmuseum Dresden) and placed under the authority of the Wehrmacht.50

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This content downloaded from 78.48.172.3 on Tue, 19 Jun 2018 08:16:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Military History Museum in Dresden

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the Allies prohibited all museums and exhibitions with a military character. Hence, it was only in 1961 in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) that a German Army Museum opened in Potsdam. In 1972, it was relocated to the arsenal building in Dresden.51 Its counterpart in the Federal Republic of Germany was the Museum for Military History in Rastatt.52 During the Cold War, the politics of display emphasized class struggle and the revolutionary traditions of the working class.53 In early 1990, the German Army Museum was renamed the Mili- tary History Museum (Militärhistorisches Museum). Following German reunification and the merging of the two German armies, the Bundeswehr took over the administration of the MHM, designating the latter in 1994 as its leading museum (Leitmuseum), hierarchically subordordinated to the Military History Research Office (Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt).54 A lengthy process of renewal started. In 1999, the Research Office defined the tasks and objectives of the Bundeswehr museums. Their “guiding ques- tion” (Leitfrage) was to be the acceptance of war and of state-sanctioned military violence. Furthermore, “multiperspectivity and controversiality” were highlighted as representational imperatives, although with the caveat that military history museums have to countervail “false emotions” and processes of romanticization.55 In 2001, a team of experts coming from different disciplines (mili- tary history, art history, cultural history, anthropology, engineering), and also including people with experience in museum work, developed a new concept for the MHM.56 The activity of the team was largely “steered” by military historian Bernhard Kroener.57 The Scientific Council of the MHM together with the staff of the latter, then further worked on the concept and oversaw its implementation, which resulted in the October 2011 reinauguration.58 Initially, the leading curator in charge of the project was Siegfried Müller (2003–2005), who was also one of the members of the aforementioned team of experts. Following Müller’s departure, the role was taken over by Gorch Pieken, who is currently scientific director of the institution.59 The director of the museum comes from the higher ranks of the Bundeswehr. The new concept of the MHM drew on the recently construed affinity between military history and cultural history. The “cultural turn” in military history implied a move toward a “cultural-historical sociology

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This content downloaded from 78.48.172.3 on Tue, 19 Jun 2018 08:16:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Cristian Cercel of organized violence,” freed from the “discursive ballast of the symbolic order of the military” and from the “self-stylizations of a violence-free civil society.”60 Thus, military history as presented in the MHM is understood as part of the history of violence.61 Embracing such a disciplinary focus entailed a clear break with traditional representations of war and of the military in army museums, focusing on the technical, tactical and strategic aspects of warfare and exalting military deeds. The MHM sees itself as a modern cultural history museum.62 The MHM aims to put the individual at the center of its discourse and to present violence as an “anthropological constant of human behavior.” Hence, the “confrontation with the very diverse forms of exerting and avoiding violence ... is ... the unmistakable stamp of the entire museum.”63 The initial concept outlined that visitors would be confronted from the very beginning of their visit with so-called “fundamental anthropological questions,” divided in antonymic pairs (“to exert violence”/“to suf- fer violence,” “fear”/“courage,” “despair”/“hope,” “life”/“death,” “freedom”/“constraint”).64 The idea failed because of spatial constraints.65 Nevertheless, regarding war as the utmost expression of an anthro- pological predisposition of human beings toward violence establishes an equivalency between the history of violence and the history of war, which should be taken cum grano salis.66 Furthermore, the anthropologization and culturalization of war run the risk of depoliticizing it.67 The MHM aims to juxtapose individual subjectivities, feelings and emotions on the one hand and the broader political, social and historical contexts on the other hand. It places emphasis on multiperspectivity, controversiality and ambivalence, and it programmatically targets the disruption of the tradi- tional discourses present in army museums. This indicates that its concept shows important compatibilities with the agonistic mode of remembering, whilst also being informed by the tension “between history and anthro- pological universalization.”68 At the same time, the reconceptualization of the exhibitions at the MHM stands in direct relationship with the post–Cold War shift in German military politics, which sanctioned the participation of the Bundeswehr in “peace-keeping [friedenssichernd] and peace-building [friedensschaffend]” interventions. The MHM is meant to provide the basis for “a positive, as well as a critically constructive support from public opinion.”69 More- over, it has to contribute officially to “the political-historical education”

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This content downloaded from 78.48.172.3 on Tue, 19 Jun 2018 08:16:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Military History Museum in Dresden of military personnel, illustrating “the values and norms of the liberal democratic order” and enabling them to “acquire from the knowledge of the past criteria for the evaluation of contemporary political issues.”70 The immediate proximity of the Officer Candidate School, which was relocated from Hanover to Dresden in 1998, is linked to this purpose.71 The renovation of the MHM could therefore be included in a larger process of rebranding the Bundeswehr following German reunification.72 The stakes of this process have been both internal, that is, constructing the image of an attractive and modern Bundeswehr, and external, that is, showing the world the German capacity to critically address its own mili- tary past and the legitimacy to claim a leadership role at the international level.73 German military interventions abroad are presented by means of a liberal cosmopolitan vocabulary referring to “humanitarian interventions,” “pacification,” “peacekeeping” (Friedenswahrung), “peace enforcement” (Friedenserzwingung) or the safeguarding of world peace (Sicherung des Weltfriedens) in the context of the “humanization of the world” that former German president Roman Herzog envisaged for the twenty-first century.74 Taking these new tenets of German military policy for granted defuses some of the agonistic potentialities of the museum. A tension ensues between the programmatic openness of the MHM, in principle compatible with agonism, and the role it has to play in the development of a positive image of the Bundeswehr and of support for German military policy. The counter-hegemonic potential of the museum is confined: the forum is neutralized by the temple.

THE NEW ARCHITECTURE

Libeskind’s architecture transforms the building into the “first and big- gest exhibit” of the museum, a “symbolic expression of our problematic history.”75 His project entailed a five-story extension in the shape of a wedge, made “of glass, concrete, and steel,” cutting “into and through the former arsenal’s classical order” (figure 1).76 The wedge indicates from the outset a critical interpretation of German history in general and of the recent history of Dresden in particular. It disables the original representational purposes of the edifice.

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This content downloaded from 78.48.172.3 on Tue, 19 Jun 2018 08:16:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Cristian Cercel

Fig. 1. The Military History Museum in Dresden. Photo by author, courtesy of Military History Museum, Dresden.

The redesign directly refers to the fateful night of February 13, 1945, inscribed in public memory as the night of the destruction of Dresden: the sharp wedge purportedly points “towards the triangulation of the area where the fire bombing began.”77 Moreover, it “corresponds to the area of Dresden that was destroyed by the bomb raids in February 1945.”78 Nonetheless, the destruction had started in effect earlier, with the Nazi devastation of the Semper synagogue in November 1938, a fact often forgotten in victim-centered discourses about Dresden.79 Questions related to the reconstruction of the city have been key in its postwar history and are also relevant for understanding post-reunification urban, sociocultural and political developments. Attempting to get rid of the city’s socialist past, “Dresden residents have undertaken popular initiatives to ensure the rebuilding of almost all parts of the historic city center the way they looked before the firebombing of 1945.”80 The much publicized restoration and reconsecration of the Church of Our Lady in October 2005 is part of a broader endeavor to connect visions for the future with the pre–National Socialist past. Yet such visions fail to critically address National Socialism.81 By provocatively entering the debate regarding Dresden’s cityscape and by opting for a project questioning potential monolithic narratives, the new architecture of the MHM can be seen as responding to Clelia Pozzi’s agonistic plea for transforming national museums into spaces for

