This compact and engaging study explores how WWII is narrated in postcommunist Europe through detailed examination of three city museums in Russia, Poland and Germany. Drawing on consideration of wider national memory discourses alongside careful reading of the displays in the State Museum of the History of St Petersburg, the Historical Museum of Warsaw and the Dresden City Museum, the authors reveal how both wartime enemies and selves are identified and represented in these different settings. By making the representation of the wartime enemy their central question in each case study, the authors are able to identify a number of suggestive commonalities and differences in postcommunist national memory cultures.

As perhaps might be expected, similar representations of the German invader are found in the city museums in St Petersburg and Warsaw. Both foreground their respective wartime cities as “the scenes of national dramas” (148) and assemble a binary cast of characters within rather monolithic narratives in what the authors dub “temple” museums (5). In the case of St Petersburg, alongside the local story of Leningrad citizens fighting hunger, cold, and the threat of bombardment, the museum also exhibits a national narrative of the battle between Soviet heroes and German soldiers who are constructed as an almost sub-human “ferocious Homo ferus” (56). A similar binary can be found in Warsaw where constructing the enemy as “an idea” (95) eschews complexity and positions the wartime battle between Poles and Germans as one between Good and Evil. As the authors astutely note, 1989–90 does not emerge as the year nulla in display practices in these museums. Rather, they point to striking continuities in Warsaw as well as between the narrative developed of the Leningrad blockade in the 1960s and within the contemporary display.

In contrast to these monolithic “temple” museums, the authors signal more complexity in the narratives found in the “forum” museum (5) in Dresden, which is less concerned with “great and tragic national wartime events,” and more with “ordinary people’s decisions” within the locale (150). Here the Nazi rise to power with popular support from townspeople in 1933 is positioned as the beginning of an end that reached its climax with the Allied bombing of the city in February 1945. Narrating the history of the 1930s and 1940s this way, the museum suggests that “the real enemy of both the city and the citizens are the citizens themselves” through their support for the Nazi party. Doing this does not position the enemy as external to the nation as is done in St Petersburg and Warsaw, but rather internal and found in “the hostile ‘I’” that is seen ultimately lying within all of us (130). Reflecting broader trends in post-war German memory cultures, the treatment of Jews in Dresden is central to the narrative, in contrast to its relative unimportance in Warsaw.

In arguing that the museum in Dresden offers a complex and critical approach to WWII, however, the authors also note the counter tendency to draw on and continue narratives of German victimhood. Through placement of the display on the Allied bombing of Dresden outside of and apart from the linear historical narrative, the curators position this as an ahistorical event. Here is an example of the careful reading of museum displays as texts that characterize the volume as a whole. The different elements—photographs, objects, captions, text panels—of display, as well as wider consideration of the spaces and places of museums, are unpacked to good effect. Examples of the productive focus on museum space are particularly striking. In Dresden, the display positions reunification as a return to the former glory of this center of European culture by bringing the visitor full circle back to the beginning of the longer history of the city. In Warsaw, placing images of daily life in the Warsaw ghetto physically within a “ghetto-box” glimpsed through gaps in the wall serves to frame the visitor as non-Jewish Varsovian looking in to the ghetto, which both replicates and draws on wider cultural traditions in post-war Poland.

Such sophisticated analysis is a result of the distinctive methodology developed in the wider project that this book emerges from. As the authors explain in a fascinating section that outlines their approach, the case studies benefited from collaborative interrogation through a variety of playful methods—what they term the “museual game” (17)—as well as the more focused co-working in pairs that brought native and foreign voices together, as well as fostering interdisciplinary working among anthropologists, historians and sociologists. This model of team work enriches the case studies that are all the stronger for multiple iterations of collaborative interpretation.

However, despite this commitment to collaborative working, the authors—rather ironically—tend to smooth out distinctive and different readings of these displays within the text. The result is a single rather than multiple narrative—or book as temple rather than forum to draw upon the metaphor that is fruitfully adopted to explore museum display—which means that the sense of “conversation” (16) that the authors point to in their introduction is absent from the case study chapters themselves. Laying bare something of that conversation among disciplines and perspectives would enrich both the analysis as well as foregrounding the innovative methodology that the authors adopt in a work that is enriched by co-research and co-writing.