We need to keep a watch on the way the first world war is being commemorated, wrote Santanu Das in the Guardian this week. He is right. With the 4 August centenary of the outbreak less than two weeks away, that watchfulness is now very pressing. In Britain, at least, it is hard not to be apprehensive about the story we are about to be told.

The British government’s official website has recently started to describe the first world war with studied care as “a significant milestone in world history”. It was certainly that. But what kind of milestone? And with what lessons? In the past two weeks I have had the opportunity to visit two impressive and serious commemorations of the war: one in London, at the Imperial War Museum’s justly admired new first world war galleries; the other in Berlin, in a no less powerful special first world war exhibition in the Deutsches Historisches Museum.

In many respects the exhibitions are similar. In each visitors are offered a chronological story of the war; in each the exhibits and displays are thematically clustered. There are special sections about war in the trenches, at sea and in the air; about weaponry; about the home front; about women and the war; about the Russian revolution, medicine, the arts, and many others. In each there are plenty of interactive opportunities.

Strikingly, the two commemorations have also both produced catalogues with identical titles. On my desk are the IWM’s new hardback publication, A History of the First World War in 100 Objects. Next to it is the equally weighty Der Erste Welt Krieg in 100 Objekten, published by the DHM. Both formats are a tribute to the influence and success of the 100-objects approach to world history pioneered by the British Museum director,’s Neil MacGregor.

But there things begin to diverge. Looking at the first objects in the two catalogues, you might think the differences merely reflected different national audiences. The first object in the London catalogue is King George V’s imperial crown; the first in Berlin’s is a portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The same point, perhaps, in different contexts.

But the second objects part narrative company. In London it’s the pen with which Protestants signed the Ulster covenant against Irish home rule in 1912, in Berlin, a German beer tankard commemorating the Paris congress of the Socialist International in 1889. The contrast is emblematic of what follows. For the two exhibitions, and the two books, offer very different treatments of the war. The 100 objects on which they focus are different. The conceptual approach is different. The stories they tell are different. And those differences matter, as do their larger implications for today.

In Britain the commemoration at the Imperial War Museum is fundamentally about Britain and British people. Step into the new galleries and you find yourself watching newsreel film about the people of Britain in 1914. In Berlin the commemoration is fundamentally about Europe and the wider world. Step into that gallery and you find yourself watching newsreel film from Berlin, Vienna, Paris and St Petersburg.

That’s not to say that the London galleries ignore the rest of the world. Likewise it would be absurd to pretend that the Berlin exhibition is not profoundly about Germans and Germany. Nor is it to ignore the fact that Germany’s wish to see the war in international terms – and the current popularity there of books such as Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, which has the European powers all contributing to the drift to war in 1914 – owes something to the wish not to see the conflict as the result of German aggression.

But it is to say that the German approach to commemorating the war – seeing it as an international event in a different Europe from the one we inhabit today – is different from the national continuity that still characterises the British narrative. It is also to say that this reflects a markedly less heroic approach to history. Both viewpoints have some validity. But the German approach, especially in the light of the Balkan wars of the 1990s and of today’s Ukraine crisis, is the more urgent one for an audience in 2014.

This goes to a much deeper point about the way we commemorate our history generally. In Britain our monuments are notably comfortable with the national past, even when that past is a troubling one. Even when they commemorate great loss – as with the first world war cemeteries – British monuments nevertheless manage at some level to venerate, and even to celebrate, the sacrifice. That’s not true in Germany, for reasons of more recent German history. More Germans than Britons lost their lives in the world wars of the 20th century. Yet in Britain every village has a lovingly tended war memorial, while Germany is a country with few war memorials indeed. The British 100 objects survey ends, appropriately in this context, with the comfort of the Cenotaph. The German, on the other hand, ends with the postwar street violence of the paramilitary nationalist Freikorps, in which many future Nazis took part.

In a recent lecture in which he previewed the British Museum’s upcoming autumn exhibition about Germany, MacGregor argued that Germany is one of the few countries in Europe whose national monuments, museums and commemorations refuse to allow any heroic vision to intrude at all. The refusal of the heroic runs through contemporary Germany, he argued. But in Britain, and even more so in the United States, the heroic is ever present, especially in relation to the commemoration of war. It is what unifies the way the British remember the first war as tragic-heroic and the second as idealist-heroic. Today even our soldiers in illegal wars are described as heroes.

While British monuments are mostly rooted in this heroic view of the past, modern German monuments cannot be. German ones are therefore always as much about the future as the past. That is certainly true of the Berlin first world war exhibition. The German word Mahnmal – a warning monument – has no direct equivalent in English, or in British culture. But the Berlin exhibition is in the end a warning exhibition about nationalism and war. The IWM’s is not. In the end, for all its efforts and care, it offers a subduedly heroic national view of the war.

In Britain our commemorations and memorials do not address the awkward chapters of our history. As a result they do not illuminate the awkward dilemmas of our future. In my view we are much the poorer for it.