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This content downloaded from 78.48.172.3 on Tue, 19 Jun 2018 08:16:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Military History Museum in Dresden confrontation. Symbolizing fracture, the wedge lends itself to be interpreted “as a corrective to the homogenising effects of much museum discourse, which frequently seeks to alleviate and regiment societal polarities into a unitary portrait.”82 Furthermore, the fact that the wedge dramatically recast the architecture of a historical building paradoxically left untouched by the 1945 bombing is not devoid of meaning. Yet Libeskind’s architectural intervention also implied erasing the material traces of state socialism appended onto the museum’s facade during the GDR period. A mural from the 1970s, depicting motifs from the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon, commissioned for a “poly- technic grammar school,” is, since 2013,83 exhibited on the wedge in the inner yard of the museum, hidden away and probably unnoticed by most visitors.84 Architecturally obscuring the state socialist past shrouds the collective potentialities and promises inscribed within the latter social and political project. In 2001, when Libeskind won the competition for the architectural refurbishment of the MHM, he was already known for designing the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the Felix Nussbaum House in Osnabrück and the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester. The Holocaust and the Second World War are at the center of all these projects, yet in the meantime Libeskind’s abstract vocabulary of voids and absences, dizzying angles and jagged edges morphed into a catchall architectural paradigm. An architectural jargon, which initially seemed so critical toward Euro- pean memory and history, has become integrated within a repetitive jive lacking self-reflexivity.85 The questions this shift raises are more profound than the simple observation that Libeskind’s architecture has lost its criti- cal sharpness. The use of a visual vocabulary first devised to symbolically address Europe’s dramatic and genocidal past for projects of a totally dif- ferent nature indicates the transformation of the blurred memory of the Holocaust into a watermark of contemporary social, cultural, economic and political relations. But if this is the case, if Libeskind’s architectural language engaging with the traumatic past ends up transposed onto train stations, art museums, conference centers, theater buildings incorporated into commercial developments, or university research centers, it becomes an ubiquitous empty shell.86 It is then difficult, if not outright impossible, to reclaim the alleged initially critical symbolism.

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Furthermore, Libeskind’s confrontation with the authoritative canon- producing function inscribed within the nineteenth-century building does not dismiss the temple- or cathedral-like connotations of the MHM. The sheer scale of the soaring glass wedge apparently cutting in two the already grandiose edifice might make visitors gape in awe after climbing the stairs toward the impressive entrance of the museum, but if it succeeds in doing so it is because the MHM’s new architecture is also an authoritative state- ment. Against the previous monumentality of the MHM’s architecture, Libeskind intervened irreverentially, yet just as monumentally. Politically and aesthetically, architectural feats of the sort are well inscribed in the contemporary neoliberal project rather than bearing the seeds of progres- sivism and emancipation.87 Such a gesture in the former GDR is a modality to show Dresden as a city apt to embrace the globalization implied by the aesthetics of contemporary architecture. In this context, it should be noted that Libes- kind’s architectural overhaul of the MHM was in effect his second project in Dresden, after the plan to refurbish a shopping center from the GDR period failed because of citizens’ protest.88 Hence, the scope of the criti- cism inscribed within Libeskind’s architectural gesture is circumscribed. The wedge symbolically and physically opens spaces to reflection, creates unevenness and produces broken viewing axes. Nonetheless, such cold monumental deconstructivism also prevents the positive role that emo- tions, passions and collective solidarities can play in the construction of emancipatory social projects. Moreover, it tries in effect to connect the role of the museum as temple to that of the museum as forum. However, this will lead to the taming of the radicality inscribed in the latter function of the museum. The potential for agonism in Libeskind’s project easily gets lost in translation.

THE EXHIBITION(S)

On War

The permanent exhibition of the MHM consists in effect of two different tours, one chronological and the other thematic. Libeskind’s wedge physi- cally separates the two, although they also meet at times, suggesting the

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This content downloaded from 78.48.172.3 on Tue, 19 Jun 2018 08:16:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Military History Museum in Dresden interlacing of historical context and anthropological universalization.89 The chronology is divided into three broad periods: 1300–1914, 1914–1945, and 1945–today. The thematic tour is divided into twelve sections: the Dresden view, war and memory, politics and violence, military and fashion, military and music, war and play, military and language, animals and the military, the formation of bodies, suffering in war, military and technol- ogy, and defense and destruction. The very first exhibit that visitors come across on the ground floor is a copy of Carl von Clausewitz’s On War, the famous treatise written in the first half of the nineteenth century, which includes the dictum that “war is merely the continuation of policy with other means.”90 Going further, visitors see a LED installation where quotations by Clausewitz flow past on the lower part, whilst on the upper part comments by several respondents to Clausewitz are displayed, also through a visual flow. The respondents come from different spheres of life: religion, politics, arts, literature, journalism, business and justice. Presenting several stances with respect to war face to face with some of Clausewitz’s considerations theoretically ties in with agonism’s plea for open-ended multiperspectivism in memory discourses. It also seems to avoid the risk that such multiperspectivism may become frozen through the presentation of rigid binary points of view. Nevertheless, the visitor does not necessarily come across subject positions that would not normally be placed together. The two politicians chosen to comment on Clausewitz were Thomas de Maizière, Christian-Democrat minister of defense in 2011, and Angelika Beer (formerly with the Greens, since 2009 member of the Pirates Party), neither of them opposed to German military interventions abroad. The opposition to war is represented by the position of Hans Peter Kaul, former judge at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. The absence of a position from within the Left Party, the only German party programmatically rallying against German military interventions abroad, suggests a rather careful circumscription of perspectives.91 In effect, the inclusion of Kaul’s position, considering the underlying principles of the ICC, indicates that MHM’s pluriperspectivism oscillates in-between liberal cosmopolitan idealism and realpolitik. Thus, it rather obscures any potential alternative counter-hegemonic projects situated outside the circle circumscribed by the two aforementioned poles.92

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The use of art in the MHM

Once past the Clausewitz exibit, visitors come upon Love and Hate, a computer installation by Charles Sandison (figure 2). The two words are projected thousands of times onto a huge not-to-be-missed wall, in an endless loop. The installation resembles an agonistic encounter, like a clash between adversaries. With the two words constantly mobile and attacking each other, it is not a simple static confrontation between rigid parties. The words love and hate indicate the central place that emotions and pas- sions are supposed to occupy within the MHM’s permanent exhibition. Through its location and its visibility, Sandison’s installation points to a potential key for interpreting the MHM exhibition. It also indicates that the MHM makes use of contemporary art in a radically different way to typical war/military museums. Traditionally, art in military museums has been used to serve self-identification and self-assertion purposes. Yet the MHM’s display of a broad range of both historical and contemporary works of art, running the whole gamut from war propaganda paintings to pacifistic works, from historical paintings to contemporary art, from state-sponsored art to works by persecuted artists can be interpreted as a modality through which agonism enters the stage.93 Many of the contemporary art works and installations have been specifically commis- sioned for the permanent exhibition at the MHM. Scholars have already acknowledged the role played by art in moving beyond binary thinking when dealing with past wars and atrocities. Being “expected to be able to deal with contradictions and ambiguities and add complexity and multilay- eredness to politics,” art can shed light upon contradicting and conflicting identifications, it can question dominant hegemonies and it can provide a stage for the polyphonic expression of agonistic emotions and passions.94 In the case of the MHM exhibition, the widespread use of both contemporary and traditional art enables the confrontation with a broad spectrum of conflicting emotions and passions. My own selection would emphasize the permanent exhibition’s display of paintings glorifying war, along with antimilitaristic drawings, for example by Lea Grundig, a Jewish Communist painter whose work was considered “degenerate” during the Nazi regime, the critical realist painting by Harald Duwe questioning the role of the Bundeswehr in the so-called “affluent society,” or contemporary artworks by artists such as Martha Colburn, Klaus vom Bruch and Nancy

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Fig. 2. Love and Hate, installation by Charles Sandison. Photo by author, courtesy of Military History Museum, Dresden.

