Heeresgeschichtliches Museum and the Kunsthistorisches Museum

15 August 2010

After Saturday in Bratislava, it was hard to go back to visiting museums on Sunday. However, we had to go to the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum (military museum) and revisit the Kunsthistorisches Museum to view the antiquities collection.

The Heeresgeschichtliches had some interesting exhibits, including both the car in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated by the Black Hand and which began the first World War, and the exhibition of the Ottomon Turks and their relation to Austria throughout the seiges in 1529 and 1683. The lower level of the museum focuses primarily on Austria during World War I, with a small, slightly out of place exhibition at the end regarding Austria's involvement with the UN. There were many different cases of military uniforms, war medals, guns, etc. It looked much like one would expect during any time of war in the past, only with the uniforms and weapons emblazoned with the crest or flag of the nation they belonged to. The room containing Franz Ferdinand's car was amazing however. The car stood, bullet hole and all, to the side of the room, while the military jacket through which the bullet pierced him was lying in the middle of the room, along with the couch which he bled to death on (the blood is covered). It was definitely a different feeling than one gets when seeing the relics of an American war - to see the remnants of a nation during a war into which it was largely drawn into due to Germany's invasion of Belgium, Luxembourg, and France, one has mixed emotions.

The shelled bunker domes and the worn military uniforms give one a glimpse into the weariness of war and of the Austrian morale - a culture which went from complete control under an absolutist monarchy to a war into which they did not directly choose to become involved in.

This desolate mentality and utter despair - despair which any nation at war faces, but which is intensified in a nation with a suppressed culture - is so plainly displayed throughout this exhibit. The end, the exhibit displayed cars and engines used during the war and also displayed various large machine guns and weapons.

The UN exhibition was most definitely out of place within the museum, much less placed alongside the previous WWI display. The staged scenes of UN involvement and of cars and mannequins in mid-action looked cheap and took away from both the importance of Austria's relationship with the UN and from the dramatic display of WWI.

Walking through the various sculptures of military generals and important Austrian military figures, the upstairs is much more grand than downstairs. The marble walls with large frescos of Austrian rulers and war victories, the crests of the Austro-Hungarian empire, including that of Bohemia, inlayed into the marble, and the domed roofs and tall columns all lend to the power and show which the Habsburgs desired. Even though this building was built as an arsenal for military equipment and deliberation with no intention of being a public museum, it was in a sense built exactly for that - as a museum to show wealth. Like much of the Habsburg empire, the arsenal was built for pomp and show, a physical manifestation of power, wealth, and beauty meant to dominate and overwhelm any enemy or common citizen.

After the military museum, we headed over to the Kunsthistoriches Museum for a second visit - this time to see the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman antiquities. The Egyptian art and relics were amazing - most everything was in excellent condition and was in whole units, not broken and missing pieces. Most of the artwork or engravings which we saw involved some sort of matriarchal worship, blessing the gods for food and good harvests. The altar of Sety I, an Egyptian Pharoh reigning from 1290-1279 BC and most notable for having captured the Syrian city of Kadush, was also on display amongst the tombs and stone pieces. The most interesting thing for me, however, was the various tablets of writings shown, ranging from hieroglyphs to cuneiform. It is amazing to think that those were common ways of communication, and that somewhere in the world, some one can read these tablets! Also, to see the progression of language throughout the antiquities exhibition as a whole was interesting, noting the transition from hieroglyphs to cuneiform to Greek and then to latin. Having studied the latter two and their complex grammatical systems, I can appreciate the complexity of both hieroglyphs and cuneiform, especially without an auditory basis for each language.

After the Egyptian artifacts came the Greek and Roman artifacts, showing an almost uneven transition in the layout of early and later Greek art. I found it hard to establish a pattern in the exhibit's fluidity, or lack there of, and found much of the later Greek art to have been placed near the beginning of the rooms. Also, much of the Roman art and many of the Roman sculptures were interspersed with the Greek artifacts, making for an unclear and less informative exhibition. Also, referencing back to the progression of languages, many Roman tablets were placed before the Greek tablets, and many of the Greek tablets were near the end, showing an uneven and inaccurate formulation of modern languages.

However, for as much as fluidity lacked, the relics within the rooms were quite interesting. A lot of Roman busts were on display, although there were very few of actual emperors or generals - most were of figures not particularly famous. There was also a lot of preserved jewelry and potsherds - interesting, but after having taking 'Intro to Archaeology' my first quarter at Davis, my interest was lacking. The neatest things on display were the greek figurines of the various gods (these figurines showing a progression over time of both style and perception of worship) and the tablets inscribed with Ancient Greek.

As a whole, the exhibit was interesting to see but hard to follow; individually, each culture within the exhibit was informative and relevant to an earlier Austrian history, when Vienna was in reality Vindobona.