lofter1
December 2nd, 2006, 10:50 AM
In the Midwest, Remembering Europe’s Fields of Red
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/12/02/arts/02muse_CA2.600.jpg
Mark Cox
National World War One Museum in Kansas City, Mo., is entered over a mock field of poppies.
nytimes.com (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/02/arts/design/02muse.html)
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
December 2, 2006
Museum Review
KANSAS CITY, Mo., Nov. 30 — There was never a network of trenches running through the vast fields here in Missouri, as there was in Flanders or along the 466 miles of the Western Front. Nothing in America’s heartland ever resembled the “morass full of shrieking and dying” that a German soldier witnessed after the battle of Verdun. And these plains have surely never been as saturated with blood as the muddy earth that provided a ready grave for Europe’s lost generation during World War I.
In fact, the Kansas City soldiers dead in that war numbered only in the hundreds. Even the scars left by the deaths of 100,000 American soldiers seem slight compared with the nearly 9 million dead of the other combatants.
But now Kansas City, so remote in space and time from that cataclysm, has become one of the few places where that war can begin to be understood, and the shadow that it still casts can be mapped out.
On Saturday a new 30,000-square-foot National World War One Museum is opening here, recounting the history of that “Great War” and the United States entrance into it in 1917, drawing on a major collection of 49,000 objects and wrapping around them a strongly conceived narrative of conflict, heroism, death, determination and waste.
This museum, with its name given by Congress and its $26.5 million cost largely financed by city-issued bonds, is also both conceptually and physically an inversion of one of the nation’s most imposing World War I monuments, the Liberty Memorial. The new museum was excavated under its base, conceived in its shadow and completed after the memorial’s recent $76 million restoration, providing a contrast to it that is almost as revealing as the museum itself.
The memorial, dedicated in 1921 and opened in 1926, is a 217-foot obelisklike tower jutting upward out of a plaza, framed by stone sphinxes representing Memory and the Future, and two tomblike exhibition buildings. It is a mock-Egyptian monument, promising a kind of mythic afterlife. “In honor of those who served in the world war in defense of liberty and our country” is the inscription at the tower’s base.
The memorial reflects, that is, a spirit of justified purpose and epic heroism; it is the kind of vision the traumatized European victors could not fully muster at the time. But in Missouri, one of whose native sons was Gen. John J. Pershing, the leader of the American forces, the war was seen with a less bloodied gaze. The tribute is overblown, but affecting: the war was solemn and somber but also a triumph.
The new museum, designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates (Mr. Appelbaum also designed the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Clinton presidential library), asserts almost the opposite view, though it too is affecting. It is less solemn, and there is no sense of triumph. The war’s intertwining events are surveyed in a timeline that circles the tower’s subterranean base. The entire museum is a narrative circle, telling the war’s history, with the unseen tower providing the geometry but not the inspiration.
While the tower’s purpose is reverence, in the museum the point is almost journalistic: to come at the war through its particulars, seeking to discover in ordinary objects like boots and tobacco tins as much truth as is found in a life-size trench at which visitors awkwardly peer, like voyeurs, through various openings. There are charts of deaths, accounts of mobilization, descriptions of how the new technology of flight was harnessed. There are interactive exhibits in which flashlights are used like mouse cursors to make selections on an illuminated table.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/12/02/arts/02muse_CA1.650.jpg
Mark Cox
One exhibit at the new museum is a life-size depiction of World War I soldiers in a trench.
There is no grandeur here. Approaching the building, you walk toward the tower but then descend a ramp leading beneath it into a dim hall. At first, things look hopeful, as daylight streams down on a glass bridge leading into the exhibition, suspended over a mock field of 9,000 poppies. But each of those blood-red flowers actually represents a thousand dead soldiers. Death, not liberty, is the overriding fact here. The nature of that death and the world it gave birth to become the museum’s subjects.
And while the war’s purpose is so confidently proclaimed in the memorial’s inscription above, here, following the lead of historians, the conflict’s original goals remain mysterious, puzzling, eclipsed by the nightmarish battles that entangled 36 countries and 65 million combatants. An opening film tries to touch on some of the war’s causes: a European nexus of secret alliances, the beginning of an urban society, rival colonial powers seeking to increase their territory. If anything, the patriotism and nationalism celebrated above ground are here rendered suspect.
But there is also a redemptive aspect to this story, which is told from a distinctively American perspective. The first half of the presentation takes us to the war’s darkest point in 1917, before the United States involvement. In a 20-minute high-tech theater piece, film clips, sounds of battle and flashes of light are seen above a life-sized diorama of soldiers trudging through the mud. President Woodrow Wilson had just won re-election using a campaign slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War.”
