In the Trenches

FERGUSON, ANDREW

In the Trenches A descent into Kansas City's National World War I Museum. by Andrew Ferguson In 1917 and 1918, while World War I raged across Europe, the citizens of Kansas City, Missouri, raised...

...Where academic historians might reject narrative and even chronology as artificial impositions on a messy and endlessly refractable reality, Appelbaum builds his museums around a solid chronological spine...
...Young boys, especially, linger before glass cases stacked with rifles and knives and grenades and look longingly at the howitzers that rest just out of reach beyond velvet ropes...
...It's history without actors, and therefore without heroes or villains...
...There's a lot going on at once...
...You are meant to rise up...
...It's a cavernous space, usually, with high ceilings opened up to expose the pipes and air conditioning ducts, which are painted flat-black, giving the effect of a looming night sky...
...Kansas Citians decided to hold an architectural contest...
...It's almost impossible to read, but if you try you'll find yourself staring at the floor and moving sideways and then lengthwise to take it in...
...that's the point...
...The other day, during my visit, kids and grown-ups alike clustered around animated maps that trace the bloody back-and-forth across the Meuse and through the Belleau Wood...
...This establishes a narrative and pulls the visitor through the story from month to month, event to event, cause to effect...
...It was designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, the New York firm responsible for the U.S...
...And sometimes the cleverness runs away with the story altogether...
...And therefore without honor or sacrifice or meaning...
...Bad luck, though: The horrific slaughter ended too soon to disburse the money...
...It's surprising to see how slowly visitors make their way through the National Museum, and encouraging to see how much history they can take in as they do...
...And isn't there something impertinent in our refusal these days to celebrate the sacrifice, even in a museum...
...Outside, approaching the Liberty Memorial, a visitor ascends: You rise up a sweeping staircase, then up another to the top of the obelisk...
...He has none of the postmodern aversion to fact and storytelling...
...A modern high-tech museum must be harder to maintain than a theme park (which it resembles...
...Video screens jump with images in the general gloom—maps and film clips—and disembodied voices ring out from hidden speakers...
...And it's a good quotation, too—a vivid battlefield description from Ernst Junger's classic Storm of Steel—and almost worth the trouble of bumping into half-a-dozen other museumgoers who are staring at the floor and moving sideways across your path...
...Here in the museum there are no individuals, no identifiable persons of flesh and blood (even the dim figures in the trench are faceless...
...It's survived as a touching, ungainly curiosity of the kind you find in older, midsized Midwestern cities, where enthusiasm, good intentions, and cash on hand always won out over modesty and understatement...
...During my visit, several digital-dependent displays involving infra-red light wands and interactive email programs were on the blink, if that's still the technical term for "broken...
...Still, something's missing amid all the words, the artifacts, and the technical magic, and what's gone is felt most dramatically when you remember where you are, in a vault beneath a 217-foot high memorial built shortly after the war to the honor and sacrifice of the men who fought in it and were changed by it forever...
...Today's Kansas City is understandably proud of its new museum...
...Think of the riotous interior of Best Buy or Circuit City...
...The introductory video tries to explain the origins of the war, and while an older approach to history might trace them to the insecurity of the kaiser, the fumbling of the czar, the vanity of Clemenceau, the haplessness of King George, and the stupidity and mis-judgment of them all, Appelbaum's museum shows the war as the grinding collision of vast forces, impersonal and implacable: imperialism and nationalism, capitalism and prosperity, immigration and technology...
...by Andrew Ferguson In 1917 and 1918, while World War I raged across Europe, the citizens of Kansas City, Missouri, raised more than $2 million to support the war effort...
...How surprised they would be to discover that their tribute to sacrifice and valor has, by their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, been hollowed out—literally, of course, but figuratively too...
...With the opening several months ago of a stunning museum devoted Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, is the author, most recently, of Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America...
...It's as though we think we understand the experience of these earlier generations better than they did themselves...
