systematically created together by people online and in Brussels. The result is an ever- Our team has developed the “House” concept further. For us, a house has a positive
changing map in the exhibition and a rich web of present-day contacts which can be connotation, it can be associated with “home” - and we like to see the House of European
explored onsite and online. The results are very interesting: The places most often selected History as a home for European memories in all their diversity. Rather than a memorial
become more and more visible, big cities appear on the map, but also hubs indicating for a fixed and clearly defined historical event or period, it is an open concept which can be
people’s similar preferences, such as Italian cities for food, English cities for music, and so understood as a recipient for evolving content.
on. Connections to places outside of Europe show a strong general westward orientation but
Did the project encounter specific challenges when constructing a transnational
memory that surpasses the borders of national states?
also many connections to Asian cuisine. This collective visualisation experiment therefore
demonstrates how strongly our contacts - and our mental maps - are influenced by history,
be it the Cold War, the guest-worker movement bringing Italian cuisine to the North, or
First of all, I would not say that we have already constructed a transnational memory. In our
globalisation.
view, memory is something evolving and contested, which keeps changing over time. What
In the future, we would like to enhance this kind of participative project through we have constructed in our permanent exhibition is a transnational historical narrative, in
cooperation with partners such as Europeana and through developing other forms of which uses a critical concept of memory as one of the ‘red threads’, reappearing at different
participation or even co-creation in exhibitions or events. What is more, the research points of the exhibition.
service of the European Parliament has created a participative platform called “My House of
The way in which we have constructed the narrative is that we have concentrated on
European History” which should be integrated and connected with our offers.
those events and processes which have originated in Europe, have spread more or less
In regard to the naming of the House of European History, why was the term “house”
chosen as opposed to “museum” or “memorial”?
across the whole continent, and which are still relevant today. These three criteria were
the basis for the selection of the topics of our exhibition - they are arranged in a roughly
chronological order starting from the 19th century up until today. In a prologue to the
In the initial discussions, the term “House” was first used to signify a larger concept: The permanent exhibition, we raise awareness for the fact that memory and heritage are
House of European History was thought, from the beginning, to house not only exhibitions but subject to interpretation, changing with the point of view and the time period of the
also a documentation and information centre about European history. The name also connects beholder. Memory and oblivion are strongly connected in an individual person’s mind, as
our project to a certain type of contemporary history museum which has been initiated over well as at a collective level: A society decides what it wants to remember or forget, partly
the past four decades: Not only the successful Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik for subjective or emotional reasons. Similarly, it is up to us Europeans to choose what we
Deutschland uses this term but also smaller Houses of History in some German Federal States want to acknowledge as being part of European heritage or not. By presenting the topics of
and projects in the Netherlands, Austria, and France which have not been realised to date. They heritage and memory together, we question whether a shared European memory exists and
have all preferred u