Mickey Mouse Gas Masks and Wonderlands: Constructing Ideas of Trauma within Exhibitions about Children and War

In recent years, a number of exhibitions have sought to recreate and put on display the wartime experiences of children. In “The Children’s War,” held at the Imperial War Museum in London between 2005 and 2012, recovered letters written by children to their mothers and their servicemen fathers during the Second World War were placed alongside more recent testimonies by people who had survived that war as children. In 2011, a second exhibition was held at this London museum before going on tour throughout the United Kingdom. Entitled “Once upon a Wartime: Classic War Stories for Children,” it wove testimonial accounts from children in both World Wars alongside objects that were said to have inspired a number of texts for children published in the second half of the twentieth century. Since June 2012, a permanent exhibition held at the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, Belgium, displays works of war artists such as Paul Nash and Käthe Kollwitz alongside an interactive timeline that enables visitors to engage with accounts and artifacts of the period.¹ Visitors to this exhibition are allocated a key chain that enables them to access, from a database, the stories of either an adult or a child who lived during the First World War. By assembling children of war within such paraphernalia, these exhibitions appear to enable the transformation of personal experience into a universal story, and by extension into a universal trauma.

This article considers the implications of these collisions and the processes of transformation by exploring how such exhibitions construct wartime children, represent their trauma, and transform their testimonies into stories for mass consumption. It interrogates the tensions produced by seemingly oppositional discourses of trauma and entertainment that are foregrounded in the aims of these exhibitions, including the homogenization of children and war, the problematic identification of a tangible story and storyteller, and the question of what exactly counts as testimony. As well, because all these exhibitions rely on letters, diaries, props, and videos as testimonial accounts of conflict, making the story of children and wartime experience readable as a malleable composition, the article also considers the extent to which these exhibitions construct contemporary ideas of national identity out of past traumas in the form of diachronic discourse. My study relies on recent work within the fields of trauma and testimony, Holocaust texts for and about children, and childhood autobiography in order to consider the purpose and the target audience of such exhibitions and how they function within particular socio-cultural contexts.

The consideration in this study of childhood testimony as a form of exhibition coincides with the current opposition to war memorials in the United Kingdom. In 2012, British Prime Minister David Cameron delivered a speech at the Imperial War Museum in which he announced a fifty-million-pound plan to mark the centenary of the First World War in 2014 with “a commemoration that captures our national spirit, in every corner of the country.” This centenary, which Cameron declared would “provide the foundations upon which to build an enduring cultural and educational legacy” that puts “young people front and centre,” has more recently been opposed by the No Glory Campaign in an open letter published in August 2013. “[D]isturbed” by these plans to celebrate what is alternatively believed to have been a “military disaster and a human catastrophe” (“Open”), this group of academics and well-known media figures will hold their own political and educational campaign in 2014, investigating the role of political power as a hindrance to peace. My study falls within the scope of this opposition, not as a promise of resolution but as part of an ongoing investigation into the contextual framing of children and war within contemporary cultural discourse.

Children, War, and Performance

Created to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, the Imperial War Museum exhibition “The Children’s War” purported to offer insights into the perspective of children who had lived through that worldwide conflict. Disruptions to family life were placed at the forefront of the...