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Dissonant Heritage
THE MANAGEMENT OF THE PAST AS A
RESOURCE IN CONFLICT

J.E. TUNBRIDGE
Carleton University, Canada
and
G.J. ASHWORTH
University of Groningen, The Netherlands

JOHN WILEY & SONS

Chichester » New York ° Brisbane * Toronto * Singapore
Copyright © 1996 J.E. Tunbridge and G.J. Ashworth
Published in 1996 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd,
Baffins Lane, Chichester,
West Sussex PO19 1UD, England

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tunbridge, J.E.
Dissonant heritage : the management of the past as a resource in
conflict / J.E. Tunbridge and G.J. Ashworth.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN 0-471-94887-X
1. Historic sites. 2. Cultural property, Protection of.
I. Ashworth, G.J. (Gregory John) II. Title.
CC135.T86 1995
363.6'9—dc20 95-25159
CIP

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0-471-94887-X

Typeset in 10/12pt Palatino from authors’ disk by

Mayhew Typesetting, Rhayader, Powys
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd
To Indy who inspired one half of this book’s labour, and Chimo
who sustained it; and to Thomas, Roxane and Rufus who saw
the other half to fruition. Its virtues are their legacy; its faults are
all too human.
2s pS, 7 La

aren” Sane a a)
rr Le ne e (ats
Contents

Preface 1X

Acknowledgements

i From History to Heritage

A world of heritage
The structure of the argument of the book
The past, history and heritage
A heritage model
Heritage in some wider contexts

Dissonance in Heritage
What is dissonance in heritage?
Dissonance implicit in commodification
Dissonance implicit in place products
Dissonance implicit in multi-use
Dissonance implicit in the content of messages
From dissonance to disinheritance
Heritage and spontaneous cultural conflict

Dissonance and the Uses of Heritage

Heritage as a cultural resource
Heritage as a political resource
Heritage as an economic resource
Harmony or dissonance among types of users?

Dissonant Heritage and Human Diversity

The individual and collective human variable
Culture/ethnicity and heritage dissonance
Social dimensions of heritage dissonance
Political ideology and heritage dissonance
Human geographical contexts of heritage dissonance
Whose heritage? Concluding perspectives

The Heritage of Atrocity

Dissonant heritage and human trauma
The variety of atrocity
viii CONTENTS

Interpreting atrocity: strategies of management 103

The concentration/extermination camp as the heritage of genocide 122
Conclusions: atrocity within wider heritage dissonance 128

6 Central Europe: Managing Heritage in the Maelstrom 131

Into the maelstrom 131
Discerning patterns in the mix 132
Towards an explanation 143
Conclusion: towards a European consonance? 176

7 Canada: Heritage Dissonance in a ‘New World’ Settler Society 179

The heritage context of settler societies 179
The principal participants 181
Case illustrations of intra-Canadian diversity 197
Conclusion: dissonance management approaches 219

8 Southern Africa: Dissonant Heritage as the ‘Black Man’s Burden’? 223

Heritage dissonance in the post-colonial ‘Third World’ 223
Decolonisation and heritage in southern Africa 220
South Africa at the post-colonial threshold 228
Established post-colonial African cases 251
Conclusion: towards a post-colonial heritage resolution? 2o7

9 Retrospect and Prospect of the Management of Dissonance 263

The past — a cause for despair? 263
The wider dimensions of heritage dissonance 264
Managing dissonance for political and economic sustainability 267
The local focus: dissonant heritage and the tourist-historic city 273
The national focus: dissonant heritage and political stability 274
The global focus: a ‘new world order’? 275

References OTT

General Index 291

Place Index 297

Preface

The body of history is like that of a drowned man who has lain long on the sea bed,
and whose ravaged flesh has been encrusted with all manner of shells, algae, corals
and underwater flowers. And the more the flesh is ravaged, the more the shells, the
flowers of mother-of-pearl, the accretions of tears and blood proliferate. (Sylvie
Germaine, ‘The weeping woman on the streets of Prague’ 1993 Daedaelus.)

The last thing that a peacekeeper wants to know is the history of the region he is
' going into. It complicates the task of mediation. (Major-General MacKenzie,
UNPROFOR Bosnia. Quoted in Almond, 1994)

Our previous book on the planning and management of heritage (Ashworth and
Tunbridge, 1990) was a logical extension of our academic interests in urban
geography and spatial planning, easy to justify as a text filling what we believed
was an obvious need among the many students and colleagues working in the
fields of heritage tourism and urban conservation planning. It was predictable in
the sense that it fitted into existing structures of understanding and analysis and
also because we could readily envisage our destination before we began.
This book however is different on both counts notwithstanding a strong
thread of conceptual linkage foreshadowed then and developed now. Although
our interests in the preservation and presentation of the conserved built
environment led logically to posing the questions ‘why do we do it and what is
it used for?’, we did not anticipate being led by the search for answers into so
many fields in many of which we have no specific expertise. In our daily work,
in Canada and the Netherlands respectively, we are engaged in both academic
teaching and practical involvement around the issues of urban and regional
economic and social analysis and planning. It has been obvious to us that the
past at the very least imposes constraints through its physical legacies and we
have become accustomed to recognising the existence of political and social
values which we have for a long time consigned to an undifferentiated box
marked ‘complications’, even though an incipient dissonance issue began to
suggest itself some years ago. We began with the idea that we had brought into
focus a special and relatively rare problem which, although often important for
those involved, was nevertheless we believed a marginal issue in the context of
the practical routine management of heritage as a whole. As we proceeded
however the potential for dissonance grew as we discovered new ways in which
new categories of people could be, and however regrettably should be, seen as
affected: the exceptional became more normal in its incidence and the affected
few expanded to encompass almost everyone at some time and in some way.
Neither of us is historian, sociologist or cultural specialist, which in no way
x PREFACE

inhibits us in this task. The past, contemporary society and human culture are
the property of us all and make their appeals without expert intermediaries.
As we assembled cases we became aware that not only was the topic of this
book a matter of obvious contemporary relevance but that we were describing a
situation in very rapid flux. While this book was being written the mosque at
Ayodhya was destroyed, Dubrovnik was shelled, the Bosnian national archive in
Sarajevo was burnt down, the bridge at Mostar destroyed and numerous statues
and memorials in Eastern Europe were being dismantled or de-dedicated. The
50th anniversaries of many traumatic events of the Second World War were
being celebrated or commemorated with very mixed feelings and the opening
up of many old resentments and rivalries. Contemporaneously the almost
miraculous transfer of power occurred in South Africa and a crescendo of
controversy peaked over the significance of the Columbian quincentennial,
presaging the reinterpretation of the European heritage imprint upon other
continents. Equally, however, numerous new museums, theme parks and similar
presenters of the history resource were opened, in many cases promoting
revisionist heritage interpretations. Most significantly of all, new countries, new
flags and symbols based on a new view of history have been proclaimed from
the Balkans to the Caucasus and beyond. A field of concern which had first
glimmered in our consciousness more than a decade ago, and which suddenly
loomed large with the end of the Cold War, as we were concluding our previous
book, The Tourist-Historic City, has dramatically expanded as the subsequent
ferment of intellectual revision has grappled with the legacy of events of 50 and
500 years past, amongst many others. We believe we have grasped the moment
to write this book; how firm our grasp may be is for the reader to decide. It is
too soon to judge whether the pace of heritage reassessment will abate and the
re-ordering of dissonances subside after the tumultuous early 1990s, or whether
they, and their management implications, will continue to grow. There is no
doubt however that developments to come will extend and qualify our present
assessment.
There is very little literature recognisably concerned with dissonant heritage as
such. There is, however, a very large amount which bears tangentially on our
theme, and much of it is in media, tourism or otherwise non-academic sources.
The research for this book has involved much painstaking detective work,
identifying insights and cross-connections within and between a most improb-
able array of documentary source materials in fields where we did not expect to
find ourselves. However, the case illustrations, with a few usually minor and
well-referenced exceptions, are the result of personal field investigations, nearly
all recent and specific to this purpose. As they are drawn from five continents it
is obvious that an enormous quantity of travel has been incurred. Clearly we are
indebted to the many who made this possible in various ways, financial and
otherwise, and the equally numerous individuals and institutions upon whose
hospitality and generosity with their ideas, suggestions and introductions, we
have depended. Particular thanks are extended to the Woods, Wills and Graburn
families of Nairobi, Pietermaritzburg and Berkeley respectively. We are
specifically indebted to the following for assistance: Sue Cohen (Giyani College
of Education, South Africa); Terry Lawson (Ministry of Defence, London); John
PREFACE : xi
Clark (Museum of London); Shuzo Ishimori (Museum of Ethnology, Osaka);
Jacek Purchla and Zbigniew Zuziak (International Cultural Centre, Krakow);
Judy Froom (Parks Canada, Ottawa); John Sinclair, Gennady Ozornoy, Nancy
Doubleday and Joan Debardeleben (past and present colleagues at Carleton
University); Kimberley Adam, Bettina Dupille, Dan Hill, Kevin Tappin, Sarah
Grasset, Mark Jovanovic and Michael Vickers (Carleton students). For
cartographic and photographic assistance we are grateful to Eric Runau, and
especially to Christine Earl and Larry Boyle who returned from serious illness to
complete the work. Most fundamentally, the widespread support of our family
members has been indispensable.
To claim that we have enjoyed our academic excursions into the wide range of
abuses of the record of the past, let alone the depths of human depravity and,
more shocking in practice, indifference to the sufferings of others, would give
quite the wrong impression. Yet we feel that we have learned important lessons.
At the least we will never again look at a monument or exhibit without posing
not only the ‘whose heritage is this?’ question but also the insistent ‘who is
disinherited here and what are the consequences of such dispossession?’ We, of
course, are inheritors of our own individual selective pasts, for better or worse,
and would not pretend otherwise, and perhaps our most valuable benefit is that
self-knowledge of the contexts of our own uses of the past. If others can
similarly benefit we will be well satisfied.
JET
GJA
October 1995
Acknowledgements

PERSONAL COMMUNICATIONS

The authors would like to acknowledge the specific help of the following:
G. Antoine, Department of Geography, University of Kéln, 1994
F. Barbour, McGregor Museum, Kimberley, 1995
D. Boulet, Director of Planning, National Capital Commission, Ottawa, 1994
J. F. Butler-Adam, Deputy Vice Chancellor, University of Durban-Westville, 1994
A. J. Christopher, Department of Geography, University of Port Elizabeth, 1993
S. Cumming, Department of Geography, University of Zimbabwe, 1992, 1994
G. Dominy, Natal Museum, Pietermaritzburg, 1993, 1995
D. Gordon-MacLeod, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 1993
L. Grant, Department of Geography, University of Natal Pietermaritzburg, 1993
R. F. Haswell, Department of Geography, University of Natal Pietermaritzburg,
1993
R. Jones, School of Social Sciences and Asian Languages, Curtin University,
Peri 1995
D. C. Lai, Department of Geography, University of Victoria, 1994
P. Lawson, Director, Advertising and Marketing, Charleston Trident Convention
and Visitors Bureau, 1994
S. Levy, Developer, Sam Levy’s Village Borrowdale Harare, 1993
A. McQuillan, Department of Geography, University of Toronto, 1994
W. Montour, Assembly of First Nations, Ottawa, 1993
R. Nason, Provincial Archaeologist and Bicentennial Co-ordinator, New
Brunswick, 1994
S. O’Dea, Co-director Centre for Material Culture Studies, Memorial University
of Newfoundland, 1994
R. Phillips, School for Studies in Art and Culture, Carleton University, Ottawa,
1992
I. Prinsloo, School of Architecture and Planning, University of Cape Town, 1992
L. Richer, Heritage Department, Parks Canada, Quebec City, 1994
C. Sharpe, Dean of Graduate Studies, Memorial University Newfoundland, 1994
M. Smirnova, Department of Geography, Moscow State Pedagogical University,
1994
C. Soutter, Department of Geography, Queen’s University, Kingston, 1994
E. van Heyningen, Department of History, University of Cape Town, 1994
T. Wills, Department of Geography, University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1993
T. Woods, Brooke Bond Ltd, Nairobi, 1993
1 From History to Heritage

A WORLD OF HERITAGE

Expanding meanings
Until not very long ago the word ‘heritage’ had a simple and generally accepted
primary meaning; it was the collective generalisation derived from the idea of an
individual’s inheritance from a deceased ancestor. A glance through a modern
newspaper would quickly reveal that the word has acquired at least five much
wider commonly understood meanings and is applied in a wide variety of
contexts.
e It is used as a synonym for any relict physical survival from the past. This
was originally objects significant enough to be included in museum collections,
or major archaeological sites and designated monumental buildings. England
renamed its custodial body for state-maintained monuments ‘English Heritage’
in 1983 as a result of a National Heritage Act. The list of what is includable has
been steadily extended. Canada has its ‘heritage canals’ (Hunter, 1995; from
1972, but not ‘heritage rivers’ until 1984) and ‘heritage railway stations’ (1988) as
legally designated entities. The French Ministry of Culture went further, ‘the
notion of heritage has been expanded. ... It now includes the village wash
house, the little country church, local songs, forms of speech, crafts and skills’
(Hoyau, 1988). Even sites which have no surviving physical structures become
marked heritage locations through their associations with past events or
personalities and this can be extended to cover whole districts, towns or regions
which become ‘heritage places’ in toto.
e To objects, buildings, sites and places can be added any non-physical aspect
of the past when viewed from the present. If ‘I remember therefore I was’
(Sorensen, 1990: 61) defines individual heritage in terms of individual memory,
then ‘collective memory’ (Foucault, 1969) or ‘national memory’ is community or
national heritage. Taking the idea further, any modern condition that may be
attributed to, or even influenced by, the past becomes a product of heritage. The
poor educational attainment, motivation and housing conditions of modern US
black populations can be ascribed to ‘the heritage of slavery’. The point can be
reached, as in some studies of the ‘heritage of everyday life’, where surviving
buildings and objects are quite deliberately excluded from the definition because
they are inevitably the heritage of governments and social elites, whereas
everyday heritage is discernable only in the predispositions, habits, attitudes and
behaviour of the common people.
2 DISSONANT HERITAGE

e It is used not just to refer to objects or artefacts from the past but extended
to all accumulated cultural and artistic productivity, frequently whether
produced in the past or currently. It has been incorporated into the set of
activities and preoccupations that can be labelled as ‘high culture’: ‘heritage is
beginning to appear as just one element in a wider package of culture/ leisure
activities participated in predominantly ... by individuals who are socialised
into perceiving these activities as a legitimate and worthwhile use of their time’
(Merriman, 1991: 72). Such a package can be extended to include almost any
aspect of national life which contributes to the effective functioning of society or
to the favoured national image, and which is thereby worthy of note or
preservation for the enjoyment of this or future generations. This idea of ‘our
national heritage’ becomes a synonym for national culture broadly defined. It is
discernable in many countries, being implicit in the ‘English Heritage’ organis-
ation already noted. In 1992 Britain acquired a Ministry and a Secretary of State
for National Heritage with a wide portfolio including the public funding of the
contemporary performing arts, a national lottery and public broadcasting
(consequently this minister is popularly referred to as the ‘Minister of Fun’).
Canada’s federal Department of Canadian Heritage, founded in 1993, has a
similarly wide mandate ranging from National Parks through multiculturalism
to amateur sport. On a quite different plane (although increasingly recognised
within the national bodies such as Canada’s) aboriginal people in many parts of
the world depend for their tribal and ethnic identities upon a less institu-
tionalised but nevertheless critical idea of a group heritage of orally transmitted
stories, crafts, songs and dances and often imprecisely located sacred places.
e Its coverage over the artefacts of human productivity has been successively
extended to include elements in whole or in part from the natural environment
in terms of ‘heritage landscapes’ and even ‘heritage flora and fauna’ which
are survivals from a past or are seen as in some sense original or typical. In
North America it is increasingly common to identify, label and accord some
special conservational attention to certain species such as British Columbia’s
‘heritage trees’ or New York State’s ‘heritage fish’ which are regarded as more
indigenous, being longer established than other species, and thus by extension
more characteristic of particular habitats or at least considered more appropriate
for passing on as heritage to future generations.
e It is also a major commercial activity, loosely grouped into what is increas-
ingly termed the ‘heritage industry’, which is based on selling goods and
services with a heritage component. The most obvious of these are, of course,
recreational and tourism experiences that are self-consciously related to some
aspect of a remembered or supposed past. The visit experience can be extended
to participation in heritage entertainments, banquets, and even battles. But the
meaning has again been extended from a saleable past to include a saleable
culturally distinctive present. This may be in the form of cultural objects that
convey an ethnic distinctiveness or just a vaguely formulated infusion of
regional or ethnic identity. The ‘craft’ shop concentrations of almost any Western
European tourism town, the ubiquitous soapstone carvings sold as Inuit heritage
art in Canada; the wooden wild animal carvings sold throughout East Africa;
these and many more are all heritage products, although newly manufactured,
FROM HISTORY TO HERITAGE 3)

because they are seen as relating to a geographically distinct region or an

ethnically distinct group. They may also by extension be seen as containing and
conveying valued attributes such as craftsmanship, self-reliance and even
spiritual messages about harmony with the environment and with eternity. The
idea of people and places being a living heritage attraction is most succinctly
expressed in the ‘ecomuseum’ concept, discussed in Chapter 7, currently popular
especially in Canada and France, in which the contribution of natural and
anthropogenic environmental elements is intrinsic and the aggregate regional-
geographical sense of place is exploited as a marketable resource. A glance in
any telephone or trade directory reveals that the word ‘heritage’ has been added
to a wide variety of products far beyond those sold to visitors, being often used
to attribute a quality of continuity or workmanship to the goods or services
traded.
Finally we are obliged to add that heritage has acquired a further, sinister
meaning which certainly aspires to be commonly understood, by implied
association with the foregoing. This is its adoption by political extremism in
which heritage becomes a euphemistic cloak for ethnic or racial exclusivism. This
usage will not be legitimised by further comment but its existence lends an
especially harsh edge to the dangers of meaning extension which are central to
our ensuing argument.

