Dresden Museum Seeks to Tell Truth about War

Germany confronts its past at the new Dresden Museum:

"In August 1943, German soldiers attacked the village of Kommeno in western Greece. They burnt down homes and drove the villagers' cattle away. They raped the women and tortured the men. They stuffed gasoline-soaked cotton wool into babies' mouths and lit it. At dawn, a priest with a Bible under his arm confronted the soldiers. He died in a hail of bullets. The Bible fell to the ground.

"Historian Gorch Pieken says he tells this story whenever people ask him why he is opening a war museum, and in Dresden of all places. He tells it again as he wanders through the as yet unfinished exhibition, through dark, empty rooms and past oppressive, angular walls designed by architect Daniel Libeskind.

"Pieken, 49, reconstructed the attack on Kommeno for the museum. He discovered that the brave priest's Bible was kept in the village church. Pieken now wants to display the yellowed and bloodstained Bible alongside the other 7,000 objects at the Bundeswehr's Military History Museum in Dresden, the first war museum of the reunited Germany."

'German History Isn't Beautiful': Dresden Museum Seeks to Tell Truth about War - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

 

I'm not sure I'm understanding what this museum is about. Is it about the horrors committed by Germany in war or just wars in general?

I do agree though that the building redesign does kind of look ugly.

 

From the Article:
"Up to now, most military museums -- like the Imperial War Museum in London and the Musée de l'Armée in Paris -- have been more akin to an homage to warfare than places for reflection.
They present weapons, shining machinery and pressed uniforms, celebrate great battles, and recall the heroic deeds of brave soldiers patriotically fighting against the odds and often enough sacrificing their lives for their country.

The new military museum in Dresden wants to do away with this tradition. Although there will also be plenty of guns and cannons on display, and the chronology of military campaigns will be recounted, the historians have a far loftier goal in mind. They want to examine the topic of violence from the perspective of cultural history.
The museum will address the big questions in human history: Where does violence stem from? Is humanity evil? Is there such a thing as a just war?"

I will visit it for sure.