Exhibiting the War. Heroes, Perpetrators, and Victims of the Two World Wars in German, French, and British Museums

Out of the TowerEssays on Culture and Everyday Life

Edited by Monique Scheer / Thomas Thiemeyer Reinhard Johler / Bernhard Tschofen

Translated by Michael Robertson

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Thomas Thiemeyer Exhibiting the War Heroes, Perpetrators, and Victims of the Two World Wars in German, French, and British Museums

The formation of European memory is a topos often used to characterize a pro-cess in which national boundaries are transcended in favor of universal/Euro-pean perspectives.1 The Holocaust is regarded as a classic example of this type of universalization, which measures the Second World War by the yardstick of human rights and democracy rather than in relation to the national interests of the Germans, British, or French.

Museums are central media for the formation of European memory. Their exhibitions present material remnants of the two world wars in order to keep the memory of them alive. In communicative memory, with an expiration period of a single lifetime, the two world wars are now largely forgotten, since fewer and fewer veterans are still alive and able to pass on their own ver- sions of the experience of war. Memory of the world wars has to be transferred to cultural memory, where it is artificially produced, passed on in a deliberate fashion, and institutionally guaranteed.2 It is not that the war only becomes suit- able for museum treatment once there is no one left who has experienced it di-rectly. On the contrary, it is in particular topics with strong contemporary rele-vance that attract visitors, as the world war exhibitions held between 1914 and 1918 impressively illustrate.3 But it is only when memories of the war have passed from communicative to cultural memory that a society has to decide de-

1 For a critical view, see Henry Rousso, “Das Dilemma eines europäischen Gedächtnisses,” in Zeithistorische Forschungen 1 (2004), online edition, available at: www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/16126041-Rousso-3-2004.

2 Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1992), pp. 51–2; see also Jan Assmann, “Com- municative and Cultural Memory,” in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, eds., A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 109–18.

3 Christine Beil, Der ausgestellte Krieg: Präsentationen des Ersten Weltkriegs 1914–1939 (Tübingen: Tübinger Vereinigung für Volkskunde, 2004).


liberately which memories it wants to preserve of the war and how they are to be shaped. Without the living memory of contemporary witnesses, the museum (along with other media) becomes more than ever a creator of meaning and an agenda-setter for the politics of commemoration, since by exhibiting certain ob-jects and not showing others it establishes the framework and sets the reference points within which and about which public debate is conducted.

The following analysis of ten current museums in three countries4 attempts to grasp the political significance of the First and Second World Wars for mu-seums today through the categories of perpetrators, victims, and heroes. It dis-tinguishes analytically between the three countries and the two world wars, and its content is divided into two parts. In the first part (sections I and II), it is concerned with the perpetrators and victims of the two world wars and thus with the originators and victims of violence and their individual responsibility and guilt. To begin with (section I), the research debate is summarized in order to make the historiographic context clear and to identify the principal issues on the basis of which the exhibitions are examined (section II).

On that basis, the second part (sections III and IV) addresses the question of whether and when physical violence is regarded as legitimate in the muse-ums’ image of war. The focus is on the question of whether war is a legitimate means of resolving conflict, or whether it is utterly discredited as a continuation of politics. An examination of role models in the world wars is helpful here: what is the role played by the hero who sacrifices his life for a good cause, in comparison with that of the passive victim who only suffers and is unable to de-fend anything? These questions highlight the politics of commemoration in Eu-rope in a post-heroic society.

4 The analysis is based on a comparison of ten national museums in three countries (Ger-many, France, and the United Kingdom) that are concerned with the First and/or Second World War and have been opened during the last 20 years. For the First World War, these are the Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne (1992), the Bavarian Army Museum in Ingolstadt (new exhibition in 1994), and the Wehrgeschichtliches Museum in Rastatt (new exhibition 1999); for the Second World War, the Mémorial pour la Paix in Caen (1988) and the German–Russian Museum in Karlshorst, Berlin (new exhibition 1995); for the First and Second World Wars, the Musée de l’Armee in Paris (new exhibitions on the Second World War in 2000 and on the First World War in 2006), the Imperial War Mu-seum in London (new exhibitions in 1989 and 1990), the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester (opened in 2002), the German Historical Museum in Berlin (new exhibition 2006), and the Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr (Military History Museum of the Federal Armed Forces) in Dresden (2011). For details, see Thomas Thiemeyer, Fort-setzung des Krieges mit anderen Mitteln: Die beiden Weltkriege im Museum (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2010).

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Perpetrators and Victims in Historical Research

Perpetrators and victims encounter each other in the act of violence. There is no reciprocity between them; instead, their relationship is characterized by asymmetrical conditions of violence. In German, the term “perpetrator” [Täter] nowadays carries the meaning it has in criminal law. A perpetrator intends “ele-ments of an offense that are precisely definable, subjectively imputable, and punishable.” This legal concept of the perpetrator is intended to allow clear de-marcation of individual responsibilities for specific acts, and it has limitations in cases of diffuse inculpation.5

By contrast, the victim has escaped from his poor reputation in recent years. He has become a moral authority, which shapes memories of the Holocaust in particular. In contrast to English, in which there is a distinction between “victim” and “sacrifice,” the German word Opfer mingles the two cate-gories and can be used in either a victimological or a sacrificial sense. In vic-timological contexts, it corresponds to the Latin victima and refers to a de-fenseless, passive victim who has innocently had to suffer violence. Most of the victims of total war are victimae this sense. The sacrificial victim (Latin sacri-ficium), by contrast, is part of the concept of the hero. He has deliberately and voluntarily sacrificed himself for the sake of others.6

The violence of war cannot be grasped using a perpetrator–victim dicho-tomy alone, since not every act of violence in war is a crime. In addition to the perpetrator in the criminal-law sense, there is also the figure of the soldier as a combatant who kills and injures within a framework of regulations. Although he is a perpetrator in the wider sense, since he actively exerts violence and leaves behind victims, he is not a perpetrator in the colloquial sense of the word, because he has not committed a crime. In war there are primarily the victors and the defeated. War gives rise to perpetrators only in gray areas that are not co-vered by the laws of war.7

5 Wulff Brebeck, “Zur Darstellung der Täter in Ausstellungen von Gedenkstätten in der Bundesrepublik—eine Skizze,” in Annegret Ehmann, ed., Praxis der Gedenkstätten- pädagogik (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1995), pp. 296–300, quotation on p. 297; Hans Mommsen, “Forschungskontroversen zum Nationalsozialismus,” in Aus Politik und Zeit-geschichte 14/15 (2007), pp. 14–21, here p. 17; Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Munich: Beck, 2006), p. 72.

