The authors analyse the presentation of WWII in the city museums of St Petersburg, Warsaw and Dresden. These narratives, they argue, are the effect of merging and interconnection of themes and elements coming from various types of discourse, shaped respectively by the local communities and by the state’s historical policy. Having characterised the most important elements of these two discourses, the authors indicate that to this day, the exhibitions contain interpretation patterns characteristic for the Cold War era. The dominant state discourse strongly influences the presentation of the city’s destruction and its inhabitants’ trauma. The exhibitions in both Warsaw and St Petersburg emphasize the image of an innocent victim attacked by the enemy, and present the city’s destruction in terms of lost but heroic struggle. In Dresden, there are visible references to the discourses of German guilt and German suffering. The exhibitions cannot detach themselves from the context of national history, and they fail to present many aspects of the local experience of WWII.
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