Davenport. An agonistic itinerary within the MHM could be delineated by focusing on the works of art displayed. In this context, it is also worth referring to the temporary exhibition War and Madness, which showed works relating to the First World War authored by patients interned in civil mental institutions (“outsider art”). The works were intended to “expand old and open up new perspectives.”95 The use of art in the MHM brings to the fore a multitude of often conflicting points of view and stances related to war and thus is one of the most relevant points of contact with agonism and with the understanding of the museum as a forum that bears relevant disruptive and counter-hegemonic potentialities.

Multiperspectivity and Bakhtinian polyphony

Alongside pluriperspectivism, Bakhtinian polyphony and open-ended dia- logue have also been discussed as characteristics of the agonistic mode of remembering. They imply the rethinking of democracy as “non-consensual.”96 Against this background, polyphony is understood as both “a fact of life” and “a value to be pursued endlessly.”97 Analyzing Dostoevsky’s works,

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Bakhtin recognized how they present “an opposition,” “never canceled out dialectically, of many consciousnesses,” which “do not merge in the unity of an evolving spirit.” Presenting a “genuine polyphony of fully valid voices,” Dostoevsky’s “completely new type of artistic thinking” appears to be the epitome of the plurality implied by agonism in both contemporary politics and discourses about the past.98 The production of multiperspectivity in the permanent exhibition of the MHM takes place in several ways. On the top floor, within Libeskind’s wedge, the exhibition connects the destruction of Dresden with two previ- ous cases of carpet-bombing conducted by the Luftwaffe, namely, Wieluń (Poland) and Rotterdam (Netherlands). Objects related to the destruction of the three cities are exhibited (concrete slabs from Wieluń and Dresden, a statue originally adorning the entrance of the Rotterdam orphanage). The text on Wieluń includes a quotation from a Polish inhabitant: “Debris and rubble lay everywhere, and we heard groans coming from beneath the ruins. Three times the aircraft bombed the hospital.” The quotation is then counterposed to that of a Luftwaffe pilot who “described the town’s destruction as a stirring spectacle.” The text on Rotterdam starts with the perspective of the orphans who “knew it was farewell to the orphanage forever” and ends with a quotation from a German soldier on how the destruction of Rotterdam “has bred a hatred that will last for generations.” The caption about Dresden places the bombardment in the broader context of the Allied “morale bombing,” “designed to break the will of the civilian population to wage war.” It also refers to the 1943 bomb- ing of Hamburg, thus suggesting that Dresden has become a powerful symbol although other German cities suffered a broadly similar fate. The fragments of personal perspectives presented belong to two of the Jews still in Dresden in 1945, for whom the raid actually meant salvation, and to one of the Allied radio operators, deploring that the Allies “had sunk to the level of the ‘Krauts.’” Three sets of two biographies of individuals whose lives were marked by the bombings accompany the objects and texts. One is a German pilot who bombed Wieluń, and who accepted his responsibility toward the end of his life. Another biography considers the life of a Pole, thirteen years old when Wieluń was bombed, who went through several traumatic experiences living under German occupation. He, however, “actively supports Polish- German reconciliation,” whilst also attempting to keep “the memory of

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This content downloaded from 78.48.172.3 on Tue, 19 Jun 2018 08:16:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Military History Museum in Dresden the air raid alive.” For Rotterdam, the biographies are of Japp Timmers, who in 2006 was still stating with respect to Germans: “I hate them, for what they did to us with their invasion ... that moment that I had to endure when I was 19, I will never forget that.” The other biography is of a Dutch cabin boy who had to work on a ship operating for the Germans and who in this context witnessed (and survived) the bombings of Rot- terdam, Duisburg, Cologne, Minden and Dresden. In February 1945, German refugees jumped aboard his ship, yet when they were turned away by the Americans, “women with their children jumped into the river and drowned.” The biographies accompanying the Dresden exhibit are those of Manfred Puchs, nine years old at the time of the bombing, who lost his entire family during the air raid, and of Henny Brenner, the daughter of a Jewish-Protestant couple, whose family had been told on February 13 of their “impending deportation” and who were thus in effect saved by the bombing. The narrative of the Dresden bombing which emphasizes that the destruction of the city actually contributed to the survival of the Jews still living there underlies MHM’s presentation of the event in both the permanent and the temporary exhibitions.99 It destabilizes the widespread German victimhood discourse related to Dresden, present for example in the way the Dresden City Museum renders the event.100 The recourse to biographies is a key feature of the museal discourse of the MHM, in both the permanent and temporary exhibitions. In the permanent exhibition, the presentation of numerous sets of two biographies, of both ordinary people and actors directly involved in the conduct of war, fits with the observations on the plural character of memory, compatible with agonism. It stands for multiperspectivity and polyphony and it can enable the establishment of links between historical context, individual narratives and sociopolitical struggles. The complexity of the presented life trajectories avoids the risk that agonism in museums may turn into a presentation of static antagonisms. There are also other ways of staging multiperspectivity in the MHM. Curator Gorch Pieken refers to two paintings by French artist Nicholas- Edward Gabé showing “one and the same barricade of the 1848 Revolution in Paris, both from the perspective of the soldiers and from the vantage point of the insurgent population.“101 In the section entitled “War and Memory,” visitors can review modalities through which war has been inserted into collective memory, such as war as reenactment, war in film,

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This content downloaded from 78.48.172.3 on Tue, 19 Jun 2018 08:16:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Cristian Cercel war as game. In some cases, the opposing stances are placed one in front of the other, like in a confrontation: for example, “War against War—Critical Reflections on World War I in Film and Art” versus “Undefeated in the Field—the Glorification of World War I in Film and Art.” In the section dedicated to the Cold War period the armies of the two German states are presented in parallel. Such a face-to-face display is in principle particularly apt for staging agonistic encounters in the museum. Nevertheless, the tone in which the history of the German People’s Army (NVA) is presented is mainly liberal-hegemonic. In the debates within the Scientific Council regarding the future configuration of the exhibition, the option for a more neutral and less faultfinding presentation of the NVA could not be successfully asserted.102 The exhibition includes some of the postwar criticism directed against the Bundeswehr from within broader West German society. It also provides unexpected perspectives, for example when it emphasizes that the incor- poration of the NVA into the Bundeswehr meant in the first instance a regression in terms of women’s rights in the former’s fighting forces, since the latter allowed women to be active only in the army’s administration and medical services.103 The biography of Tanja Kreil, the woman whose lawsuit led in 2000 to the opening of the armed military service in Germany to women, is also presented. Nonetheless, the degree of pluriperspectivism and the inclusion of more critical stances toward the Bundeswehr seem rather subordinated to the PR role of the MHM. Potentially disruptive contemporary subject positions, such as LGBT perspectives or issues such as sexual harassment or neo-Nazism within the military, are not addressed. Toward the end of the chronological tour, a jeep blown up during the intervention in Afghanistan is displayed next to the voting cards used in the Bundestag by Angela Merkel and Gerhard Schröder (figure 3). The existence of (left-wing) political opposition to the German intervention is again forgotten. The exhibit establishes a connection between political decisions and the deaths of German soldiers, hence presenting the latter as victims. Yet at the same time it fails to draw any connections suggest- ing that victims of the German intervention in Afghanistan were also the result of the same political decisions. An Afghan critical perspective is missing. The exhibition also does not address any potential connections between the exports of the German arms industry and the various con- flicts taking place in the world today. It does not hint in any way that the

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Fig. 3. Bundeswehr jeep blown up in Afghanistan next to the voting cards of Merkel and Schröder. Photo by David Brandt, courtesy of Military History Museum, Dresden.