6 Ibid., pp. 73–4; on the concepts of the victim, sacrifice, and hero, cf. Aleida Assmann, “History, Memory and the Genre of Testimony,” in Poetics Today 27 (2006), pp. 261–73; see pp. 268–9.

7 Ibid., p. 72.

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Perpetrators and Victims in Current War Exhibitions

In 1995, fifty years after the end of the war, the Hamburg Institute of Social Research launched an exhibition provocatively entitled “War of Extermi-nation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941–1944,” which created a scandal and consequently became “the most successful exhibition ever held in the Fede-ral Republic,”8 with some 850,000 visitors over a period of four and a half years. Modest in presentational terms, the exhibition—which traveled to 34 cities in Germany and Austria—triggered a storm of indignation with its suggestive photographs and pointed exhibition texts alone. What was so provoca-tive about it? It was essentially an attempt to break out of the monopoly of com-memoration enjoyed by the generation that had experienced the war and to use rhetorical vehemence and visual brutality to destroy the image of a “de-cent” Wehrmacht (the German Army, not to be conflated with the Nazis) still cherished by that generation. That was the image of the army that shaped public awareness at the time, even though historical research had long since correc-ted it. It was the Wehrmacht exhibition—or rather the public debate over it that made it such a fascinating subject—that first succeeded in changing the collective awareness of the war of extermination on the eastern front.9 “The scan-dalousness of the exhibition lay in the fact that it went beyond the dividing lines and made the overlaps between war and crime in the Wehrmacht’s sphere of action visible.”10 The decisive prerequisite for this was a change in the cul-ture of commemoration in Germany during the mid-1990s, with increasing in-terest in how willing the German population had been to take part in the war of extermination.11

8 Ulrich Raulff, “Schockwellen: Das Bild des Zweiten Weltkriegs hat sich geändert,” in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 1st, 1999.

9 Omer Bartov, Cornelia Brink, Gerhard Hirschfeld, et al., Bericht der Kommission zur Überprüfung der Ausstellung “Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944” (November 2000), pp. 89–90 (available at: www.his-online.de/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/veranstaltungen/Ausstellungen/Kommissionsbericht.pdf); Hans-Erich Volk-mann, “Der öffentliche Umgang mit den Verbrechen der Wehrmacht: ‘Vergessen prägt un-ser Dasein’,” in Militärgeschichte 2 (2002), pp. 5–11.

10 Helmut Lethen, “Der Text der Historiografie und der Wunsch nach einer physikalischen Spur: Das Problem der Fotografie in den beiden Wehrmachtsausstellungen,” in zeitge-schichte 2 (2002), pp. 76–86; here p. 76.

11 A great deal has been published about the exhibition, and a more detailed analysis of it is therefore unnecessary here. Cf. for example Hans-Günther Thiele, ed., Die Wehrmachts-ausstellung: Dokumentation einer Kontroverse (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bil-dung, 1997); Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, eds., Verbrechen der Wehrmacht: Dimensionen des Vernichtungskrieges 1941 bis 1944, exhib. cat. (Hamburg: Hamburger Editionen, 2002); on the reception history, cf. ibid., ed., Eine Ausstellung und ihre Fol-

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Whatever one’s assessment of the content of the Wehrmacht exhibition, it sensitized German museums to issues involving soldiers as perpetrators and the influence of Nazi ideology on the Wehrmacht. The Military History Museum in Dresden, for example, supplemented its permanent exhibition in 1998–1999 with the period from 1919 to 1945 that had been missing. Major parts of the ex-hibition were presented through example biographies for ten soldiers, and im-portance was given to presenting several of the soldiers as ideologists and per-petrators as well.12

Whereas all of the exhibitions about the Second World War presented in Germany since the Wehrmacht exhibition have had to critically address the is-sue of the guilt of the Wehrmacht, the connection between the Wehrmacht and the war of extermination is barely mentioned in the exhibitions at the Musée de l’Armée in Paris, the Mémorial pour la Paix in Caen, or the two Imperial War Museums in London and Manchester. The German perpetrators are Hit-ler and the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials. The national view of the war leaves hardly any space for presenting topics that are controversial in other countries, such as the participation of the Wehrmacht in the war of extermina-tion in Germany (and the same applies to the German museums). Conditions are different with regard to the Holocaust, which since the 1990s has become exportable beyond the German museums and memorial sites. The Imperial War Museum in London supplemented its permanent exhibition in 2001 with a large department on a separate floor exclusively devoted to the murder of the Jews and other victims of the Holocaust.13 In its exhibition on the Second World War, the Musée de l’Armée devotes a side room off the main tour route to the con-centration camps.14 In the Mémorial in Caen, the Holocaust now forms the ne-gative climax of the exhibition,15 after having been moved from the margins

gen: Zur Rezeption der Ausstellung “Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944” (Hamburg: Hamburger Editionen, 1999); Hannes Heer, Vom Verschwinden der Täter: Der Vernichtungskrieg fand statt, aber keiner war dabei (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2004).

12 Conversation between the author and Dr. Karl-Volker Neugebauer, Museum Represen-tative of the Federal Armed Forces in the Military History Research Institute (MGFA) in Potsdam, October 25th, 2006.

13 Cf. Gunnar S. Paulsson, The Holocaust: The Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum London (London: Imperial War Museum, 2000). The idea for a special exhibi-tion emerged for the first time in 1993, and planning for the exhibition started in 1995.