But Germany had also just resumed its submarine attacks on neutral ships, and the United States felt under increasing pressure. The second half of the exhibition shows how America, with a standing army of fewer than 108,000 men, goes on a war footing, revamping its industries and sending 1.3 million troops to France by August. The United States ends up playing a decisive role in bringing the war to its close.
But in the wake of German defeat, empires collapse, economies stagger and, as the exhibits point out, 20,000 miles of borders are redrawn (with consequences still being felt). The American century begins. Europe is so shell-shocked that all through the 1930s, few could bear the prospect of having to fight again. “Is peace possible?” a voice asks in a closing display, just before visitors emerge to walk over the poppies again. Does this exhibition form a circular path because we are doomed to repeat history’s follies?
This is the museum’s narrative, and the message suits the current mood. But the emphasis is so placed on death and futility that even the museum’s own account of the war’s origins seems inadequate. The exhibits are full of individual detail, but the causes are abstract ideological forces. There is a lineup of villains: imperialism, the arms race, industrialization. It takes a while to realize that one of the unusual things about the museum’s story is that apart from these forces, there are no bad guys, or rather, no good guys.
The narrative is also drained of personality, a flaw in many contemporary histories. What, for example, was the German kaiser like? History’s forces did not just sweep along passive human actors. Choices were made, many with moral consequences. Was there any justification for the Allied cause? What if the Allies had lost? The museum makes it seem as if such questions, like detailed examinations of individual battles, would distract from the central theme.
In contrast, consider this museum’s counterpart in London, the Imperial War Museum. That institution was established when the war still raged. Its permanent exhibition about World War I is exhaustive and exhausting. It is also pointed: it is impossible not to know who was fighting whom and why.
Of course, World War I, with all its foolishness and tragedy, should not be turned into a morality tale. But other simplifications are also a danger. It is too easy to think that the lesson of the war to end all wars is that all wars should be avoided. World War II’s confrontations, begun too late and precariously fought, proved how disastrous that course could be.
This new museum, which remains an imposing achievement, never goes that far. But emerging from its doors, I still find reassurance in the memorial tower above, with its solemnity, confidence and sense of purpose, and think that the truth lies somewhere in between.
The National World War One Museum opens today at 100 West 26th Street, Kansas City, Mo; (816) 784-1918 or http://nww1.org/ .
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/12/02/arts/02muse_CA2.600.jpg
Mark Cox
National World War One Museum in Kansas City, Mo., is entered over a mock field of poppies.
nytimes.com (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/02/arts/design/02muse.html)
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
December 2, 2006
Museum Review
KANSAS CITY, Mo., Nov. 30 — There was never a network of trenches running through the vast fields here in Missouri, as there was in Flanders or along the 466 miles of the Western Front. Nothing in America’s heartland ever resembled the “morass full of shrieking and dying” that a German soldier witnessed after the battle of Verdun. And these plains have surely never been as saturated with blood as the muddy earth that provided a ready grave for Europe’s lost generation during World War I.
In fact, the Kansas City soldiers dead in that war numbered only in the hundreds. Even the scars left by the deaths of 100,000 American soldiers seem slight compared with the nearly 9 million dead of the other combatants.
But now Kansas City, so remote in space and time from that cataclysm, has become one of the few places where that war can begin to be understood, and the shadow that it still casts can be mapped out.
On Saturday a new 30,000-square-foot National World War One Museum is opening here, recounting the history of that “Great War” and the United States entrance into it in 1917, drawing on a major collection of 49,000 objects and wrapping around them a strongly conceived narrative of conflict, heroism, death, determination and waste.
This museum, with its name given by Congress and its $26.5 million cost largely financed by city-issued bonds, is also both conceptually and physically an inversion of one of the nation’s most imposing World War I monuments, the Liberty Memorial. The new museum was excavated under its base, conceived in its shadow and completed after the memorial’s recent $76 million restoration, providing a contrast to it that is almost as revealing as the museum itself.
The memorial, dedicated in 1921 and opened in 1926, is a 217-foot obelisklike tower jutting upward out of a plaza, framed by stone sphinxes representing Memory and the Future, and two tomblike exhibition buildings. It is a mock-Egyptian monument, promising a kind of mythic afterlife. “In honor of those who served in the world war in defense of liberty and our country” is the inscription at the tower’s base.
The memorial reflects, that is, a spirit of justified purpose and epic heroism; it is the kind of vision the traumatized European victors could not fully muster at the time. But in Missouri, one of whose native sons was Gen. John J. Pershing, the leader of the American forces, the war was seen with a less bloodied gaze. The tribute is overblown, but affecting: the war was solemn and somber but also a triumph.