Bundeswehr interventions can be interpreted as acts of military invasion or that they can be linked to a potentially intrinsic relationship between capitalism and war. Such a reading key is only timidly touched upon in the section dedicated to politics and violence, where a poster of the US security company Blackwater is exhibited, referring to the contemporary outsourcing of war to private contractors. In this context, it should also be noted that the collection of the MHM includes the “rests of two tanks from 1917 (origin: Italy) and 1925 (origin: France),” used by the Afghan army in the 1920s. The two unexhibited objects were “discovered” by German soldiers in a “scrapyard” in Afghanistan.104

Beyond the victim-perpetrator dichotomy

Agonistic memory aims to move away from the oversimplifying perpetra- tor-victim perspective, emphasizing instead the relative character of such categorizations. It is thus bound to be connected with the theorization of the so-called grey zone, which considers the intricacies of agency in contexts of extreme coercion and pays attention to the perspectives of both perpetrators and victims (sometimes in interchanging roles), but also to a wide range of third parties eschewing binary categorization (witnesses, spies, bystanders). Nevertheless, this should not entail the indistinct blur-

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This content downloaded from 78.48.172.3 on Tue, 19 Jun 2018 08:16:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Cristian Cercel ring of lines between victims and perpetrators. Primo Levi, who coined the concept of “the grey zone,” warned both against the oversimplification of history seen as a Manichean confrontation between Good and Evil and against mixing the roles of murderers and victims.105 Paying attention to the “grey zone” does not require “blanket identification with anyone and anything at all, but parsing the possibilities of empathy and identification situation by situation.”106 An instantiation of the concept in the MHM can be found in the Second World War section in the chronological tour, where an entire cabinet is dedicated to the story of Fritz Lübbert, fighter pilot in the First World War, half-Jew according to the Nuremberg Laws, protégé of Karl-Heinrich Bodenschatz (one of Hermann Göring’s closest aides), who accepted to be sterilized in 1944, at his own expense, in order to avoid further repressive measures. The sterilization was in effect a compromise solution reached following the intervention of Bodenschatz. After the end of the war, Lübbert helped Bodenschatz in turn, vouching for him in front of denazification authorities.107 The cabinet displaying the case of Lübbert indicates the interspersed character of the roles of victim and perpetrator. However, a reticence can be noticed in dealing with one of the most important aspects related to war and perpetration, namely, killing. The MHM does exhibit weapons, and we know that humans kill by using weapons, but this is rather a circumlocution of killing. A crypt-like space within the thematic tour is divided into three subsections dedicated to “dying,” “suffering” and “memory.” Visitors can read here a letter from a German soldier from the Second World War describing the killing of a dog, yet this suggests an avoidance of directly addressing the topic. Pho- tographs of atrocities are displayed throughout the exhibition, but such images also create a certain distance. In the section dedicated to contemporary challenges, the drone video of the 2009 Kunduz airstrike is exhibited, but this is a rather blurred perspective on the act of killing. The photo of a contemporary antiwar poster bearing the inscription “Soldaten sind Mörder zu jeder Zeit an jedem Ort” (Soldiers are murderers anytime anywhere) is also displayed. Yet there is no head-on confrontation with the fact that “the characteristic act of men at war is not dying, but killing.”108 This absence is particularly striking in the context of a military history museum, indicating the limits

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This content downloaded from 78.48.172.3 on Tue, 19 Jun 2018 08:16:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Military History Museum in Dresden of representation and, indirectly, one of the most sensitive aspects of the agonistic mode of remembering. A temporary exhibition (2013) about contemporary extreme right- wing violence in Germany provided relevant points of contact with agonism and with the forum function of the museum.109 By showing photographs and texts by American photographer Sean Gallup, the exhibition presented stories of victims, dropouts from the scene, but also that of an active neo- Nazi.110 The contributions in the exhibition catalogue offer relevant insights into the social and political context related to right-wing extremism in contemporary Germany. One of the texts emphasizes the rapprochement between “center” and “extreme right,” the instrumentalization of the equation of “right-wing extremism” with “left-wing extremism” and the dangers embedded in the exclusionary processes of neoliberalism which ultimately legitimate exclusionary attitudes indebted to social Darwinism.111 The personal stories of the right-wingers presented in the exhibition similarly concur in suggesting the links between the impact of the dissolution of the welfare state, the attenuation of differences between political parties, and the embrace of right-wing radicalism. Thus, they confirm the premises of agonistic memory. Both the dropouts from the right-wing scene and the active neo-Nazi photographed by Gallup straightforwardly make this connection. For example, one of those photographed got involved with the NPD after a chance encounter at a demonstration against Hartz IV, the neoliberal labor reform implemented by the Schröder government.112 The neo-Nazi specifically refers to the dismantling of the German welfare state as the reason for his embrace of neo-Nazism.113 Hence, the exhibi- tion addressed the social and political context directly related to the surge in right-wing extremism in Germany. Its discourse was compatible with the concepts of agonism and agonistic memory, whose point of depar- ture is also connected with the consequences of contemporary neoliberal politics. Furthermore, agonism focuses particularly on the emotions and passions which are part of collective identifications that can be hijacked by nationalistic and xenophobic movements. Gallup’s portraits addressed such emotions and passions. In their article, Cento Bull and Hansen refer to one of the scenes in Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing as a prime example of agonism, which compels the spectator “to reflect upon the social and political circumstances that create the conditions for crime

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This content downloaded from 78.48.172.3 on Tue, 19 Jun 2018 08:16:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Cristian Cercel and mass atrocities.”114 Engaging with perpetrators in a reflective, yet not relativizing manner, is theoretically one of the distinctive features of the agonistic mode of remembering in its ideal version. Against this background, (agonistic) war (and history) museums ought to address and acknowledge the social and political contexts leading to brutalization and perpetration, as well as the emotions and passions associated with the act of killing. The MHM makes tentative steps in this direction, yet it does not activate its complete agonistic potential. It attempts to move beyond the simple victim-perpetrator dichotomy by showing the complexities underly- ing these roles. It partially addresses the social and political circumstances related to perpetration and victimhood in their historical dimension, yet it refrains from addressing the emotions and passions of perpetration. It shows that soldiers die, but less so that they also kill (particularly with respect to the contemporary period). Nonetheless, full agonism in a war museum implies engaging with killing to the same extent as with dying. Otherwise, the representation of war will appear sanitized. Furthermore, addressing the act of killing and the complexities of perpetration would also imply that the temple loses its luster in favor of the more critical forum.

Open-endedness

The premise of agonism, in the footsteps of Bakhtin, is that the quest for consensus should be always left open-ended. Bakhtin’s conceptualization of open-endedness is based upon the fact that the “plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses” and of “fully valid voices” means that all of them have “equal rights” (and in addition that each of them has its “own world”).115 Furthermore, open-endedness has in effect two dimensions: internal, “of the characters and dialogue” and “external,” “in most cases compositional and thematic.”116 One of the strategies of the MHM is structurally related to the internal open-endedness. The fact that visitors are invited to look at exhibits from different perspectives indicates the polyphony and open- endedness embedded within one and the same object, similar to the way in which Dostoevsky sometimes makes his characters display an internal open-ended dialogism.117 Next to the technically impressive V2 rocket, a potential object of fascination for military aficionados, photographs from the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp are exhibited, where the rocket