Growing concerns
This enormous and relatively recent inflation of meanings reflects, at least in
part, a very commendable and welcome increase in popular, and subsequently
government, attention to the recognition and conservation of the world’s
diversities, whether represented by physical survivals from the past, cultural
creations or ethnic or natural environmental distinctiveness. It is not the purpose
of this book to belittle the concerns that underlie the bestowal of these meanings,
nearly all of which have some place in the discussions that follow. However,
there are intrinsic dangers in the rapidly extending uses of the word and in the
resulting stretching of the concept to cover so much. Inevitably precision is lost,
but more important, this in turn conceals issues and magnifies problems intrinsic
to the creation and management of heritage that are the concern of this book.
A growing sense of unease about the extension of the idea of heritage to cover
such a wide field of human interest is detectable from many quarters but is
focusing upon three main charges, each of which is as yet more a vaguely felt
misgiving rather than a clearly formulated and argued objection to aspects of
heritage. These misgivings cannot be ignored with impunity and form a
background motif to the issues discussed below; they can be briefly itemised
here as the socio-economic, the resource and the socio-political charges:

e The orientation of economic production towards the buying and selling of

the past, whether to tourists or residents, is argued to be at best the creation
of an economy based on a ‘product devoid of intrinsic meaning’ (Merriman,
1991: 10) and at worst a symptom of a ‘climate of economic decline’
(Hewison, 1987), in which a retreat into the past is the direct result of the
+ DISSONANT HERITAGE

failure of a society to face the economic challenges of the present and build a
different future.
e The exploitation of historic resources for the creation of heritage inevitably
affects the nature of those resources, leading to fears that they will be subject
to damage, distortion, bowdlerisation, or just depletion. The relation of
heritage to its resources is characterised as at once ‘destructive’, ‘dishonest’
(Newby, 1994), ‘parasitical’ (Mossetto, 1991) and a form of ‘cultural prosti-
tution’ (Pfafflin, 1987).
e The dominance of a concern for the recall and reconstruction of an imagined
past over finding a solution for the difficulties of the present and a shaping
of the future is a denial of the possibility of change and thus a reinforcement
of the present status quo. This can be seen as, at best, the inadvertent
maintenance of undesirable injustices and inequalities by supporting a
reluctance to change or, at worst, as a cynical conspiracy of manipulation by
social and political elites using a version of the past to justify and
consolidate their command of the present.
A paradox intrinsic to each of these arguments once they are developed is that
they are capable of resolution in two seemingly conflicting ways, namely by less
heritage or more heritage. The concerns about the narrowness of the economic
base of the heritage industry, and its encouragement of a dependence upon a
nostalgia for a vanished past, are as likely to be met by a widening of the scope
of that industry to cover a broader range of aspects as by a contraction.
Endeavouring to replace the heritage industry, which is a response to contem-
porary needs, with a return to the ‘real’ industry of the Industrial Revolution can
equally be seen as a failure to meet the challenges of the future by a retreat into
a previously successful but now obsolete economy. Similarly the resource
problem can be defined, at least in large part, as a consequence of selectivity
leading to over-concentration and thus distortion and overuse, which in turn can
be resolved by including a wider resource base, spreading the impacts and
reducing the distortions through a supposedly more accurate reflection of a
wider selection of pasts. Finally the supposed ‘capture’ of the creation and
transmission of heritage by dominant groups is most likely to be countered by
demands for its ‘liberation’ or at least ‘liberalisation’ to include more hitherto
marginalised or ignored ‘heritages’ in the total heritage package — a reinterpret-
ation, not an absence of interpretation.
In all three the opposition to heritage, in so far as the growing but very varied
group of doubters can be so labelled, is as likely to result in the widening of the
idea of heritage to include more historical resources, more products, more social
groups, more uses and purposes, which extend and diversify the problems
rather than reduce or ameliorate them.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE ARGUMENT OF THE BOOK

The central argument of this book derives initially from the misgivings outlined
above and the paradoxes that arise if the attempt is made to meet them. There is
FROM HISTORY TO HERITAGE 5
an additional underlying paradox that the ‘argument of this book is in part a
focusing and development of the objections and in part a refutation of them and
a search for compromise between opposing views. Our argument therefore must
begin with an outline definition of heritage that structures most if not all of the
varied new meanings mentioned above so that the issues they provoke can be
revealed and analysed.
This introductory chapter therefore goes back to find a sharper definition in
answer to sets of simple questions about ‘What is heritage?’, ‘Who decides what
is heritage?, ‘Why, and for whom, is heritage created?’ This process will reveal
the underlying difficulties and contradictions that are at the heart of our
argument. The establishment of a process model of what is occurring in the
creation of heritage will allow the components to be isolated for more detailed
examination and implications to be drawn. Similarly it will allow the difficulties
and contradictions inherent in such a model to be demonstrated and criticisms of
it incorporated. These in turn need embedding in some wider contexts including
the semiology of places, the nature of social and economic postmodernist change
and the linking of production and resource systems within an environmental
perspective.
The next step, taken in the following chapter, is to move from such a
definition to the tensions inherent within it. Heritage so defined makes its own
peculiar use of the time dimension but, less obviously, also possesses a strong
intrinsic spatial component: both are the cause of dilemmas. Both the con-
sideration of heritage as a ‘product’, and its relation specifically to places, raise
the kinds of tensions inherent in all products and specifically in all place-
products. This approach is essentially from the side of supply and the viewpoint
of the producers. From the consumer perspective the uses of heritage raise an
additional set of tensions stemming from the incorporation of values, not least
political values and thus the ideological uses of heritage interpretation. All such
tensions are then incorporated into our concept of heritage dissonance. Once that
point has been reached then the rest, and the bulk, of the book is a description of
the range of types of dissonant heritage, its incidence and consequences, its
extreme manifestation in the context of atrocity and then the possibilities and
methods for its planning and management that can be based on such under-
standing. A worldwide topic requires a worldwide coverage and cases are
globally drawn. However, three subcontinental-scale studies are used to stand as
representatives of wider instances, namely Central Europe, Canada and southern
Africa.

THE PAST, HISTORY AND HERITAGE

The distinction between the past as history and the past in heritage must now be
examined, if only to postpone discussion by sidestepping some controversies
unnecessary at this point for the development of the model but which will need
to be confronted with its application. It can be argued that both history and
heritage conceive of, and use, the past in similar ways. Nevertheless however
much agreement in theory can now be demonstrated in the argument below,
6 DISSONANT HERITAGE

familiar to most historians, differences in the detailed practice is a frequent

source of dissonance, as will be described later in many contexts. It is thus worth
briefly restating.
History assumes the existence of episodes from the past in much the same way
as geography assumes the existence of places that can be described, however
imperfectly, as really existing even if not directly experienced by the narrator, on
the basis of whatever record is available and selected for use. Few historians
today would accept that their task was, as Ranke (1908) expressed it, ‘to show
how it really was’ (‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’) or even to believe in the theoretical
possibility, however remote, of writing what Acton (1906) called the ‘ultimate
history’ once all the facts were known. Most would agree that ‘history, although
based on facts, is, strictly speaking, not factual at all but a series of accepted
judgements’ (Barraclough, 1955). If history is not the assembly of historical facts,
‘like stamp collecting or antiquarianism’ (Carr, 1961: 15) then ‘the facts of history
do not exist until a historian creates them’ (Carr, 1961: 21). Heritage makes
similar assumptions: the past is assumed to exist, even in the sense as Avalon or
Atlantis exist, as products of a creative imagination, in response to some need in
the creator. Heritage is, by the original definition of the word, determined by the
legatee; all heritage is someone’s heritage and that someone determines that it
exists. Similarly ‘history means interpretation . . . it is necessarily selective’ (Carr,
1961: 23). The distinction is not that history is ‘true’ and heritage is not. If
however selective and subjective, ‘history is just the old things that happened to
happen, then ‘heritage, the dreaded “H” word, is possession’ (Chippindale, 1993:
6). It is thus a product of the present, purposefully developed in response to
current needs or demands for it, and shaped by those requirements. It makes two
sorts of intergenerational links both of which are determined by the present. The
present selects an inheritance from an imagined past for current use and decides
what should be passed on to an imagined future. This is only an extension of the
idea that ‘all history is contemporary history’ (Croce, 1941); ‘the past through the
eyes of the present’ (Carr, 1961: 21).
Therefore both history and heritage make a selective use of the past for
current purposes and transform it through interpretation (Light, 1987). History is
what a historian regards as worth recording and heritage is what contemporary
society chooses to inherit and to pass on. The distinction is only that in heritage
current and future uses are paramount, the resources more varied, including
much that historians would regard as ahistorical, and the interpretation is more
obviously and centrally the product that is consumed. This broad conceptual
consensus is stated here because it will rapidly be lost once detailed cases are
described, and ‘history’ will frequently be used as an antonym and even as a
means of discrediting ‘heritage’.

A HERITAGE MODEL

A first step in tracing such a relationship between the past as used in heritage
and its contemporary functions is to understand the process by which
occurrences, artefacts and personalities of the past are deliberately transformed
FROM HISTORY TO HERITAGE i,
i

OTHER
RESOURCES

:E :
L ASSEMBLY R
| ORES E Int erpretation
tati gE HERITAGE
R ESOURCES tu
C yer: Le
Ene
| PRODUCTS
T
[ a ;I !
CONSERVATION |. n._| HERITAGE
AGENCIES « |INDUSTRIES

Figure 1.1. A model of heritage production

into a product intended for the satisfaction of contemporary consumption

demands. This is a ‘commodification’ process, which has not been uniquely
applied to the past but equally can be detected in other aspects of human
activity and creativity (for example, see Whitt, 1987, on the commodification of
the arts). The model is an ‘industrial’ analogy, in that there is an assumption of
an industrial or assembly resource—product-consumption system, strongly
influenced by marketing science, in its description of the nature of a set of
relationships. The process can be simplified into a model (Figure 1.1) and the
operation of its relevant component parts can be briefly summarised.

The resources

The resource base from which heritage is assembled is a wide and varied
mixture of past events, personalities, folk memories, mythologies, literary
associations, surviving physical relics, together with the places, whether sites,
towns, or landscapes with which they can be symbolically associated. These are
raw materials which form a quarry of possibilities from which selection occurs.
Such selection is performed not only, or even principally, by chance survival
through time (either physically or in terms of a fallible and selective human
memory) but by deliberate choice. The resource endowment sets, at most, a
determining limit on which final heritage product may be developed, and
frequently not even that, as conservation moves along the spectrum (exemplified
8 DISSONANT HERITAGE

at length in Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990) from preservation of what remains,

to maintenance, replacement, enhancement and facsimile construction of what
might, could or should have been.

The transformation process

Selected resources are converted into products through ‘interpretation’. This
could be described as ‘packaging’, as long as this is understood to mean not
merely marginal enhancement but the selection, assembly and integration of the
chosen resources in an appropriate mix with the aim of deliberately creating a
particular product. Interpretation has been defined as ‘the basic art of telling the
story of a place’ (Walsh-Heron and Stevens, 1990). This will serve here in so far as
the story then becomes what is transmitted, and not just a means of transmitting
it: the question ‘which story is told to which listeners?’ will be posed later.
Interpretation integrates resource elements by the shaping of a ‘core product’.
The idea here is that it is not the physical components of heritage that are actually
traded, such as historic monuments or sites, but intangible ideas and feelings
such as fantasy, nostalgia, pleasure, pride and the like, which are communicated
through the interpretation of the physical elements. When historical sites or
artefacts are ‘sold’, the physical product is rarely exchanged but an experience is.
This experience (the ‘core product’) is conveyed through thematic interpretation,
whether or not such themes are made explicit. These therefore are not marginal
accretions but an essential part of the assembly process.

The heritage product

It is obvious that the product of the transformation process is not synonymous
with preserved relict historical resources. By definition, heritage exists only in
terms of the legatee and thus the heritage product is a response to the specific
needs of actual or potential users. The concept of heritage is culturally con-
structed, thus there is an almost infinite variety of possible heritages, each
shaped for the requirements of specific consumer groups. Taken to its logical
conclusion it can be argued from the viewpoint of the customer that each
individual determines the constitution of each unique heritage product at the
moment of consumption. However, the important point for the producers is that
not only are different materials combined to create a product but equally quite
different products for quite different markets can be created from the same raw
materials by varying the interpretation process (Ashworth and de Haan, 1990).
The same site, town or country markets a product range. A consequence of this
‘joint supply’ is that reinforcement, co-existence or conflict between the products
may be encountered. This may appear obvious but it is the management of such
conflicts that is a central task of much heritage planning.

The heritage consumer

The simple question of ‘why create heritage?’, or in terms of the model, ‘for
which consumer demands are heritage products produced?’, can receive many,
FROM HISTORY TO HERITAGE 9
far from simple, answers. The stated goals of the commodification of the past
can neither be fully inventorised nor adequately explored here (see the extensive
list in Newcombe, 1979). Chapter 3 will discuss three of the most commonly
argued uses of heritage and Chapter 4 will review many types of consumer, but
it is only important at this stage in the argument to recognise the distinction
between intrinsic and extrinsic purposes. The former rely upon an appeal to
characteristics intrinsic to the artefact or place itself. Such criteria are usually
either broadly ‘aesthetic’ or ‘antique’ (i.e. dependent upon appeals to beauty or
age as qualities valued in themselves). The important point is that there is an
assumption that such criteria are recognisable by consensus and measurable.
Extrinsic purposes, on the other hand, make an appeal to various supposed
contemporary benefits conferred on individuals or society as a whole by the
conservation and preservation of heritage. These are by their nature neither
universally recognisable nor generally measurable. It is these extrinsic purposes
which relate to wider economic, social or political objectives that are central to
the concerns of this book.

Implications of the model

The simple model described above contains a number of far from simple
implications. These include the following.

The absence of a fixed resource endowment

An obvious implication that needs constantly reiterating is that the nature of the
heritage product is determined, as in all such market-driven models, by the
requirements of the consumer not the existence of the resources. The idea that
there exists a fixed quantity of a conservable past that is recognisable through
objective, universal and measurable sets of intrinsic criteria, underpinned the
urban conservation movement through most of its history of development.
Inventories were constructed and protective legislation framed on just such
assumptions of an ultimately listable, agreed, fixed quantity. The revelation
gradually dawned that such assumptions were untenable as heritage did not
exist in a fixed and once-for-ever endowed quantity that could theoretically be
included in a comprehensive inventory, but was infinitely creatable in response
to demands and expectations and management skills at exploiting these, rather
than the availability of materials. The important point, expressed in marketing
terminology, is that the product development is a consequence of market
segment identification and targeting rather than the reverse.

