The Military History Museum in Dresden: Between Forum and Temple

Agonistic memory as a relational concept: Remembering socialism in Lithuania

“…As the examples vividly show, Adele's account fulfills the three most important requirements of agonistic memory discussed in the literature. First, and consistent with what Cercel (2018) as well as Bull and Clarke (2020) in particular have emphasized as a central feature of agonistic memory, Adele's account is undoubtedly interventionist in character. The choices she makes with the selection, composition, and assemblage of her stories regularly lead to destabilizing the two partisan narratives circulating in the public space.…”

“…And, unlike antagonistic memory, which is seen as propagating Manichean views of self and other as well as making absolute truth claims, agonistic memory is further said to shed light on the ambivalence inherent in historical realities and to reflect on the contingency of its own articulations. Cercel (2018) takes a slightly different approach. Arguing from a functionalist point of view and asking what this specific mode of remembering actually does, he has described agonistic memory as destabilizing hegemonic discourses by giving voice to all that is usually silenced and as unsettling even its own narratives by offering, for example, intentionally ambivalent stories that incite sharply opposite interpretations.…”

“…Cercel (2018) takes a slightly different approach. Arguing from a functionalist point of view and asking what this specific mode of remembering actually does , he has described agonistic memory as destabilizing hegemonic discourses by giving voice to all that is usually silenced and as unsettling even its own narratives by offering, for example, intentionally ambivalent stories that incite sharply opposite interpretations.…”

“…A few years ago, a group of scholars, most of them Western-based, introduced agonistic memory as a mode of remembering the past which was meant to offer an explicitly political, multi-perspective, and context-sensitive alternative to cosmopolitan memory perceived by some to be too abstract and too consensus-oriented to prevent a relapse into populist, antagonistic memories. So far, agonistic memory has been considered the exclusive domain of creative intellectuals like film-makers (Bull and Hansen, 2016), museum curators (Cercel, 2018), or activists (Bull and Clarke, 2020). Conceptual blueprints furthermore clearly bear the marks of the Western context they emerged in—a context that is characterized by the dominance of cosmopolitan memory.…”

The Cold War in European museums – filling the ‘empty battlefield’

“…The possible exception to this finding is the Military Museum in Dresden. Its pedagogical focus on the nexus between army, violence and democracy relates directly to mainstream German memory discourses in connection with National Socialism (Niven, 2001 ;Cercel 2018). Yet taking the Cold War-related sections of the museum for themselves, there is no specific interpretation that one might not have transferred to the British context.…”