Museums, Modernity and Conflict:

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Museums, Modernity and Conflict

Museums, Modernity and Conflict examines the history of the relation-

ship between museums, collections and war, revealing how museums have
responded to and been shaped by war and conflicts of various sorts.
Written by a mixture of museum professionals and academics and rang-
ing across Europe, North America and the Middle East, this book exam-
ines the many ways in which museums were affected by major conflicts
such as the World Wars, considers how and why they attempted to contrib-
ute to the war effort, analyses how wartime collecting shaped the nature
of the objects held by a variety of museums and demonstrates how muse-
ums of war and of the military came into existence during this period.
Closely focused around conflicts which had the most wide-ranging impact
on museums, this collection includes reflections on museums such as the
Louvre, the Stedelijk in the Netherlands, the Canadian War Museum and
the State Art Collections Dresden.
Museums, Modernity and Conflict will be of interest to academics and
students worldwide, particularly those engaged in the study of museums,
war and history. Showing how the past continues to shape contemporary
museum work in a variety of different and sometimes unexpected ways, the
book will also be of interest to museum practitioners.

Kate Hill teaches History at the University of Lincoln. She has written exten-
sively on the history of nineteenth-century British museums; her most recent
book is Women and Museums 1850–1914: Modernity and the Gendering of
Knowledge (2016). She is Co-Editor of the Museum History Journal.
Routledge Research in Museum Studies

Museum Gallery Interpretation and Material Culture

Edited by Juliette Fritsch

Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums

Edited by Laurajane Smith, Geoff Cubitt, Kalliopi Fouseki, and Ross
Wilson

Exhibiting Madness in Museums

Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display
Edited by Catherine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon

Designing for the Museum Visitor Experience

Tiina Roppola

Museum Communication and Social Media

The Connected Museum
Edited by Kirsten Drotner and Kim Christian Schrøder

Doing Museology Differently

Duncan Grewcock

Climate Change and Museum Futures

Edited by Fiona R. Cameron and Brett Neilson

Animals and Hunters in the Late Middle Ages

Evidence from the BnF MS fr. 616 of the Livre de chasse by Gaston Fébus
Hannele Klemettilä

Museums, Heritage and Indigenous Voice

Decolonising Engagement
Bryony Onciul

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.

routledge.com/Routledge-Research-in-Museum-Studies/book-series/
RRIMS
Museums, Modernity and
Conflict
Museums and Collections in and of War
since the Nineteenth Century

Edited by Kate Hill

First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2021 selection and editorial matter, Kate Hill; individual chapters,
the contributors
The right of Kate Hill to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hill, Kate, 1969- editor.
Title: Museums, modernity and conflict : museums and collections in and of
war since the Nineteenth Century / Kate Hill.
Other titles: Museums and collections in and of war since the Nineteenth
Century
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2020. | Series:
Routledge research in museum studies | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020028260 (print) | LCCN 2020028261 (ebook) | ISBN
9780367272500 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429295782 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Museums--Europe--History--20th century. | Art treasures in
war. | War and society. | Historic sites--Conservation and restoration.
| Monuments--Conservation and restoration. | Cultural
property--Protection. | Cultural property--Destruction and
pillage--History--20th century. | Military museums--History--20th
century.
Classification: LCC AM40 M8758 2020 (print) | LCC AM40 (ebook) | DDC
069.094/09041--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028260
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028261
ISBN: 978-0-367-27250-0 (HB)
ISBN: 978-0-429-29578-2 (eB)
Contents

Figures vii
Contributors xi

Introduction: museums and war 1

KATE HILL

PART I
Collecting and conflict 13

1 Salvage and speculation: collecting on the London art market

after the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) 15
TOM STAMMERS

2 Treasure, triumph and trespass: the place of conflict

in the collecting and display of ‘Priam’s Treasure’ 39
ZOE MERCER-GOLDEN

PART II
Keeping going? 59

3 The evacuation and management of the Louvre Museum’s Near

Eastern Antiquities Department during the Second World War 61
ZOÉ VANNIER

4 Implementing preventive strategies between World War I and II:

the Catalan art museums and the Spanish Civil War 79
EVA MARCH
vi Contents
PART III
Propaganda, morale and resistance 103

5 ‘The present is pretty terrible, the future is unknown, the past

is the only stable thing to which we can turn’: Philip Ashcroft,
Rufford Village Museum and the preservation of rural life and
tradition during the Second World War 105
BRIDGET YATES

