Rationalizing military death: the politics of the new military monuments in Berlin and Stockholm

Abstract

ABSTRACT How do state monuments secure public consent to war efforts? This article examines the official military monuments constructed in Berlin in 2009 and Stockholm in 2013 in reaction to Germany’s and Sweden’s participation in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan (2001–2014). Monuments express powerful truth claims and participate in the reproduction and transformation of war-justificatory narratives. By comparing the Berlin and Stockholm monuments, the article demonstrates their engagement with national identities and historical experience and their management of gendered military ideals. The Swedish monument Restare by sculptor Monica Dennis Larsen is white and human-sized, has an organic shape and sits in a pastoral setting, while architect Andreas Meck’s massive and austere German Ehrenmal der Bundeswehr is strictly rectangular and placed near military buildings. The article’s comparative analysis foregrounds the planning, names and dedications, locations, and designs of the monuments and the specific ways that they address individual death. A central conclusion is that these monuments repress gendered war histories and the masculinization of the armed forces. Restare disallows Sweden’s historical experience of gendered militarization and bolsters the country’s peace identity so that contemporary military violence appears publicly acceptable. The Bundeswehr monument forestalls linkages between Germany’s contemporary military identity and the country’s history of authoritarian regimes. By invoking neither military masculinity nor the feminized homeland, the monument orchestrates the separation of contemporary military activity from that in the German past.