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The House of European History (HEH) in Brussels has opened its doors in 2017 at the initiative by the European Parliament. It was supposed to a testament of our shared European culture and achievements. Yet it has become “the EU’s Propaganda Museum, writes Hungarian museologist and author, Katalin Deme, a Senior Research Fellow at the Hungarian-funded MCC Brussels.
Situated in the heart of Brussels, The House of European History is one of the European Union’s most controversial memory culture projects, which has become a litmus test of how we define a putative European history and identity. The HEH’s current permanent exhibition is the result of several years of intense debate between historians from different political and philosophical backgrounds. As such, it is a carefully thought-out compromise which, in principle, should accommodate visitors from all member states and allow them to feel at home in ‘their’ house of European history.
Since its opening in 2017, the House of European History in Brussels has been a Pandora’s box of debates, ranging from the astronomical cost of the building to various historical, conceptual and didactic issues. From the outset, critical historians have targeted not only the HEH but also each other. For example, concerned Eastern European historians felt that the historical traumas and experiences of their region had been trivialized or misinterpreted, while
Western European historians believed that the HEH had deviated from the liberal canon of European history and had thus become ‘Eastern Europeanized’.
Meanwhile, like two genies refusing to go back into their bottles, the memories of the Holocaust and Stalinism fought for their place within the exhibition concept, while national and European perspectives of the narrative clashed fiercely in the background. One could go on at length about the fault lines of these debates, but the price of doing so would be to distract attention from the fundamental dilemma surrounding the HEH phenomenon.
Analyses that focus on the various ambiguities of the exhibition have missed a central point: namely, that the HEH is not a pioneering experiment, but the culmination of a step-by-step change in our approach to history since the end of the Cold War. From an institutional point of view, this new approach has been achieved by transforming traditional history museums into so-called ‘houses of history’ on a national or European scale.
The decisive paradigm shift posed by the HEH was to create a unified European history out of the fragmented and often contradictory national narratives of the 27 member states. The compromise was reached over a decade through the cooperation of museum experts and various political stakeholders around Europe. This could only be accomplished by blunting the sharp academic debates on history into a consensus-seeking interpretative debate that avoids the dominance of a particular doctrine. This compromise set a precedent for future large-scale memory culture projects that would remove the controversial core of history and replace it with a more easily digestible narrative that is acceptable to all.
Photo: MCC Brussels
The architectural setting of the exhibition, with its grandiose 1930s building in the heart of the European Quarter, expresses the importance of the message it must convey. Glass lifts take visitors up and down to different historical periods, creating the illusion of sci-fi time travel. Visitors of all ages – but predominantly students, and many families with children – enjoy the trip. The younger ones are running around with notebooks, discussing the exhibition in groups, obviously following an educational plan that involves task-solving. They are having fun, as the exhibition is adapted to the needs of the digital generation.
European history and identity are presented for them as an amazing puzzle, a melting pot of nations and cultures, through an emotionally involving depiction of their tragedies and achievements, but mainly their struggles for freedom.
The starting place of the visit is always crucial, as a sort of business card, marking the house’s identity. The anteroom to the exhibitions, where multilingual audio-guides are distributed, is decorated with murals by the internationally renowned Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi. Here you see symbols evoking environmentalism, human rights and democracy, reminders of the pandemics or the Ukrainian war, but also inputs of politically correct irony about ‘good’ oil and ‘bad’ oil, or ‘good’ weapons and ‘bad’ weapons. This graphic entry design is about as thought-provoking as a perpetual BBC News channel, but it certainly serves its own purpose in setting the tone of the visit.
Regardless of this rather superficial graphic overture, visitors entering the exhibition room are immediately confronted with fundamental philosophical questions that have preoccupied thinkers since at least the Age of Enlightenment. What is Europe? What does it mean to be European? What is European history? These are epochal dilemmas that today appear to be more political than philosophical.
