In a smallish room there are a few guns and helmets, the military uniform of Kaiser Willhelm II, some posters, and a quick primer on the geopolitics of the time. And that's about it, for the ''total war'' that killed unprecedented millions in muddy desperation on the Western Front; that saw the birth of modern chemical warfare and rewrote Europe.

Just down the stairs, more space is devoted to the six years following the war than the war itself.

To an Australian it feels almost like an affront. This is the war that, we are taught, forged our nation. A horror that must never be forgotten. Isn't that the story?

But if you want to find even a mention of Gallipoli here, you have to dig through the multimedia program on the computer in the corner to find one solitary line. Australia literally is not on the map.

Museum curator Juliane Haubold-Stolle is apologetic, almost embarrassed, as she shows me around. "It's not a strong part of our exhibition," she says. "In Germany [World War I] is overshadowed. I won't say it was forgotten. But for quite a time it has been some kind of prehistory, a prologue that prepares for World War II, the real Great War for Germany."

The rest of Europe doesn't feel the same way. As 2014 and the centenary of the start of World War I approaches, countries across the continent are planning big events in commemoration.

Britain, France and Italy are well into their preparations for the 100th anniversary. In Britain a four-year program includes a delegation from every secondary school visiting First World War battlefields, a vigil at Westminster Abbey, and a nation-wide poppy-planting scheme.

But Germany has nothing to publicly announce."At this point we are not giving any interviews on the topic," was the official government response. One insider admitted that "pretty much nothing" has been done yet. The country's only apparent activity has been an official at the German Embassy in London calling for a "less declamatory tone" to Britain's memorial events, saying they should not focus on who was responsible for the war.

Germany's special envoy to the centenary, Andreas Meitzner, recently held a series of meetings with his British counterpart to discuss Britain's proposed events and their tone, The Telegraph reported.

"There are understood to be some official German concerns that the way Britain marks the centenary could cool relations between the two countries," the newspaper said. Implied was just a hint of a threat about the coming negotiations as Britain tries to reframe its relationship with the European Union.

Germany's concern could be justified. The reports prompted lively online debate in Britain with some of the commentary along the lines of "Two world wars and one world cup."

It wasn't just hooligans on the anti-PC bandwagon. Some historians also pushed back, saying the war should not be depicted as merely accidental and futile, but that it was a "just necessary fight for survival against a Germany bent on European domination".

This is exactly the sort of thing that Germans don't want to hear. "We don't want that one on our conscience too," one young Berlin professional said while admitting she didn't know exactly when World War I was fought.

There are several reasons Germans draw a blank on such an important moment in their history, says historian Professor Oliver Janz, of the Friedrich-Meinecke Institute at the Free University of Berlin.

"For Germany, it's a defeat," he says. "But it's neither the biggest defeat nor the biggest catastrophe of our history. This is clearly World War II and the Holocaust.

"It can't be celebrated in a conventional way, as something central for nation building, or nationhood, or pulling together."

Countries need founding myths, Professor Janz says. It's part of how we identify ourselves: we take a key point in our past and say ''that's where we began''. Founding myths are normally positive - wars of independence, the French Revolution, the Glorious Revolution.

"Germany had old founding myths that aren't surviving, so it has turned the Second World War into a founding myth." Once Germany came to define itself in the shadow of Nazi Germany, the previous war was at most a prologue, a setting of the scene. "It is something where all this shit starts, but it's not where it ends - there's no climax."

Dr Haubold-Stolle says the Great War is "not really that well taught" in German schools, except as the lead-up to Nazi Germany. "The main point is its influence on the interwar period," she says.

Students skip briefly over the war in a rush to get to 1918. Then it's on to the turmoil of the next two decades when Germany suffered, briefly flowered in the Weimar Republic's golden era, then was plunged into division as the national socialists fought the communists in the rubble of the Great Depression. The chaos of that time is, in itself, a reason the Great War didn't settle easily into the national consciousness. The war, its causes and consequences, was a matter of public disagreement.

"Germany was divided in how to remember the war," Dr Haubold-Stolle says . "It is easy to remember a victory and what one fought for. But Germany lost. Millions of dead, civilians dead, hunger and disease - what was it for? There was a pacifistic 'never again' reaction, but there were also people saying they needed a new war to make sure the first was not senseless."

Professor Janz says there was a secondary consequence. Because the memory of the war was being challenged, there was no consensus on physical memorials.

Australia, half a world away, has a stronger connection to the battlefields than Germany has. Gleaming-white war graves cover the fields of the Somme, where the locals still embrace Australians in living gratitude for our country's sacrifices on the Western Front. Across the Belgian border in Ypres, the Last Post sounds proudly every Anzac Day.

But the war was not fought on German soil, there were no battlefields or graves to mark it within their borders, and its war dead are not revered in foreign fields.

"Memory needs sites, memory cannot be abstracted," Professor Janz says. "No sites of memory were created [immediately] after 1918; there is no natural memorial for it."

It wasn't until the 1930s that Germany created its own tomb of the unknown soldier, in the Neue Wache building in the Unter Den Linden boulevard in Berlin. But it never became popular. "It's considered Prussian," Professor Janz says. "It was France's one and only victory since Louis XIV, so they are full of glory of course. Between Napoleon and the First World War there was nothing for France, so this is a big victory. For Italy it's the only one they ever won. It's the big victory they longed for after Risorgimento [the 19th century unification of modern Italy]."

As for Britain, ''probably because it's not the end of the Empire".

However, Professor Janz understands the war's importance to Australia. "From a European point of view it is sort of absurd, surprising - this is considered by many as a European conflict - but it's about nation-building." He believes that Germany needs to join in. Compared to other countries, Germany's lack of engagement is ridiculous. "We are three months before 2014. I think they will desperately wake up now when they realise that they have slept so long."

The commemoration should be "something common, something transnational and European," he says. "It would be ridiculous to reproduce the old systems of alliances and fronts. It's time we can historicise this event."

Professor Janz is leading a three-year international research project entitled ''1914-1918 online'', an encyclopaedia of the war edited by 90 historians from 21 countries, with contributions from renowned experts, including Australians.

At the Berlin Historical Museum there will be a big exhibition in the second half of next year, designed to redress the omissions of the past. "The exhibition aims to provide an effective tale of horror, but also an analysis of the structures of the war," the museum's publicity material says.

Dr Haubold-Stolle says Gallipoli will get a mention this time along with other major battlesites. It will cover the ''new war'', the new ways of killing, and include personal stories from people in battle.

It has been hard work. Much of the country's military history was lost, or taken by the Russians, after World War II. But the museum has discovered plenty of new material; personal items that survived in attics and cellars. But "the things survive but not the story; the objects don't tell the story," Dr Haubold-Stolle says. The stories were not written down when the veterans were alive, and the memories of a generation were lost.

But historians agree it is time for Germany to face its past. "The big challenge is for Germans to understand why it's so important," Professor Janz says. "It's an event that has a lot to teach us. It's a beginning of this European civil war which lasted until the 1940s. And it was the beginning of something which ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Empire. Really, World War I was the beginning of a global common European history, and the beginning of the Cold War also. It should be remembered as the beginning of what we are today."