Abstract

Eastern European museums represent traumatic events of World War II, such as the Siege of Leningrad, the Warsaw Uprisings, and the Bombardment of Dresden, in ways that depict the enemy in particular ways. This image results from the interweaving of historical representations, cultural stereotypes and beliefs, political discourses, and the dynamics of exhibition narratives. This book presents a useful methodology for examining museum images and provides a critical analysis of the role historical museums play in the contemporary world. As the catastrophes of World War II still exert an enormous influence on the national identities of Russians, Poles, and Germans, museum exhibits can thus play an important role in this process.

Tim Buchen is the assistant Professor for the Modern History of Economic and Social Networks of Germans in Eastern Europe at the Technical University in Dresden. Among his most recent book publications are Elites and Empires. Imperial Biographies in Austria-Hungary and Russia 1850-1918, Berlin 2015 (co –edited with Malte Rolf) as well as Akteure der Neuordnung. Ostmitteleuropa und das Erbe der Imperien, Berlin 2017 (co-edited with Frank Grelka).

“...the book highlights the fascinating issue of displaying war, and, through display, defining and exposing certain concepts of national and local identity. In that sense the volume is an important contribution to the growing literature on Central and East European museums in particular, and the issue of presentation of war in museums in general.” · Canadian Slavonic Papers

“The study contains a multitude of interesting details and observations pertaining to various regimes of collective memory, the specifics of national and local commemorations, and the inclusion of contested past into the fabric of museum exhibitions.” · Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research

“Certain key passages make very important and significant points about the depiction of the past in the recently ‘museified’ Eastern European countries. The focus on Dresden, Warsaw, and Leningrad/St. Petersburg works very well as each thematically driven case study complements each other and offers new ways of understanding images of the enemy in historicized museum depictions.” · Keir Reeves, Monash University

Zuzanna Bogumił is Assistant Professor at the Maria Grzegorzewska Academy of Special Education in Warsaw and a member of the Social Memory Laboratory at the Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw. Her most recent book is Gulag Memory (Universitas, 2012).

Joanna Wawrzyniak is Head of the Social Memory Laboratory at the Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw. Among her recent books are Veterans, Victims, and Memory: The Politics of the Second World War in Communist Poland (Peter Lang, 2015) and Memory and Change in Europe: Eastern Perspectives (co-edited with Małgorzata Pakier, Berghahn Books, 2016).

Christian Ganzer is a PhD student at Leipzig University, Germany. His publications include a monograph on the Museum of the History of the Zaporozhian Cossackdom in the Ukraine (ibidem-Verlag, 2005). As the chief-editor of a Belarusian-German collective he published an anthology of primary sources on the first four weeks of the German-Soviet war 1941-1945 in the Belarusian city of Brest: Brest: Leto 1941 g. Dokumenty. Materialy. Fotografii [Brest: Summer 1941. Documents, Materials, Photos] (with Irina Yelenskaya, Yelena Pashkovich et al. (eds.). Smolensk: Inbelkul’t 2016. Second edition forthcomming in 2017).

Maria Senina is a historian at the Museum of the Political History of Russia in St. Petersburg. Her main academic interest is the history of Russia at the beginning of twentieth century