Europe’s Divided Memory

Abstract

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, European politicians developed the idea of a European Museum in Brussels. A group of professional experts was commissioned to plan a site that would tell the transnational citizens of the European Union (EU) who they are, where they come from, and what connects them. A team of experts, with the Polish-French historian Krzysztof Pomian as the head, started to work on the design of a European Museum in the 1990s. The opening of the museum, however, had to be postponed several times. The emblematic date 2005—60 years after the end of the Second World War and 55 years after Robert Schuman’s declaration on May 9, passed without a symbolic event. In 2007, an exhibition with the title “C’est notre histoire” was opened in Brussels, featuring the visitor of the exhibition as a prominent actor. In 2008, a fresh start for the museum was made by appointing a new team and choosing a new name for the project. The central focus is to be the history of European unification after 1945 up to the present. Rather than looking back into divisive national pasts it was now decided to tell the story of new alliances and the shared resolve to look forward to a common future. The current team is working under a definite deadline; the museum in Brussels, now named “House of European History” after its model, the German “Haus der Geschichte” in Bonn, is to open in 2014.