Did somebody say "boom"?
the military history museum
August 14: Monday
Well, I always knew I would head to the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, the Museum of Military history here in Vienna. What I didn't expect was to accidentally stumbled across it while trying to get lost on Saturday. I slipped in for a bit then, and now I'm back for more.
The Museum itself is huge, bigger than any other museum except for maybe the Kunsthistoriches Museum. Its divided into four big sections: the first details the 30 Years War (always a big fascinationf or me, partly because of its popular obscurity outside of Europe); the second details the Napoleonic Wars; the third details World War I; and the fourth details World War II. Add to that a nice outdoor area lined with 17th century cannons, plus a cafe and book shop (yes, I bought a book, The Twilight of the Habsburgs, helpful for both my video project and my term paper), and you've got a truly spectacular place.
My two favorite sections were the 30 years War and WW1 exhibitions, and I'll detail them here.
Germany Torn Apart
It seems hard to believe that the scores of states within modern Germany, and a dozen states outside Germany, were turning the nation into a battlefield on and off for thirty whole years, but it's true (Okay, to be fair, we've been in Afghanistan for a good 16 years now).
The Thirty Years War was the big conflict of the Baroque Era, a time when the people fighting each other weren't fighting for their country but for their rulers - whoever that may be. There wasn't really conscription, so to speak back then, but militias of peasantmen armed with sword and pike and flintlock. Foreign mercenaries inhabited large portions of the army on both sides. Some states, like Brandenburg-Prussia, switched sides several times during the war, depending on which side was winning and which side was forking over more cash and post-war promises.
It was truly a mess, and that's probably why the only book on the Thirty years War that I've ever seen (and own) is a 600 page behemoth that I can't even read without taking extensive notes on my computer to keep track of the factions and their leaders. No, that's not a joke. I actually do. I've been biting away at it since my senior year in high school. I remember reading it in math class.
But I digress.
So, my pictures of these Peter Snayers paintings fall so, so short, of the true magnificence of his work. These paintings are about five feet tall and nine feet wide, and depict massive, massive scenes of the Thirty Years War - painted while the war was still going on. There were about eight of these in total int he exhibition, and I could spend at least ten minutes just sitting in front of each one (yeah, there were chairs). I almost couldn't believe the amount of dedication that must have gone into these paintings - thousands of figures across a landscape several miles wide, stretching as far as the eye can see. Almost all of paintings put the viewer on top of a hill, as you can see. From there, you can look down on the area below - soldiers fighting to the left, a city under siege in the middle, refugees streaming away on the right, and a million little stories in between.
If Peter Snayers actually painted all of these himself, as opposed to commissioning nameless slave-students to do his work for him like Paul Ruebens, then he should really be a household name as one of the most impressive painters in history.
Left: See, this is what I'm talking about - a tiny part of a single Peter Snayers painting, somewhere in the corner. It's a group of dogs feeding on a dead horse and fighting over the carcass. Little stories like this abound in the paintings.
Below: The 30 years War took place during that awkward period when people were getting more used to guns but certainly weren't willing to give up on swords either. But with the apparent unreliability of firearms back then, I can hardly blame them.
One thing I noticed is that the suits of armor seem so small that they practically look like they're made for kids. It reminded me of the German WWI pickelhaube I have at home, which can't even fit my head. And speaking of World War I...
The Not So Great War
World War I fascinates me for a lot of reasons, and one of those is that the war serves as a bridge between the old world and the new - a very burnt, broken, terrifying, awful bridge, but a bridge nonetheless. I don't think the world was ever so changed in so short a time than between July 1914 and November 1918.
What's especially interesting to me about that is the role of Austria-Hungary, which of course started the war, and would be destroyed at its end. The Habsburgs had been in power in Central Europe since the early 1200s, and they managed to lumber into the 1900s despite the wars, revolutions, reforms, enlightenment, reformations, and modernization that Europe was going through. But it would not survive the Great War.
Right: Austria-Hungarian troops had not-so-good reputations in World War I. I'm glad that the Military History Museum acknowledges this instead of calling it Fake News!
But seriously, Austria-Hungary was always a hard country to lead into war. Unlike Britain, or France, or Germany, Austria-Hungary was a very multi-ethnic empire, comprising of Germans, Poles, Sloavakians, Czechks, Bosnians, Serbs, Croatians, Slovenians, Romanians, Hungarians, Ruthenians, and... well, I'm sure I left out an ethnicity or two.
When Austria declared war, it had to send out its conscription orders in nearly a dozen languages. Three in four of Austrian generals only spoke German, while only one in four of the troops spoke German.
And to make matters worse, Austrian uniforms were notoriously colorful, with bright blue tops and bright red and black striped bottoms. In a way, it's advantageous, because there's nothing more intimidating that being bayonet-charged by a fashion show. But Austrian troops were not well-trained, well-organized, or well-led, and so their colorful outfits only served to make them more ridiculous to their enemies - and to their allies, the grudging Germans.
Left: The Great War, as I mentioned before, was the bridge between the Old and the New. This meant that this war had some of the first great pictures of war... as well as some of the last great paintings.
There are dozens of these in the exhibition, and something that strikes me is that they are not combat pictures at all. Rather, they are quite boldly pictures of the soldiers in repose - often wounded, usually miserable, finding comfort only in companionship and sometimes faith amidst a landscape turned moon-like by years of fire and shells.
Really makes one quite emotional.
Below: Well, there it is. The one thing I most wanted to see. Franz Ferdinand's vehicle, the very car that he was assassinated in. It's like staring the war right in the face.