The exercise of choice

This being the case, the production of heritage becomes a matter for deliberate
goal-directed choice about what uses are made of the past for what contem-
porary purposes. It is thus inherently a planned system; the questions of who
plans and for what purposes remain open, the necessity for intervention does
not. The deliberate exercise of choice is thus inherent at many points in the
10 DISSONANT HERITAGE

above process model. It is the essence of a market-driven system that such

choices of resources, interpretative packages, product markets and the like will
be exercised on both the consumer and producer sides, as each reacts to the
other according to quite different strategies designed to achieve different goals;
profit maximisation for one and an optimum trade-off of cost against satisfaction
for the other. However, this is not a closed system and it is this inherent
openness that makes deliberate intervention both possible and necessary. Choice
on both sides is affected by factors external to the heritage market, such as
broader social or economic trends in patterns of consumption or competition
with non-heritage producers for resources. Furthermore, the heritage industry is
not only reactive but causative: it can influence other aspects of national life
through the heritage product it produces, and this possibility moves the whole
process from the domains of the architect or historian to those of the place
planner and manager.

The definition of authenticity

A commonly encountered justification for preserving surviving artefacts and
sites relating to the past is that they contribute to the construction of an accurate
record of what has occurred, even if dispute can exist about the degree of
accuracy attained. An appeal is made to authenticity, in this sense, as a self-
explanatory justification and criterion for selection and interpretation. The
quality of authenticity endows the object or site with value (and its removal
renders the object worthless). ‘The notion of authenticity, the idea of the true
cross, lies at the heart of all museum activity’ (Smith, 1989: 18). This raises the
question of authentication, i.e. the act of endowing authenticity. This is central to
all the uses of heritage discussed later and requires an answer to the question,
‘who is authenticating?’ Many early museums (see Hudson’s (1987) account of
the British Museum in the early nineteenth century) failed to label artefacts,
regarding any such interpretation as an irrelevant intrusion between the object
and the viewer: the authenticity of the object required no context (and a visitor
so ill-informed as to need information had clearly no business in the museum).
Most modern collections, however, provide at least minimum authentication
through exhibit labelling or guide book marking, thus instructing the visitor
about which objects should be viewed and indeed what should be experienced.
Given the conventional wisdom among museum managers that visitors select
only a small fraction of exhibits and view these for only a matter of seconds,
then their reliance upon both authentication and clarity in communication is
obvious.
The outcomes of the model described here, however, are clearly not attempt-
ing any accurate revelation of the past as a fixed and describable truth. Heritage
is obviously not the totality of the history of a place or even facets of that
totality, expressed through preserved and presented artefacts and interpreta-
tions. It is, to restate the argument, a created phenomenon continuously
recreated anew according to changing attitudes and demands. Authenticity in
the heritage model derives from the experience of the consumer and specifically
from the extent that the product satisfies whatever expectations the consumer
FROM HISTORY TO HERITAGE tt
has of the past. This does not remove the need for external authentication. In
tourism especially the guide book ‘stars’ and local marking are especially
important for the ‘on this spot . . .’ or ‘the only example of a... in...’ type of
heritage site. Heritage is therefore what and where we say it is: it is the ‘we’ in
these contexts, not the object itself, that determines the authenticity and thus
what is worth investigating.
However, although logically the intrinsic definition of authenticity can be
dismissed here as the concern of historians while heritage planners define
authenticity, as in any other product, in terms of the consumer, these two quite
different approaches become intertwined in practice. This occurs in part through
the organisational structure of heritage production: the materials being used, such
as museums, monumental buildings, historic townscapes and the like, are in the
custodial charge of individuals and institutions with a resource-based definition
of their task, while the producers of heritage use a demand-based definition.
Consequently frictions are almost inevitable in the selection and management of
heritage products and accusations of overinterpretation, triviality, dishonesty and
distortion from the one side, and elitism, rigidity, obscurantism and irrelevance
from the other, abound.

Critique, rejection or modification of the model

The process model, or more usually its implications, may be subject to a number
of criticisms which may extend to outright rejection, although rarely its replace-
ment by a more acceptable alternative explanation of what is actually hap-
pening. These criticisms can be reduced to two main types: those that reject the
fundamental assumptions of the uses of heritage implicit in the commodification
model and those that concentrate upon the practical problems of its implemen-
tation. Both need consideration because they pervade many of the working
practices of those involved at various stages in the operation of the model.

Conceptual objections
The first set of objections may be based upon a quite different view of the past,
or how relics from the past should be valued and used. This is most usually
expressed as a rejection of the implications of the model and especially of the
idea of historical or cultural artefacts being treated as priced saleable products
within a contemporary market rather than as having an intrinsic immeasurable
value which is bestowed by their age or beauty.
It is easy to dismiss this often strongly expressed revulsion to commodification
as naive because such aesthetic pleasures or satisfactions are in themselves a
consumption, whether in the present or in the future, by users who are merely
objecting to the competition of other users. Frequently these types of objections
focus upon the nature of the interpretation and presentation, which is con-
demned using adjectives such as banal, tasteless, shoddy, sanitised, simplistic
and the like. At one level this may be no more than a misunderstanding. The
commodification of cultural achievements does not deny their intrinsic qualities
(any more than selling motor cars as life styles denies their intrinsic technical
12 DISSONANT HERITAGE

qualities); it only explains one aspect of society’s relationship to these phenom-

ena. However, at a deeper level it may be implicitly argued that such
interpretations are an inevitable result of what is seen as commercialisation.
Commercialisation, popularisation and degradation are logically linked. It is
easy from that position to slide into an elitist, anti-popularist defence of heritage
which at best is regarded as a sacred charge laid upon a sensitive minority of
custodians for future generations and at worst the attempt to maintain a
monopoly for a few self-chosen arbiters of public taste. The fact that such
arbiters, and such a minority, may be decreasingly representative of an
increasingly pluriform public taste, a central concern of this book, greatly
aggravates the difficulties caused by the attempts to maintain such a monopoly
position.
The strength of this line of thought can be gauged from some recent seriously
intended official reactions to the increased popularity of the Italian art cities
among tourists who are blamed for ‘crowding out’ serious connoisseurs.
Solutions to the very real tourism management problems of such cities at
particular times and sites include discriminatory pricing or taxing to discourage
lower-spending visitors, thereby reserving the enjoyment of the heritage of cities
such as Florence and Venice to those able to afford high-quality hotel accom-
modation; the issuing of a ‘Venice Card’ granting privileged access to selected
groups of visitors; and even the imposition of tests of knowledge of art or
architectural history upon those seeking access to certain popular galleries or
buildings so as to admit only those regarded as being capable of beriefiting, as
judged by expert opinion, from the aesthetic experience. The problems and
resulting proposed solutions in many of the Italian cities can be regarded as
extreme but they reflect a much more widespread, if less locally intense, reaction
to increasing tourism and recreational uses of heritage.
The dismissal of many of these objectors as elitist aesthetes, naively
bemoaning the loss of their previous exclusive rights to determine and enjoy
culture, is unwise. Such views are quantitatively important, receiving much
popular support, especially from residents of historic and cultural cities (see
Jansen-Verbeke (1990) on the opposition of Bruges residents to the existing levels
of heritage tourism in their city); and current ‘aestheticisation’ (Ley, 1993) of
cities more generally, considered further below, raises the possibility that
support for these views will broaden. More generally significant is that these
objections, and the assumptions that lie behind them, are especially prevalent
among those charged with the care of historic and artistic resources and those
who in most western countries dominate what can be termed the art/culture
lobby, who thereby function as influential leaders of taste as well as powerful
political lobbyists and usually also as distributors, through semi-official agencies,
of public finance and state sponsorship. However misplaced, therefore, the
opinions of those controlling many of the resources used in the commodification
process cannot be ignored; they need to be assuaged as far as possible, and, in so
far as they are misunderstandings, resolved, as will become clear in the later
chapters on management policies.
A subtler objection rejects the implicit element of free choice intrinsic to the
market model. Those holding a more structural view of society, including but
FROM HISTORY TO HERITAGE 13

not confined to Marxist interpretations, would argue that free choice within the
market, especially from the side of the consumer, is largely illusory. One version
of this position echoes the elitism discussed above but in this case is posed as an
attack on, rather than a defence of, the existence of a controlling group
exercising a dominating influence on what heritage is selected and which
messages it contains. Such a view contradicts the market-driven assumption of
the model, substituting a producer-driven system which denies the existence of a
free consumer choice. If producers are also assumed to be capable of exercising
an effective monopoly and consumers are assumed to be no more than passive
and unresisting recipients of what is produced, then the way is open for the idea
of a dominant ideology being projected as an act of policy and instrument of
management by governing elites. It is a short step to the reaction (detectable
even in much serious writing; see for example Davies, 1987) that all heritage, but
especially any that appears to have government sanction, is thus suspect and to
be accorded as much credibility as a commercial advertisement or an official
press release. The extensive discussion of the various political uses of heritage in
Chapter 3 is not based upon such simplistic assumptions. Neither of the two
basic assumptions required to arrive at such conclusions is tenable, at least as
they stand above, as is argued at length later. However, some of the unease that
underlies this objection can be accommodated within a broader discussion of the
important role of values in heritage that is conducted later, as long as it is
allowed that choice between a plurality of producers is exercised by varied and
selective consumers. Of course, these conditions have been conspicuously absent
in those states professing a Marxist dominant ideology, the majority of which
are now defunct.

Operational objections
There are many other criticisms of the process model which focus upon its
operation rather than on the basic assumptions upon which it depends. An
important and growing concern is that the definition of heritage in terms of its
users threatens to cause irreversible damage to the resources upon which it is
based. There is certainly a growing volume of accounts of damage to resources,
whether physical damage caused by the feet, breath, body warmth or digestive
systems of visitors or, more subjectively, damage to ambiance and atmospheres
as an inevitable concomitant of mass consumption. However, this is not an
inevitable consequence of the commodification argument. Indeed the view of
heritage advanced here as a contemporary created product offers in many ways
a more flexible range of resource management techniques than the more rigid
view of a fixed stock of inherited artefacts. The recycling, renewal and
recuperation of resources, increasingly important in the management of natural
resources, can be paralleled in historic resources where objects including
buildings can be moved, restored and even replicated. Resource damage and
depletion is a result of inadequate management and is therefore responsive to
more efficient management of such resources, within which the deliberate
manipulation of created heritage can be a valuable instrument.
The major difficulty of implementation which may be seen as insurmountable
14 DISSONANT HERITAGE

lies in the nature of the organisations engaged in the process of heritage

creation. A serious weakness of the industrial assembly model used above is
that, unlike many commercial products, the production of the heritage product
is not managed by a single organisation nor even controlled by a consistent
purpose. On the contrary, each component of the process model is most usually
managed by quite different organisations with quite different motives. Historic
resources are preserved and maintained by quite different organisations from
those responsible for shaping and marketing the heritage products that are
constructed from them. This leads to the most telling objection to the whole
argument advanced here: it is not that heritage production cannot in principle
satisfy the various demands for it, but only that it is not done in practice
because there is no organisation capable of doing it in its entirety. Taken
further, it is likely that the existing institutions, in both the public and private
sectors, responsible for the various phases of heritage production are pursuing
quite explicitly different objectives, often at quite different spatial scales. The
argument can be extended by pointing out that even if consistent management
goals could be established, the means of implementing them are inadequate to
the tasks being set.
It is no surprise to discover that reality works less perfectly than the model
suggests: but the various tensions that result from the discrepancies described
are the central management task of most of the heritage agencies involved.

HERITAGE IN SOME WIDER CONTEXTS

It is obvious from many of the above arguments that heritage occupies import-
ant roles in a number of wider contexts, sometimes getting subsumed within
them. This book has begun by isolating and defining heritage in a particular
way so as to focus on its creation more clearly but thereby incurs the danger that
its wider links will be ignored. These however are critical to the thesis and will
dominate the analysis of planning and management discussed later. Some of
these wider contexts must therefore now be sketched in their relation to the
heritage theme.

Heritage in place semiotics

The city is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language: the city speaks to us
its inhabitants, we speak to our city, the city where we are, simply by living in it,
by wandering through it. (Barthes, 1986: 92)

Such statements are part of a now widely accepted way of viewing places.
Clearly places are not only full of different sorts of signs conveying symbolic
meanings but more fundamentally such signs are what makes one place distinct
from another for any individual: what makes places localities rather than just
points in an abstract geometry of space. Although it is no longer necessary to
argue in general that places are such collections of symbols, it is not sufficient for
our purposes here to rest the argument at this point. If the city, and presumably
FROM HISTORY TO HERITAGE 15

by extension all occupied places, is sucha language, as the semiologists

(summarised in Gottdiener and Lagopoulis, 1986) have constantly declaimed,
then the nature of the grammar, syntax and vocabulary should be made clear, at
least in this context in so far as it concerns the uses made of the past.
Two points relevant to heritage can be extracted from the considerable volume
of literature on the subject for further investigation here: the first on method and
the second on content.
First, places express and convey messages through codes (Choay, 1986). Both
encoding and decoding are required and the difficulty is, as every advertiser
knows, that such coding systems are neither universal nor stable: we are dealing
with a language for which each individual possesses their own personal
dictionary which is constantly and rapidly being replaced over time. There are
two obvious implications of this for the argument of this book. First the
encoders, who in the heritage case are frequently government agencies, are often
physically and socially distant from the decoders in the places treated: this is
especially so when the decoders are tourists. Secondly the physical signs that
carry such coded messages are often deliberately designed to be robust enough
to survive over long periods of time: in heritage these are frequently preserved
physical monuments and structures. Both points make it likely that significantly
different code books will be in use by producers and consumers.
Thus, to return to Barthes’ vision of the city as discourse, what is occurring is
not an ordered and widely intelligible communication, so much as a city of
Babel where numerous languages are being muttered or shouted together, most
of which are understood by only some of the citizens, many are so obsolescent
as to be only dimly and incompletely comprehended, and some are so dead as
to be totally incomprehensible. This cacophony is seen by Featherstone (1990: 2)
as, ‘diversity, variety and richness of popular and local discourses’ which
‘playback systemicity and order’. But the very diversity is far more likely to
contribute to chaos than to any such order.
However, the effective planning of heritage for any of the uses considered
here depends on the existence of just such order. It is argued that places are
endowed with messages through their association with the past and such
intentionally coded messages are designed to convey specific ideas to designated
groups of users. The paradox here is that although this purposeful communi-
cation lies at the heart, not only of many of the arguments of this book, but also
of important sets of promotional activities of governments and firms, it rests
upon very vaguely formulated theoretical foundations and upon concepts
insufficiently defined to assist in its operationalisation.
It may well be that those who have pioneered the development of semiotics
have been sociologists (such as Lyotard) or linguists (such as de Saussure) little
interested in places as media of expression. Equally those concerned with
ordering and managing places have traditionally had little interest in the
psychological theoretical basis of what they were doing in practice. This general
observation of the lack of a self-conscious ‘topological semiotics’ admits of a few
exceptional, but tentatively promising lines of development.
The first of these is the attempt (notably by Pred, 1984) to link some of the
ideas of structuration theory developed by sociologists to place identity. A
16 DISSONANT HERITAGE

central idea of this theory is the socialisation of individuals in collective values,

which includes their relationship to places and especially to spatial jurisdictions,
through their experiences of, and in, places through time.
The second is the development over the past 30 years of a substantial body of
phenomenological work in cognitive geography and mental mapping. The
legacy of Lynch (1960), and his less influential predecessors such as Firey (1945)
or Tolman (1948), is an enormous corpus of cases and techniques investigating
the detail of the specific place experienced by particular social groups or
individuals. The value of this whole line of investigation to the current argument
is that it makes clear that each individual inhabits a unique place which is
composed of sets of structuring features selected according to individual
predispositions which, in semiotic terms, have become a decoding system. The
shortcoming of this approach for the purposes of this study is that it is
essentially descriptive of individual geographies rather than prescriptive. It
explains the individual’s behavioural reactions to environments rather than how
such environments come into existence or can be deliberately created: it is
perceptual rather than conceptual (Gottdiener and Lagopoulis, 1986). Places, as
Eco (1986) has argued, possess attributes of both functionality and communica-
tiveness — they are both denotative and connotative. Each attribute is of interest
here; the first to explain the individual’s reactions to signs, the second to
understand the deliberate use of such signs for communication and thus open
the way for planning intervention.
Heritage is associated with the semiotic approach to places in three different
ways. Monuments, objects and past events and personalities, together with their
interpretive markers, are one, often the principal, means through which places
create a separate distinctive identity. New towns or districts lack identity
precisely because they are silent in this respect. Secondly, the act of preserving
physical relics from the past for whatever reason inevitably preserves their
accumulated messages although these may be expressed in archaic coding
systems. Thirdly, in so far as heritage is the deliberate creation of official bodies
then public heritage production becomes a particularly effective medium of
official communication between governors and governed.