6 Museums without objects? The Staatliche Sammlungen

für Kunst und Wissenschaft in Dresden during
the Second World War 129
KARIN MÜLLER-KELWING

7 Exhibiting in wartime. Nazification and resistance in Dutch art

exhibitions 149
EVELIEN SCHELTINGA

PART IV
Museums of war and conflict 169

8 Displaying Ravensbrück concentration camp memorial: from

the ‘antifascist fight’ to ‘history and memory of the women’s
concentration camp’ 171
DOREEN PASTOR

9 ‘Flight without feathers is not easy’: John Tanner and the

development of the Royal Air Force Museum 191
PETER ELLIOTT

10 ‘We are a social history, not a military history museum’: large

objects and the ‘peopling’ of galleries in the Imperial War
Museum, London 213
KASIA TOMASIEWICZ

11 War stories: the art and memorials collection at the

Canadian War Museum 235
SARAFINA PAGNOTTA

Index 255
Figures
viii Figures
Figures ix
Contributors
Peter Elliott is the RAF Museum’s first Curator Emeritus, having retired
from the post of Head of Archives in 2016. He is now studying for a
PhD at the University of Hertfordshire, examining the development of
aviation museums in the United Kingdom.
Kate Hill teaches History at the University of Lincoln (UK) and researches
the history of British museums. Her recent publications include Women
and Museums 1850–1914: Modernity and the Gendering of Knowledge
(2016) and, as editor, Britain and the Narration of Travel in the
Nineteenth Century (2016). She is Co-Editor of the Museum History
Journal.
Eva March is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the
Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona). Her field of study is public and
private collections in Catalonia during the last years of the nineteenth
century and the beginning of the twentieth century. On this topic, she
has published various books and articles. Her current research focuses
on methodological issues related to the patterns of artistic reception.
Zoe Mercer-Golden received her BA from Yale University and her MA
from the Courtauld Institute of Art. She was Assistant Curator at Royal
Museums Greenwich, London, and is currently helping to build a new
museum focused on the counterculture in San Francisco.
Karin Müller-Kelwing is a freelance art-historian. Previously she was
Research Associate at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
(Dresden State Art Collections) and worked on the research project
‘Between art, science and politics: Museums under National Socialism.
The Staatliche Sammlungen für Kunst und Wissenschaft in Dresden and
their scholarly employees.’
Sarafina Pagnotta completed her master’s degree in Art History with
a concurrent diploma in curatorial studies in 2018. Since then, she
has continued her research and has given papers at conferences both
nationally and internationally. She presented at the Canterbury 100
conference in Christchurch, New Zealand, as part of the centenary
commemorations of the Armistice in November 2018. She is currently
working as a research consultant at the Canadian War Museum and will
begin her doctoral research at Carleton University in September 2020.
Doreen Pastor recently completed her PhD candidate in German Studies
at the University of Bristol and is currently working as Teaching Fellow
in German Politics and Society at the University of Bath. Her research
focusses on the politics of memorialisation of the Nazi past and the
xii Contributors
GDR legacy in contemporary Germany. She is particularly interested in
the visitor response to exhibitions and conducted empirical research at the
concentration camp memorials Ravensbrück and Flossenbürg, the House
of the Wannsee Conference and the former Stasi prison Bautzen II.
Evelien Scheltinga is a curator and researcher, with a focus on propaganda
and fascism. She took part in the research for the exhibition The Stedelijk
in wartime at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2015) and had a
curatorial traineeship at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. She worked
with Jonas Staal on various projects and exhibitions. Her paper ‘The van
Abbemuseum under Fascist influences. Exhibitions and daily life 1940-
1944’ resulted in an exhibition focusing on Eindhoven’s daily life during
the occupation and the role of the museum during the Second World
War at the Van Abbemuseum, where she currently holds the position of
assistant curator; she works on several projects, such as the exhibition
series Positions.
Tom Stammers is an Associate Professor in Modern European Cultural
History at the University of Durham. His book The Purchase of the Past:
Collecting Cultures in Post-Revolutionary Paris (2020) explores the
politics of collecting, the art market and cultural heritage in nineteenth-
century France. He continues to publish work related to collecting,
connoisseurship, museum institutions, the historiography of art and the
cultural memory of the French Revolution. He has two new research
projects: one related to the Orléans family and nineteenth-century French
monarchism, and another related to the theme of Jewish collectors as
co-investigator on the major AHRC-funded project ‘Jewish’ Country
Houses: Objects, Network, People.
Kasia Tomasiewicz is a final year Collaborative Doctoral Partnership PhD
researcher at the University of Brighton and the Imperial War Museum.
Her research traces the changing landscapes of Second World War
memory and commemoration at the Museum’s flagship London site. She
uses archival, ethnographic and oral history research methods, and is
particularly interested in methodological approaches to museum spaces.
Zoé Vannier is a PhD student at the Ecole du Louvre and Paris 1 Panthéon-
Sorbonne, and has a double bachelor in Art History & Archaeology and
History (Sorbonne) and a master’s degree from the Ecole du Louvre on
museology. Her research focuses on the protection and rehabilitation of
the National Museums of Beirut and Kabul in times of crisis.
Bridget Yates is a retired museum professional and independent researcher
with a particular interest in volunteer run rural museums, especially
those established in the 1920s and 1930s. She holds a doctorate from the
University of Gloucestershire on the history of volunteer-run museums.
 Introduction
Museums and war
Kate Hill

