Remembering First World War in Germany and Russia: commemorative exhibitions between heroism and humanism

The essay analyzes the transformation of cultural memory of the negative war experience in contemporary so­cieties on the basis of the concepts and materials of museum exhibition projects created to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the First World War in Russia and Germany. In both countries, museum commemoration depends on public discourse, and the absence of living event witnesses allows to attribute the values convenient and understand­able for the contemporary generation to the events of the war. In Russia, the process of commemoration is facilitated by the use of the outdated expression of ''a forgotten war''. The semantic and visual shift of accents allows to portray the First World War as no longer a symbol of the revolutionary Soviet era''s beginning, but as a symbol of violent and tragic decline of the Russian Empire. The transmitted patterns of interpretation and the principles of creating of mu­seum projects diverge to opposite directions in Russia and Germany. While in Western Europe subjective experi­ences of the representatives of different ethnic, social and gender groups are being brought to the fore of the war commemoration (that may be explained by predominant use of the results of "anthropological turn" in History Stud­ies), Russian museum projects follow the route of persistent glorification of negative experience and the exclusion of global perspectives, often draw back the anti-human nature of the war and emotional experiences of the civilian pop­ulation, and thereby render the militarized discourse divergent from the post-heroic paradigm of European cultural memory.