Heritage in postmodern critiques and visions

Despite the absence of agreement on the constituents of a postmodern society,

a number of commentators (such as Soja, 1989; Cooke, 1990) have produced
what amounts to a consensus on at least some of the commonly recognisable
attributes of a postmodern society and its reflection in postmodern places. The
significance of this to the arguments of this book is that heritage is either
intrinsic to, or at least can make a substantial contribution to, a number of
these core attributes. This is to be expected when much of the critique of
modernism was in the re-assertion of the importance of form in general and
past forms in particular, and a leading role has been played in postmodernism
by inherently visual and accessible architecture and public art and design
(Fowler, 1989).
FROM HISTORY TO HERITAGE 17
These core characteristics include the following.

e The restructuring of economic production in favour of decentralised service

industries, producing a diverse and flexible product range in response to an
increasingly individualistic and volatile consumer market. The products of
such industries are designed to satisfy higher-order needs for health,
education, entertainment, security and the like. The heritage industry fits
closely such a definition.
e Society is structured by the choice of life styles which are defined by
patterns of consumption and behaviour intended as self-expression. Histor-
icity as the personal reaction to a re-creation of the past has an obvious
potential role in shaping and distinguishing such life styles.
e The changes in economic production and in society have both resulted in the
rise in relative importance of amenity, however defined, and specifically
relevant to heritage, what Ley (1993) has termed the ‘aestheticisation’ of the
city; this involves (iter alia) urban design, spectacle events and the accen-
tuation of the performing arts. To the individual, quality environments,
whether natural or anthropogenic, become important consumables and
components of the life-style package; to the producer, such environments
become a significant location factor; to place managers, amenity can be used
instrumentally to attract or retain investment, residents or recreationists.
Heritage is one important component in the shaping of such quality
environments (see Ashworth, 1992) and its perceived significance as an
attractive component of place images, deliberately projected with the aim of
attracting inward commercial investment, is described in a number of
examples in Ashworth and Voogd (1990; 1994).
e Diversity, eclecticism, variety, ephemeralism and libertarianism are descrip-
tions frequently used to typify not only the qualities of a postmodern society
but also the character of postmodern places. Such ‘heterotopia’ is sum-
marised in a sensory-dominated local distinctiveness, often incorporating a
rediscovery, or invention, of a vernacular in architecture and design. This is
essentially conveyed through the morphological elements of places to which
heritage is a major contributor. Taken further, Farago’s (1991) definition of
postmodernist eclecticism as ‘the permanently renewed interpretation of the
traditions ... not the preservation of fragments of the past but its re-
organisation, restoration and reinterpretation’ comes very close to the central
tenet of the heritage model described earlier.

The fact that these disjointed and fragmentary observations may not in
themselves comprise any coherent philosophy is immaterial here. The point is
only that urban form and urban environments, the valuation of historicity and
the commodification of the past as a high-order consumer good, all of which
were at best peripheral by-products or passive results of modernist production,
are increasingly central and active elements in whatever new system is
emerging. The planning and management of heritage that is our central concern
occurs within the context labelled postmodernism, whether or not this amounts
to no more than a ‘a box collecting otherness’ (Farago, 1991).
18 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Heritage as an environmental issue

It has been the practice in many European countries to divide the environment
sharply into its natural and man-made components, and to base the study and
management of each in quite separate agencies with separate responsibilities.
The stature and comprehensive mandate of the national park authorities in
North America has substantially reduced this dichotomy there however.
Objections to this division can be made on two logical grounds: first, the built
environment is not only clearly an environment, it is in practice the most
commonly experienced environment for most people in Western societies most
of the time; and secondly, it is all but impossible in reality to find representative
environments at either end of such a man-nature spectrum, as some natural
elements and some evidence of human intervention are present in all cases, thus
rendering any such distinction one of degree rather than kind.
More directly relevant in this context, however, are the conceptual and
managerial links which allow the conservation of the built environment and its
derivative idea of heritage to play a substantial role in meeting contemporary
concerns about sustainable environmental management. Without entering into
the debate about the precise meaning and validity of the term, sustainability can
be linked to heritage in three main ways, namely:
e Philosophical links. The management of both natural and built environmental
resources face the same fundamental conditions which account for the
special character of their management problems. First, both use resources
that are external to the production—consumption system, which in turn
determines that both depend upon resources which in economic terms are
largely openly accessible, zero-priced public goods; and both, as a conse-
quence, face variations of the same type of resource crisis resulting in actual
or potential over-use. Secondly, both confront similar problems of estab-
lishing selection criteria. The questions posed above about ‘what is heritage
and what is authentic?’ are echoed in the conservation of the natural
environment by the questions ‘what is nature and what is natural?’
e Organisational links. Given the similar motivation for the conservation of both
natural and man-made features, it is not surprising that there is an overlap
in popular support. Some voluntary agencies, the British National Trusts
being the largest and most venerable examples among others such as
Heritage Canada (Dalibard, 1992), cover both types of phenomena; equally
there is a strong correlation between the membership lists of historical and
natural environmental protection associations and lobby groups. This in turn
is reflected in official organisations in some countries and even on occasion
joint legislation. Ministries of Heritage and Heritage Trusts and associations,
encompassing both natural and constructed elements, are found in an
increasing number of countries.
e Linking management concepts. Such management concepts as resource-use
revaluation, output equity, carrying capacity and linking production—
resource systems are equally applicable and will be exemplified at length
later. There are two types of general links: first, if the issues and basic
dilemmas are philosophically similar, despite the different nature of the
FROM HISTORY TO HERITAGE 19

processes powering them, then the concepts governing their sustainable

management should be equally similar as will be the application of these
concepts in management practice. Secondly, there is a complementarity
between natural and built environmental sites which allows advantages to
accrue to their joint management, such as creating integrated interpretation
facilities and allowing trade-offs in capacity (Ashworth and Tunbridge,
1990).
Finally, the integration of cultural with natural heritage in a process of
environmental management brings us to a deeper meaning of the contemporary
idea of sustainability which bears directly upon the theme of this book. Sus-
tainability is not only a question of the physical maintenance of the resource but
also of the comprehensive social and cultural relevance, hence political
sustainability, of this exercise. Nelson asks, in the Canadian context, ‘how do we
know what to sustain if we do not understand what natural and human heritage
has come to us from the past?’ (Nelson, 1991; see also Nelson et al., 1993). While
our above discussion refutes the existence of absolute values implied in this
question, Nelson’s assertion that only a broadly based inclusivity can hope to
be socially and politically sustainable provides a point of departure for our
exploration of heritage dissonance.
2 Dissonance in Heritage

WHAT IS DISSONANCE IN HERITAGE?

The previous chapter drew distinctions between the past (what has happened),
history (selective attempts to describe this), and heritage (a contemporary
product shaped from history). From early in that discussion it became clear that
the heritage creation process is controversial in a number of respects. A few
argue that it cannot be done; more argue that although it is done it should not
be, for various reasons; but the largest quantity of objections are from those who
implicitly accept the logic of what is occurring but would do it differently,
especially in order to include the coverage of more or different heritages. We
must now examine more closely the nature of these objections and more
specifically their underlying cause, because it is this that forms the heart of the
heritage management issues that are our central concern. To do this a new
concept is required which embraces all the difficulties raised and yet also focuses
the argument more sharply on the essential characteristics of heritage that are at
issue. The idea of dissonance provides such a structuring concept in two ways.
First, it keeps at the forefront the ideas of discrepancy and incongruity.
Dissonance in heritage involves a discordance or a lack of agreement and
consistency, which in turn immediately prompts the question, ‘between what
elements does dissonance occur?’. This in turn allows a new classification to be
constructed based on the types of such dissonance. Secondly, the implicit
analogy with musical harmony and its classification of disharmonious combi-
nations of sound can be extended by an analogy drawn from psychology, which
makes use of the idea of cognitive dissonance, a state of psychic tension caused
by the simultaneous holding of mutually inconsistent attitudes or the existence
of a lack of consonance between attitudes and behaviour (Sears et al., 1985: 150).
This psychological analogy stresses the consequences of dissonance in the
principle that ‘people will adjust their patterns of behaviour so as to reduce
dissonance and move towards consonance’. Its management also implies that
‘steps will be taken in the direction of increased congruity with the existing
frame of reference’ (Festinger, 1957: 8). Iso-Ahola (1980) described children’s
play as a continuous attempt to achieve a balance between arousal and incon-
gruity by constantly adjusting behaviour so that an optimum balance between
the two is maintained. We can similarly postulate an individual’s reaction to
levels of heritage dissonance by behaviour designed to return to an acceptable
level of incongruity.
The concept of heritage dissonance is consistent with these analogies in that it
DISSONANCE IN HERITAGE 21
provides a means of taxonomic description of the issues but also leads directly
to the management of behaviour to reduce its incidence. It provides both a tool
of description and a guide to planning interventions.
Two important characteristics of this dissonance are central to the discussion
of incidence and solutions. First, it is intrinsic to the nature of heritage as we
have defined it. It is not an unforeseen and unfortunate by-product of the
heritage assembly process that can be removed by improving the production
process itself. It is inevitable in some form or other in a system where selection is
unavoidable. At its simplest, all heritage is someone’s heritage and therefore
logically not someone else’s: the original meaning of an inheritance implies the
existence of disinheritance and by extension any creation of heritage from the
past disinherits someone completely or partially, actively or potentially. This
disinheritance may be unintentional, temporary, of trivial importance, limited
in its effects and concealed; or it may be long-term, widespread, intentional,
important and obvious. Much of the rest of this book is concerned with those
who, in one way or another, have thereby been written out of the script of
history. The problem of disinheritance is not simple, therefore it admits of no
simple solution. The attempted creation of a universal heritage which provides
an equal but full inheritance for all is not only essentially illogical but the
attempt to approach it rapidly creates its own problems, as is discussed at length
later in consideration of multiculturalism policies in relation to public heritage
interpretation. But equally this is not an argument for inactivity in the face of the
inevitable. It is important to be able to evaluate the consequences of what we are
doing, with increasing abandon, in the creation of heritages. There needs to be at
least foreknowledge of the potential effects and costs of disinheritance so that, at
best, decisions can be made as to who inherits and who does not in particular
cases, in pursuit of realistically pragmatic policies for overall and long-term
balance between different segments of society.
Secondly, it follows from the above that dissonance is universal in that it is a
condition, whether active or latent, of all heritage to some degree. It is the
incidence and magnitude of this ‘some degree’ that provides a geography of
dissonant heritage that can be described here.
Each of these fundamental assertions needs some elaboration here in the form
of an outline of the sources of this intrinsic, universal yet in principle manage-
able dissonance. Given the cardinal importance to heritage of its economic uses,
and especially the tourism market either in fact or in prospect, it is appropriate
to structure this outline from the perspective of marketing theory. However, as
we shall subsequently discuss, the significance of heritage dissonance is far more
widespread than its economic effects.

DISSONANCE IMPLICIT IN COMMODIFICATION

The treatment of historical resources so as to create heritage products endows

those products with the tensions and dilemmas inherent in all commodification
for contemporary markets. The prime commitment to a marketing model as a
means of structuring our understanding of heritage commits us also to
22 DISSONANT HERITAGE

examining those aspects of the complete marketing process relevant to heritage,

namely product development and market analysis.

Product development
From the producers’ point of view the most important decisions stem from
product development, or more fully the development of a product-line composed
of a range of interrelated products. They can be summarised in two pairs of
dichotomies familiar in marketing and therefore expressed in that terminology:
generalisation or particularisation; homogeneous or heterogeneous product.
The choice between stressing the generic or the unique qualities of a product is
a fundamental dilemma in all product development. Some uses of heritage
strongly favour generalisation. Much tourism in particular requires the reduction
of a rich and complex past to a set of easily recognisable characteristics: the
heritage product must be rapidly assimilated into the existing experience,
expectations and historical understanding of a visitor with limited local knowl-
edge and quite definite expectations of what this heritage product should
contain (Cohen, 1979). On the other hand, heritage designed to support place
identities will similarly generalise and reduce but will tend strongly towards
particularising unique products. The uniqueness of the specific historical
experience will be stressed in the attempt to differentiate it from other, and
contrasting, experiences elsewhere: this attempt is commonly a consequence of
rival national, regional or local identities and therefore has sensitive political
implications. The choice of the amount and type of generalisation is likely to
require the creation of different products for these different markets. This
dilemma can be resolved in three ways: by targeting either market and ignoring,
and thus failing to satisfy, the other; attempting to satisfy both with the same
compromised product and thus risking satisfying neither; or producing products
in the same place with sharply different characteristics for what is hoped can be
widely segmented markets with little connection between them, which risks
conflict and dissonance. All three responses will be evident in examples
described later.
The choice between constructing homogeneous or heterogeneous product-lines
often largely depends upon the stage of product development achieved. At early
stages the production of a largely homogeneous heritage product greatly
simplifies many of the marketing, and especially promotional, problems. Simple
brand images are more easily accepted and remembered, and conflict between
interpretations of different aspects of the product is minimised by generalisation.
A simple national or local identity can be shaped through a few selected
stereotyped qualities, representative personalities and supporting mythologies.
Such a homogeneous product may well be an ideal product for both tourism
and local political identification. Particularly in the early stages of tourism
development, most especially for foreign markets, potential visitors have a
weakly developed consciousness of the destination and only simple preconcep-
tions of it. Although many different uses may favour homogeneity, it may not of
course be the same homogeneous product that is required.
The longer term development, however, may find a homogeneous heritage
DISSONANCE IN HERITAGE 23
product unsatisfactory. A homogeneous heritage satisfies a homogeneous
market but disinherits excluded social, ethnic and regional groups, creating the
dissonances discussed at length in Chapter 4. Whether this is sustainable or even
desirable will depend on the value placed on a clear unified recognisable
heritage product and the ability of this heritage to compete with alternative local
heritages, as well as the desirability of social cohesion. At the very least the
result will be a reduction of the country’s heritage production potential. Equally,
although the early stages of tourism development favour concentration in the
product line, as well as spatial concentration for the establishment of the product
on a newly created market, further expansion from these beginnings increasingly
stresses diversification and deconcentration (Pearce, 1987). Increasingly differen-
tiated products are needed to seek out new market niches among the growing
range of possibilities of an increasingly competitive, fragmented and demanding
market. The result is likely to be an increasingly heterogeneous heritage tourism
product, within which ethnic and cultural variety, as well as regional and local
differences, play a larger role. This may or may not harmonise with the devel-
opment of the other markets for heritage, and in particular those of political and
social identities and state-building.

Market segmentation
An approach to the marketing process from the side of the customer rather than
the producer would stress the numerous choices required by market segmenta-
tion and subsequent targeting. Segmentation is the recognition by producers that
identifiable and delimitable groups of consumers have different relationships to
the product: targeting is the exploitation of these differences through appro-
priately directed marketing strategies. At its simplest the division of potential
markets into users/non-users, and the former into heavy or light and frequent or
infrequent, presents a heritage producer with quite different strategies. Similarly
the idea that different consumers derive quite different benefits from the same
product (‘buyer-benefit’ analysis) has an obvious relevance to a product so
essentially individual as the experience of heritage.
Tensions arise through a failure to appreciate the existence of a segmented
market, failure to target its diverse segments, or more usually a failure of the
targeting strategies themselves to penetrate their intended markets. In heritage
marketing this results in conflicts between different consumers of the same
product or between the expectations of the consumer and the experience
delivered by the producer. The result is either production inefficiency or con-
sumer dissatisfaction — or all too often elements of both.