The impact of conflict on museums is very visible in the twenty-first cen-

tury.1 Not only have museums been destroyed, their collections looted,
and their curators killed in the course of recent conflicts, but older con-
flicts continue to dog modern museums and to undermine their claims to
advance humanity. 2 Equally, though, war and conflict continue to drive the
formation of new museums, new exhibitions and new collections. In 2019,
the Musée de la Libération de Paris opened; while in 2014 the Imperial
War Museum (London) opened its redisplayed First World War galleries,
to coincide with the centenary of the outbreak of the war, a centenary
which has driven a large quantity of new displays in many museums.3 Legal
frameworks, such as the Hague Convention of 1954, and international
bodies such as UNESCO, have emerged from conflict to protect cultural
property during war.4 Museums are undertaking collecting of contempo-
rary and recent conflicts in Afghanistan and elsewhere.5 Thus museums
and their collections are both at great threat from, and substantially cre-
ated by, modern warfare. Moreover, modern warfare has itself been shaped
by museums. They have helped to define the qualities of the nation which
was being fought for, and shaped the memory and understanding of con-
flict in the aftermath.
This volume aims to extend the examination of war and museum history
into new fields. Some aspects of this history are already quite well-trodden
ground; during the recent centenary of the First World War, museum com-
memoration has been both an action and a focus of study. Attention has
been drawn both to the ways in which museums aligned with new state
mechanisms for remembering war, through official artists and photogra-
phers, for example, and to the ways in which museums adapted and gave
some voice to the widespread experience of loss and trauma and to popular
expressions of this experience through the collecting and donation of ordi-
nary objects of war. Jay Winter suggests that museums were key ‘vectors
of the memory boom.’6 Moreover, museum narratives of the First and then
Second World Wars in museums, which innovatively included both official
and family memories, drove today’s configuration of museums and public
history in general towards the location of ‘family stories in bigger, more
2 Kate Hill
universal narratives.’7 It is clear, therefore, that museum representations of
war have been critical to our understandings of war, memory and museums
themselves. However, the way that war commemoration intersected with
other aspects of museums, such as the physical effects of war on them, has
rarely been considered, and this volume aims to move beyond a focus on
commemoration and engage in new ways with the relationship between
and history of museums and military conflict in the modern world.
In drawing together a number of studies of conflict and museums over a
150-year period, this volume aims to offer a more wide-ranging examina-
tion of that complex and contradictory history and to highlight particularly
the different effects war could have on museums, as well as the different
roles museums could play in shaping understandings of conflict. Despite this
emphasis on diversity and on unexplored aspects of the war-museums rela-
tionship, the volume also seeks to suggest that there is a distinctive align-
ment between modern museums and modern war in two key ways. First, it
suggests that although museums and their history are usually seen as part of
process of modernisation resting on ‘expanding secularisation, individualis-
ation, peaceful bureaucratisation, multicultural integration, tourism and a
growing cultural industry,’ the more violent and disruptive forces of moder-
nity, in particular imperial conquest and the development of ‘total war,’ are at
least as important in driving the development of museums during the period
of modernity.8 There is, in other words, a productive relationship between
museums and war which is part of the modern world. ‘Total war’ has been
defined as ‘modern industrial war, involving the mobilisation of society and
the erosion of the distinction between military and civilian’ (my emphasis),
and is often seen as originating in the nineteenth century (in the US Civil War,
the German wars of unification, or the Franco-Prussian War, or occasionally
as far back as the Napoleonic Wars) and accelerating through the twentieth
centuries with the First and Second World Wars.9 Such an approach to war,
however distinct and wherever and whenever it originated, put museums and
heritage at the service of military action in ways they had not hitherto been.
Museums themselves, it could be argued, while no more exclusive to moder-
nity than war, took on their current ‘modern’ form at the same time as war
itself was modernising.10 Sections 2 and 3 of this volume show that total war
had enormous implications for museums’ functioning during wartime.
Second, the ways in which modern nation states and their populations
engaged with both war and museums has produced contradictory results.
Museums have a role in the legitimation of power and of violent conflict,
and also in the growth of memorialisation and marking of individual
loss. Both trends have been visible in museums over the last two centu-
ries; museum memorialisation can be seen in the nineteenth as well as the
twentieth century, while power and its legitimation was a key question for
museums in the twentieth century, as chapters in this volume on museums
in the occupied Netherlands and in Germany during the Second World War
 Introduction 3
show. Sections 1 and 4 look at these quite different aspects of museums’
role in relation to shaping the meanings of conflicts.

