Between the National and the Transnational: European Memories of World War II in the Twenty-First-Century Museum in Germany and Poland

Abstract

Whereas in the past war museums have tended to focus on national memory, Jaeger demonstrates how representations in the twenty-first-century museum allow for an increasing complexity of national, transnational, and universal narratives and experiences of World War II. Since the 1990s, there has been a representational re-orientation from merely documenting the past to memory forms that can move towards the future by creating a transnational European memory that also incorporates regional and national perspectives. Focusing on German and Polish museum exhibits on World War II at the Eastern front, Jaeger considers by what means, and to what extent, these exhibits represent World War II as a unifying, but nevertheless multiperspectival, European memory.