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This content downloaded from 78.48.172.3 on Tue, 19 Jun 2018 08:16:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Military History Museum in Dresden was in effect built. The Soyuz space capsule used by DDR cosmonaut Sigmund Jähn in 1978 and a video installation by Klaus vom Bruch with a quotation from Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists complete the display. Compositional open-endedness is suggested both by the existence of two different tours of the exhibition and by the relative freedom in choosing one’s way through the museum, which comes together with potentially different interpretations. Curator Gorch Pieken suggests that the visit should start on the top floor, inside Libeskind’s wedge, where a magnificent view over Dresden offers itself to the visitor.118 Thus, the reconstructed city of Dresden is practically an exhibit in itself. Neverthe- less, seeing it at the very beginning of the exhibition and then descending toward the lower floors can have a very different meaning to seeing it at the end of the museum visit. In the latter case, the reconstructed city could be interpreted as a redemption and a promise for a better, peaceful future. In the former case, the view over the reconstructed city of Dres- den functions rather like a frail background that can easily vanish because of war and violence. Nonetheless, no physical sign within the exhibition indicates that individual visitors should start their tour on the top floor. The last exhibit in the section called “Challenges of the Twenty-First Century,” which concludes the section dedicated to the contemporary period, consists of two ladders used by African migrants trying to jump over the fences separating Morocco from the Spanish exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla (figure 4). This particular part of the exhibition is constantly revised in order to be as up-to-date as possible. The frail and makeshift character of the two ladders is blatant. Are these real challenges, real perils that the Bundeswehr has to cope with in its defense of so-called “Fortress Europe”? Should the ladders remind us of the dangers one has to go through in order to reach Europe and hence elicit our empathy? Are they an ironic, sad or critical reference to the inhumanity inscribed in the militarization of European border defense? There seems to be no clear answer to such questions, no proper denouement. It is also worth noting that initially fragments of the Boeing 747 blown up in 1988 above Lockerbie were supposed to be the final object to be exhibited.119 Such a closure would have conveyed a totally different (much less open-ended) message. The Lockerbie terrorist attack stands for state-sponsored (Libyan) terrorism: the wreckage of the plane would have rather reinforced the image of the Western fight against Middle Eastern

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Fig. 4. Ladders used by migrants trying to reach the Spanish exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. Photo by author, courtesy of Military History Museum, Dresden. terrorism, of a fight against perpetrators blowing up innocent victims. In exchange, exhibiting the Ceuta and Melilla ladders opens up a radically broader field of possibilities and interpretations.

CONCLUSIONS

The discourse proposed by the MHM displays important compatibilities with the concept of agonistic memory and with the tenets underlying the forum function of the museum. Nevertheless, its scope is not as broad as an agonistic museum forum would imply. Pluriperspectivism and openness to contestation are not fully unfolded. Critical of the German militaristic past, Libeskind’s penetrative architectural reinvention of the museum is an authoritative gesture in itself. The agonistic tendencies of the MHM are flattened out by the internal tensions embedded in its relationship with the military and by its rather uncritical embrace of the current political order. The agonistic mode of remembering aims to expand the subject posi- tions represented by the cosmopolitan mode of remembering and embedded

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This content downloaded from 78.48.172.3 on Tue, 19 Jun 2018 08:16:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Military History Museum in Dresden within the cosmopolitan present. The objective of the agonistic opening is to acknowledge the need to provide a critique of both past and present and to find in conflict and contestation possibilities for the disruption of present hegemonies and for the configuration of a more democratic pres- ent and future. Thus, there is a particular synergy between understanding the museum as forum and the concept of agonistic memory. One can find disruptive potentialities in the MHM, as expressed for example through the way it uses art, through its open-endedness and through the face-to- face presentation of opposing positions and biographies. Nonetheless, the forum is significantly subdued by the temple func- tion of the MHM, inscribed within the deconstructive monumentality of Libeskind’s architectural project and within the cautious positioning with respect to contemporary German military politics and to the contemporary Bundeswehr. This is also the crux of presentist liberal cosmopolitanism: its openness is in effect circumscribed and subdued by the inherent pretense that it is no contingent order, but one about to become both permanent and global, which explains its self-congratulatory rigidization. The MHM does not fully dismiss the authoritative voice of the museum. Hence, it oscillates between being a temple-clad forum and a forum-clad temple. Applying the agonistic mode of remembering to museums funda- mentally appeals to a reimagination of the latter “as laboratories redolent with possibilities,” perhaps going even beyond the forum versus temple dichotomy.120 The MHM appears to aspire to be such a laboratory. Yet in its disruption of the monolithic narratives typical of military history museums it sets in motion a counteroffensive which is to a large extent similar to that of a big battalion. In exchange, the agonistic mode of remembering would also require some guerrilla action.121 Rather than rewriting and expanding the template of the temple, agonism implies a concerted undermining of the temple function of the museum, together with a stretching of its forum function toward its most radical potentialities.

NOTES

Research for this article has been supported by the Horizon-2020 Programme of the European Commission (H2020-EU3.6. Project ID 693523: Unsettling Remembering and Social Cohesion in Transnational Europe). The author would

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This content downloaded from 78.48.172.3 on Tue, 19 Jun 2018 08:16:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Cristian Cercel like to thank all the project team members for the constant intellectual exchanges on agonism and museums, and particularly Stefan Berger, David Clarke, Wulf Kansteiner, Nina Parish and Eleanor Rowley for their feedback on various drafts of this article. The staff of the MHM, especially Avgi Stilidis, have been very helpful in facilitating my research. The feedback of the two anonymous reviewers has also been extremely valuable. The usual disclaimer applies.

1. Siegfried Müller, “Das Militärhistorische Museum der Bundeswehr in Dres- den,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 57, no. 12 (Dec. 2006): 750–59; Hans-Ulrich Thamer, “Die Kulturgeschichte der Gewalt im Museum: Ein Konzept und seine Realisierung im Militärhistorischen Museum in Dresden,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 63, no. 11–12 (Nov.–Dec. 2012): 658–68. 2. Thomas Thiemeyer, Fortsetzung des Krieges mit anderen Mitteln: Die beiden Weltkriege im Museum (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2010); Thomas Thiemeyer, “Zwischen Helden, Tätern und Opfern: Welchen Sinn deutsche, fran- zösische und englische Museen heute in den beiden Weltkriegen sehen,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 36, no. 3 (2010): 462–91; see also Alexandra Kaiser, “Gestorben wird immer: Das Militärische Museum der Bundeswehr öffnet in Dresden mit einer neuen Konzeption,” in Zeitgeschichte-online, October 2011, http://www. zeitgeschichte-online.de/geschichtskultur/gestorben-wird-immer (accessed May 16, 2017). 3. Swen Steinberg, review of the Military History Museum, H-Soz-u-Kult, January 14, 2012, http://www.hsozkult.de/exhibitionreview/id/rezausstellungen-152 (accessed March 1, 2017); Burkhard Müller, “Reliquien der Gewalt,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, October 17, 2011; Andreas Kilb, “Ein Minenschaf zieht in den Krieg,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 13, 2011; Michael Bartsch, “Mensch gegen Mensch,” Die Tageszeitung, October 16, 2011; Falk Jaeger, “Keil der Wahrheit,” Der Tagesspiegel, October 12, 2011; Thomas Schmid, “Ein Keil ohne Donner,” Die Welt, October 8, 2011; Stefan Schirmer, “So ist der Krieg,” Die Zeit, October 6, 2011; Thomas Mickan, “Wenn der Kontext das Problem ist: Das Militärhistorische Museum der Bundeswehr in Dresden,” and Lucius Teidelbaum, “Ein Gang durch das Militärhistorische Museum in Dresden,” IMI-Standpunkt 3 (2012), both available at http://www.imi-online.de/2012/01/26/das-militar- historische-museum-in-dresden-–-zwei-blickwinkel/ (accessed March 1, 2017); Thomas Thiemeyer, “Ästhetik des Schreckens: Das neue Militärhistorische Museum in Dresden,” Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte 6, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 124–27. 4. Susanne Vees-Gulani and Stephan Jaeger, “Introduction: Representations of German War Experiences and the Legacy of the Second World War,” Seminar 50, no. 1 (Feb. 2014): 7–8.