14 Paris has had its own Mémorial de la Shoah since 2005, and the Holocaust section in the Musée de l’Armée, which had to be included at the time for reasons of memory politics, may therefore close eventually.

15 This was the case in April 2007. The exhibition has since been restructured.

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to the center of the tour in 1992 following public protests.16 The Imperial War Museum North in Manchester devotes one of six display cases on the Second World War to the Shoah, in its chronological tour. It is notable that in three of these four museums (not in the Imperial War Museum North), the exhibition ar-chitecture used in the Holocaust sections differs from that in the rest of the ex-hibitions. In a comparatively reduced design, they follow the gestures of memo-rial culture, appearing as dark or cool commemorative spaces that require silent reverence for the innocent victims, instead of dramatizing military action as in the rest of the exhibitions.17

The sections on the Second World War in the German Historical Museum (Deutsches Historisches Museum, DHM) and the German–Russian Museum (both in Berlin) differ from their equivalents in Caen, Paris, London, and Man-chester in that they regard the entire Second World War as an integral compo-nent of the Third Reich and as a colossal crime. They focus on the political and ideological aspects of the Holocaust and the war of extermination on the eastern front, rather than on military action (in the west). It is not by accident that the sharpest turning point in the exhibition tour at the DHM, the passage between the new Pei Building and the old Arsenal, marks the start of the war of extermi-nation in the east in 1941, rather than the start of the war in 1939.18

Although the Nazi regime also provides the referential framework into which the Second World War is placed in the four British and French museums, it is not the German point of view of the nation of perpetrators that domi-nates the presentation, but on the contrary the active struggle of each country’s own and Allied soldiers against barbaric Nazism. The Germans are the required antagonists who give war its meaning as a struggle in a good cause. Collabora-tion with the Nazis and failure to bomb the railroad tracks leading to the extermi-

16 Benjamin Brower, “The Preserving Machine: The ‘New’ Museum and Working through Trauma—The Musée Mémorial pour la Paix of Caen,” in History & Memory 11 (1999), pp. 77–103; here pp. 84–5.

17 On the Imperial War Museum, see also Suzanne Bardgett, “The Holocaust Exhibi-tion at the Imperial War Museum,” available at: http://london.iwm.org.uk/server/show/nav.00b005005; on the Musée de l’Armée, Nadine Bonnefoi and Vincent Giraudier, “Pré-sentation générale du parcours,” in Revue de la Société des Amis du Musée de l’Armée1 20 (2000), pp. 36–47, here pp. 46–7; on the Mémorial de Caen, Le mémorial de Caen: guide de visite (Caen: le Mémorial de Caen, 2003), pp. 10–11.

18 The depiction of genocide and persecution of minorities takes up more space at the DHM than the events of the war. Auschwitz is the concluding point. Cf. also Burkhard Asmuss, “Die Dauerausstellung des Deutschen Historischen Museums: Vorgeschichte, Kritik, Ge-genkritik,” available at: http://www.zeitgeschichte-online.de/portals/rainbow/documents/pdf/dhm_asmuss.pdf, p. 14. On the exhibition as a whole, see also Bill Niven, “Colourful but Confusing: The Permanent Exhibition in the German Historical Museum,” available at: http://www.zeitgeschichte-online.de/portals/_rainbow/documents/pdf/dhm_niven.pdf.

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nation camps are overlooked, in a master narrative designed to create meaning. War, the message runs, required sacrifices, but it was necessary: “… the ide-als defended by the Allies in this conflict eternally represent a solemn hope.”19 Expressed in general terms, the difference lies in the fact that the two German museums convey a verdict of “never again” on the Second World War, while the British exhibitions, the Musée de l’Armée, and even the Mémorial pour la Paix regard the Second World War as a necessary evil and as a war that has continued to have meaning right down to the present day. Their “rhetoric of a civilizing mission”20 condemns violence and suffering, but it accepts the purpose of the war. However, the overstatement involved originates to a con- siderable extent from the museums’ different points of view: the two Berlin mu-seums focus much more strongly on the war on the eastern front than the British and French museums (and the whole of the German–Russian museum is devo-ted to it); this is because the institutions are located in the eastern part of Ger-many and it takes into account the operational areas in which German soldiers moved in the Second World War.

Whereas all of the museums privilege the point of view of the innocent victim and contrast it with the murders carried out by the guilty perpetrators in their presentations of the subject of the Holocaust and the war of extermina-tion (when the latter is included), this does not apply to the regular war between 1939 and 1945. In the two Imperial War Museums, as well as in the Musée de l’Armée, the exhibitions are dominated by the figure of the war hero—whether as resistance fighter, soldier, or civilian. The war is primarily action here, rather than suffering. Its victims are not ignored,21 but they are absent as a (dominant) image. The exhibitions are characterized by militaria and uniforms. In contrast to this, the two German museums, and also the Mémorial pour la Paix in Caen,

19 “… les idéaux défendus par les Alliés de ce conflit représentent toujours une grave es-pérance.” From the text in the concluding area (Actes de Conclusion) at the end of the sec-tion on the Second World War in the Musée de l’Armée in Paris. The text is located in the final room in the exhibition, where visitors leave the darkness of the war rooms and enter a brightly lit area where they are welcomed with a quotation from de Gaulle, “Le jour de victoire est arrivée.” The large photographs shown include the German war criminals in the dock in Nuremberg.

20 Jan Philipp Reemtsma, Trust and Violence: An Essay on a Modern Relationship (Prince-ton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 153, quote on p. 160.

21 For example, in the introductory text to the chronological section on the Second World War in the Imperial War Museum North: “conflict brings mass death and destruction. 55 million die on battlefields, in death camps, in their homes. Millions more become refu-gees. Cities, towns and countryside are devastated. Societies are shattered and nations smashed. The impact of this war is total.” Also printed in Trustees of the Imperial War Mu-seum, eds., Imperial War Museum North, Guidebook (Manchester: Imperial War Museum, 2005), p. 11.

