There has been a lot in Vienna describing the country’s history in the Second World War but at the same time these monuments are not openly advertised and so are quite hard to find if you don’t have a guide book or knowledge from word of mouth. So far in Vienna I’ve seen the Monument against Fascism, the German flakturmes, the monument at Schwedenplatz where Vienna’s Gestapo headquarters used to stand, and the Jewish monument at Judenplatz. These monuments all create a sense of victim hood, which in some cases is a reasonable assumption while at other times it seems to be directing blame completely on the Germans. These monuments feel focused on condemning the past without actually looking into what that past means. They blame the past for the past without reasonably identifying what happened in their country as a whole. This might all sound like the opinions of a naïve American but there doesn’t seem to be a concrete stance on the issue the way there is in Germany. To a lesser degree, Austria is kind of like France, where it focuses on the victimization and tries to ignore the collaborators, whether they be Austrian or in the case of France, part of the Vichy regime. Probably the building with the most accurate depiction of life after 1938 would be the Heeresgeschichtliche military museum, most notably because of the plethora of objects from the time period on display. The section on Nazi occupied Austria has some fascinating objects, including pamphlets, pocket books of fascist doctrine, and armbands from the different groups fighting in the streets of Vienna. The museum doesn’t seem to acknowledge one side or the other regarding the question of Austria’s duplicity but simply shows what was going on in an unbiased manner, which I greatly appreciated. When you finally get to the war I was interested in a variety of the weapons, uniforms, and vehicles they had available but at the same time considered the exhibit much smaller than the WWII section at Les Invalides in Paris. Nonetheless, the kubelswagons, Stork reconnaissance planes, and ME 262 engine pieces were all quite interesting to view. I think the museum did a good job of showing all the environments that the German army went through during the war, showing uniforms for desert and tundra combat, as well as those for planes and submarines.
One of the more abstract parts of the exhibit were several cases featuring interpretative images of the Nazi period. These modern art pieces featured disorienting forms of Nazi soldiers eating body parts and drinking blood as well as on of Hitler using a fork and knife to cut a brain apart. The museum had a similar gallery on the second floor with artists depicting Napoleon’s reign over Austria in the early 19th century but those paintings had a more neutral tone. The pictures could be sad and melancholy but they didn’t resort to morbid perversity like the WWII section’s modern art. I understand what these artists were attempting to achieve, they wished to show that the intellectualism and humanity of the world was nearly destroyed by the rise of fascism but these pieces are so ugly and disturbing that they reduce the symbolism to paltry exploitation and leave little real substance in its wake. I have to say I’ve been fairly hard on a good deal of the memorials here in Vienna and these works are another disappointment but that being said, it was only a small part of the WWII exhibit and the rest successfully explained through historical research and presentation of objects what happened between 1938-1945 in Austria. I am much more skeptical of monuments and works of art that tell me how to feel and blatant manner of the cannibalistic art at the Heeresgeschichtliche military museum left a bad taste in my mouth but when the museum isn’t trying to push forward its ideas I found it to be compelling. Rather than show ugly images of wolves eating human bodies show actual pictures from the war to get your point across. Show what really happened rather than interpret what happened. The rest of the museum follows the former idea and completely excels at explaining WWII to visitors. All the uniforms, weapons, and vehicles I explained above give people a sense of the totality that was going on back then. It shows that the war wasn’t confined but expanding to nearly every continent. Overall, the museum gives visitors a look at how a turbulent belligerency of ideologies throughout Austria and Germany transformed internal politics into a global cataclysm that saw all the major powers get dragged into the bloodiest conflict in human history. For this reason, I feel the museum succeeds because it doesn’t present solely one emotion or one event on the historical timeframe but combines all of it into one whole exhibit. While the monuments around Vienna discuss the persecution of Jews or political prisoners, or war itself, the museum identifies these problems and all the other issues surrounding the time period and thus adds weight to why these persecutions happened and thus makes these events more accessible to people. The museum tells the story of how all this happened, from the rivalries and antagonisms between the Social Democrats and the Christian Socialists, or better yet the battles between the conservative Heimwehr and liberal schutzhund militias.
The museum then goes into depth on the Nazi takeover of the country and its entrance into the Second World War. I was surprised that the museum did not do a greater job at conveying the horrors of the Eastern Front. Besides showing the different Wehrmacht and Soviet infantry uniforms, there was really nothing else that portrayed this part of the war as being anything more brutal than the other fronts even though the Western Front cannot compare with the horrors both sides faced in Russia. The other area that I found somewhat aggravating was the tank yard. I was very excited to see what tanks they had outside but was surprised to find really only American and Soviet tanks. I had really wanted to see some of the German tanks, like the Panther or the Tiger, but none of these tanks could be found. I understand that hundreds of them were destroyed after the war in order to inject life into the infrastructure of the ruined Axis nations, but this was a national military museum and I know some of these tanks are still around so it was a little surprising to not see a single one there. Still, I got to see a T-34, the most important tank of the war and workhorse of Russia’s push into Germany, so that was pretty cool. I guess you can’t always expect to see everything you want, especially when it’s dealing with a time period that many would like to forget.
Overall, the Heeresgeschichtliche military museum succeeds in presenting its history in a logical manner that does not let passions turn its exhibits into exploitation or overdone sentimentality. Besides the disturbing modern art, I believe the museum puts history before emotions, even when everything we know about this time period seems to force emotion above impartiality. I’m sure others would disagree on my opinions about objectivity but I feel being unbiased allows countries like Austria to finally come to terms with their past. If emotion is put at the forefront, consensus would be impossible and so that debate over guilt and victimization would go on without scholarly agreement. One doesn’t have to be completely emotionless about events like the Holocaust, in fact, emotion can sometimes do more to allow someone to enter a world like that then cold scholarship. What I dislike is when such emotions take on a greater part of one’s historical outlook until there really is no interest in what facts and figures have to say about our past. I’m sure this debate can get combative, especially when these debates have to do with events so close to our recent history but if one can’t be objective while still having the heart to actually feel something then they haven’t fully invested themselves into historical professionalism. When you visit sites like Mauthausen you have every right to feel something, in fact, you should feel something. What I’m getting at is the ability to recognize, understand, and study just as much as feel, relate, and come to terms with an event in history. History continues to play an important in world politics and Austria is no exception. The museums devoted to describing the past have all been amazingly good and I feel there is a general interest among these museums to explain history in a concise and unbiased manner. I feel that the monuments around Vienna may somewhat be hampered by their inability to express a whole part of history at one time. I feel they are similar to the way Ruth Kluger feels concentration camps tell people how to feel. Everyone has a right to honor the past but I think one can only truly do so through expanding the narrative of time so that it encompasses what happened before and what happened after in order to set these emotional events into the context of reality. That is why I enjoyed the Austrian military museum so much and why I hope more memorials to the past attempt to show what happened in Europe with an objective understanding.