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5. Stefan Jaeger, “Between the National and the Transnational: European Memories of World War II in the Twenty-First Century Museum in Germany and Poland,” in Christina Kraenzle and Maria Mayr, eds., The Changing Place of Europe in Global Memory Cultures: Usable Pasts and Futures (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 36–40; Stephan Jaeger, “Temporalizing History Toward the Future: Representing Violence and Human Rights Violations in the Military His- tory Museum in Dresden,” in Karen Busby, Adam Muller and Andrew Woolford, eds., The Idea of a Human Rights Museum (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2015), 247–61. 6. Stephan Jaeger, “Historical Museum Meets Docu-Drama: The Recipient’s Experiential Involvement in the Second World War,” in Peter M. McIsaac and Gabrielle Mueller, eds., Exhibiting the German Past: Museums, Film, and Muse- alization (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 152–53. 7. Silke Arnold-de Simine, Mediating Memory in the Museum: Trauma, Empa- thy, Nostalgia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 48–49, 86. The careful reader of Arnold-de Simine’s otherwise insightful volume can also notice some- thing of a contradiction in her observations on the role of empathy in the new exhibition. Compare “Instead of offering the comfort of confirmed views and values or inviting visitors to feel empathy with soldiers or civilians, the museum attempts to challenge the way past and present conflicts are perceived” (50) with “they [several museums, including the MHM] try to encourage visitors to get emotionally involved and empathize with the suffering of individual soldiers and civilians” (72). 8. Elke Heckner, “Fascism and Its Afterlife in Architecture: Towards a Revalu- ation of Affect,” Museum & Society 14, no. 3 (Nov. 2016): 366–67. 9. Some recent examples: Irit Dekel, “Subjects of Memory? On Performing Holocaust Memory in Two German Historical Museums,” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 30, no. 3 (Dec. 2016): 296–314; Thomas Hertfelder, Ulrich Lappenküper and Jürgen Lillteicher, eds., Erinnern an Demokratie in Deutschland: Demokra- tiegeschichte in Museen und Erinnerungsstätten der Bundesrepublik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016); David Clarke, “Understanding Controversies over Memorial Museums: The Case of the Leistikowstraße Memorial Museum, Potsdam,” History & Memory 29, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2017): 41–71; Arleen Ionescu, The Memorial Ethics of Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum (London: Pal- grave Macmillan, 2017). 10. Thomas Thiemeyer, “Geschichtswissenschaft: Das Museum als Quelle,” in Joachim Baur, ed., Museumsanalyse: Methoden und Konturen eines neuen Forschungs- feldes (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2010), 79, 82.

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11. Gregor Feindt, Félix Krawatzek, Daniela Mehler, Friedemann Pestel and Rieke Trimçev, “Entangled Memory: Toward a Third Wave in Memory Studies,” History and Theory 53, no. 1 (Feb. 2014): 24. 12. Anna Cento Bull and Hans Lauge Hansen, “On Agonistic Memory,” Memory Studies 9, no. 4 (Oct. 2016): 390–404; Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge, 2005); Berthold Molden, “Resistant Pasts versus Mnemonic Hegemony: On the Power Relations of Collective Memory,” Memory Studies 9, no. 2 (Apr. 2016): 125–42. 13. Mouffe, On the Political, 9, 4, 6. 14. Ibid., 18. 15. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso Books, 2001), 175–76. 16. Dan Stone, Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 17. Frank Biess, “Introduction,” in Frank Biess and Robert G. Moeller, eds., Histories of the Aftermath: The Legacies of the Second World War in Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 1–2; Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holo- caust and Memory in the Global Age, trans. Assenka Oksiloff (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006); Alon Confino, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 18. Stone, Goodbye to All That?, 191. 19. Levy and Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age. 20. Cento Bull and Hansen, “On Agonistic Memory.” A similar argument can be found in Duncan Bell, “Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Memory,” Constellations 15, no. 1 (Mar. 2008): 148–66. 21. Molden, “Resistant Pasts versus Mnemonic Hegemony,” 126. 22. Ibid., 137. 23. Ibid., 128, 135; Cento Bull and Hansen, “On Agonistic Memory,” 395. 24. It would be beyond the scope of this paper to discuss museum taxonomies in depth, yet suffice to say that there is a strong affinity between history and national museums. See also Michael Henker, “Geschichtsmuseen im engeren Sinn,” in Markus Walz, ed., Handbuch Museum: Geschichte—Aufgaben—Perspektiven (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler Verlag, 2016), 103–6. 25. Peter Aronsson and Gabriella Elgenius, “Making Museums and Nations,” in Peter Aronsson and Gabriella Elgenius, eds., National Museums and Nation- Building in Europe 1750–2010: Mobilization, Legitimacy, Continuity and Change (Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge, 2014), 1; Stefan Berger, “National Museums in between Nationalism, Imperialism and Regionalism, 1750–1914,” in ibid., 13–32. 26. Duncan Cameron, “The Museum, a Temple or the Forum,” Curator 14, no. 1 (Mar. 1971): 21.

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27. Ibid., 20. 28. Ibid., 19. 29. Rosmarie Beier-de Haan, Erinnerte Geschichte—Inszenierte Geschichte: Aus- stellungen und Museen in der Zweiten Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005). 30. Rhiannon Mason, “National Museums, Globalization, and Postnationalism: Imagining a Cosmopolitan Museology,” Museum Worlds 1 (2013): 40–64; Peggy Levitt, Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). 31. In this article, I use the terms “military museum” and “war museum” interchangeably. For a short discussion of the various types of museums related to war and the military see Eva Zwach, Deutsche und englische Militärmuseen im 20. Jahrhundert: Eine kulturgeschichtliche Analyse des gesellschaftlichen Umgangs mit Krieg (Münster: LIT, 1999), 24–25. 32. Jay Winter, “Museums and the Representation of War,” in Wolfgang Muchitsch, ed., Does War Belong in Museums? The Representation of Violence in Exhibitions (Bielefeld: transcript), 26. 33. Ibid.; also Hansen-Glucklich, Holocaust Memory Reframed, 9–10; Wolfgang Muchitsch, “Does War Belong in Museums? The Representation of Violence in Exhibitions,” in Muchitsch, ed., Does War Belong in Museums?, 10. 34. Beier-de Haan, Erinnerte Geschichte; Thiemeyer, Fortsetzung des Krieges. 35. Kirk A. Denton, Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004): 118; see also Olga Kurilo, ed., Der Zweite Weltkrieg im Museum: Kontinuität und Wandel (Berlin: Avinus, 2007); Ekaterina Makhotina and Martin Schulze Wessel, “Neue Konfliktlinien in den Erinnerungen an den Zweiten Weltkrieg im östlichen Europa: Zur Einleitung,” in Ekaterina Makhotina, Ekaterina Keding, Włodzimierz Borodziej, Etienne François and Martin Schulze Wessel, eds., Krieg im Museum: Präsentationen des Zweiten Weltkriegs in Museen und Gedenkstätten des östlichen Europa (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 1–27. 36. Clelia Pozzi, “Museums as Agonistic Spaces,” in Luca Basso Perresut, Francesca Lanz and Gennaro Postiglione, eds., European Museums in the 21st Century: Setting the Framework, vol. 1 (Milan: Politecnico di Milano, 2013), 7–15; Chantal Mouffe, “The Museum and Radical Democracy,” in ibid., 17–22. 37. Hilde S. Hein, The Museum in Transition: A Philosophical Perspective (Wash- ington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2000), 32–33, 64. 38. Pozzi, “Museums as Agonistic Spaces,” 9. 39. Mouffe, “The Museum and Radical Democracy,” 22. 40. Pozzi, “Museums as Agonistic Spaces,” 10. 41. Hein, The Museum, 64.