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concentrate on the evil and criminal side of the Second World War. The Ger-man–Russian Museum in particular declines to present any German heroes and focuses on the effects of the violence of war rather than on its action—which is hardly surprising, in view of the exhibition’s concentration on the German war of extermination in the east.

All of the exhibitions generally lack any acts of killing or injury in the course of normal war events—that is, depictions of aggressors and victims during the act of violence in a single image. In the museified Second World War, the act of killing only occurs in asymmetrical acts of violence, that is, in crimes (exe-cutions, massacres, etc.), but hardly ever as a normal incident in war. Killing and being killed are visually concise in war crimes,22 but as the ultimate intensi-fication of extreme violence in “normal” warfare they remain invisible. For the First World War as well, there are no exhibitions that show photographs or film sequences of soldiers in the act of killing. Although the exhibitions show sol-diers with weapons, war preparations, maneuver exercises, and maimed bodies and ruined landscapes, the act of killing and the moment of death appear at best in the form of diagrams or paintings.

There are attempts to show soldiers as active combatants, as in the Bava-rian Army Museum in Ingolstadt, where a figurine of a soldier with a weapon in his hand stands in front of a large photograph of wounded soldiers. In general, however, the act of violence itself is not the focus of the exhibition curators’ interest, or else showing it has been regarded as counterproductive or as not educationally useful.23 The depiction of killing in warfare is also ethically complex: in contrast to war crimes, which can be clearly condemned morally, everyday killing in warfare cannot be flatly traced back to base motives, since killing is sometimes an urgent necessity for soldiers at war and is always closely linked to victimhood. In war, the soldier does not regard himself as a

22 Examples of this visual concision in the DHM and in the German–Russian Museum are series of images that show the act of killing as a sequence and thus aim at a particularly strong effect, as the visitor is able to follow the process of murder in minute detail.

23 In the wake of Wolfgang Sofksy’s Traktat über die Gewalt (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1996; cf. ibid., Violence: Terrorism, Genocide, War, trans. Anthea Bell, London: Granta, 2003), sociologists argued over the value of explicit depictions of violence. While one fac-tion assumes that violence must be primarily understood as a phenomenon, in its pheno-menology, the other side is concerned above all with questions of the causes of violence. The opposing parties did not succeed in finding an answer to the question of whether it is the “how” or the “why” that is essential in understanding violence—if this dichotomy is at all justified. Cf. Peter Imbusch, “‘Mainstreamer’ versus ‘Innovateure’ der Gewalt-forschung: Eine kuriose Debatte,” in Wilhelm Heitmeyer and Hans-Georg Soeffner, eds., Gewalt: Entwicklungen, Strukturen, Analyseprobleme (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), pp. 125–48; Reemtsma, Trust and Violence (see note 20), pp. 261–2.

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murderer, but exists in a constant state of self-defense. It is therefore difficult neither to victimize nor to demonize soldiers.24

But what is gained by presenting the act of killing in a photograph or film? Images of extreme violence are quite familiar, and the risk is that images of atrocities may create more fascination than horror, or resistance instead of ana-lysis. On the other hand, avoiding depictions might leave the field of imagina-tion open to those willing to supply unambiguous images. There is one thing that only documentary pictures of the act of killing can achieve, and it is de-cisive here: they all convey killing and dying in war as a man-made disaster, showing the active involvement of human beings in the death of other human beings.

The central issue is not what the viewer can learn from these images (infor-mation), but rather how he or she perceives war (the impression). A false im-pression of killing in warfare arises when a specific type of image (active kil-ling in battle) is lacking in the museums, while other images (killing in mass executions, pictures of victims) are presented. As the French historian Sophie Wahnich has noted, in view of the lack of images of war and perpetrators in the Historial in Péronne, “it is a museum of before the blow and after the blow, not a museum for finding out what happened and what was felt in the heat of action.”25 According to Wahnich, the figures of soldiers lying on the ground, faceless, only symbolize the victim; they are dead bodies and not perpetrators. As passive victims, they have no individuality and suggest that there was never any choice for them. War appears as a natural disaster, as it were, not as an event for which human beings at war are responsible.26

In essence, it is this tendency to present soldiers as victims and war as fate that Wahnich regards as the hallmark of contemporary war museums in Eu-

24 Thomas Kühne, “Massen-Töten: Diskurse und Praktiken der kriegerischen und genozida-len Gewalt im 20. Jahrhundert,” in Peter Gleichmann and Thomas Kühne, eds., Massen-haftes Töten: Kriege und Genozide im 20. Jahrhundert (Essen: Klartext-Verlag, 2004), pp. 11–52; here in particular pp. 18 and 45.

25 “C’est un musée de l’avant-coup et de l’après-coup, non pas un musée pour savoir ce qui c’est passé et ce qui a été ressenti dans le feu de l’action.” Sophie Wahnich, “‘Disposer des corps’ ou mettre la guerre au musée: L’historial de Péronne, un musée d’histoire eu-ropéenne de la guerre de 1914–1918,” in ibid. and Mireille Gueissaz, eds., Les musées des guerres du XXe siecle: lieux du politique?, themed issue of the journal Tumultes 16 (2001), pp. 55–81; here p. 75.

26 Sophie Wahnich, “La fabrique de l’histoire des guerres au musée: l’art moyen et l’installation postmoderne,” in ibid., ed., Fictions d’Europe: la guerre au musée—Allema-gne, France, Grande-Bretagne (Paris: Éditions des Archives contemporaines, 2003), pp. 147–87, here quotation on p. 176; ibid., “De quelle démocratie nous parlent les musées de guerre en Europe?” in ibid., pp. 325–44; here p. 327.