War, nation states and power

In many ways, the French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic Wars in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century mark the start of a certain
relationship between museums, especially national ones, and state aggran-
disement. Napoleon’s conquests across Europe were accompanied by sys-
tematic confiscation of cultural heritage assets as part of a wide-ranging
attempt to harness culture to support the creation of an empire. It has been
suggested that he was trying to overlay his military network with a cultural
network legitimising the new, expansionist French state.11 So significant was
this attempt that though it was very short-lived, it stimulated those nations
who had been conquered by Napoleon to create their own national museum
as soon as they were able to reclaim their art and culture; thus solidifying
the principle that military and imperial power, power as a nation, is vested
in control of culture and heritage.12 This was a principle asserted between
European nations, although not necessarily over European heritage; Britain
and France played out a European rivalry through competition for histor-
ical treasures from Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, and Mesopotamia. Such
scenarios continued in the twentieth century, as Mercer-Golden shows in
her chapter, with the dispersal of ‘Priam’s treasure’ around Europe as well
as Turkey through forces of nationalism and conflict. This means that even
during civil wars, museums and the control of cultural heritage assets have
been a critical part of the conflict, because it is the meaning of the nation
that is at stake and which is both produced and threatened by conflict.
Both March and Vannier explore how fascist regimes of the mid twen-
tieth-century tried to use the circumstances of war to move and display
cultural heritage in order to legitimate their visions of nations and empires.
Even without such national or state engagement with the appropriation
of cultural heritage, though, commercial imperatives also function to put
museum objects in motion during conflict. Stammers’ chapter shows clearly
how the disruptions and economic hardships of war, in combination with
dealers and marketplaces keenly alert to the prospect of bargains, created
a flow of art out of France and into (largely) Britain in the aftermath of the
Franco-Prussian War. Thus, Section 1 examines the way in which mod-
ern international conflicts have created international flows of objects with
major effects on the collections of European museums and galleries.