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42. Sophie Wahnich, “De quelle démocratie nous parlent les musées de guerre en Europe?,” in Sophie Wahnich, ed., Fictions d’Europe:. La guerre au musée: Allemagne, France, Grande-Bretagne (Paris: Éditions des archives contemporaines, 2003), 335. (All translations of direct quotations from French and German into English are mine.) 43. Ibid. For Caen, see also Benjamin C. Brower, “The Preserving Machine: The ‘New’ Museum and Working through Trauma—The Musée Mémorial pour la Paix of Caen,” History & Memory 11, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1999): 77–103. 44. Jan Werner Müller, “On ‘European Memory’: Some Conceptual and Nor- mative Remarks,” in Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth, eds., A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 34. 45. Jens Andermann, “Returning to the Site of Horror: On the Reclaiming of Clandestine Concentration Camps in Argentina,” Theory, Culture & Society 29, no. 1 (Jan. 2012): 92; see also Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 20–40. 46. Richard H. Kohn, “History at Risk: The Case of the Enola Gay,” in Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, eds., History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 1996): 140–70; Hein, The Museum, 145–46; Steven C. Dubin, “The Postmodern Exhibition: Cut on the Bias, or is Enola Gay a Verb?,” in Sheila Watson, ed., Museums and Their Communities (London: Routledge, 2007), 213–27. 47. Joachim von Puttkamer, “No Future? Narrating the Past in Bosnian History Museums,” Nationalities Papers 44, no. 5 (Sept. 2016): 799. 48. See also Graham Black, “Museums, Memory and History,” Cultural and Social History 8, no. 3 (June 2011): 415–27. 49. Doris Müller-Toovey, “Sammlungskonzept,” November 30, 2012, 4. This, as well as the other documents related to the MHM, are accessible in the library of the museum. Also Eugen A. Lisewski and Hans Mehlhorn, “Von der Arsenal-Sammlung zum Armeemuseum Dresden (1897–1945),” in Christian- Wilhelm von Prittwitz und Gaffron, ed., 100 Jahre Museum im Dresdner Arsenal (1897–1997): Eine Schrift zum Jubiläum (Dresden: Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr, 1997), 12–13; Mathias Rogg, “Der historische Ort,” in Gorch Pieken and Mathias Rogg, eds., Das Militärhistorische Museum der Bundeswehr: Ausstellungsführer (Dresden: Sandstein, 2011), 7–8. 50. Rogg, “Der historische Ort,” 8, 10; Lisewski and Mehlhorn, “Von der Arsenal-Sammlung zum Armeemuseum,” 22. 51. Rogg, “Der historische Ort,” 11; M. Lachmann, “Aus der Geschichte des Armeemuseums der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik,” in Armeemuseum

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This content downloaded from 78.48.172.3 on Tue, 19 Jun 2018 08:16:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Military History Museum in Dresden der DDR, ed., Armeemuseum der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik 1961–1981 (Dresden: Armeemuseum der DDR, 1981), 11–19. 52. Joachim Niemeyer and Christoph Rehm, “Vorwort,” in Joachim Nie- meyer and Christoph Rehm, eds., Militärgeschichte in Baden-Württemberg: Das Wehrgeschichtliche Museum Rastatt (Rastatt: Vereinigung der Freude des Wehr- geschichtlichen Museums Schloß Rastatt e. V., 2009), viii. 53. Rogg, “Der historische Ort,” 12; Müller-Toovey, “Sammlungskonzept,” 5; see also Armeemuseum der DDR, Armeemuseum. 54. Bundesministerium der Verteidigung, “Konzeption für das Museumswesen in der Bundeswehr,” June 14, 1994, in von Prittwitz und Gaffron, ed., 100 Jahre Museum, 223. 55. Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, “Die militärhistorischen Museen der Bundeswehr: Überlegungen zur Aufgabenstellung und Zielsetzung,” Potsdam, 1999, 18, 15–16, 13. The MHM also has an external branch (Außenstelle) in Berlin-Gatow, dedicated to the air forces. A new exhibition was planned to open in the summer of 2017, yet this is thought of as an interim exhibition before the envisaged reopening of the permanent exhibition following a large-scale reconfiguration, in eight to ten years. The present article does not consider the Gatow museum, although the (new) exhibition concept(s) for the latter and the temporary exhibitions hosted there in recent years (e.g. Falkenstein Goes to War) have a similar approach to the museum in Dresden. Doris Müller-Toovey, email message to author, December 21, 2016. 56. Author’s interview with Bernhard Kroener, member of the team of experts, March 29, 2017, and with Siegfried Müller, member of the team of experts, March 21, 2017. 57. Manfried Rauchensteiner, “Einleitende Bemerkungen,” in Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr, “Konzeption: Fortschreibung,” May 15, 2009, 3. 58. Ibid., 3–4; Thamer, “Die Kulturgeschichte der Gewalt,” 662; author’s inter- view with Manfried Rauchensteiner, member of the Scientific Council, February 23, 2017. 59. Interview Müller. 60. Thomas Kühne and Benjamin Ziemann, “Militärgeschichte in der Erweitrung: Konjunkturen, Interpretationen, Konzepte,” in Thomas Kühne and Benjamin Ziemann, eds., Was ist Militärgeschichte? (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2000), 34. 61. Müller-Toovey, “Sammlungskonzept,” 7. 62. Ibid.; Gorch Pieken, “Contents and Space: New Concept and New Building of the Militärhistorisches Museum of the Bundeswehr,” in Muchitsch, ed., Does War Belong in Museums? 64. See also “Neukonzeption des Militärhistorischen Museums Dresden,” December 14, 2001.

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63. ”Neukonzeption,” 4–5, 7. 64. Ibid., 25. 65. Thiemeyer, Fortsetzung des Krieges, 39–40, 216–17. 66. Bernd Hüppauf, Was ist Krieg? Zur Grundlegung einer Kulturgeschichte des Kriegs (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2013). 67. Thiemeyer, Fortsetzung des Krieges, 129; Heckner, “Fascism and Its After- life,” 366. 68. Jaeger, “Between the National and the Transnational,” 39. 69. “Neukonzeption,” 4, 8. 70. Bundesministerium der Verteidigung, “Richtlinien zur Unterstützung der politisch-historischen Bildung durch militärgeschichtliche Exponate (Sammlun- gen),” March 19, 1999, 1. 71. Thomas Eugen Scheerer, “Das Militärhistorische Museum der Bundeswehr in Dresden: Geschichte, Auftrag, Realisierung, Perspektive,” in Thomas Eugen Scheerer, ed., Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr in Dresden, vol. 1, Aus- stellungen 1990–2000, Dresden, 2000, 7; Thiemeyer, “Ästhetik des Schreckens,” 124; Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, “Die militärhistorischen Museen,” 11. 72. “Neukonzeption,” 4; Rauchensteiner, “Einleitende Bemerkungen,” 2; Müller-Toovey, “Sammlungskonzept,” 7; Thiemeyer, Fortsetzung des Krieges, 111. 73. “Neukonzeption,” 4; Rauchensteiner, “Einleitende Bemerkungen,” 2; on the post-Wende German foreign policy identity and military interventions abroad, see Ruth Wittlinger, German National Identity in the Twenty-First Century: A Different Republic After All? (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 115–38. 74. Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr, “Konzeption: Fortschreibung,” May 15, 2009, 68; “Neukonzeption,” 8. 75. Militärhistorisches Museum, “Konzeption: Fortschreibung,” 13. 76. Studio Libeskind, “Military History Museum,” available at http://libeskind. com/work/military-history-museum/ (accessed October 9, 2017). 77. Ibid. 78. Pieken, “Contents and Space,” 65. 79. Susanne Vees-Gulani, “The Politics of New Beginnings: The Continued Exclusion of the Nazi Past in Dresden’s Cityscape,” in Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Paul B. Jaskot, eds., Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 28. 80. Ibid., 35; see also Anne Fuchs, After the Dresden Bombing: Pathways of Memory, 1945 to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 118. 81. Vees-Gulani, “The Politics of New Beginnings,” 36; see also Zuzanna Bogumił, Joanna Wawrzyniak, Tim Buchen, Christian Ganzer and Maria Senina,