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rope—with the exception of the British museums.27 This hypothesis is inade-quate in relation to the Second World War, but it is applicable to the First World War. All of the museums analyzed here present soldiers in the First World War above all as victims who have no responsibility for the war dead. The soldiers do not kill, they suffer. The museums that show most restraint in relation to images of victims are the two Imperial War Museums, but here as well the sol-dier is more the passive victim of a pointless war than a war hero (in contrast to the Second World War). In addition, all of the museums lack images of war-time atrocities against civilians or of the “dirty war” in the east, which would most tend to disturb the image of a decent struggle. In the German museums, the depiction of the war in the east is reduced to Tannenberg, the German–Rus-sian peace treaty at Brest-Litovsk in 1917, and this or that military campaign in Serbia or Turkey. War crimes against the local population are of as little interest here as the genocide against the Armenians.28 The same also applies to the museums in France and Britain analyzed here: While the soldiers’ suffering on the western front usually29 takes up a large amount of space, war crimes on the western front are barely mentioned and the eastern front is only of interest for operational history, if at all.30 Hardly a single object or photograph, and only a few of the texts presented, tell of the fate of the people and the vandalism of the soldiers in the East. But there are documents in the archives such as the re-port by the Swiss writer Rodolphe Reiss on war crimes in Serbia, commissio-ned by the Serbian government in 1914 and published in book form in several languages in 1916. The report documents with photographs, which were also published in the French journal L’Illustration in 1915, the mass graves in which the soldiers buried the bodies.31

When the exhibitions discussed here are analyzed with regard to perpetra-tors and victims, the following picture emerges: whereas the exhibitions in Ger-many interpret the Second World War as a consequence of the Nazi regime and conceive of it as a warning to the country about its own failure, which becomes particularly clear in the Holocaust and the war of extermination, the ex-

27 Cf. Sophie Wahnich, “Les musées d’histoire du XXe siècle en Europe,” in Etudes: Revue de culture contemporaine 403 (2005), no. 1-2, pp. 29–40.

28 At best, the Armenian genocide is mentioned in passing, but is not illustrated or specifi-cally exhibited.

29 The two Imperial War Museums generally give little space to suffering during war. When it is shown in connection with the First World War, it is illustrated with soldiers on the western front.

30 This is also due to the fact that these museums are located on the western front or concern countries that mainly fought on the western front.

31 Anton Holzer, “Augenzeugen: Der Krieg gegen Zivilisten. Fotografien aus dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Fotogeschichte 85/86 (2002), pp. 45–74; here pp. 50–54.

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hibitions in Caen, Paris, London, and Manchester regard the Second World War as a necessary struggle for a good cause, in which the most important partici-pants were their own soldiers and Allied soldiers. While national boundaries thus decisively determine the way in which the perpetrators and victims of the Second World War are dealt with, the different points of view on the First and Second World Wars are crucially shaped by the resources and stocks of objects at each museum’s disposal. The First World War appears here as an immense mass death that took place mainly on the western front and in which the sol-diers committed few crimes, whereas the Second World War appears as a gigan-tic mass murder, partly because the war’s criminal outrages are more easily pre-sented visually than everyday killing and dying.

Victims and Heroes of the Second World War in Current Exhibitions

The above examination of perpetrators and victims in the world wars clearly shows that museums today present the soldiers of the First World War as pas-sive victims (victimae), while those of the Second World War are primarily ex-hibited as criminals or heroes (sacrificial victims). The role of victimae is as- signed here to the civilians. An interpretation that regards the struggle between the nations in the First World War as having been pointless is incapable of fea-turing heroes, since the higher values for which the heroes would be able to sacrifice themselves are lacking.32 In the Second World War, by contrast, these values are present in the form of democracy and human rights. This is where the German, French, and British museums recognize their war heroes.

The two British museums in particular indulge in a hero cult that supports the version of the Second World War as a “people’s war” and a “good war” and dramatizes the population’s common staying power and the daring of Winston Churchill and his generals as the basis for war victory. The passive victims of the Second World War pale into insignificance alongside its heroes—with the exception of the victims of the Holocaust. When the three countries are com- pared, the two British museums are seen to be carrying out the strongest he-

32 In comparison with the German and French museums, the two Imperial War Museums treat the participants in the wars least as victims, and also emphasize the contribution of individuals to the course of the war in the First World War. In comparison with the presen-tation of other wars in these museums (particularly the Second World War), the participant is more affected by the consequences of the war (i.e., is a passive victim) than he actively determines the course of the war himself.

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roization of the Second World War. They commemorate sacrificial victims and military achievements and do not condemn war generally as a political option, but instead remind visitors that it is necessary to remain capable of defending oneself. On the wall of the Imperial War Museum North, this message is em-phatically embodied by a torpedo, under which the word “Peace?” appears in bold lettering. In the epoch-spanning “Legacy of War” theme room, sensa- tional pairs of words are used to explain why violence sometimes offers a solu-tion rather than a problem: “liberty & occupation,” “hope & despair,” “freedom & oppression,” “victory & defeat,” “democracy & dictatorship.” The message is that “War destroys people’s lives and the places where they live, but it can also bring new hope and opportunity.”33

The picture at the Musée de l’Armée (in Paris) and at the Mémorial pour la Paix (in Caen) is less consistent. The two French museums are in agreement that the Second World War had a purpose in defending freedom and democracy. The Second World War exhibition at the Musée de l’Armée is characterized by its marked hero cult, which in this case is devoted to the soldiers who fought in the war, above all de Gaulle and the French Resistance against the Nazis. Hardly any space is given to collaboration in comparison with the Resistance, and its perpetrators are left without any identity. The same applies to the Mé-morial in Caen: the Resistance predominates in terms of space and is personi-fied in individual heroes. Collaboration is also identified with individuals, but these are only leading politicians. By contrast, the Mémorial presents in vari-ous databases the biographies of “ordinary” French people who opposed colla-boration. While the curators of the exhibition in Paris limit the war to active re-sistance and military action by the Allies and thus heroize it, in Caen there is a vacillation between legitimation of the war (as in the image of the Resistance, or in the weapons and militaria exhibited) and a general renunciation of all military violence. The leitmotif of the Mémorial in Caen, decorating its facade in large lettering, gives expression to this dual thrust: “Sorrow crushed me, fra-ternity raised me up again, from my wound there flowed a river of freedom.”34

The German museums analyzed here have difficulties with heroism in the Second World War. Only the resistance fighters against Nazism are regarded as worthy of commemoration as war heroes. Otherwise, the Second World War is treated by the museums as a warning: it legitimizes (almost) nothing, and instead commemorates the country’s own failure. It consists above all of suffering or crimes. Each of the exhibitions commemorates the victims among the German population that were claimed by aerial warfare, refu-

33 From the display text in the “Legacy of War” theme room.34 “La douleur m’a brisée, la fraternité m’a relevée, de ma blessure a jailli un fleuve de li-

berté.” The text is by the Caen poet Paul Dorey.

