Helping Europe Remember

It's the time of year when poppies in British buttonholes and a Europe-wide holiday on November 11 remind us of the terrible wars that scarred the continent in the 20th century. And now a remarkable experiment in cyberspace is offering intriguing new perspectives on a bloody past.

Teams of historians in six countries are putting the finishing touches to an unprecedented project that links key national museums on one dedicated website to provide a gateway and a detailed guide to the conflicts that forged modern Europe.

Officially launched last month, but still very much a work in progress, Les Chemins de la Memoire (Pathways to Memory) is billed as providing a unique multilingual map-centred database on the events of the first and second world wars and the Spanish civil war.

The project was initiated by the memorial museum in Caen, the first Normandy town to be liberated from the Germans by advancing allied troops after the invasion of June 1944.

It also involves the D-Day Museum in Portsmouth; the House of German History in Bonn; Italy's Museum of War and Peace in Emilia Romagna; the Guernica Museum in the Spanish Basque country, site of the notorious bombing in 1937; and the Belgian Centre for the Study of War and Contemporary Societies in Brussels. Each participant is contributing 100-140 entries.

The aim, say the organisers, is to strip history of its national bias, creating something approaching an objective description of events that still arouse angry passions.

"Clearly, the aim is not to give a Brezhnevite, uniform account but to show specifics and compare them," explained Claude Quetel of the Caen memorial.

"The French memory of Dunkirk is not the same as that of Belgium, or of Britain, nor of Germany. The idea is to present all views in a manner that can be reconciled."

Simple browsing across an interactive map of Europe makes it easy to see how national experiences varied.

"Comparing the texts for one of the British cities bombed during the Blitz and a German city bombed by the allies immediately makes one notice how many more German civilians were killed in the allied attacks than vice versa," says Portsmouth's Andrew Whitmarsh.

Terror, mass killings and the firestorm caused by the RAF's 10-day Operation Gomorrah against Hamburg in July 1943 can be looked at together with an account of Bomber Command's High Wycombe HQ, where such devastating raids were planned.

Unusual perspectives open up: the entry on Dunkirk, for example, explains how the "miraculous" British evacuation "left a bitter taste for many French people who felt they had been abandoned by the allied forces.

"From that moment, this episode of the battle of France revived the mistrust which some French people felt towards the British. On the day after the armistice, Anglophobia began to develop in France, a sentiment which the Vichy authorities made use of and cleverly kept alive."

The website, solid and informative but deliberately non-academic, is aimed especially at young people, for whom the wars of the 20th century are now ancient history. And the hope is that the six founding countries will be joined by collaborators from Russia, Poland, Austria and Greece in the coming year.

Funded by the European commission to the tune of 150,000 euros (£95,000) , Les Chemins de la Memoire seeks to promote understanding of different national experiences. The British participants had to work hard to persuade their partners of the need to focus not just on battles but also on the "home front" - that long and nostalgia-shrouded period of pulling together that continental Europeans living under Nazi occupation never had.

Other sensitivities had to be tackled: Germans have long come to terms with Hitler's responsibility for the war of 1939-1945, but Italian historians were anxious about how to document their country's fascist period for this international audience.

Thematic coherence is helped by the way the website is organised: thus the second world war section can be searched by military operations, the war effort, occupation, liberation, repression and resistance.

The completed site will place special emphasis on civilian life, though again, circumstances differed. Aachen, the first German city captured by the Americans in 1944, suffered badly - and in recent years has seen intensive local activity to explore and commemorate what happened during the Nazi era.

Bayeux in Normandy, by contrast, was liberated easily and with little damage to its mediaeval architecture.

Information about Carlton Gardens, the London headquarters of De Gaulle's Free French forces, has background on other allied governments in exile as well as a handy street map.

Many entries have useful links to local tourist authority websites to help visitors find their way to plaques, monuments and cemeteries. And it is striking how much information is available about the still painful issues of collaboration and resistance in France and Belgium. The Netherlands and Scandinavia are conspicuously absent.

Anti-Nazi activity inside Germany is covered in a Berlin entry on the White Rose group alongside others about Gestapo actions against the Jews. Also in Berlin, click on "4 Tiergartenstrasse" and you get a chilling account of Hitler's euthanasia programme to exterminate the mentally ill and the disabled.

But Polish participation is sorely needed to document what happened in death camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka, the industrial killing sites of the "final solution".

Go to Gent in Belgium and you find the fascinating story of Germany's attempt to foster Flemish separatism during the first world war.

This is an especially interesting subject for British audiences more used to reading about the mud and trenches of Flanders Fields- and an enduring embarrassment in a country where national identity is still sharply fractured.

Entries on Spain - with their own thematic categories - focus on subjects such as the notorious Republican work camp at Concabella ("living conditions and treatment were appalling and several aspects could indeed be considered worse than the Nazi camps"). The effects of three years of civil war on one small town, Vilalba, were devastating: memories fading in a Europe now long at peace.