What are the things you expect to see at the EU museum? You will see there Scarlet lingerie, a Soviet ballistic missile and the good-luck charm of a Portuguese truck driver.
All are on show, however, in a Brussels exhibition designed as the core of a Museum of Europe which organizers hope to open in the next few years to illustrate the continent's road to unity after the devastation of World War II.
"We have tried to show Europe in a different way, to attract people to something that maybe they saw as cold, bureaucratic, distant," says Elie Barnavi, an Israeli historian and former diplomat who is one of the driving forces behind the planned museum.
The idea, Barnavi explains, is to blend the "macro and micro history" of postwar Europe by showcasing grand events like the breakup of Europe's colonial empires, the creation of the EU or the collapse of the Berlin Wall alongside the daily life of citizens over the past six decades.
That's where the red nylon panties come in. They are shown with an early model TV and fake tiger-skin rug in a recreated 1950s apartment representing the emerging consumer society in Western Europe.
In another display, a Soviet missile lies nose-to-nose with an American one in a dark corridor symbolizing Europe squeezed by the superpower standoff.
Portuguese truck driver Carlos Manuel Perreira's lucky Virgin Mary statuette is part of an interactive, multilingual video display illustrating how the abolition of border controls in Europe has transformed the trucker's trade.
Perreira is one of 27 Europeans - one from each EU nation - selected to personalize Europe's story.
Other featured individuals include a Latvian survivor of the Soviet gulags, French and British diggers of the Channel tunnel, a Luxembourg army veteran of NATO's mission in Afghanistan and Slovak ice-hockey-star-turned-politician Peter Stastny.
Among the hundreds of objects on show is the outsized pen wielded by Solidarity leader Lech Walesa to sign agreements with Poland's waning communist government in the 1980s; a watering can used by West Germany's postwar leader (and keen gardener) Konrad Adenauer; a toppled statue of Lenin from Hungary; and an electric lamp made in Belgium from a World War II shell case.
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