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The Enemy on Display: The Second World War in Eastern European Museums (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 107. 82. Pozzi, “Museums as Agonistic Spaces,” 10. 83. I am thankful to one of the two peer reviewers for this piece of information. 84. The monument honoring the fallen soldiers of the Red Army, placed on Olbrichtplatz, in the near vicinity of the museum, represents a visual recognition of the state socialist past. Yet it is not situated within the museum area but is rather tucked away in a small park. Moreover, during state socialism, it was more promi- nently located on Albertplatz. It was moved to its current location in 1994. See http://www.dresdner-stadtteile.de/Neustadt/Albertstadt/Strassen_Albertstadt/ Sowjetisches_Ehrenmal/sowjetisches_ehrenmal.html (accessed November 12, 2017). 85. William J. R. Curtis, “Daniel Libeskind (1946–),” Architectural Review, September 21, 2011, available at https://www.architectural-review.com/rethink/ reputations-pen-portraits-/daniel-libeskind-1946-/8620025.article (accessed May 24, 2017); Nathaniel Coleman, “‘Building in Empty Spaces’: Is Architecture a ‘Degenerate Utopia’?,” Journal of Architecture 18, no. 2 (Apr. 2013): 151, 154. 86. Studio Daniel Libeskind, “East Thiers Station,” http://libeskind.com/ work/east-thiers-station/; “Royal Ontario Museum,” http://libeskind.com/ work/royal-ontario-museum/; “Extension to the Denver Art Museum, Frederic C. Hamilton Building,” http://libeskind.com/work/extension-to-the-denver-art- museum-frederic-c-hamilton-building/; “Centre de Congrès à Mons,” http:// libeskind.com/work/centre-de-congres-a-mons/; “The Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre,” http://libeskind.com/work/the-run-shaw-creative-media-centre/; “Bord Gaís Energy Theatre and Grand Canal Commercial Development,” http:// libeskind.com/work/bord-gais-energy-theatre-and-grand-canal-commercial- development/ (all accessed May 18, 2017). 87. Nadir Lahiji, ed., Architecture against the Post-Political: Essays in Reclaiming the Critical Project (Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge, 2014). 88. Daniel Libeskind, “Ich bin kein Pazifist,” Cicero: Magazin für politische Kultur, October 14, 2011, http://cicero.de/kultur/ich-bin-kein-pazifist/46157 (accessed September 24, 2017). 89. Jaeger, “Between the National and the Transnational,” 39. 90. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and transl. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 69 (emphasis in the original). 91. Die Linke, “Auslandseinsätze der Bundeswehr,” https://www.die-linke. de/die-linke/wahlen/archiv/archiv-bundestagswahl-2009/positionen/themen- a-z/a-d/auslandseinsaetze-der-bundeswehr/ (accessed March 1, 2017).

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92. Paulina Tambakaki, “Cosmopolitanism or Agonism? Alternative Visions of World Order,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 12, no. 1 (Mar. 2009): 101–16. 93. A journalist described the exhibition as “art instead of militaria”: Susanne Altmann, “Kunst statt Militaria,” Art: Das Kunstmagazin, January 5, 2012, http://www.art-magazin.de/kunst/7544-rtkl-militaerhistorisches-museum- dresden-kunst-statt-militaria (accessed January 25, 2017). 94. Rosemarie Buikema, “Performing Dialogical Truth and Transitional Justice: The Role of Art in the Becoming Post-apartheid of South Africa,” Memory Stud- ies 5, no. 3 (July 2012): 283; Chantal Mouffe, “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces,” Art & Research 1, no. 2 (Summer 2007), available at http://www. artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/mouffe.html (accessed October 8, 2017); Cento Bull and Hansen, “On Agonistic Memory,” 400. 95. Katja Protte, “Krieg und Wahnsinn: Outsider Art im Militärhistorischen Museum der Bundeswehr (MHM),” in Sabine Hohnholz, Thomas Röske and Maike Rotzoll, eds., Krieg und Wahnsinn: Kunst aus der zivilen Psychiatrie zu Militär und I. Weltkrieg. Werke der Sammlung Prinzhorn (Heidelberg: Wunder- horn, 2014), 19. 96. Cento Bull and Hansen, “On Agonistic Memory”; Molden, “Resistant Pasts”; Leszek Koczanowicz, “Beyond Dialogue and Antagonism: A Bakhtinian Perspective on the Controversy in Political Theory,” Theory and Society 40, no. 5 (Sept. 2011): 553–66. 97. Wayne C. Booth, “Introduction,” in Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dosto- evsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxi. 98. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 26, 6, 3. 99. Gorch Pieken, “Einleitung,” in Gorch Pieken and Matthias Rogg, eds., Schuhe von Toten: Dresden und die Shoa (Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2014), 14; Ralph Giordano, “Von der Unteilbarkeit der Humanitas,” in ibid., 28. 100. Bogumił et al., The Enemy on Display, 99–132. 101. Gorch Pieken, “Konzeption und Aufbau der Dauerausstellung,” in Pieken and Rogg, eds., Das Militärhistorische Museum der Bundeswehr, 24. 102. Interview Rauchensteiner. 103. Rudolf J. Schlaffer, “Sicherheitspolitik und Streitkräfte 1955 bis 2015,” in Rudolf J. Schlaffer and Marina Sandig, eds., Die Bundeswehr 1955 bis 2015: Sicherheitspolitik und Streitkräfte in der Demokratie. Analysen, Bilder und Übe- rsichten (Freiburg i. Br.: Rombach Verlag, 2015), 111–12. 104. Müller-Toovey, “Sammlungskonzept,” 34. 105. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1989).

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106. Marianna Torgovnick, The War Complex: World War II in Our Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 69; Cento Bull and Hansen, “On Agonistic Memory,” 397–98. 107. Beate-Christine Fiedler, “Verfolgung und Ausgrenzung sogenannter ‘Mischlinge’: Der Fall Friedrich Wilhelm Lübbert,” in Institut für Geschichte der deutschen Juden, ed., Hamburger Schlüsseldokumente zur deutsch-jüdischen Geschichte, September 22, 16, available at http://juedische-geschichte-online. net/beitrag/jgo:article-90 (accessed February 28, 2017). 108. Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare (London: Basic Books, 1999), xiii. 109. See also the remarks by Heckner, “Fascism and Its Afterlife,” 367–68. 110. Gorch Pieken and Matthias Rogg, eds., Rechtsextreme Gewalt in Deutschland, 1990-2013 (Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2013). 111. Oliver Decker, Johannes Kiess and Elmar Brähler, “Aspekte des Rechts- extremismus: Erscheinungsformen und Verbreitung,” in ibid., 21–35. 112. Sean Gallup, “Fotoprojekt: Rechtsextreme Gewalt in Deutschland,” in ibid., 184. 113. Ibid., 192. 114. Cento Bull and Hansen, “On Agonistic Memory.” 398. 115. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 6, 34 (emphasis in the original); Booth, “Introduction,” xxiii. 116. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 39. 117. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005), 83–85. 118. Pieken, “Contents and Space,” 66. 119. Thiemeyer, Fortsetzung des Krieges, 40. 120. Anthony Shelton, “Critical Museology: A Manifesto,” Museum Worlds: Advances in Research 1 (2013): 20. 121. This is a paraphrase of Bill Schwarz, who stated with respect to Raphael Samuel’s work: “he felt compelled to set in train a counteroffensive, commanding the resources not of the big battalions, but of the guerrilla.” See Bill Schwarz, “Foreword,” in Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Con- temporary Culture (London: Verso, 2012), vii.

Cristian Cercel is a postdoctoral researcher with the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr University Bochum. His book Romania and the Quest for European Identity: Philo-Germanism without Germans is due to appear with Routledge in 2018. ([email protected])

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