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gee movements, and action on the front, but they do not relativize German guilt. The only heroes are in the resistance, and military action is no reason for pride in one’s own achievement. The German–Russian Museum regards its educational task as being to convey the message that “war has to be excluded as a tool of politics,”35 and sees itself as a “museum against war.”36 It dispen-ses with any German heroes and largely does without any militaria, in order to avoid masking the suffering caused by war with any suggestion of active mili-tary power during the war.37 The German Historical Museum also shows fewer militaria for the Second World War in comparison with wars in earlier periods. The focus is on the politics of the war, rather than on its military side. The ex-hibition has no sense of heroism in the field of battle, and instead presents sol-diers who died for the Fatherland through death notices that show them as prot-agonists in the Nazi hero cult—a revealing presentation.

In pointed terms, Britain and Germany show two different poles in the mu-seum treatment of the Second World War, with the French museums located between them. Heroization and pride in one’s own achievements in the Imperial War Museums stand in contrast with politicization, criminalization, and the focus on the victim in the German exhibitions. The most important reason for these differences lies in the role of the British as unsullied victors of the Second World War and Germany’s status as the defeated power with moral defects. France, as a nominal victor in the war in 1945, with moral flaws (as a result of collaboration), ranges in between the two. To what extent are these national dif-ferences explained by the way in which victims and heroes are dealt with in the three countries’ commemoration policies?

War Exhibitions in a Post-Heroic Society

Ever since the battlefield first began to be perceived not as a field of honor, but rather as a cemetery for those pointlessly killed, the passive victim has taken the place of the hero and has attracted immense attention.

35 Christoph Stölzl, “Ein Ort der Erinnerung und Begegnung,” in Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, eds., Erinnerung an einen Krieg (Berlin: Jovis Verlags-Büro, 1997), p. 9.

36 Reinhard Rürup, “Ein Museum gegen den Krieg,” in ibid., pp. 10–11.37 On this point, cf. also Peter Jahn, “Die Darstellung des Krieges gegen die Sowjetunion

1941–1945,” in Bernd Faulenbach and Franz-Josef Jelich, eds., Reaktionäre Modernität und Völkermord: Probleme des Umgangs mit der NS-Zeit in Museen, Ausstellungen und Gedenkstätten (Essen: Klartext-Verlag, 1994), pp. 143–52; here p. 151.

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The trend in the most recent historical research, and also in the pub-lic sphere, is clear. War is regarded above all from the point of view of the violence associated with it and the destruction—both mental and physical—that it leaves in its wake. The history of war in Europe has in general become a history of its victims—and almost everyone now counts among the victims of war.38

The emptied-out concept of the victim no longer distinguishes between active sacrifice (sacrificium) and passive suffering (victima).

The rise of the victim corresponds to the decline of the hero and of honor. While the French and British were already raising doubts about the purpose of mass death even after the First World War and were increasingly aware of the victims of the war as well as its heroes, the Germans worked through their defeat using a heroic semantics that revolved around concepts such as disgrace [Schmach] and scandal [Schande] and demanded revenge for the injury to national honor. This way of coping with the war became obsolete after the Second World War, since the Nazis had destroyed the moral foundation of the concept of honor. Only East Germany was able to regard the defeat in 1945 as the start of the triumphant progress of the working class.39 Sociologists have coined the term “post-heroic society” for today’s democracies. “In a general sense, the term describes the disappearance or declining significance of a type of comba-tant who aims to achieve greater social respect for himself through an increased willingness to make sacrifices [Opferbereitschaft].”40

This turn toward the victim in war commemorations as a dominant discourse of the present day is a legacy of the Holocaust, but in the meantime it has also extended to other conflicts as well. The ethical standards of Holocaust commemoration have become a yardstick for wars of the present day and of the past. The First World War is affected by this just as much as the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

38 Richard Bessel, “Gewalterfahrung und Opferperspektive: Ein Rückblick auf die beiden Weltkriege des 20. Jahrhunderts in Europa,” in Jörg Echternkamp and Stefan Martens, eds., Der Zweite Weltkrieg in Europa: Erfahrung und Erinnerung (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007), pp. 253–68; here p. 255.

39 Sabine Behrenbeck, Der Kult um die toten Helden: Nationalsozialistische Mythen, Riten und Symbole (Vierow bei Greifswald: SH-Verlag, 1996), pp. 18–19 and 600–1; Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit (see note 5), pp. 66–7; Bessel, “Gewalterfahrung und Opferperspektive” (see note 38).

40 Herfried Münkler, Der Wandel des Krieges: Von der Symmetrie zur Asymmetrie (Wei-lerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2006), p. 310; on the “rise of the civilian state,” see also James Sheehan, The Monopoly of Violence: Why Europeans Hate Going to War (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), pp. 172–97.

