Shades of Red, Shades of Grey: The Role of Cultural Context in Shaping Museums of Communism

In the post-communist era, Eastern-European museums face three key issues in their attempts to interpret the history of daily life under communism: feelings of nostalgia, representing both individual and collective histories, and ‘purposeful forgetting’. As socialism was experienced differently in each regional context, a sin- gle country or museum does not give a full comparative analysis to examine these issues. This work focuses on comparing three institutions across Eastern-Europe: the Museum of Communism in Prague, the GDR Museum in Berlin, and the Romanian Peasant Museum in Bucharest. Two central questions guided the approach of this work: how have these museums, and the countries they represent, portrayed, memorialized – or rejected – socialism in Eastern Europe? More specifically, what issues have these museums faced in preserving a controversial and raw past and how do their approaches connect or diverge? Though all are faced with complex interpretive issues, each museum is unique in its approach.