DISSONANCE IMPLICIT IN PLACE PRODUCTS

Places and heritage

The relationship of heritage to the time dimension is obvious, although not
simple, and has been discussed in Chapter 1; its relevance to space is less
24 DISSONANT HERITAGE

obvious but is still important and needs raising here. To argue that there is
a strong relationship between places and the occurrences of the past may seem
to many to be self-evident. All ‘pasts’ occurred somewhere and all ‘some-
wheres’ have a past. Yet this is an insufficient description of the link for our
purposes.
It is not just that the past has left physical traces of its existence at specific
locations in the present, nor is it only a matter of physical survivals obstructing
or modifying current processes. Places are in a continuous state of becoming (see
Pred (1984) for a closely argued positioning of place within structuration theory).
This process is one of the main determinants of the individual character of
places. Thus neither academic geographers nor tourists need persuading that the
past is one of the principal components of present areal differentiation; what
makes places more than spaces.
It is also not only the continued existence of relict structures and patterns at
places that are valued, but locations where past events occurred may also
frequently be valued even if no single physical material survival is present at
that site. Countries, regions, cities or just abstract points on the earth’s surface
can be ‘sacralised’ (to use MacCannell’s (1976) terminology) by their ascribed
associations. This may occur in some societies even if locational precision in the
Western sense is missing, which leads to recurrent misunderstandings in
appreciating some heritage places sacred to native peoples in Australia and
North America (as we discuss in Chapter 7). Thus history can be localised, at
least in the sense that it is most widely and powerfully expressed through the
sites with which it is strongly associated (Ashworth and de Haan, 1986). The
argument can be taken further in that heritage is not only frequently anchored
at a specific place, but the place, marketed as a whole, frequently is the product.
However, not only does the past shape the sense of locality upon which rests
the uniqueness of local place identities, but also the reverse process can now be
conceived; namely that places can be structured or planned deliberately to
create such associations with a past, for various purposes, and that possibility is
the core of the link between heritage and physical planning and place
management in what has been defined as the practice of ‘heritage planning’
(Ashworth, 1991a).
The contribution of the built environment to this sense of place is easy to
accept but King (1990) goes further by strongly arguing that it is the built
environment which is one of the main ‘sieves of social theory’ (p. 403): it is thus
‘fallacious to conceptualise society ... without reference to the physical and
spatial material reality of the built environment’ (p. 404). He then takes the
argument further, ‘the built environment does not reflect social order, it
constitutes much of that social order’ (p. 404). Historical and anthropological
evidence for this deliberate use of physical structures and morphologies at
scales varying from the wider settlement pattern to the individual building has
been accumulated from many different time periods and societies (see for
example Kirk’s (1970) work on the transmission of myths in various societies or
Choay’s (1986) selection of cases of historical settlement forms; also Duncan
(1990) on townscape symbolism encoding rival political ideals in Kandy, Sri
Lanka).
DISSONANCE IN HERITAGE 25
Rather than expand on this point, which is exemplified in different contexts in
the later discussion of the uses of heritage, it is more pertinent to pursue the
consequent idea that if the past can be used to shape the character of places, and
places managed so as to shape a perception of a past, then what are the tensions
implicit in this important activity that must be defined in more detail?

Tensions inherent in place-products

If heritage as it is marketed is typically place-bound then it will be subject to the
general dilemmas intrinsic to all product development as well as to the special
conditions relating specifically to place-products. Place-products have certain
distinctive characteristics which affect their production and marketing (described
at length in Ashworth and Voogd, 1990, 1994) of which the most relevant here
are as follows.
e They are assemblages of many diverse elements, which may include non-
heritage components, with the same resources being used in the production
of a wide variety of place-products serving an equally wide variety of
consumer markets.
e Stemming from this is the curious simultaneous double definition of place-
products. A place as an entity can be the marketed product while simul-
taneously sets of products composed of elements, aspects or even particular
localities within the place can be separately marketed.
e They are ‘multi-sold’, ie. the same physical space can be sold simul-
taneously as different products to different users. In this context it can be
added that they can also be ‘multi-interpreted’, i.e. the same locations can be
simultaneously interpreted in different ways to different consumers.
e They exist within nested spatial scale hierarchies. This in turn raises
questions of which spatial scale is being bought and which sold, and are
these the same in each case. Equally reinforcement or contradiction can
occur between place-products at different scales which creates positive or
negative spatial ‘shadow effects’.
Each of these characteristics raises particular tensions with a potential for
dissonance when heritage is used for specific purposes, but that of spatial scale
is of such widespread relevance that it should be considered in more detail.

The scale question

If places cannot exist other than within a spatial hierarchy then place-products
similarly exist at particular scales and at particular levels in such a hierarchy.
This in turn creates the possibility for conflict in a number of different ways. The
most obvious is that place-products at different but related spatial scales will
conflict by contradicting each other. The heritage interpretation used to sell a
town may convey a different and contradictory message to that simultaneously
being used to sell the region or country in which it is set. This is so common in
tourism marketing as to be the rule rather than the exception (see Goodall, 1990)
and can generally be discounted if the markets can be sufficiently segregated
26 DISSONANT HERITAGE

from each other. The same phenomenon in the selling of place identities,
especially for political purposes, has been little researched but would appear to
be as widespread, usually expressed in terms of a regionalism/centralism
divergence (illustrated in Chapter 7 with respect to Canada). Rather less
obvious is a potential discrepancy between the place that is sold and that which
is bought. Customers, or receivers of place-products, are quite likely to be
purchasing a different spatial scale from that which is being promoted,
generally because official promotion provides only a fraction, and the least
credible fraction, of the information used by the customer to construct place
identities (Ashworth and Voogd, 1990). Again this difficulty has become
apparent in tourism, where the mental geography of the visitor frequently bears
no relationship to the jurisdictional responsibilities of the place-bound
organisation performing the selling. Finally if, as is usually the case, heritage is
to be marketed for different purposes simultaneously, albeit to different
markets, the question arises of whether the spatial scale is the same for each set
of users.
Spatial scales may interfere with each other in another way through ‘shadow
effects’. Places may benefit, or suffer, from the shadows cast by products being
offered at higher or lower hierarchical levels. Indeed those concerned with
promoting place-products frequently attempt to develop their own mental maps
by either sheltering under, or conversely distancing themselves from, the herit-
age of either neighbouring areas or heritage place-products being simultaneously
offered at a different hierarchical level. Dissonance may stem from such actions
and be experienced by either the ‘perpetrator’ or the ‘victim’ of such hijacking or
disowning of heritage at a different scale. The elasticity of the boundaries of
tourist board regional nomenclature, such as “The Robin Hood’ or ‘Robert Frost
Country’ or the ‘Gateway to ...’ designations are often obvious attempts at
shadow sheltering. Equally places may wish to distance themselves from the
unattractive heritage marking of neighbours: “The Chernobyl Country’ is
unlikely to be used in tourism brochures.
Of the various manifestations of these potential difficulties, two have become
particularly apparent. One emerges as the national or international heritage
product dilemma. Products produced for sale on the international tourism
market will, by the demand-led definition already given, be largely determined
by that market. This has a myriad of practical implications. The successful
tourism product is thus an interpretation of the local historical experience in so
far as it can be related to, and incorporated in, the historical experience of the
visitor. Thus a successful foreign heritage tourism industry is dependent less on
the sale of the heritage of the destination country to visitors from the consumer
country and more on the re-sale in a different guise of the consumers’ own
heritage back in an unexpected context within the destination country. The
potential of this discrepancy for producing dissonance in either group of
domestic or foreign consumers is obvious and aggravated in an age of
nationalist hypersensitivity, as will be illustrated in the following chapters. Note
that such dissonance may not be the consequence of scale alone but may be
compounded by specific past antagonistic or exploitative relationships between
the countries of visitors and visited.
DISSONANCE IN HERITAGE 27
DISSONANCE IMPLICIT IN MULTI-USE

Aspects of this problem have been touched upon above in the contexts of the
implicit multi-buying or multi-selling involved in any place-product. The
potential dissonance arising from the quite different uses of the same
commodified past, even managed often by the same agencies, will be considered
in detail in Chapter 3 in which the focus shifts to uses and users of heritage.
However, it is worth noting here that it is not multi-use in itself that leads to
dissonance but multi-use in situations where user markets are distinctly
different, tend to conflict and are not successfully segregated.

DISSONANCE IMPLICIT IN THE CONTENT OF MESSAGES

The process of heritage product creation and development, for whichever

market, raises some fundamental dilemmas of content selection. First it needs to
be reiterated that heritage is created by interpretation and this inevitably implies
the existence of messages. This being the case it is the content of such messages
that may cause dissonance in various ways.

The inevitability of messages and values

‘History will always be used as a collection of political and moral precedents’,
argued the historian Wedgwood, in a published study of German historical
topics used to provide justification from the past for Allied war efforts in 1943.
The commodification argument advanced in Chapter 1 goes further than this in
implying that not only may heritage contain messages and values, but that it
cannot avoid doing so. If it is the interpretation that is traded, not its various
physical resources, then at one level the heritage product is a particular service,
such as a visit to a museum, theme park or historic city, but at a deeper level it
is an intangible experience — whether it is nostalgia, pleasure, pride or some-
thing else — that is the product. The inescapable consequence of this is that both
what is sold and what is bought contain messages that stem from the conscious
choices of resources, products and packaging which are made on the basis of
sets of subjective values, whether consciously held or not, of those exercising
these choices. If choice is inherent in the model and the heritage product is
shaped through thematic interpretation, then the nature of the message
conveyed by such themes is obviously important. That all heritage contains
implicitly or explicitly value-laden messages is obvious: which messages, for
which purposes and with what effects is far less obvious.
Education is often included among the extrinsic justifications for heritage
creation and presentation and thus heritage is expected to have a socialisation
function in reproducing the dominant or currently favoured ideas and mores of
the community. This may amount to a coherent political ideology (as discussed
in Chapter 3) or just identification with particular spatio-political or ethnic
entities. This raises a whole series of other issues, which are discussed in detail
later, and at the very least official heritage interpretations reflect ideas and
28 DISSONANT HERITAGE

standpoints that are currently fashionable (or ‘politically correct’ to use current
North American terminology as extensively illustrated in Chapter 7). This is not
to claim that all heritage is deliberately executed by government officials for
explicit, clearly thought out, political purposes. Such a circumstance is probably
exceptional. Equally, however, heritage creation motivated ostensibly by non-
political, technical approaches in search of historical accuracy, aesthetic beauty,
or even just entertainment, cannot fail to attempt to shape attitudes according to
a set of preconceived values, whether this was the intention or not and whether
or not the attempt was successful.
The possible role of this interpretation in reflecting a particular coherent
political programme or supporting any distinctive prevailing view of society is
not in discussion here but is raised in later chapters. The point here is only that
the assembly of the heritage product is indelibly linked to messages which are
not marginal accretions to the process, or a rare perversion of it, but form the
essential binding medium, without which the various components selected from
the past could not be transformed into heritage products. Interpretation is
ideological in the sense that sets of ideas are being conveyed through the
heritage product and is no less ideological if it can be shown that there are many
such possible messages, that producers are often insufficiently aware of their
message-delivering role or that recipients, the consumers of the heritage product,
receive a message quite different from that intended. Thus whether or not
heritage is deliberately designed to achieve pre-set spatio-political goals, place
identities at various spatial scales are likely to be shaped or reinforced by the
messages intrinsic in heritage planning.

Types of dissonance in message content

There are, of course, numerous ways in which the content of the messages
contained within the interpretation of heritage could create dissonance among
particular groups of recipients. A few types of these ‘wrong’ messages are of
such general application as to be worth listing briefly here although exemplified
in different contexts at length later. The problem may lie in one of these
conditions, or in any combination of them.
e Contradictory transmissions. The projected messages implicit in the
interpretation of the same or related heritage may conflict with each other
and thus themselves create a dissonance among consumers who have to
incorporate contradictory ideas into their psychological constructs. Differ-
ence, even when it amounts to contradiction, does not inevitably lead to
dissonance: the UK, for example, currently markets British heritage to
tourists as staid Victorian respectability, medieval roisterism, 1960s liber-
tarian experimentalism and much besides, which rarely causes difficulties
either because the markets are usually separately targeted or because
individual tourists seem capable of enjoying a range of different experiences.
e A failure in transmission. The message projected may be designed to be in
itself unexceptional, and thus dissonance-free, but, for various reasons, is
received in quite a different way from that intended, by some or all of the
DISSONANCE IN HERITAGE 29

recipients. In fact what is occurring is that different messages are being

received from those that are sent. This may be due to inadequate or
incomplete market segmentation and consequently market separation,
leading to non-targeted groups being approached. The message is being
received by the wrong consumer. This may be rendered more likely because
many of those responsible for the preservation, maintenance and promotion
of physical heritage, not least building conservation and museum
management, are by their education, skills and motivations predisposed to
underestimate, misjudge or even largely ignore, the reactions of consumers
to their products. This supply orientation of some producers, discussed at
length in the context of heritage users in Chapter 3, creates a situation where
the intended message is incompletely transmitted, distorted or even ignored
in favour of a quite different unintended message. Each of these situations
can be a source of dissonance.
e Obsolete transmission. Messages may continue to be projected to a changed
- society, which has quite different policies and goals from those of the society
for which they were originally intended. The world is littered with relics,
buildings, monuments, statues and dedications expressing obsolete messages
that are either no longer relevant to the society of current recipients, have a
quite different meaning to that originally intended, or are just no longer
understood. This may result in no more than an irrelevant distraction but
may also project an embarrassing and even destabilising contradiction, as
will be abundantly illustrated from post-Cold War Europe (Chapter 6), post-
colonial Africa (Chapter 8) and even post-imperial Canada (Chapter 7).
e Undesirable transmission. Finally there is the category of distasteful messages,
often about ‘the history that hurts’ (Baker, 1988). These are the messages that
society, or sections of it, would rather not hear themselves or permit others
to hear. Humanity’s long history of war, pogrom, persecution, discrimi-
nation and just general nastiness between nations, tribes, classes, races and
religions has left its own widespread legacies. This heritage exists in
abundance and conveys its own strident messages. This can create dis-
sonance among previous victims, their descendants or those who fear they
might be future victims. Equally it can be dissonant to previous perpetrators
and their descendants, or to society as a whole, or generations within it,
which would rather not be constantly reminded of the depths that can be
reached by their shared flawed humanity. The various options open for the
management of distasteful messages implicit in much heritage range from
deliberate concealment to a reinterpretation to reduce dissonance. This type
of dissonance is both so prevalent but equally so sensitive as to require quite
separate treatment in Chapter 5.

FROM DISSONANCE TO DISINHERITANCE

The shaping of any heritage product is by definition prone to disinherit non-

participating social, ethnic or regional groups, as their distinctive historical
experiences may be discounted, marginalised, distorted or ignored. This, it has
30 DISSONANT HERITAGE

been argued, is an innate potentiality and a direct consequence of the selectivity