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This moral context is nowhere clearer than in the Bavarian Army Museum in Ingolstadt. The beginning of the war section is marked by a film and large- format wall sketches showing the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, as the starting-point of the war. The exhibition clo-ses with a photograph of two corpses in Sarajevo in the 1990s.41 The image is part of a photographic collage that also shows an atomic mushroom cloud (1945), the “caller over Dresden” (1945), and the handshake between François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl over the military graves in Verdun (1984). The text for the exhibition area describes the First World War as the “seminal catastro-phe of the twentieth century” (a quotation from George Kennan) and regards it as a pattern for the history of violence in the decades that followed. Even in the present day (1994, in the case of this exhibition), the concluding text in the ex-hibition states, there are still wars such as those in the Balkans. But Kohl and Mitterrand had demonstrated that “even a so-called ‘traditional enmity’ need not last forever.” The moralizing undertone is emphasized by the concluding film in the same room: the First World War, it is stated, was the “greatest and bloodiest war in human history up to that time.” A close-up of a war cripple follows. The final sequence is a military cemetery. The film, which has con- sisted of black-and-white materials up to this point, now switches to color. The final image is of white crosses on green grass, with a soundtrack consisting of slowly pulsing drumbeats. The trick of showing the closing sequence in color is also used by the Historial in Péronne in its film En Somme. Both films use this to bring the historical events, which the black-and-white shots keep at a di-stance as temporally remote, into the present day and to update the moral mes-sage: this war was pointless.

This interpretation of the First World War is typical of the way in which it is depicted in all of the museums analyzed here. The message, particularly in the German and French exhibitions, always condenses into the same iconographic elements: military cemeteries, war cripples, images of destruction, and some-times gestures of reconciliation. None of the museums attempts to justify the 1914–1918 war. The clearly hostile stance characteristic of the exhibitions on the Second World War is lacking. The First World War is a war with no clearly guilty parties, although it is sometimes claimed that the Germans bore the ma-jor responsibility for its outbreak. For the Bavarian Army Museum, the assas-sination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo “triggered the catastrophe.” It was followed by reciprocal ultimatums and declarations of war, until “almost mechanically … the existing alliances came into force … and the fully-armed

41 The visitor is not informed of this, however, as the picture is not accompanied by a cap-tion.

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powers went to war.”42 The Musée de l’Armée also interprets the outbreak of the war as almost inevitable: the assassination in Sarajevo “triggers a mecha-nism that nothing can stop.”43 And even the Imperial War Museum speaks of a “chain reaction”44 leading to the outbreak of war. By contrast, all of the exhibi-tions clearly name the guilty party in the Second World War. Whereas the Impe-rial War Museum North still cautiously states for the First World War, “The as-sassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand … provided the spark that ignited the First World War,” no reservations are thought necessary for the Second World War: “On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded Poland. The Second World War had begun.”45

This asymmetry in the attribution of guilt is not surprising, as it corresponds to real differences between the two wars that are also present in the current cul-ture of commemoration.46 The historians Antoine Prost and Jay Winter wrote on today’s interpretation of the outbreak of the war in 1914 that “What had been deemed a crime had become a collective error.”47 The question of war guilt that concerned historians up to the 1970s takes second place in the museums nowa-days to an attitude of understanding among nations, which although it does not overcome national differences no longer sees them as having any moral added value that could justify the bloodbaths of the First World War. Death and suf-fering make the military yardsticks of victory and defeat seem irrelevant.48 The documentary film presented at the Musée de l’Armée summing up the war and contrasting scenes of victory with scenes of suffering is entitled “Victory and Mourning.” The headline in the Daily Chronicle shown at the end of the sec-

42 From the introductory text in the museum, which however emphasizes the important role played by Germany’s “blank check” for Austria–Hungary.

43 From the introductory text in the museum (“déclenche un mécanisme que rien ne peut ar-rêter”).

44 Cf. Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, eds., Imperial War Museum London (London, n.d.), p. 10.

45 Cf. Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, eds., Imperial War Museum North (see note 21), quotations on pp. 14 and 20.

46 Historians never argued as passionately and antagonistically over the question of blame for the outbreak of the Second World War as they did over blame for the First World War. The evidence for German guilt in the sources were too clear; cf. Gerhard Schreiber, “Der Zweite Weltkrieg in der internationalen Forschung: Konzeptionen, Thesen, Kont-roversen,” in Wolfgang Michalka, ed., Der Zweite Weltkrieg: Analysen, Grundzüge, For-schungsbilanz (Weyarn: Seehamer, 1997), pp. 3–24; here p. 10.

47 Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 56.

48 Cf. also Susanne Brandt, “Exposer la Grande Guerre: La première guerre mondiale dans les expositions en Allemagne de 1914 à nos jours,” in Jean-Jacques Becker, ed., Histoire culturelle de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Colin, 2005), pp. 139–55; here p. 153.

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tion on the First World War in the Imperial War Museum in London is “Surren-der of Germany.” The case opposite shows a gravestone, military medal, and the last letter written by Lieutenant Edwin Bennett to his wife Dorothy, with pho-tos of the couple.

In comparison with the other museums, the two Imperial War Museums are the most restrained in relation to victimization and relativization of national differences. The Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne goes furthest, treating the adversaries in the First World War—France, the United King-dom, and Germany—equally and conceding a right to commemorate their own suffering to all three nations. Sophie Wahnich therefore accuses the Historial of concealing the differences between the adversaries, dismissing their hatred for each other as atavism and instead only looking at the suffering in which they all share equally. It is not the contemporary individuals’ motivation for fighting (chauvinism, will to defend one’s country, etc.) that is shown; instead, fighting for one’s own country is presented as generally illegitimate. The concern is not with the nation, but rather with European reconciliation. The cultural history of the war traced by the Historial, she argues, has overwritten the political reality of the event and produced an aseptic image of the war that dispenses with images of battle and no longer has anything in common with the experience of those who took part in the war. The Historial, according to Wahnich, denounces the modern concept of the nation which the First World War was fought to protect, in favor of a postmodern vision of European reconciliation. This has removed the foundation for any form of heroism, as there is no basis for heroism when there is no real adversary who can be fought against for good reasons. The view of history underlying this, which is shared by many war exhibitions in Europe, rejects as a legitimate political method the idea of fighting for a just cause that is embodied by the hero, and instead condemns any form of violence as inad-missible, Wahnich argues. It commemorates innocent victims and reinterprets former heroes as victims. Sympathy is the central emotion this form of com-memoration aims for. It does not teach visitors to be active and defend themselves and instead promotes apathy and passivity.49 What Wahnich is criticizing is what she regards as the conviction-ethics attitude of many museum presenta-tions of the world wars. Whereas an ethics of responsibility would consider the negative consequences of renouncing violence, the exhibitions make the prin-ciple of non-violence absolute.