The new museum, designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates (Mr. Appelbaum also designed the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Clinton presidential library), asserts almost the opposite view, though it too is affecting. It is less solemn, and there is no sense of triumph. The war’s intertwining events are surveyed in a timeline that circles the tower’s subterranean base. The entire museum is a narrative circle, telling the war’s history, with the unseen tower providing the geometry but not the inspiration.
While the tower’s purpose is reverence, in the museum the point is almost journalistic: to come at the war through its particulars, seeking to discover in ordinary objects like boots and tobacco tins as much truth as is found in a life-size trench at which visitors awkwardly peer, like voyeurs, through various openings. There are charts of deaths, accounts of mobilization, descriptions of how the new technology of flight was harnessed. There are interactive exhibits in which flashlights are used like mouse cursors to make selections on an illuminated table.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/12/02/arts/02muse_CA1.650.jpg
Mark Cox
One exhibit at the new museum is a life-size depiction of World War I soldiers in a trench.
There is no grandeur here. Approaching the building, you walk toward the tower but then descend a ramp leading beneath it into a dim hall. At first, things look hopeful, as daylight streams down on a glass bridge leading into the exhibition, suspended over a mock field of 9,000 poppies. But each of those blood-red flowers actually represents a thousand dead soldiers. Death, not liberty, is the overriding fact here. The nature of that death and the world it gave birth to become the museum’s subjects.
And while the war’s purpose is so confidently proclaimed in the memorial’s inscription above, here, following the lead of historians, the conflict’s original goals remain mysterious, puzzling, eclipsed by the nightmarish battles that entangled 36 countries and 65 million combatants. An opening film tries to touch on some of the war’s causes: a European nexus of secret alliances, the beginning of an urban society, rival colonial powers seeking to increase their territory. If anything, the patriotism and nationalism celebrated above ground are here rendered suspect.
But there is also a redemptive aspect to this story, which is told from a distinctively American perspective. The first half of the presentation takes us to the war’s darkest point in 1917, before the United States involvement. In a 20-minute high-tech theater piece, film clips, sounds of battle and flashes of light are seen above a life-sized diorama of soldiers trudging through the mud. President Woodrow Wilson had just won re-election using a campaign slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War.”
But Germany had also just resumed its submarine attacks on neutral ships, and the United States felt under increasing pressure. The second half of the exhibition shows how America, with a standing army of fewer than 108,000 men, goes on a war footing, revamping its industries and sending 1.3 million troops to France by August. The United States ends up playing a decisive role in bringing the war to its close.
But in the wake of German defeat, empires collapse, economies stagger and, as the exhibits point out, 20,000 miles of borders are redrawn (with consequences still being felt). The American century begins. Europe is so shell-shocked that all through the 1930s, few could bear the prospect of having to fight again. “Is peace possible?” a voice asks in a closing display, just before visitors emerge to walk over the poppies again. Does this exhibition form a circular path because we are doomed to repeat history’s follies?
This is the museum’s narrative, and the message suits the current mood. But the emphasis is so placed on death and futility that even the museum’s own account of the war’s origins seems inadequate. The exhibits are full of individual detail, but the causes are abstract ideological forces. There is a lineup of villains: imperialism, the arms race, industrialization. It takes a while to realize that one of the unusual things about the museum’s story is that apart from these forces, there are no bad guys, or rather, no good guys.
The narrative is also drained of personality, a flaw in many contemporary histories. What, for example, was the German kaiser like? History’s forces did not just sweep along passive human actors. Choices were made, many with moral consequences. Was there any justification for the Allied cause? What if the Allies had lost? The museum makes it seem as if such questions, like detailed examinations of individual battles, would distract from the central theme.
In contrast, consider this museum’s counterpart in London, the Imperial War Museum. That institution was established when the war still raged. Its permanent exhibition about World War I is exhaustive and exhausting. It is also pointed: it is impossible not to know who was fighting whom and why.
Of course, World War I, with all its foolishness and tragedy, should not be turned into a morality tale. But other simplifications are also a danger. It is too easy to think that the lesson of the war to end all wars is that all wars should be avoided. World War II’s confrontations, begun too late and precariously fought, proved how disastrous that course could be.
This new museum, which remains an imposing achievement, never goes that far. But emerging from its doors, I still find reassurance in the memorial tower above, with its solemnity, confidence and sense of purpose, and think that the truth lies somewhere in between.
The National World War One Museum opens today at 100 West 26th Street, Kansas City, Mo; (816) 784-1918 or http://nww1.org/ .
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company