built into the concept of heritage. Choice from a wide range of pasts implies that
some pasts are not selected, as history is to a greater or lesser extent hijacked by
one group or another for one purpose or another.
This idea of ‘heritage dissonance’ through ‘heritage disinheritance’ stems
partly from the problem of choice of content from among the many possible
heritages available at a given point in time; and partly from the problem of what
to do with existing heritages that no longer conform to the present goals of the
heritage creation exercise, because they contain messages that are dissonant in
the context of the prevailing norms and objectives or in terms of the dominant
ideology. Heritage, we have argued, is a contemporary creation, but as each
generation creates its own new heritage, it leaves behind it, if not immortalised
at least for very long periods of time, traces of that heritage for future
generations — whether or not those future generations either need it or want it.
The choices made by one society about which history to transform into heritage
present a donation of preserved objects, sites and buildings, as well as
commemorated personalities and events, to each succeeding generation, with
which it has to come to terms regardless of the intervening changes in that
society. This is a central challenge posed for heritage management that it has no
choice but to face. It is worth adding that if, as stated at the beginning of this
book, heritage as we have defined it is a very recent phenomenon, then this
problem of ‘relict heritage’ is likely to increase rapidly in the next generation and
planning for a heritage that is inter-generationally sustainable may become a
priority. This problem is, of course, paradoxical to the common perception of
heritage as a resource, the very essence of which ensures continuity down the
generations.
This notion that the heritage of one is the disinheritance of another confronts
us with a particularly widespread and disquieting possibility which needs
immediate consideration and qualification. The inevitability of disinheritance
must be modified by drawing an important distinction between identity and
interpretation.
In a plural, or otherwise socially complex, society in which different groups
have no obvious generalised dependencies, one upon another, and in that
broadest sense are social equals, the assertion of a heritage identity by one group
does not necessarily affect any other group and does not innately cause
dissonance in others by depriving them of that heritage. On the contrary, a
society composed of different social groups is fully capable of encompassing a
number of different but exclusive heritages without these leading to conflict.
There are three main ways in which this may occur: it can be based upon
mutual indifference, tolerant acceptance as of necessity, or a mutuality of esteem
leading to mutual association and participation. In the first case a social group
may cherish and experience a very distinctive and cohesive heritage quite
exclusively and separate from the wider society within which it exists, without
either threatening or feeling threatened by that society. The Polish community in
Britain after 1945, for example, maintains not only its language, folklore and
religion but also a political vision which for 50 years was quite different from
that of its original ‘mother country’. Yet few in Britain were even aware of the
DISSONANCE IN HERITAGE 31
existence of such a community, let alone felt any resentment at their dis-
inheritance from it. The heritage being denied to the majority society was just of
no particular interest to it and certainly not seen as threatening.
In the second case there is a version of the ‘pillar principle’ of social
organisation which was originally developed in the Netherlands (under the
name ‘verzuiling’), as a means of reconciling contradictory and potentially
divisive Protestant and Catholic social visions within a single state. Here two or
more distinctive groups maintain a completely separate existence, each with its
own social organisations and version of history, while accepting the existence of
the others, their rights to autonomy but also the contribution of all to the state as
a whole. Such social separation with separate heritages (the Dutch word is
‘apartheid’, which acquired a notoriety elsewhere where it was applied quite
differently) depends not upon a mutual understanding nor mutual participation,
neither of which is required, but upon a mutual acceptance of the necessity for
an equal contribution to be made by each group to the wider society.
‘Thirdly, various heritages can be not only tolerated but shared by groups who
may participate to some extent in the celebration of the heritage of others. The
Notting Hill Carnival in London and Caribana in Toronto are well-known
examples where West Indian musical and culinary heritage is freely enjoyed by
others, and in New York on St Patrick’s Day or Columbus Day many citizens
without historical or cultural links may become ‘Irish/Italian for a day’.
Thus heritage identification as such need not constitute an inconvenience or a
threat to excluded groups, less still create an awareness of disinheritance among
them. However, at a simple level, if such identification inconveniences others by
denying them free access to, or use of, structures and places which the
identifying group regards as their property or space, then conflict may indeed
arise. For example, the summer ‘marching season’ in Northern Ireland in
practice denies access to the non-participating community, whether nationalist or
unionist, to the streets and places where such marches occur. Similarly an
intractable case is the division of ‘ownership’ of the sacred shrines of Jerusalem
between three major religions, and many more denominations among these,
which effectively physically dispossesses others, at least at certain times and
sites. The context of this sort of interference is one of practical dispossession
as well as disinheritance, which is not dissimilar to the widely recognised
phenomenon of the dispossession of typically poorer incumbent residents of
inner cities and waterfronts by gentrification, considered further in Chapter 4
(Short, 1989; Merrifield, 1993).
Partisan interpretation of a more generally acknowledged heritage is another,
and often more serious, matter. Where social or economic relations between
groups are experienced as unequal, as has frequently been the norm between
competing human groups, then the possibility of disinheritance leading to
serious consequences is increased. Master-servant relationships, whether arising
from a segregation of social classes or cultural groups, as in colonialism, endow
disinheritance with a further and potentially unsettling twist. In these cases both
the identification and interpretation of heritage in favour of the dominant group
is likely to entail the disinheritance of those who physically created it at the
behest of their masters, or were dispossessed from it by their advent in the first
32 DISSONANT HERITAGE

place. The stigma of such disinheritance and the historical pain endured in
its creation may eventually result, when the servants have acquired political
power, in their denial of such heritage, in effect a self-disinheritance, in favour of
alternative heritage identification whether from pre-subservient times, pre-
viously undervalued resources or newly created focal points of group identity.
The empowerment of a former subservient group may thus lead to the destruc-
tion, decay or marginalisation of the heritage from which they were hitherto
excluded: it may also lead, however, to its valued retention and reinterpretation
along radically different lines, scripting quite different parts for the previously
subservient and dominant groups. These scenarios are illustrated in Chapter 8.
Empires wax and wane, populations come and go and cultural ideas, norms
and fashions change and migrate even more rapidly. The probability of shifts in
population groups, political and social power structures and ideological
allegiances leaving behind cultural and material relics that no longer reflect
relevant or desirable contemporary place symbolisms is extremely high. Such
diffusions are a mainspring of what can be described as a social geography of
heritage dissonance. This is analysed in Chapter 4 in the same way as other
social attributes with distinctive spatial characteristics: its consequences for
disinheritance will be exemplified in many different contexts in subsequent
chapters.

HERITAGE AND SPONTANEOUS CULTURAL CONFLICT

The typologies and classification systems proposed and used above are essen-
tially based upon a marketing science perspective of the relationships between
resources, products and consumers. There is a danger of much heritage fitting
only partially and uncomfortably into these structures because it is both less
precisely articulated and yet quite viscerally perceived. Such heritage values are
often pivotal to resurgent culturally based conflict around the contemporary
world. This is the raw material of national cohesion and disintegration and thus
clearly the most fundamental heritage issue in many parts of the world. Because
many such issues are nebulous, in that tangible heritage icons are variously
interwoven with much wider sets of culturally specific values, they are difficult
to comprehend fully within our framework and yet are quite literally matters of
life and death significance. The removal of the mosque at Ayodhya, India, in
1992 was motivated by extremist conviction that it defiled the sacredness of the
site to Hindus, but its demolition affronted the sacredness of the same site to
Muslims. What we can classify technically as a typical conflict of the multi-
selling of a place-product with inadequate market differentiation actually
focused centuries of grievance over displacement of religious symbolism, caused
hundreds of deaths, destroyed property 10 000 km away and destabilised the
world’s largest democracy.
It is clear from cases such as this that tangible physical heritage can wield
enormous power and can be harnessed to social, cultural and political forces of
enormous constructive or destructive potential. In no sense therefore should our
use of marketing structures imply any paramountcy to economic uses: the role
DISSONANCE IN HERITAGE 33

of heritage tourism in particular is easy to overestimate, if only because it can be

exemplified with some precision and accommodated more comfortably into our
analysis. The reality in many of the cases discussed in later chapters is that
economic arguments are, or could be, decisively negated by the other less easily
quantified or analysed uses of heritage.
The spiritual significance of heritage in social, cultural or political terms
cannot, however, be divorced from its economic significance, since both operate
(actually or potentially) in the same space. The interaction between them can be
entirely negative, where spiritual reaction to dissonance generates violence
which frightens away the economic market. In extreme cases heritage tourists
have been specifically targeted in order to undermine the economic base of those
in power and make a political point extraneous to heritage as such (as seen in
the actions of Muslim fundamentalists in Egypt or the Kurds in Turkey in 1993).
Conversely, differentiating the economic heritage product in order to broaden its
market could be used as a vehicle for promoting recognition of all heritages in a
plural society, and thereby promoting social equity and harmony.
The interplay between the economic and social harmony dimensions of
heritage dissonance will be frequently encountered in the following chapters.
3. Dissonance and the Uses of
Heritage

The purpose of this chapter is not to attempt to construct an inventory of the

many possible uses of heritage: this has been done with varying amounts of
completeness, and a varying focus upon particular types of use by others (e.g.
Newcombe, 1979). Even a review of a selection of such uses is in itself not
directly relevant to our argument. Three major categories of use have, however,
been chosen for cursory examination here. Each of these has a specialist
literature of its own and our purpose is not merely to summarise this but to
further the analysis of potential dissonance in this chapter from the perspective
of the use for which the heritage is intended rather than, as in later chapters, its
impact on individuals or social groups. Some overlap between chapters is
inevitable but the same material is viewed from the sides of the producers and
the consumers and in so far as these are different, dissonance may occur as a
result of such different perspectives.
The three types of uses of heritage reviewed here all reflect the idea that
heritage is a resource upon which extensive activities or industries have been
constructed. First there is the use of heritage as a cultural resource, seen as
valuable in itself and thus forming the basis for collection and subsequently
display in which museums play a central institutional role; secondly, heritage is
used as a political resource in the creation or support of states at various spatial
jurisdictional scales and the legitimation of their governments and governing
ideologies. Thirdly, heritage is used as an economic resource supporting
economic activities, either directly as an industry in itself or indirectly as a
contributor to the locational preferences of other economic activities.
These three broad sets of uses overlap considerably, not least because it is
frequently the same historical events, personalities and associations that are
being used in all these uses of heritage, often in the same places. However, each
relates to a separate area of policy, namely cultural or artistic policy, political
policy and economic policy respectively, each of which is in practice pursued by
separate agencies of government involving separate individual producers or
resource managers. Furthermore, partly as a consequence of this, the motives,
background and working methods of those involved tend to be quite different in
each case. Finally, and this is usually less easy to distinguish, the consumers of
each have different expectations and requirements of the resource and are using
it in different ways. The source of much of the potential dissonance this chapter
seeks to reveal can be expected to be traced to these various differences.
DISSONANCE AND THE USES OF HERITAGE 35
HERITAGE AS A CULTURAL RESOURCE

The motives for collecting heritage resources

Heritage becomes incorporated into culture either because the artistic and craft
productivity of the past is included alongside modern artistic creativity in what
is identified as culture, or more comprehensively because culture more broadly
defined as the ‘mentifacts’ as well as artefacts of a social group, whenever it was
produced, is viewed as heritage in the sense that it is regarded as suitable for
assembly, preservation and transmission to future generations as an inheritance.
In either situation deliberate collection is a central activity, although clearly not
all such heritage has been, or even physically could be, accommodated in
museum buildings: physical memorials, buildings as monuments and even
whole historic cities are ‘collected’. However, the museum occupies an important
and visible role in such collecting and thus can stand as an archetype for many
other such institutions.
There are many reasons why people have collected and assembled objects or
records relating to the past and housed them in a purpose-built museum, other
than the political and social uses that are central to our argument (see for
example Hudson’s (1987) account of the history of museums, and thus of their
underlying motivations, over the last 500 years). The ease of a comparative
scientific study of artefacts divorced from their physical locations was an
important motive for many archaeological or anthropological collections. A
desire to protect endangered objects, buildings and even methods of expression
and ways of life threatened with extinction lay behind many folk and craft
museums. Similarly objects may be so treated because they are seen as
aesthetically beautiful, as unusual curiosities, or just collectable and fulfilling a
need, or according to Overduin (1988), an obsession of people to collect for
collection’s sake. This is a summary of the case for museums as places where
artefacts are assembled, protected from further harm, reconstituted, classified
alongside others of their kind and recorded for their own sake, and not in
furtherance of any other contemporary objective, by individuals and organis-
ations disinterested in all save the values emanating from the objects themselves
or the historic truths that they are believed to reveal.
Such a case based on allegedly intrinsic qualities needs making at the outset
if only because much of the rest of this section is composed of discussion of the
counter-arguments, in which museums and cultural policy more generally are
seen as possessing a role in creating and disseminating values which are
ascribed to the objects extrinsically because they are conceived as being
important for contemporary and future societies. What has been termed the
‘new museology’ (Mayrand, 1985; Vergo, 1989a) needs contrasting with the ‘old’
not only because otherwise the changes cannot be understood, but more
practically because many of those working in this field today are still explicitly
or implicitly motivated by such considerations, which cannot therefore be
lightly dismissed as incidental or relating only to past practices now obsolete.
Many museums are ‘still trapped in a nineteenth century mode, carrying out
nineteenth century intellectual projects’ (Lord and Lord, 1991: 21). Indeed the
36 DISSONANT HERITAGE

vociferousness and tendency towards over-statement of the reformers can only

be explained by the strength of the traditional entrenched ‘establishment’ view
that it opposes. As late as 1977 a Dutch national museums policy statement
listed the five functions of museums as collecting/acquiring, conserving/
restoring, securing in safety, registering and documenting and, only in fifth
place, displaying (Ministerie van Cultuur, Recreatie en Maatschappelijk Werk,
1977). Any accommodation of visitors is confined to what amounts to an
afterthought to be pursued when other functions are complete and only to the
extent that it does not compromise more fundamental activities. It is revealing
that museums exhibit on average around 10% of their stock and the idea that
they sell unshown artefacts in order to finance continuing display has been
strongly resisted (Grampp, 1989). Even many of the changes in approach
towards a more centrally important contemporary social or economic function
that have occurred recently may, it has been suggested (Kirby, 1988; Overduin,
1988), be no more than a reluctant and essentially superficial reaction to
externally imposed circumstances, especially financial constraints, and not a
radical conversion from traditional views on the purpose and functioning of
museum collections: display to visitors is only a means of continuing to fulfill
other responsibilities. Thus from the outset it is evident that conflicting ideas
about what museum collections are for exist, both between those responsible for
such collections, and also between the curators and those outside these
insitutions who would use such collections for other purposes.
The traditional view that museums had a clear and essentially neutral role in
society is directly and uncompromisingly challenged in the ‘new museology’.
‘The museum is not a preconstituted entity that is produced in the same way
at all times. No “direct”... or “fundamental role” can be identified’ (Hooper-
Greenhill, 1992). Further, ‘The decision to acquire and display a museum object
is both philosophical and political’ (Hudson, 1987: 114). If this challenge is
correct then it is directly important to the whole argument of this book. It
suggests that those who are assembling and maintaining the raw materials
from which heritage will be created are themselves motivated by contemporary
values and needs and thus just as consumer-driven as are the more explicit
heritage producers. It furthermore strongly implies that they also may have the
same philosophical view of the interpreted past as being a changeable creation
of the present amenable to goal-directed intervention. At the very least it poses
the inevitable questions about what are then the contemporary functions of
museums and other similar public cultural agencies, what role are they playing
especially in the transmission of social and political values, and who deter-
mines these. Expressed more narrowly for museum practice, Hooper-Greenhill
(1992) has argued that four questions are now central, which either were not
asked previously or were assumed to be answered by a consensus which now
no longer exists: why are collections assembled, what is considered collectable,
how is a collection to be classified, and how are collections to be used? It must
be stressed that it is not only the fourth question that affects the active role
of museums and other heritage resource collectors in shaping the heritage
product.
DISSONANCE AND THE USES OF HERITAGE 37
The content of museums

‘Museums are dedicated to the glorification of objects’ (Lord and Lord, 1991).
They impose their own visions of reality upon such objects from the moment a
decision is made to collect them and long before any presentation to visitors is
considered. The selection of items, their divorce from their original context of use
and place, and their arrangement, all impose a particular chosen vision of reality
that presumably is acquired outside the museum and varies over time. ‘But it is
a mistake to assume that there is only one form of reality for museums, only one
fixed mode of operating . . . the reality of museums has changed many times .. .
according to the context, the plays of power and the social, economic and
political imperatives that surround them’ (Hooper-Greenhill, 1992: 1). In
particular, classifications impose a rationality upon the objects that will reflect
wider epistemologies. Thus the unavoidable structuring arrangement of exhibits,
or of buildings as monuments, is a reflection of how society views and structures
knowledge as well as an influence shaping those views. Therefore in any set of
museum exhibits ‘ideas are more important than objects’ (Hooper-Greenhill,
1992: 206). A recent attempt at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, to present an
exhibition on exhibiting which challenged visitors through varying and even
contradictory presentations of objects was a demonstration of this point that led
to much confusion among those visitors who expected a fixed arrangement of
reality (Anon., 1992).
It can be added, of special relevance to the main argument of this book, that
the very concept of what is a museum then comes into question (Sorensen,
1990). What was a room or a building in which items were stored and displayed
may equally now be a wider range of possibilities that can be encompassed in
the philosophy of the new museology. Once museums include sites, whether
covered or outdoor, that are artefacts in themselves, with collections of build-
ings, vehicles, mines, quarries and the like which are themselves the objects on
display, then the concept of a museum becomes so wide as to begin to merge
with entire settlements. There are villages or towns which, in whole or in part,
have been dedicated as museums (such as Sherbrooke, Nova Scotia) but which
remain in use for other residential and commercial purposes: they are literally
inhabited museums. From this point the idea of a museum extends in two
different directions. It merges first with the historic theme park (whether
composed of reassembled buildings, such as Gamle By in Aarhus, or
reconstructed buildings temporarily re-peopled by animators, such as the
fortress town of Louisbourg, Nova Scotia, or fantasy constructions it is imagined
might have been, such as Turin’s ‘Citta Vecchia’). Secondly, it becomes
increasingly indistinguishable from the conserved and interpreted tourist-historic
city reconstituted by urban conservation planners and recognisable from
archetypes such as Bath or Florence (Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990).
An extreme manifestation of the inhabited museum is the ‘ecomuseum’, an
idea developed by de Varine at the behest of the French government in 1971 at
Le Creusot and subsequently applied elsewhere as in Bentivoglio’s Museum of
Rural Life (1974) and farther afield in Canada (Chapter 7). The idea is that an
entire region presents its distinctive geographical characteristics (physical as well
38 DISSONANT HERITAGE

as cultural) as a unique and indivisible heritage synthesis in which the daily

lives of the inhabitants, past and present, constitute an essential integral com-
ponent (McManus, 1991). The comprehensive inclusion of all such elements is, of
course, impossible and would in any event be unpresentable; therefore those
features arbitrarily considered to be the most unique, typical or interesting will
be chosen and what in practice emerges is often not very different from the
traditional eclectic display of many local museums.

