An object that has been incinerated beyond recognition is easy to contextualize in a military museum sited in Dresden. Several museums in our selection show what firepower can do to manmade materials and, by implication, to human bodies. But if we panned back from this image we would see something more complex.
In a section about children’s play-fighting the museum has set up a 20-foot long, fantastical parade of ‘soldiers’. They are lined up in formation like a crazy queue to get into Noah’s Ark. Most of the figures on parade are toy soldiers or weapons from different centuries and continents, but some are fantasy figures, for instance from the Star Wars franchise. The figures have different proportions so that some tower over others. At the head of the colourful formation are tanks of various sizes. The foremost tank is separated by a space from this burned Panzer, found during an archaeological dig in Dresden old town.
The space between the pristine toys and the toy tank that has been through the firestorm represents the absolute divide between play-fighting and real war. Lining up soldiers, the caption tells us, is an imaginative way for a child to control the world, and even future pacifists go through this phase in life. But in a real war a child has no control.
The display is at eye height for children, but children will enjoy it only for the colour and form. They cannot learn its message, making it somehow a pessimistic display.
German History Museums 