Museums under threat

Because of the increasingly obvious power functions of museums, they
have become targets in war. Usually sited in city centres, they were acutely
4 Kate Hill
vulnerable to bombardment and air attacks; this was noticeable from the
period of the Franco-Prussian War when the first evacuation plan for
the Louvre was created, but accelerated rapidly and was most prominent
in the Second World War. In the United Kingdom, a number of museums
suffered direct hits in bombing raids during this conflict, and the dam-
age was extensive: Liverpool Museums, the Hunterian Museum of the
Royal College of Surgeons, and the Natural History Museum are exam-
ples.13 Other combatant and occupied nations had similar stories to tell; in
Frankfurt am Main, concentrated bombardment of the historic centre of
the city meant nearly all the city’s museums needed housing in new build-
ings.14 The second section of the volume thus examines the ways in which
threats of destruction affected museums and galleries.
Such vulnerability in fact led to the growth of partial consensus about
the mutual protection of such sites. As Vannier and March demonstrate, the
growth of a heritage profession with common standards and international
organisation led to the start of a focus on the protection of cultural heritage
during war, by attacking and occupying forces as well as by defending or
defeated ones.15 Yet such agreement was dependent on heritage profession-
als having positions of power during conflict, which as Vannier shows was
not always the case, and was strongly threatened by the competing impulse
not so much to destroy heritage as to appropriate it. In both Paris and
Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, works
of art were not just at risk of destruction, but also of being co-opted into
the schemes of the victorious power which would necessitate moving them
from their safe places to which they had been so carefully removed. In the
twenty-first century, the undoing of what was only ever a partial consensus
on heritage protection in places such as Iraq and Syria shows the limitations
of this approach.16
Modern warfare created unprecedented physical risks for museums
and their collections and in so doing also drove new methods of collec-
tion management which allowed for better, safer packing and evacuation,
record-keeping, environmental monitoring and conservation. In the same
way that modern warfare stimulated the development of certain branches
of medicine, especially surgery, so it impacted on museum practices.17
Vannier demonstrates that the Louvre became increasingly systematic in
evacuating its collections, gaining speed and safety from these innovations.
While museums in Catalonia had fewer opportunities to practice evacua-
tion, international guidelines were starting to become available to assist
museum curators and directors in planning to minimise war damage. Thus,
the section reveals the importance of warfare for the development both of
the practices and the networks of curatorship and conservation, developing
international organisations and a more specific professional set of compe-
tences both enhanced the power and prestige of museum work, and acted
to protect museums, in the twentieth century.
 Introduction 5
Museums and the war effort
The requirement that museums contribute to the war effort also devel-
oped in this period. Both museum visitors and museum staff were critical
in simultaneously embracing and evading the job of winning ‘hearts and
minds.’ Museums were more suitable for propagating a general emotional
tone rather than any specific propaganda message, but if they were still
open to visitors (and this is a significant caveat; as Section 2 shows, most
museums increasingly removed as much of their collection as was feasible
and sometimes had to shut because of staff absences through mobilisation)
they were increasingly seen as important for the morale, and patriotism of
the country; under certain circumstances such as occupation and defeat,
they could be even more important and contested.
The First World War largely saw museums struggling on with decreasing
numbers of staff and in some places increasing risk of aerial attack, but
there was relatively little thought on how they might actively support the
war. During the First and Second World Wars, museum spaces were occa-
sionally commandeered for direct contributions to the war effort; in the
United Kingdom, for example, the V&A Museum was used as a canteen
for the air force training college, and allotments for growing food were set
up in the grounds of the Natural History Museum in London. Part of the
Tate Gallery’s basements was used as an air raid shelter, while the Royal
Pavilion in Brighton was converted into a hospital during the First World
War.18 However, alongside these repurposings of museums, there was an
increasing interest in the ways in which, through their museum function,
they could contribute to the war effort.
Sometimes this was largely informational; in the United States and the
United Kingdom, special exhibitions were sometimes produced focused
on food and health; topics which were anyway of growing interest to
museum curators although given an added impetus with wartime condi-
tions.19 The UK’s Department of Information, a 1917 formation designed
to try and create or maintain a ‘pro-war attitude,’ produced a number of
exhibitions for provincial museums, of war drawings, paintings and pho-
tographs, mainly the creations of official war artists and photographers.
However, in 1917 the Department of Information produced an exhibi-
tion on ‘Britain’s Efforts and Ideals in the Great War’ which, as the title
suggests, aimed to focus not so much on the war itself and its immediate
exigencies, as to highlight the nature of ‘our national life,’ and its under-
lying values such as democracy. This exhibition toured the USA as well as
Britain and was said to have a significant impact. 20 Jennifer Wellington
has described the general museum contribution during the First World
War as being part of a ‘culture for victory,’ aiming, with some success,
to encourage ‘emotional, physical, and financial commitment’ to the war
across the British Empire. 21
6 Kate Hill
The idea that museums might have more than a practical, informational
role during war time, but might be useful for inculcating values, improving
morale, and encouraging the vision of a certain post-war future, was then
developed substantially with the Second World War when a broader range
of museums in more combatant nations were drawn into the war effort.
By the Second World War, though, and at least across Europe, museums’
relationship with war propaganda became more difficult. It has recently
been shown how far museums in the United Kingdom stepped back from
the officially mandated circulating exhibitions, which were devastatingly
unpopular with visitors and staff. 22 Curators were usually as reluctant
as visitors to put forward messages about the war, especially when those
messages came from a contested political ideology; unless they themselves
owed their curatorial role to that ideology. The role of museums in propa-
gandising for Nazism, in both Germany and the Netherlands under occu-
pation, was substantially determined by the extent to which the slimmed
down museum staff had been purged of non-Nazis and was formed of party
members, as the analyses of Müller-Kelwing and Scheltinga show in this
volume. Moreover, the extent to which exhibitions could be categorised
as ‘propaganda’ or ‘resistance’ is complex; the kind of detailed exhibition
analysis which Müller-Kelwing and Scheltinga provide shows how contin-
gent such labels can be.
Nevertheless, and especially outside capitals, where museums stayed
open they were popular and often looked to the past or the future to engage
with war issues in a more oblique and less overtly propagandising way. In
Spain, the Civil War and aftermath saw an increasing Catalan focus on
Catalonian cultural heritage as a means of developing a sense of regional
identity. Similarly, as Yates shows in her chapter, during the Second World
War in rural Lancashire (UK) the ‘soul’ of the locality through its ordinary
past was held up as what was being fought for. The impulse to look to the
past for the ingredients to make the future, or to escape from the present,
was not universal but nevertheless significant in museums,’ curators’ and
collectors’ responses to war. Museums, then, took on a new role in varying
ways, entertaining, informing and performing ambiguous acts of ‘propa-
ganda’ for embattled populations.