The education function

Although the education function was included in the 1753 founding charter of
the British Museum, provision for even cursory visits was for a long time limited
to a maximum of 60 days in the year (Hudson, 1987: 25). The reverse situation
has now been reached whereby display and interpretation are considered to be
the central functions of museums. The museum becomes ‘a tool for social
awareness’ (Hancocks, 1987). The method is the relating of a story to which the
‘reticent object’ (Vergo, 1989b) as such is subordinated. Indeed the artefact is
often barely relevant and sometimes not even physically present, in a narrative
without objects. The shift from the authenticity of the object to the authenticity
of the experience is sometimes reflected in a shift in terminology from museum
to heritage centre, although any boundary between the two would be arbitrary.
Graburn (1977, 1991) has summarised the objectives of museums under three
headings and has traced shifts in the balance between these over time. These are
the ‘auratic’ (literally awe-inspiring displays of power), the ‘didactic’ and the
‘sociable’. He relates the rise in importance of the education function specifically
to the rise of the democratic nation state in the nineteenth century and the
implied requirement of the state ‘to educate its masters’ through public schools,
libraries and museums. It is worth noting that the public education function that
increasingly appears as a justification for museums in the course of the
nineteenth century assumed that it was the ‘public’ who were receiving not
giving the education in a museum that was ‘a classroom without desks’
(Graburn, 1977: 14). This public education function makes three major assump-
tions: that there are scientific truths, that these should be communicated to the
public for its own good, and that this public was waiting eagerly to receive
them.
How museums exercise their educational functions can be shown to have
changed but this says nothing about the content of such education, for whom it
is intended and its overall wider objective. The traditional view is that the
museum is merely one instrument, among many in society, charged with the
task of being the channel along which heritage is transmitted from past to
present and from present to future. ‘Collection is not an objective in itself but
must be directed towards the transmission of the past to future generations .. .
cultural transmission is the central function of the museum’ (Broekhuis, 1991: 7).
This of course poses the question of who decides whose culture shall be
transmitted to whom, which resolves itself into just one aspect of the ‘whose
heritage?’ discussion pursued in Chapter 4. It is interesting to note at this point
in the argument, however, that both the traditional ‘neutral collecting’ view and
DISSONANCE AND THE USES OF HERITAGE oy
the more recently dominant market-orientated view of museums as providers
of customer services, sidestep these questions by an appeal to an outside
determinant. In the first case the museum classifies itself as a professional
executor of political decisions made elsewhere, and in the second as an
automatic responder to the demands of an external market by just providing
what the customer wants.
Between these two extremes, each of which denies any independent decision-
making about content, there is a wide zone of compromise allowing manage-
ment policy to operate. In particular, if ‘museums map out the geographies of
taste and values’ (Lumley, 1988: 2) the temptation to create, or at the very least,
influence this ‘geography’, rather than just describe it, has rarely been resisted.
However, two quite different reactions have dominated the discussion.
The first is really only an aspect of what will be discussed later as the
‘dominant ideology thesis’, in which museum collections are assembled and
presented to legitimate a particular political jurisdictional entity or ideology: the
‘political story-line of exhibitions’ (Graburn, 1991). This idea is most easy to
demonstrate in Europe where the national museum and the nation state have
enjoyed a close relationship in terms of finance, governing bodies and policy
formulation. Horne (1984) has quite exhaustively reviewed, country by country,
the national museums’ presentation of the national heritage of the European
nation state. This is most convincing in the cases of what can be termed ‘fulfilled
nationalism’ (such as France or Denmark) where the story conveyed by the
objects self-confidently and logically leads from the past to the present. It is
much less convincing when discrepancies occur due to either an ‘incomplete
nationalism’ (such as in Wales or Catalonia) or where the nationalism celebrated
is now all but defunct (as in Belgium). It may be ironic that Horne, an observer
from the ‘New World’, should analyse the European case which is dominantly a
nineteenth-century creation, when contemporary New World nationalisms are
now in the throes of the same process. The Canadian Museum of Civilization, in
effect the national museum of Canada, was opened in 1989 and the estab-
lishment of an Australian national museum, proposed in 1927, is still being
animatedly discussed (Bann, 1989; Anderson and Reeves, 1994).
One problem with this view is that it suggests a spurious orthodoxy. The
nation state is by no means the only type or spatial scale of political entity
whose existence may be underpinned by a museum or monument collection.
Multinational empires and regions or towns may equally form the structuring
theme for interpretation, as may any of the social, ethnic or racial characteristics
described in Chapter 4. ‘Museums are spaces in which elites and social groups
express their ideas and world views’ (Kaplan, 1994: 2). A specific example is the
pressure group ‘Women, heritage and museums’ which was founded in 1984 to
encourage the representation of its particular perspective in museum collections
and their interpretation (Kirby, 1988).
An alternative reaction within museums has been to challenge this idea that
the official nationally owned and financed museums should exercise a
‘monopoly of the manipulation of cultural goods and the institutional signs of
cultural salvation’ (Bourdieu and Darbel, 1991: 113). If ‘the late nineteenth
century museums were intended for the people, they were certainly not of the
40 DISSONANT HERITAGE

people’ (Bennett, 1988: 64) and thus a self-imposed task of museums was to
represent the unrepresented. This is not a recent idea: it has constantly
reappeared over the past 100 years and is often recognisable through the use of
two key words, namely ‘folk’ and ‘everyday’.
The idea of the folk museum was pioneered in 1891 in Skansen in Sweden and
was copied for the next 50 years throughout Europe in a wave of close
imitations through Budapest, Hjerl Heide in Denmark, St Fagan’s in South
Wales, Old Sturbridge Village, Massachusetts, and many more. All were based
on the idea of ‘folk’ or ‘people’ being the unrepresented submerged masses
whose life styles and material culture were threatened with passing unnoticed
and unpreserved into extinction, overwhelmed by mass-produced consumer
capitalism. It was powered by an ideology that saw moral values in vernacular
building (Hupka, 1993) and more broadly in ways of life illustrated by crafts
and orally transmitted customs. These were to be preserved in a hostile world
and passed on to future generations. Whatever their intent, however, doubt has
been cast on their effectiveness. ‘Despite careful attempts to use such venues to
subvert existing and often romantic images of the past, the genre itself exhibits
such a strategy’ (Mills, 1994). It may only replace urban with rural icons.
Similarly the museums of ‘everyday life’ — whether rural, as in Reading, or
urban-industrial, as at Beamish (Bennett, 1989), or most spectacularly encom-
passing a large part of the town, as at Lowell, Massachusetts (Ryan, 1989;
Blewitt, 1989) — were established with distinct political motives representing
either a rural peasantry or an urban proletariat as a counter to what was seen as
the official collections which represented social, cultural or political elites. The
objective often went further than representation and implied that ‘dominated
groups can resist and subvert dominant values’ (Merriman, 1991: 128).
The representation of the culture of subordinate classes can more funda-
mentally result in museum and archive authorities increasingly viewing their
role as one of empowerment. Here the unrepresented are not only represented
by the museum authorities but are encouraged to interpret their own heritage
rather than be educated as a largely passive clientele in a particular pre-
conceived way. This is often seen as a matter of ‘transferring skills to others and
providing opportunities for them to present their own points of view within the
institutional context provided’ (Ames, 1990). This may be little more than
presentation technique, for example encouraging interactive display, where
visitors are encouraged to incorporate their own personal experiences in some
way into the exhibits. It may also influence the choice of content, stressing the
commonplace over the rare, the lives of ordinary people expressed perhaps in
oral history over documentation of the ‘great and good’. Alternatively it may
mean no more than employing or consulting ‘natives’ about the display of their
culture. More fundamentally it can lead to influence or control of the institutions
themselves, through community involvement of various sorts and the repatri-
ation of artefacts to ‘native’ control. Many examples of the operation of this
empowerment approach can be found in attempts in the United States to involve
Native Americans in the presentation of their own history (Cole, 1985; Karp and
Levine, 1991; Merriman, 1991; Graburn, 1991). There have been cases, discussed
in detail later, where an officially sponsored interpretation or even selection of
DISSONANCE AND THE USES OF HERITAGE 41
heritage has been successfully challenged by an alternative. Specifically, for
example, there was the controversy in Berlin in 1985 around the future of the
then excavated Gestapo headquarters bunker which was used unofficially by
protest groups as a museum of the National Socialist period (reported in Baker,
1988). This posed a challenge to the official policy of largely ignoring, and even
demolishing if possible (as in the case of Spandau prison), heritage of the period
as being a source of potential dissonance. This is part of the wider problem of
interpreting the heritage of atrocity which will be tackled in Chapter 5.

The visitor to museums

Almost all that has been argued so far has assumed a largely passive role for the
customer and most of the debate within the museum world has similarly
concerned the content and significance of the messages projected by the
institutions rather than the reaction of the visitors who pass through them or even
pass by them without entering (McKechnie, 1974). Even the attempts to represent
the under-represented or to empower the powerless have occurred from the
standpoint, and use the professional methods, of the current suppliers of the
museum service. McManus (1991) has argued that no fewer than five ‘filters’ exist
between the museum exhibit and the potential museum visitor which obstruct
contact between the two. Some of these are considered below as ‘structural
characteristics’, others are social, perceptual and even physical aspects of the
architecture itself. A major difficulty of changing the viewpoint to a customer
orientation is the paucity of information. Museums have existed for centuries but
no comprehensive visitor surveys were held until the 1950s and even these
recorded little more than totals. Bourdieu’s seminal international comparison
made in 1963-65 was remarkable in its attempt to link museum visiting not only
with structural characteristics of the visitor such as age and class but also with
more general attitudes of the visitor to culture and to the past (Bourdieu and
Darbel, 1991). Only in the last 10 years have these ideas been developed and
supported by statistical evidence so that some insight can be gained into the
actual impacts of museums upon individuals. Even more interesting for our
argument is whether the way individuals actually use museums or monuments is
the same as the way museum curators or monument conservators think they do.
These insights can be simplified as answers to the three questions, ‘who, how and
why?’, each of which may reveal a source of potential dissonance.

Who visits museums?

The most notable answer to this question is simply ‘more’, as museums, historic
buildings, theme parks and even antique shops have participated in the heritage
boom, an easily related story of successful, and often dramatic, growth. Britain,
in many ways the product leader, increased the number of its museums tenfold
over a century (from 217 in 1887 to 2131 in 1987), with a new museum opening
every two weeks according to Hewison (1987). The number of visits appears to
be still increasing regularly (57 million in 1977 to 72 million in 1989). Similar
figures exist in most Western European countries (Ministerie van Cultuur,
42 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Visitor numbers (1950=100)

1000

800+

600 + ee

y
400 +

200

0 = SS! = ub cs aae It | [nS L - —*

1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990

Year

Figure 3.1. Number of museum visitors in The Netherlands (Central Bureau of Statistics)

Recreatie en Maatschappelijk Werk, 1977) and the United States (Wallace, 1981):
Figure 3.1, for the Dutch case, suggests however that growth in visiting has not
been steady but experienced a distinct break point around 1970 when what had
been the preserve of a small educated elite quite suddenly appears to have
become a more popular pastime.
The two contradictory explanations for this growth can be summarised as the
‘embourgoisement thesis’ and the ‘retreat into the past’ thesis. The former links
museum visiting with a related cluster of cultural activities such as concert,
theatre or art gallery attendance which have been historically associated with
luxury consumption. They are the economists’ ‘superior goods’, the demand for
which increases more than proportionately with rises in disposable income.
Sociologists of leisure have explained it in terms of a shift from a traditional
‘bourgeois’ concern with conserving financial capital to a ‘new service class’
concerned with enhancing their position through their cultural capital (Urry,
1990). In either event increasing overall national prosperity and resulting social
change has simply increased the number of possible consumers of this ‘culture-
vulture’ package. The second explanation reverses cause and effect and views
the growth in the whole heritage industry as a myopic escapist nostalgia both
contributing towards, and being a symptom of, the relative economic decline of
the countries such as Britain where it is most prevalent. Museums, it is argued,
have in either case responded to new demands from new markets (‘the
revolution of rising expectations’; Graburn, 1977) by changing methods of
presentation and promotion, and by stressing entertainment and involvement
rather than enlightenment and instruction. The growth in museum visiting is
thus a consequence of either absolute economic growth or relative economic
decline, or possibly even both.
DISSONANCE AND THE USES OF HERITAGE 43
In either case a danger of these sorts of boom statistics is that they ignore the
fact that many people never visit museums and many more visit only rarely.
Grampp (1989) has pointed out that only 9% of the US population make an
annual visit to a museum: a low figure compared to Europe. Therefore the direct
influence of any message emanating from a museum is limited to only that
section of the total public who are making regular and multiple visits. It is also
assumed among organisers of art exhibitions that a proportion of visitors, maybe
as many as one-third, have received art training and are in some way therefore
professionally involved. The relevance of this to the idea that the task of
museums is to convey establishment interpretations of the past in support of a
dominant ideology may be curiously contradictory. If, as is likely, the visitors
are drawn from the ‘culture vultures’ or even the ‘culture professionals’ and
therefore part of the dominant group, then museums are failing to influence
their targeted subordinate groups. Ironically this may matter little if the task is
seen more as justifying the dominance of the dominant group to itself rather
than convincing the subordinate groups of their subordination.

How do they visit museums?

Some study has been made of the nature of the museum trip and specifically
how the museum visit is incorporated into the wider patterns of behaviour of
the visitor, which has implications for the effectiveness of the interpretations.
Only on a minority of occasions is a specific museum the premeditated motive
for a trip. About a third of visitors had no such intention on departure and a
further third had only the broad objective of sightseeing which might include
museums in general (Tuynte and Dietvorst, 1988; Ausma et al., 1992).
To the museum visitor, whether tourist or resident, the museum thus becomes
only a part, and often quite a small part, of a pattern of leisure consumption, in
this case the day out with the family, and is not directly related to any particular
attitude towards the past or towards historical scholarship. It is ‘a social ritual
... part of the larger ritual of the tourist trip’ (Graburn, 1977). The messages
contained within the heritage interpretation are therefore received in a quite
different context from that assumed by their producers and it is this context
which provides the filter which largely determines the effectiveness, credibility
and distortion of the transmission. To what extent consumer behaviour in
western world contexts can be related to museums in the contexts of less-
developed countries remains to be researched, particularly with respect to
potential dissonance between tourist and resident visitors: the nature of the
filtering of received messages is especially likely to vary sharply between the
two groups (as well as further vary within them) where economic and cultural
standards are most divergent.

Why do they visit museums?

