When you talk to Tommy Spree, he will turn on the charm. The 85-year-old has carried a powerful family legacy his entire life: his grandfather, Ernst Friedrich – a peace activist, writer and actor – founded the world’s first known Anti-War Museum in Berlin in 1925. Now, 100 years since Friedrich first set out to advocate against militarised conflict, more than 110 armed conflicts are being fought across the globe, and Spree is preparing to finally pass on the torch of peace promotion.
“It’s a wonderful experience to run this museum after my grandfather for 43 years now without having any dispute or trouble or anger. I’m very lucky to have a wonderful group who help me very much,” Spree says. Despite having run the museum for more than four decades, he’s still plagued by the question that has preoccupied his family for a century. “How can we help to stop warfare?” Spree asks when we speak in his office at the museum – years’ worth of exhibits squeezed into four rooms of a residential shopfront on Brüsseler Straße in Wedding. “It’s about education – if we have better teachers who teach young people how to live in peace.”
During Spree’s leadership, he kept the museum’s focus on the past, inviting visitors to discuss historical lessons but holding back from engaging in debates that current peace movements face. Now he’ll be handing over the reins to longtime volunteer Siegfried Baur – who will have to consider whether to take on new projects, expand the museum’s influence, and deal with more than just the past.
Artists and activists
Although the Anti-War Museum represents decades of history, its own has been bumpy. Ernst Friedrich, born in Wrocław, Poland (then the German city of Breslau) in 1894, moved to Berlin in his youth to be a writer and actor before being drafted to fight for Germany during World War I. Accused of sabotage and refusing to fight, he was jailed until the 1918 German Revolution, in the final days of the war. After he was released, he joined activist groups associated with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, fiercely opposing the Kaiserreich, and sought to unify the anti-war left.
In the 1920s, the economy of the Weimar Republic collapsed, leading many in German society to support fascism. In 1924, the artist Otto Dix (one of many veterans who respected Friedrich’s calls to refuse drafts and militarism) released ‘The War’, a series of paintings and etchings depicting the brutal violence of trench warfare for a public who had rarely seen such imagery. The same year, Käthe Kollwitz, an ally of Dix and a leader of the Berlin Secessionist movement, released her poster ‘Nie wieder Krieg’ (“Never again war”). Friedrich was inspired by how Dix, Kollwitz and other artists like Marc Chagall, who joined an early meeting for the founding of the Anti-War Museum, were distributing their anti-war message free of censorship. Friedrich got Kollwitz to contribute original sketches to the museum, and Dix and Chagall helped recommend material for early exhibitions – imagery of wounded soldiers and civilians that are still displayed today.
Young people and students do not have very much interest in the First and Second World Wars. They are actually interested in what is taking place right now.
On October 1, 1925, Friedrich opened the Anti-War Museum at a small house on Parochialstraße 29, in the heart of Berlin’s Nikolaiviertel. Promoting the museum as both an exhibition space and a meeting space for planning and education, Friedrich invited veterans to describe the terrors of war with the public.
While the museum’s opening was celebrated by peace activists and those exhausted by war and upheaval, Friedrich demonstrated fierce bias for leftists, anarchists and pacifists, which eventually would lead to less support from a public who were warned of the dangers of the rapidly growing influence of the Soviet Union. When the National Socialists rose to power, they immediately challenged the Anti-War Museum and its growing community. They arrested Friedrich among those accused of the Reichstag arson. In just a few months, the SS destroyed the original museum, turning it into one of their bases, and Friedrich fled to Brussels. He attempted to relocate the museum, but many of its exhibits were lost or damaged. After the war, he would transform his concept into the Island of Peace, an arts centre on a small island in Paris, where he would spend his final years.
An anti-museum
Today, the Anti-War Museum resembles an art gallery or antique bookstore. Outside, a chrome statue of a figure stands in the garden, breaking a rifle; Sculptor Antonio Monitillo installed it in 2005. In the main entry hall, cover art from War Against War!, Friedrich’s 1930 book that was later translated into multiple languages, greets visitors beside a display packed with war-game toys.
In 1982, Tommy Spree, who grew up in England and spent years as a teacher and sports coach, became so fascinated by his grandfather’s work that he decided to move his entire life to Berlin. Unlike government institutions like the German Resistance Memorial Center – which celebrates former German military turncoats in the same light as the Jewish underground – or peace-oriented foundations named for politicians like Friedrich Ebert or Konrad Adenauer, who had ties to the weapons industry, Spree had a different vision. He wanted to reopen the Anti-War Museum to be what his grandfather intended: an anti-museum. Here visitors would not find huge white walls with occasional artefacts. Instead, they would find a quaint space where people could gather around a table and have a discussion.
Much of the museum’s exhibitions are about Friedrich’s life, but some are less quaint and more unsettling – by design. One installation depicts the blast radius that would be destroyed “if one Atom bomb (1 megaton) hit Berlin”. Over Mitte, the map reads: “Two kilometer radius: Pressure and windspeed over 2500 km/h. Bunkers made of steel and concrete are destroyed”, and over Tegel “Eleven kilometer radius: Main fire area third degree burns. Dried foliage set on fire.”
