ABSTRACT
The phenomenon I describe and analyse here presented itself to me unexpectedly, when, in 1997, I began working as a historian for the In Flanders Fields Museum. This museum on the First World War is located in the rebuilt Cloth Hall in the equally reconstructed medieval city of Ypres (or Ieper in Dutch). The In Flanders Fields Museum focuses largely on the human experience of warfare. 1 It is the immediate successor of the quite different Ypres Salient War or Remembrance Museums that have existed in Ypres since the 1920s.
