ABSTRACT
This chapter, after delivering a short introduction to the concept of agonistic memory, will examine a range of selected war museums in Europe and ask how their representations of war are enhancing or hindering historical dialogue. Museums have been for a long time important places for the negotiation and promotion of forms of cultural and social identity. They have long been one of the places where the people belonging to communities have been offered narratives and invited to make them their own. Their narrativizations of the past are linked to the promotion of specific memorial frameworks in which the past is understood. War museums have in the past been at the forefront of sacralising war and promoting nationalist cultural identities through the memorialisation of violent conflict in an antagonistic mode. In Europe, under conditions of Europeanisation and within the framework of the EU project, they have had to rethink such traditional missions and re-orient their cultural identity offers. This chapter examines how more recent museums have been attempting to do this. It will conclude with some reflections on how a step change to more agonistic forms of memory might enhance the ability of representations of war to engage with the vernacular antagonistic memory politics of the political right.