49 Wahnich, “De quelle démocratie” (see note 26); ibid., “Les musées d’histoire” (see note 27); ibid., “Disposer des corps” (see note 25). On the European attitude in the Historial, cf. also Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14–18, retrouver la guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), pp. 18–19; Winter and Prost, The Great War in History (see note 47), p. 193.

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One need not agree with this interpretation in every detail to be able to share Wahnich’s core argument—but only in the case of the First World War. For the museum presentations, war between nations is not an option for the fu-ture. The allegedly base motives of contemporary participants are only passed on cautiously, as they communicate the wrong messages. It is not that the mu-seums are silent about the “struggle between cultures” or the alleged war between democracy and German militarism. Texts on this topic and propaganda posters are part of the repertoire of all the exhibitions. However, the powerfully commemorative (room-filling) photographs consist of icons of war cripples, maltreated corpses of soldiers, bodies lying on the ground, uniforms, faces of soldiers deprived of hope, and cemetery crosses. These document the truth about death and physical suffering, while propaganda posters above all of-fer evidence of lies. In addition, there is a lack of photographs or films show-ing the act of killing from the First World War and of testimony offering evi-dence about the contribution made by the soldiers themselves to wartime atroci-ties. The uncomfortable questions of guilt and responsibility in and for the war threaten reconciliation between the nations, rather than promoting it. In suffering, however, everyone is equal. “Verticality is the language of hope, ho-rizontality that of mourning,” as Jay Winter and Antoine Prost write about the Historial in Péronne. “The discourse presented by the museum is one of a com-mon catastrophe.”50 In this view, the First World War was thus a pointless enter-prise. In contrast to the Second World War, there was no enemy that could be regarded as an adversary by today’s standards.

This is the fundamental difference in terms of commemorative politics between the presentations of the First and Second World Wars in the museum. The First World War was a war between nations that are now friends, which can therefore no longer be justified. It only had losers, and no winners. All of the countries are in agreement in rejecting it. The Second World War was a con-flict between ideologies and served to protect democracy. The battle was not against the Germans, but against their false ideology. This war continues to be meaningful and just because it protected the basis for today’s coexistence:

In any case, however, it is true that theories of just war distribute justice and injustice with radical inequality: in principle, justice is all on one side and injustice all on the other. War is not conceived of as a duel between two figures that are in principle equal, but rather as an

50 Winter and Prost, The Great War in History (see note 47), p. 187.

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armed enforcement of justice or even righteousness against what threatens it.51

This interpretation of the war explains why the Mémorial pour la Paix changed its original plan to commemorate Caen above all as a “ville martyr.” Two complete sections entitled “The Cost of Victory” and “The Martyrdom of Normandy” were to have been devoted to the Battle of Normandy. According to the historian Benjamin Brower, the museum abandoned this approach because it would have threatened the desired message of presenting a plea in favor of de-mocracy and its defense. Caen was mainly destroyed by Allied bombing, which would have relativized the guilt of the Germans for all of the war’s evils.52 Just war would have appeared less just and therefore less justified.

The Second World War not only counts as a just war, but in the symbol of the Holocaust also serves as a commemorative sign for the unplumbed depths of what human beings are capable of, and the German museums in particular focus on this. The return of the perpetrators of the war of extermination and the Holocaust to museums and memorial sites since the 1990s arises from an educational approach that takes seriously the warning by Theodor Adorno that while the victims have to be commemorated, above all the perpetrators must be engaged with, as it is with them that the danger of repetition lies.53

A review of the exhibitions analyzed here suggests the conclusion that com-memoration of the First World War is similar in museums internationally. The exhibitions tell the story of the “great seminal catastrophe of this century” from the victims’ point of view, that is, that of the soldiers who had no responsibi-lity for the course of the war and who generally incriminated themselves little during it. War crimes are largely omitted, and one searches for perpetrators in vain. Neither war atrocities nor the dirty war on the eastern front are worth (much) discussion. The war is seen as a European catastrophe with no clear cul-prits, more as a matter of fate than as a failure individually attributable to hu-man beings. It was pointless, because the values for which it was waged are to-day no longer satisfactory. The First World War is depoliticized, because the uncomfortable questions of guilt and responsibility take second place to an in-ternational consensus on sympathy for the victims. It is then re-politicized and

51 Münkler, Der Wandel des Krieges (see note 40), p. 272.52 In addition, according to Brower, the Museum would otherwise not have been able to ex-

pect donations from British and American veterans’ organizations; cf. Brower, “The Pre-serving Machine” (see note 16), pp. 85–6.

53 As quoted by Thomas Lutz at a conference on “Exhibiting Nazi Medical Crimes” held in Dresden in February 2007.

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re-coded if the suffering of that time is meant to be used in the service of Euro-pean reconciliation today.54

In contrast to the First World War, the interpretation of the Second World War is even today still marked by the hostile stance of wartime: the heroes of the Second World War are the Allied liberators and the resistance fighters, and their antagonists are the European Fascists, with Hitler and the war criminals who were condemned in Nuremberg at their head. It was a matter of defen-ding democracy, freedom, and human rights against racial hatred, subjugation, intolerance, and industrialized mass murder. The focus here is on innocent ci-vilian victims on the home front and in the war of extermination. According to this interpretation, the Second World War was not pointless, but was a just war conducted by the Allies in which justice and injustice each lay with one side. The First World War is not able to offer such added value.

54 Cf. Wahnich, “Les musées d’histoire” (see note 27); ibid., “De quelle démocratie” (see note 26).

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Exhibiting the War. Heroes, Perpetrators, and Victims of the Two World Wars in German, French, and British Museums

Documents