Remembering and understanding war in museums

Modern museums increasingly took on a central role in remembering, inter-
preting and debating war, and a key part of this development was the crea-
tion of war museums. Yet what were these museums, how did they intersect
with other types of museum such as those dedicated to military forces, and
what did they ‘say’ about war? The Imperial War Museum, in many ways
the fons et origo of war museums, was set up in the immediate aftermath
of the First World War, exercising a centralising effect on numerous local
 Introduction 7
efforts across the United Kingdom to keep and remember objects testifying
to the experience of war. 23 Moreover, it was with the First World War that
the widespread national apparatuses of war artists and official collecting
started to be built in many combatant nations, to commence feeding into
national war museums.24 A recent study suggests the United Kingdom has
136 military museums, dating from the 1920s onwards. 25 Of course, mil-
itary museums are not the same as museums of war, and the category of
museums which deal with conflict is both broader and narrower than that
of military museums. That there is no clear way of defining museums which
interpret and display war is clear in the chapters making up the last section;
they show that museums have had a complex journey towards any sense of
purpose and narrative when it comes to representing and remembering war.
They have found themselves negotiating a difficult narrative: between the
national and the individual, between technology and people, and between
celebrating, adjudicating and remembering war.
From the nineteenth century, but accelerating with the increasing ‘totality’
of war in the twentieth century, museums have been used to help ‘process’ and
narrate war, through the collecting of different sorts of object; and to memo-
rialise new sorts of loss and trauma. In the United Kingdom, the Crimean,
but more particularly the first and second world wars have led to a focus on
the ‘ordinary’ soldier and their families.26 Genocide and war crimes, however,
have been hard to fit into existing narratives of war as ‘honourable’ and have
meant that while museums of the military emerged from the late nineteenth
century onwards, their purpose and narrative have been highly ambiguous.27
The chapters in the fourth section of this volume show how unstable
museums’ narration of war has been in the twentieth century and into the
twenty-first; this might be because, as Pastor shows so clearly, political
changes have repeatedly altered that narrative, or as she also demonstrates,
because the range of victims and the range of complicity in atrocities recog-
nised over time has become wider. It is also very clearly the case that muse-
ums’ role in a modern ecology of entertainment, and their responses to the
changing sensibilities of visitors, has profoundly changed the ways muse-
ums frame their coverage of war, and that this change has been ongoing
from at least the early twentieth century. Elliott and Tomasiewicz’s chap-
ters show that while museums connected to conflict might aim to function
as recruiting tools for the armed forces, or focus on the technology of war
through its machines, they might also connect visitors to personal stories
and memories, and an inability to understand this dual role has contributed
to delays and difficulties in creating museums. Such an interpretation is
also suggested by Pagnotta’s final chapter, where alongside the official war
art programme bringing a certain narrative of war into Canadian muse-
ums, trench art made by ordinary soldiers stressed the intimate, emotional
and personal narratives of war, and legitimated such narratives through
public display.
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