Memory cultures of war in European war museums

In this chapter we analyse a number of war museums across Europe, in order to assess the extent to which national(istic) narratives are being subverted and challenged by cosmopolitan and/or agonistic ones. While the representation of violent conflict in war museums lends itself very easily to adversarial contrapositions of friends and foe, it can also foreground the suffering inflicted upon both civilians and soldiers from all warring sides, or indeed highlight dissensus and contestation, offering multiple perspectives including those of the perpetrators and bystanders. This chapter also explores audiences’ motivations, experiences and emotional states, in order to understand the kind of emotions elicited by the different modes of representations, as well as the emotional responses experienced by the visitors