Page 475 - Le Operazioni Interforze e Multinazionali nella Storia Militare - ACTA Tomo II

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ActA
the Great Patriotic War should be understood was met by rather antagonistic feeling in
the GDR. East-German civil society showed an aversion to the Soviet Occupational
Power in the GDR based on their experiences at the end of the Second World War. This
attitude stood in sharp contrast to the political goal of communist ideologists, whose
aim was to form a society of friends between the Soviet Union and the GDR. To put it
all in a nutshell: How can former enemies become friends? How can victory of the one
and defeat of the other at the end of the Second World War be interpreted as the basis
of a mutual friendship of two socialist nations? To answer this questions, I will show
how the exhibition tried to reconcile these opposing views in the following three ways:
Firstly, it highlighted the friendship between the GDR and the Soviet Union. With the
focus on the victory over fascism in the Battle of Berlin and the surrender in Karlshorst,
the Red Army is portrayed as the liberator, the saviour of the German people. Secondly,
the exhibition claimed that the antifascist part of the German population founded the
GDR. Thirdly, the exhibition was a tool of the state to justify the ongoing necessity of
the presence of the Red Army in East Germany during the Cold War.

Exhibition Analysis: The Museum of Capitulation.
The master-narrative of the Great Patriotic War is represented in 12 rooms spread
over two floors. On the ground level is the historical „Zala kapituljacii“ (The Hall of
Capitulation) and the office of the Soviet Marshall Zhukov. According to the exhibi-
tion-plan and the transcript of the guided tour, the entire furnishing of these rooms is
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claimed by to be unchanged. (Photo no. 4.)
As the place forms at the same time a historic memorial site and a museum, a two-
fold form of commemoration is displayed. This form is used by the curators to interact
with the visitor on a spatial as well as on a temporal level. The term „Chronotopos“, as
introduced by the russian philologist Michail Bachtin, describes the inseparable entity
between time and place. The master-narrative’s chronotopical structures can be expe-
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rienced in the exhibition where the narration of the events of the Second World War is
staged in this historically meaningful location.
The tour started on the ground floor, where the first three rooms were used to present
a link between the October Revolution and the battle of the antifascist’s resistence figh-
ters in the Second World War. Next to the display of the atrocities of the Germans comit-
ted in the concentration camp the advance of the Wehrmacht and the Soviet resistance
was shown. On the upper floor the events of the Great Patriotic War were depicted as a
history of an offensive war and a aggressive counter-attack. After having heard about the
battle of Berlin, which is represented as a climax of the narrative, the visitor enters the
„Zala kapituljacii“ (The Hall of Capitulation) to learn about the surrender of Germany.

19 Naučnoėkspozicionnyj plan memoral’novo muzeja istorii razgroma nemecko-fašistskich vojsk v berline,
Ijun’ 1967) 1967, p. 2.
Text für die Führung durch die historische Gedenkstätte, übersetzt aus dem Russischen von Jan Zwerg, 1985,
p. 1.
20 Bachtin, Michail: Chronotopos, aus dem Russischen von Michael Dewey, Stuttgart 2008, p. 7.