World War II in Post-Communist Memorial Museums

This book analyzes the museum landscape of post-communist member states of the EU, from Estonia in the North to Croatia in the South. The book asks how World War II is exhibited in major, publicly funded memorial museums that (re-)opened after the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989. Memorial museums are cast in the book as institutions that, at once, commemorate and offer historical information, in this case about the World War II. Many museums opened new permanent exhibitions during EU accession talks of these post-communist countries while the European Union was searching for a shared European memory culture and at the same time post-communist countries were rewriting their history after the fall of the communist regimes. Grounded in culture and museum studies, history, and political science, this book shows how museums in post-communist countries communicate with Europe through their new permanent exhibitions. The book offers a systematic comparison of ten museums: the Museum of Occupations in Tallinn (Estonia), the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia in Riga, the Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius (Lithuania), the Warsaw Rising Museum (Poland), Terezn Memorial (Czech Republic), the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Bansk Bystrica, the House of Terror and the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest (Hungary), the Museum of Contemporary History in Ljubljana (Slovenia), and the Jasenovac Memorial Museum (Croatia). The book asks, too, about the reasons behind the absence of such memorial museums in post-communist Bulgaria and Romania. While the objective of the book is to offer a comprehensive overview of the history of the museums and their current permanent exhibitions, it is driven by a set of questions pertaining to the way in which memorial museums engage the Soviet and Nazi occupation, the Holocaust; how they portray and plot victimhood and collaboration; how and to what extent were they affected by the EU accession talks; and, finally, how the current authoritarian backlash, primarily in Hungary and Poland, influences the post-communist museum landscape. The book proposes the first typology of post-communist memorial museums. It draws a line between museums that center on the Soviet occupation, foregrounding the suffering of ones own majority population, at the cost of the victims of Nazism, primarily the Jews, and those invoking Europe, which closely follow the example Western Holocaust museums. This second group of museums displays Jewish victims with the help of individual stories and private photographs which evoke empathy. Yet, these museums depict Roma, who were persecuted as Gypsies in World War II, in a stereotypical way that in some cases prolongs prejudice.