From the Editor

The contributions to this issue discuss the disparate means by which memories of war are transmitted across generations, ranging from the display of war and military death in public sites in Dresden and Washington, DC, to German and British family legacies relating to World War I, to responses to visual representations of Japanese sexual violence and the Holocaust during World War II. Although they each address different events, countries and media, they all highlight the role of active agents at every stage of the formation, diffusion and reception of memories of war and collective violence.

In "The Military History Museum in Dresden: Between Forum and Temple," Cristian Cercel draws on theories of agonistic memory to analyze both the architectural structure and the contents of the museum, which reopened in 2011 with a striking new extension by Daniel Libeskind and a new permanent exhibition. Cercel argues that while Libeskind's abstract and grandiose architecture has become so popular that it no longer commands the critical edge that it carried originally, the museum's broad spectrum of art brings to the fore conflicting stances related to war, strengthening the museum's function as a forum where hegemonic narratives are questioned. Nonetheless, there are numerous issues that the museum fails to address, such as Dresden's socialist past, neo-Nazism in the army and left-wing opposition to the intervention in Afghanistan. In conclusion, he suggests that as an educational institution of the Bundeswehr the museum's function as a forum is neutralized by its role as a temple, where tribute is paid to the men and women who endured the tests of war.

Sarah Wagner and Thomas Matyók's, "Monumental Change: The Shifting Politics of Obligation at the Tomb of the Unknowns" provides a historical overview of the changes that have marked a century of commemorative practices at this national shrine of the United States. Originally, the Tomb's simplicity encouraged closeness and informality, but later ropes, and eventually, chains, railings and bars, kept the public at a respectful distance. Moreover, as time has passed since the wars whose fallen soldiers are commemorated, the sentinels' stylized display of military discipline has taken center stage at the Tomb. Nowadays, people come to watch rather than to remember. Thus, Wagner and Matyók conclude that the Tomb of the Unknowns has become transformed from a site of memory into a space for instructing visitors in the contemporary American military ethos.

Michael Roper and Rachel Duffett were part of a team that organized a four-day meeting in Bavaria in 2016, which brought together German and British descendants of soldiers who had served in the First World War. "Family Legacies in the Centenary: Motives for First World War Commemoration among British and German Descendants" reports on the event, the motives of the participants and their self-perceptions. The comment most frequently voiced was that parents and grandparents had not talked about the war. However, while some participants had experienced this silence as benign or insignificant, others considered it oppressive and damaging. Such views could be heard on both sides, but one issue clearly separated British from German participants: while the former regarded World War I as a pivotal event in both their family's and their nation's history, World War II overshadowed the family memory of the latter.

In "Transcultural Memory and the Troostmeisjes/Comfort Women: Photographic Project" Katharine McGregor and Vera Mackie study the different ways in which an exhibition of photographs and testimony of Indonesian survivors of the Japanese military sexual slavery system during the Asia-Pacific War was received and interpreted as it traveled from the Netherlands to Indonesia and Japan. They show how the message of the photographs was shaped both by the different cultural contexts in which they were exhibited and by their setting, size and juxtaposition: embedded in text, displayed individually or as a group, in a museum, cultural center or university, in a photojournalism magazine or a book.

Stefanie Rauch's "Understanding the Holocaust through Film: Audience Reception between Preconceptions and Media Effects" details the findings of an empirical study of the responses of British lay viewers to...