Alongside that, there is a photo collection of survivors of the first atomic blast site in Hiroshima, Japan, as well as the towering mushroom cloud from a hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific. As a counterbalance, one finds multicoloured crafts, origami sculptures and drawings from children with messages in Japanese and English, including, “We love peace of the world.”
There is also a narrow staircase leading into the cellar, which was used as a bomb shelter for local civilians during World War II. The door reads, “Zu dem Luftschutz-Raum” – “to the air raid shelter”. Down below, an old 1930s radio stands, and an audio track plays announcements about Allied bombing raids. On one side of the shelter, there is an old door where those taking cover once wrote in pencil the time and date of each raid. On the other, there is a gas mask alongside a ‘combat crib’ fitted with a transparent shield, meant to reduce the risk of poison gas. Photographs from the era complete the otherwise realistic installation.
The volunteers Spree has assembled are trained on how to welcome guests – often groups of students, pacifists or anarchists – with challenging questions and facilitate peacebuilding dialogue. “We work together with Quakers from England, with Dutch and Swedish peace groups … the Social Democrats, the Greens like to come,” says Spree.
The museum welcomes anyone who wants to discuss cultural memory or to consider which lessons can be brought forward to today’s tough political debates. The staff are well-prepared to answer questions about Friedrich’s life and legacy and how anti-war movements evolved, but they’re struggling with limited funding, and few have witnessed war firsthand. When challenged with questions about current global conflicts, or how Mahatma Gandhi or Bertrand Russell would approach the questions about Gaza, Israel, Sudan or Ukraine today, they avoid getting trapped in hot-button debates.
“Young people and students,” Spree says, “do not have very much interest in the First and Second World Wars. They are actually more interested in what is taking place right now. If we are asked, ‘Why don’t you show the war in Ukraine or what’s happening in Gaza?’, I tell those colleagues it is a dangerous thing to make an exhibition about a war that is just taking place.” Spree’s logic is that “in wars, those who have responsibility are lying all the time”. He continues: “We don’t yet know the reality of what’s happening in the Israeli community or Hamas. We don’t really know what Putin intends to do and what Zelensky wants to do. You have to be very careful.”
Conflicts of interest
After leading the museum for more than 40 years and a stint of medical leave last year, Spree has decided to retire after its 100-year jubilee. Now, the new museum leadership faces a turning point: whether to keep their quaint, organic, independent historical collection focused on the past, or to join future-facing peace movements and attempt to bring forward the lessons they’ve preserved from the world wars.
“There is a special legacy of Tommy’s way to run this museum that we should preserve,” incoming director Baur explains. “You will not find a museum in Berlin where you have a special guide speaking with you for one hour. In the big museums, you’re not even allowed to touch things or sirens are woowoo-ing on. Some visitors are so surprised: ‘You’re welcoming me and discussing it with me?’”
Under Friedrich’s leadership, the museum and its collection failed to unify peaceful resistance movements to prevent fascists from taking power, and in fact may have played a role in East Germany’s post-war turn toward communism. That’s left the museum with a lingering question: how should they educate visitors about reducing political violence and militarism while also showing how nonviolent efforts alone can not prevent fascism or end wars? Spree has directed volunteers to treat the exhibits as a resource; if people ask a tough question about a current conflict, they’re guided through elements of the museum that illuminate how peace-seekers addressed things in the past. In the future, Baur would like to invite a variety of speakers, many of whom could be survivors of more recent conflicts with experience in peacebuilding, and is considering new kinds of partnerships.
Spree’s approach, as well as basing the museum in a quiet neighbourhood with original pre-war housing, was meant to increase the authentic and human qualities of the experience. It’s also come at the risk of having fewer visitors and less funding. Avoiding modern-day conflicts in favour of the conscientious objection, pacifism and anarchism of the past could suggest to visitors that the museum doesn’t believe in defence when attacked. It’s rhetoric that Baur will have to tackle as he takes on the museum’s next century and attempts to attract peace activists to their message of cultural memory.
For now, the museum is focused on its anniversary jubilee, which will include speakers like former Parliamentary Commissioner for the Armed Forces of the Bundestag Eva Högl, the Greens’ district mayor of Mitte, Stefanie Remlinger, and religion scholar Agnes Imhof, who will read from her book on the life of Ernst Friedrich. Afterwards, the museum will open a new exhibition to the public about the museum’s early years. And in the face of increasingly deadly international conflicts on multiple continents, Spree invites the world to think about the lasting – if sometimes misunderstood – achievements of his grandfather a century ago, as he’s done for more than half his life.
By Daniel J Gerstle
- The Anti-War Museum Jubilee Exhibition, Brüsseler Str. 21, Wedding, through Jan 2.