The permanent exhibition was intended to be based on three fundamental elements: the memory of European history, the history of European integration (until Brexit) and its impact on the formation of a putative European identity. The six-storey interactive audio-visual exhibition attempts to answer these questions universally and invites visitors to think along. However, active thinking on the part of the visitor is, in practice, inhibited from the outset.
Given the supranational and secular framework of the exhibition, it is not surprising that it relegates both the national perspective of history and religion to the background.
The extent of this is revealed by a search of the HEH’s online catalogue, which provides an understanding of the conceptual criteria of the collection – a core identity of every museum.
A search for the terms ‘nationalism’ and ‘nation’, and ‘religion’ and ‘Christianity’, yields 83 and seven results, respectively. The nation/nationalism database contains mostly modern or contemporary objects, among them the Brexit badge or the symbol of the Norwegian ‘Nei til EU’ movement – equating EU-scepticism with nationalism. The religion/Christianity database is surprisingly poor, with only six to eight items, mostly related to criticism of religion or the Reformation, but there is also a yellow Star of David, which clearly refers to the Church’s historical anti-Semitism.
As the inseparable backdrop to the visible exhibition, the collection database reveals the house’s curatorial strategies. Its structure and taxonomy clearly indicate the HEH’s priority themes, to which national histories and religion obviously do not belong.
The two upper floors form the culmination of the HEH’s narrative and its vision of European history, memory and identity. Here we enter a new space of light and clarity – quite literally, as the designers seem to have remembered by now to install lightbulbs. The museum journey thus literally leads from the shadowy long birth of European history and identity to its illuminated unfolding, which obviously begins with the founding period of the EU. In this final section, the milestones of European social transformation and integration, the EU’s main actors and legislative processes are presented. Darkness is followed by light, and light by darkness in a theatrically staged grand narrative.
Photo: MCC Brussels
Does the end of the visit to the HEH evoke the ‘End of History’, as in Francis Fukuyama’s prediction? If not, perhaps it reveals the disappearance of the traditional history museum with an authoritative master narrative, grounded in scholarly research to safeguard the integrity of its interpretation.
At its core, the conceptual trap of both the HEH and similar memory institutions is that they see history as a problem to be solved, rather than a fascinating complexity worth learning from. Strangely enough,
the HEH, as the cultural promoter of the EU’s federalization agenda, is sometimes credited with a ‘pan-European’ vision of history that leads back to Charlemagne’s empire or even to the Roman Empire.
The assumption is ambiguous. To describe contemporary Europe as the heir to one of the world’s most glorious powers, a forerunner of social justice, while at the same time defining its past as an apologetic entity that needs to be therapeutically addressed, is a double contradiction to say the least. Rather, the truth is that the elitist and apologetic orientation of Houses of History, at national or European level, makes them complicit in Europe collapsing into an identity crisis and hatred of its own history. In fact, the emergence of these ‘houses of history’ represents a completely new model for history museums in the West. By placing ‘the narrative’ of history at the core of their mission (rather than, say, objects from the past), they attempt to provide a decisive new idea of Western history. Such ‘houses’ become intellectual ‘safe spaces’ for the postwar elites’ idea of history.
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Our new report explores how Brussels’ House of European History transforms the past into a supranational, therapeutic narrative.
What does this mean for Europe’s identity crisis? pic.twitter.com/PpmwChADLu
— MCC Brussels (@MCC_Brussels) January 8, 2025
After all, might not the best scenario for the HEH be to ditch its first exhibition concept and transform it to the history of the EU from the first pan-European vision back in 1920 to the present day? This would have the virtue of not trying to read history backwards – avoiding the temptation to say that everything in European history was always destined to end in the post-political ‘utopia’ of the EU.
But such a change is highly unlikely. The House of European History has become a key part of the EU’s legitimating narrative. Until we defeat politically the idea that the only solution to the questions posed by history to European peoples is further European integration, the House will remain a key plank of the EU’s propaganda narrative.
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