War Museums and Memory Wars in Contemporary Poland

Abstract

This chapter explores recent Polish debates over how best to memorialize and narrate the Polish experience of World War II in contemporary museums. Polish memory politics surrounding this question have tended to be strongly polarized, with the two main positions exemplified by two high-profile and high-budget war heritage institutions: the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising (which opened in 2004), and the planned Gdańsk Museum of World War Two (scheduled to open in 2015). Both of these represent powerful bids to define and narrate the Polish war experience in a modern language accessible to both domestic and European audiences. The chapter examines the selections made by the creators of these two..