...In contrast to the sedate, Euclidian style of earlier museums, Appelbaum creates a jumbled environment for the current generation of the chronically overstimulated...
...The visitor is left with the idea that the war was an inevitable consequence of these juggernauts moving through time like tectonic plates—senseless and insensible...
...to the First World War, this interesting spot in Kansas City has become even more interesting...
...What to do...
...Entering the National Museum of World War One, a visitor descends: A tunnel takes you below the memorial and into the gathering gloom across a glass bridge over a field of a thousand poppies...
...All around are tributes carved in stone to "God's gentle angels who bound our wounds and healed our troubled spirits," heartbreaking reminders of "those who have dared bear the torches of sacrifice and service...
...On what authority do we deliver such a rebuke...
...Here and there a window in a vestibule invites you to peer through, and when you do, you look into a life-sized recreation of a trench at the edge of no-man's land, the dim figures huddled against the rain or trudging by on planks half-buried in mud...
...Radiating out from the story board are rooms and vestibules that treat some particular episode or item of interest in greater depth, using lots of wall text (though seldom in doses larger than a paragraph at a time) and illustrated with countless artifacts, displayed like jewels...
...You'd think it would be the other way around, that the memory would get gauzier and more sentimental with the passage of time...
...Their bodies," says one, "return to dust but their work liveth forever more...
...The winner would design a memorial to those who had died in the war—which was, of course, the war that would end all wars while making the world safe for democracy...
...Scarcely a single decision or single act of an individual human being is mentioned...
...Set atop one of the highest hills in town, directly across from the then-bustling train station, the memorial was something that no one, visitor or resident, could miss...
...Appelbaum's emphasis on story and stuff, artifacts and chronology, accounts for the popular success his museums enjoy, and so it is in Kansas City...
...It was built, like the memorial above, with funds raised through the generosity of the residents themselves...
...But leaving it (ascending again), I wondered what the older Kansas Citians would have made of it...
...Pinpoint lighting splashes the unfinished concrete floor with overlapping pools of light...
...Over the last 20 years Appelbaum has become to history museums what Ken Burns has become to history shows on PBS: the creator and keeper of a house style, a set of mannerisms and techniques that infects anyone who works in the same line...
...A giant story board, full of names and dates, will curve along the outer wall or unspool in a kind of scroll at the core of the museum...
...Together, the new museum, so clearly a product of our age, and the memorial above it, so clearly a product of its own time, present a tidy contrast in how war and our history have been understood from those days to these, and not only in Kansas City...
...There's no room for valor...
...With what standing do we make those Kansas Citians of 80 years ago seem like victims of their own sentimentality—like chumps...
...But the Box Store aesthetic is only at the surface of the Appelbaum style...
...There's no end to the dazzling effects—even when you wish there were...
...Appelbaum and his attending historians may not be postmodernists, but they fully share the postmodern rejection of uplift and exhortation...
...A museum designed by Appelbaum or one of his many imitators is easy to identify...
...The floor of one gallery is laid in glass, below which an extended quotation has been painted, blood-red letters six inches high glaring up from a black background...
...It does raise the question, though: How could the survivors of the First World War—who knew firsthand its cost in wealth and blood—muster a sense of reverence, even of triumph, from the experience, while we who are so distant from it cannot...
...Because the war that's depicted here, below ground, is pointless, the tone is relentlessly funereal...
...The National World War One Museum sits in a vault hollowed out beneath the plaza from which the Liberty Memorial obelisk rises...
...A less generous citizenry might have simply redistributed the money among themselves...
...They'll tell a story so long as there's no moral attached—which, I suppose, is a moral in itself...
...Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, the Civil War Visitor's Center in Richmond, and others too many to list...
...Look closer, and you see how much he relies on the elements of a traditional museum...
...The memorial the city ended up with, called the Liberty Memorial, is a limestone obelisk rising from a shadeless plaza of paving stones, guarded east and west by a pair of sphinx...

Vol. 13 • September 2007 • No. 1


 
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