Exclusion through Inclusion?: Museum Architecture and the Institutionalization of Critique

Abstract

Architecture is not only a social product; the social is also constituted through architecture. This holds particularly true for the museum. Museum architecture is a spatialized expression of social order and an infrastructure through which collective imaginations are generated. I will show how the German Bundeswehr uses its principal museum to apply a post-heroic mode of identity formation. The Bundeswehr has to distance itself from the past while it also has to articulate a minimum of historic continuity to legitimize itself. The Military History Museum of the Bundeswehr (Dresden) achieves this through a twofold spatial tactic. First, through a dramatic architectural intervention, and secondly, through the interpretation of this spatial arrangement. Articulated in and through architecture, the ‘critical engagement with the past’ becomes institutionalized. Providing a sociological explanation of why the critical negation of the past became a prominent narrative within German memorial culture, I argue, that it allows for a coherent self-narration below the horizon of historical fractures and multiple conflicts in the refigured modernity. Although a similar discourse is at work at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, its affirmative architecture, however, contradicts any claims of a ‘critical engagement with the past’.