Material traces of the past are not the only object of a memorial policy rooted in democratic
referents. Evidently, wars have created a great many spaces that can be recovered, or even restored
and rebuilt, but the heritage of war has many readings and great care must be taken with regard
to the way it is transmitted and represented. It is all too easy to focus exclusively on the drama and
trauma of the military events and miss important aspects such as the transformational values, for
example, of anti-Francoism or anti-Fascism. Many military history museums reveal a certain nostalgic
narrative that can be harmful to democratic culture and the educational work that derives from it,
especially with regard to the younger generations. How should we respond to the huge proliferation of
military museums in China or in Iran (more than 150 on the subject in four years)? How can we design
educational projects in a museum on “German tanks” in the middle of democratic Europe? What do
we say when we see that more than 300,000 schoolchildren have visited the Warsaw Uprising and
Resistance Museum, full of weapons and tales of war, and housing a temporary exhibition about the
Polish army in the Middle East? These are difficult questions to answer. We may well have serious
doubts about the capacity of these spaces to transmit universal values, and may be concerned
about the political and social messages that underlie these museum narratives. All this alerts us to
the problems of portrayals of war and underlines the belief that visits to places of memory require
some preparation: for example, the study of memory as a process of reflection. Thus memory tourism
promotes education: not just to remember and to know what happened, but also to come to terms
with it and recover values ignored in more repressive, less amenable times.
These issues participate in a great ritual necessary for social peace in which individual
consciences join together with collective ones. Once the policy and its objectives have been
established, the next step is the recovery of memory, a task that we have carried out on many
occasions at the Observatory: through inventories of sites of memory, texts, signage, management
plans for potential sites and itineraries to create new projects. This procedure allows us to choose
specific objectives to be pursued as the basis for the transmission of memory, and thus avoid the risk
of banalization due to errors of content, or the frivolous
attitudes of uninformed visitors. The study of memory is
a process in which conclusions drawn from comparisons
and theoretical cases can help us to learn from history
and the transmission of memory, and apply new formulas
in which the general public are keen to engage. This is
one of the many aims of the Observatory: to address
the subject and all its intricacies, without inhibitions
EDITORIAL
or reservations and free of any political pressure. We Jordi Guixé
hope you enjoy our website and our review Observing Director of the European
Memories. Happy (and critical) reading! Observatory on Memories
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