All of the above arguments reduce the visitor to a more or less featureless
receptacle of whatever museums care to display, whether in the service of their
traditional role as custodians of the national treasures or as representatives of
at DISSONANT HERITAGE

previously unrepresented groups. Merriman (1989) has forcibly argued that

museum visitors are not passive recipients but active participants in the heritage
process and Graburn (1977) argued that visitors bring preconceived expectations
and experiences that structure their understanding. If this is so then much of the
debate described above has been misfocused. It is therefore not the content of
the messages as projected that is significant but how, or whether or not, they are
incorporated in the experience of the visitor. This in turn relates to many
different aspects of the individual’s attitudes towards the past which are
themselves shaped by attitudes towards the present and visions for the future.
There have been attempts to construct a neat twofold division of society into
those that value history, and thus the preservation of its artefacts (the
‘historians’), and those that do not (the ‘non-historians’) (Solomon and George,
1977). It is relatively easy to demonstrate that it is the ‘historians’ who visit
museums on a regular basis while the ‘non-historians’ are the perennial non-
visitors; and thence to relate visiting to a series of structural characteristics of the
visitor, usually middle-age, above-average income, non-working class and
above-average education. The conclusion is thus easy to draw; namely, that
museums cater for a distinctive, and probably minority, clientele composed of
the knowledgeable. This can then be used, depending upon broader political
perspectives, to generate one of two types of policy. The museum service can be
condemned as a largely unrepresentative and undemocratic use of public funds,
and a democratisation of museums in a ‘culture for all’ policy can be embarked
upon (as attempted for example in the Netherlands or Scandinavian countries in
the 1970s). Alternatively it can be seen as a reflection of the poor standards of
education that have left a majority in ignorance of their national treasures which
should be corrected by policy for an appropriate educational curriculum.
However, this straightforward division of society and the simple policy
options that it prompts is probably an insufficient explanation of the relation-
ship between museum collections and their visitors. There is, for instance, a
large intermediate group that cannot be accounted for in either the ‘historian/
non-historian’ or visitor/non-visitor dichotomies. Quite a large portion of those
who actually visit museums are infrequent visitors and a similarly high pro-
portion have neutral or negative attitudes towards the past (Merriman, 1991).
Museums have an enormous ‘option demand’, as does all heritage, from those
who express approval of the idea of preservation but do not currently visit what
is preserved. Conversely, Prentice (1993) concluded from visitors to a limited
number of heritage sites on the Isle of Man that visiting heritage sites was not
linked to participation in other aspects of historical scholarship as such (for
example, membership of historical associations) but was related to similar
visiting patterns to sites whose attractions were not necessarily historical (such
as nature reserves and National Trust sites). In this model, museum visiting
becomes part of a wider life style in which the content of the site being visited,
whether archaeological, historical, artistic or natural, is not so important as the
social and behavioural characteristics of the visit itself. When tested on the
contents of a recently visited museum, many visitors appear to have a vague
and chronologically confused knowledge of history in general and of what they
have seen in particular (Prentice, 1993). Some, even more surprisingly, seem to
DISSONANCE AND THE USES OF HERITAGE 45

reject the very idea of history having any value to them or to society (Merriman,
1991).
Thus many of the topics raised above as important controversies within the
museum world may just be plainly irrelevant to many visitors. The authenticity
of the object, or the quality of the evidence of the historical record is likely to be
of little significance to visitors who also readily accept the existence of Robin
Hood, Tarzan and UFOs, or are shepherding young families who do. Thus the
earnest educational intentions and self-imposed social or political missions of
the producers are acting upon visitors who are in search of entertainment rather
than enlightenment, experience the exhibitions quite differently and see the
competition of the museum as the theme park, not the library or archive:
the museum is more ‘dreamland’ (Prince, 1985) than study. In the terms of our
argument, some of the potential dissonance expected from an examination of the
content of the heritage interpretation messages may not occur simply because it
is not received, and cannot be received, because the listener is tuned to a
different wavelength. Allowance must be made, however, for situations where
some producers are well aware of this and are seeking through entertainment to
achieve minimal penetration of this different wavelength with simplified
elements of their messages.
As we have noted earlier it is likely, despite the absence of much empirical
evidence, that all visitors have their own personal pasts and heritages which are
then confronted by whatever official heritage is presented by the museum.
Whether a discrepancy between the authoritative history presented and personal
experience creates dissonance may depend upon the sort of structural charac-
teristics mentioned above. The individual reconciles any incongruities when
questioned, not by denying the authenticity of the official history, which would
fly in the face of social acceptability, but by various possible strategies of
accommodation, selective distortion of recall or failure to register. Ultimately we
can only conclude that we just do not know at present what visitors seek and
what they find in museum and monument collections, but it is in that context
that museums and many other such collecting institutions must operate. This
climate of uncertainty, existing even in the museums of the developed world
(Walsh, 1992), is inevitably intensified in the more poorly funded institutions,
confronted with major dissonance difficulties, in the less developed world.

HERITAGE AS A POLITICAL RESOURCE

Heritage as a political instrument

Both the deliberate encouragement of support for particular political entities or

jurisdictions, and also the strengthening of the identification of individuals with
specific state-supporting ideologies, would seem to be quite different activities
from the assembly and conservation of relict historical artefacts and the products
of past cultures as described above, despite the recent stress on empowerment.
Each has quite different explicit purposes, motives and historical origins as well
as frequently being undertaken by different responsible organisations. Many of
46 DISSONANT HERITAGE

those involved in the study and care of surviving aspects of the past would go
further by denying any political relevance for what they do or political
motivation for doing it. The relationship between the conservation of the past
and politics is, however, strong, permanent, intimate and quite unavoidable, if
less crude and simplistic than is sometimes expressed. Our task here is not to
argue for or against the existence of a political role for heritage. To us it is
axiomatic that such a role exists and that all heritage is thus an actual or
potential political instrument, whether that was intended or not. The task is to
examine how the performance of this heritage function creates various types of
dissonance.

National history
The idea that history is created to serve contemporary functions, as argued in
Chapter 1, can be extended to the assertion that it can be used ‘as a political
resource whereby national identities are constructed and forms of power and
privilege justified and celebrated’ (Lumley, 1988: 2). This leads directly to the
idea of the creation of a national heritage as a matter of policy. Indeed the
revelation of a distinctive national history, supported by a national archaeology
(Arnold, 1990), has proved to be an integral and necessary adjunct to the idea of
the nation state and developed synchronously with nationalism as a state-
building ideology. It is not coincidental that the rise of the European nation state
occurred at much the same time as the awakening of interest in historical,
archaeological, artistic and even geological artefacts that could be used in telling
the story of a nation. The dates of the founding of national learned societies
often under the patronage of the head of state, the establishment of national
museums and galleries, and the framing of legislation protective of the national
patrimony, all generally occurred soon after the founding of the nation state. The
relationship between nationalism and national heritage is obviously intimate but
whether as cause or effect is much more difficult to disentangle. The previous
section tried to relate national museums and the nation state, especially through
the ‘public education’ functions, but museums reflect only one aspect of an
institutionalised national heritage.
A national heritage depends upon the prior acceptance of a national history.
This is the writing and, usually more important, teaching, of an historical
narrative that explains the distinctiveness of a nation through time, stressing its
longstanding and fundamentally different characteristics from other nations and
most usually tracing an unbroken evolution from as far back in the past as
possible to the present. It might also convey a story of past or continuing
national conquests over space, nature, primitive peoples and other challenges.
Especially important for generating dissonance, it usually relates also a record of
past national injustices, claims and enmities. The aim can be quite explicit: the
British Historical Association was founded in 1906 as a defensive measure, ‘to
provide a specific version of the national past as part of the struggle for national
and imperial survival’ (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1982: 7). The
story line must be clear. It requires ‘nothing less than the abolition of all
contradiction in the name of a national culture’ and ‘projects a unity that
DISSONANCE AND THE USES OF HERITAGE 47
overrides social and political contradictions’ (Bommes and Wright, 1982: 264).
However, this national history need not be uniform and homogeneous: it can
accommodate differences so long as ‘national history postulates the existence of
a collective subject — the nation’ (Wright, 1985: 146). This takes precedence
over the differences between individuals and social groups described in Chapter
4, as these ‘acquiesce in a constituency of support’ (Wright, 1985). National
heritage need not contradict the heritage of sub-national groups but it must
subsume the micro-heritage of localities, social and racial minorities within an
over-arching macro-heritage of the nation. It can thus in practice reduce, or at
least contain, potential dissonance if this acquiescence is obtained (which is
plainly not automatically the case in the modern world, as in Canada; see
Chapter 7).
However, we cannot assume that the philosophy of a national history will
always’ be the same and correspond to what Wright (1985) has named the
‘complacent bourgeois alignment’ in which history is seen as a linear progress
culminating in a present which is seen as complete. He also identifies an
‘anxious aristocrat alignment’ where the present is seen as departing from the
past, leaving besieged defenders of a threatened national identity in the role of
self-appointed custodians in a generally uncaring or even hostile society. Even a
rejection of the past in an ‘anti-traditional technicist alignment’ incorporates the
past as existing in discontinuity, with the present as a swamp of backward
traditionality which must be rejected as posing a threat to progress into a future
that is an antithesis of the past.
An important question for our purposes is the extent to which a national
history can tolerate such alternatives without creating dissonance. Britain, for
example, has produced in this century a prodigious number of national histories
(see Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1982) intended to provide a
complete but compact account of the national story for broad, even popular,
consumption. It has even produced a popular parody of just such a national
history in Sellars and Yeatman (1930). But does Churchill’s (1956) imperialist /
nationalist narrative, for example, compete with, combine with, or separately
coexist with, the equally popular but socialist accounts of Cole and Postgate
(1938) or Hobsbawm (1962) or the liberal democratic account of Trevelyan
(1926)? The first condition would lead to dissonance while the second and third
need not.

The dominant ideology thesis

The argument can be taken much further with the so-called ‘dominant ideology
thesis’ (Abercrombie et al., 1980), which at its most extreme argues that heritage
interpretation is endowed with messages which are deliberately framed by an
existing or aspirant power elite to legitimise the existing dominant regime, or
alternatively are developed by an opposition group with the objective of over-
throwing a competitor. The practice of many communist regimes with respect to
building conservation and museum interpretations, discussed in some detailed
examples in later chapters, appeared to be following precisely such a thesis
(unsurprisingly as Marx himself employed the term). Orwell popularised this
48 DISSONANT HERITAGE

observation in his fictitious accounts of the continuous official rewriting of

archival records to conform to shifts in policy: ‘Who controls the past controls
the future: who controls the present controls the past’ (Orwell, 1949).
Two different approaches can be detected in Soviet communist attempts to
counter the nationalist use of heritage which sought to undermine their
dominant supranationalist ideology. The first was to avoid the threat of
subversion by the direct denial of the historical record upon which it might be
based, through eradicating or officially ignoring its relics and archives. Misiunas
and Taagepara (1983) have traced some cases of the operation of such a policy to
counter potential Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian nationalism. The second
approach is to accept and even promote such monuments but to deflect their
modern nationalist use by ‘museumification’ (Giese, 1979), i.e. treating them as
art objects which although interesting have no political or social connotation; for
example, the use of many mosques in the Soviet Islamic Central Asian republics.
Such policies may be judged successful having repressed ethnic nationalism for
70 years, or unsuccessful in their failure to eradicate it as is all too evident in
the early 1990s. It is also worth noting that the Soviet government was itself
prepared to use nationalist interpretations of history in extremis, as in its use of
such specifically Russian folk heroes as Alexander Nevsky and even Ivan the
Terrible in the ‘Great Patriotic War’ of 1941-45.
However, evidence is not confined to the often crude and self-conscious
examples of the communist era (despite Fakuyama, 1992) but is found more
diffusely in the more open and pluralist western societies, often in the form of
what can be loosely termed the ‘progress thesis’. History is interpreted as a
steady progression from an inferior past to a superior present and an even more
promising future, ignoring blind alleys, recidivism and contradictory streams.
Many museum interpretations, whether of economic or social life, technology,
costume, weaponry or art, contain an implicit idea of human progress, while
anthropology museums contrast the progress enjoyed by the visitor with the
primitive society displayed. This in turn contains the implication that the present
time and place is an inevitable and self-evidently desirable culmination of past
events. This confers two sets of benefits. The governments or elites responsible
for this present are confirmed in their legitimate exercise of power while the
individual receives the reassuring accolade of being the end product occupying
the pinnacle of a process of evolution.
The central tenet of the dominant ideology thesis, namely that governments or
ruling elites will project a message legitimating their position, has been explored
in greater depth by, amongst others, Habermas (1971, 1973). Bourdieu (1977)
takes the argument further by postulating the existence of so-called ‘cultural
capital’. This is composed of both the accumulated cultural productivity of
society and also the criteria of taste for the selection and valuation of such
products. Each governmental regime upon assuming power must appropriate to
itself control over this capital if it is to legitimate its exercise of such political
power. Public heritage interpretation would be an obviously important target for
such appropriation.
However, it is not necessary to accept uncritically the universal presence of
this simple dominant ideology in all heritage interpretation. There are many
DISSONANCE AND THE USES OF HERITAGE 49

common-sense objections to it and it raises many questions that have so far not
been satisfactorily answered.
The cultural capital identified by Bourdieu is not concentrated in the hands of
a few official agencies but dispersed among many producers and curators,
especially in democratic societies. Therefore these producers are frequently
conveying a multiplicity of quite different and even competing ‘ideologies’, even
in the interpretation of the same heritage, rather than a particular coherent
political programme intended to support any distinctive prevailing view of
society. The dominant ideology is in most cases both heterodox and even
internally inconsistent. ‘It is often assumed that the dominant ideologies are
clear, coherent and effective ... on the contrary they are fractured and even
contradictory in most historical periods’ (Abercrombie et al., 1980: 156).
The thesis assumes the existence of a society divided into two clear groups,
one dominant and in control of the projection of ideological messages, and the
other subordinate and receivers of these messages. This raises a number of
critical questions. Is there actually a dominant group that believes the dominant
ideology they are transmitting? If so, a major task in the analysis of heritage
interpretation will be the identification of its members, an analysis of their
intentions and an investigation of the effectiveness of their chosen means of
transmission. The failure of the many commentators on the thesis to do this
suggests either that no such dominant group exists or, if it does, that it is too
diffuse to be identifiable and perhaps also unselfconscious and unintentional.
Secondly, what is the nature of the relationship between dominant and
subordinate groups? It is possible to argue historically that even when dominant
ideologies can be recognised they may have had little impact upon subordinate
classes and were intended more for consumption within the governing group
itself in order to strengthen its solidarity and provide a sense of purpose.
Abercrombie et al. (1980) argue that in feudal times in Europe cultural separation
between governors and governed was far too wide for any effective com-
munication of this sort to occur; in early capitalism there is little evidence of a
penetration of dominant ideas into the working classes; and in late capitalism,
when communication between classes is more effective, the content of that
communication has become more pluralist. The resolution of this central
question of inter-group communication is bedeviled by a certain circularity. The
effectiveness of governing groups in transmitting their heritage interpretation to
subordinates can only be examined through the historical archives that are
themselves controlled by, and are usually the records of, that dominant group.
Thirdly, does the subordinate group accept its subordination and allow its
experiences to be transformed and incorporated into the dominant version of
history, as Bommes and Wright (1982) have argued? Two other reactions are
worth examining. A subordinate group may engage in passive resistance either
consciously or unconsciously, or it may establish an alternative version of
national heritage apart from and in opposition to official heritage. As most
studies of the shaping and transmission of heritage, including this one, are
dependent upon official agencies and official records, they are inevitably biased
towards the standpoint of official producers, and in addition are generally
intended for reading by those engaged in the official production of heritage.
50 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Expressed in marketing terms, the possibility that potential consumers are either
failing to consume the product offered to them, or experiencing a radically
different ‘buyer benefit’ from it than was intended by the producers, is serious
indeed and a source of enormous potential dissonance. Evidence for both is
largely negative. The most revealing aspect of the statistics for museum visits (as
discussed above) or even of heritage tourists (as raised below) is not the large
number of participants but the even larger number of non-participants. We have
noted that even those who do participate may, according to the admittedly
scanty evidence available, have quite different predispositions about the past, be
differently motivated and receive a quite different message from that intended.
The existence of a parallel, unofficial history has been hypothesised by those
who claim to recognise a ‘popular history’ or a ‘history of everyday life’ which is
ancillary to, or even an alternative to, ‘official histories’. As Foucault (1979)
pointed out, the difficulty with this conception is that ‘popular’ can be taken to
mean almost anything, and in any event it is unlikely to exist apart from, let
alone opposed to, ‘official history’ but is more likely to become an aspect of
it. The ‘radical history’ movement developed out of social history in the 1960s
and 1970s as a ‘conscious attempt to write history from the bottom-up’ (Conkin
and Stromberg, 1989) and thereby ‘give the masses a new consciousness’ which
it was presumed would have political consequences. However, in practice it
failed to reach much farther than the university lecture hall and became just one
more topic history.
All that needs to be argued here is that the assembly of the heritage product is
indelibly linked to messages, which are likely to have contemporary political
consequences. This may be so even if it can be shown that there are many
such possible messages, that producers are often insufficiently aware of their
message-delivering role, or that recipients — the consumers of the heritage
product — receive a message quite different from that intended. Thus whether
or not heritage is deliberately designed to achieve pre-set spatio-political goals,
place identities at various spatial scales are likely to be shaped or reinforced by
heritage creation and planning, albeit subject to variation in the way those
identities are received by consumers.

Some sources of dissonance in these political uses of heritage

Contained in almost all the general points and arguments raised here is the
simple idea that heritage events and objects can acquire, or be endowed with, a
special symbolic relationship with particular spatial political entities. The
strength of this relationship and its importance to individuals and groups is best
demonstrated by the serious political consequences of it becoming broken. A
consequence of the tying of heritage strongly to particular place-bound
nationalisms is that it creates the distinct possibility that some usable heritage
will over time become misplaced, i.e. it will simply exist in the ‘wrong’ place.
Heritage is quite easy to misplace in various ways: it can be lost, stolen,
repatriated, left behind in migrations, divided and shared, and in many other
ways lose its physical spatial link with the political entities that associate with it.
The dissonance this creates can in turn be expressed in various ways, ranging
DISSONANCE AND THE USES OF HERITAGE 51
from a vague feeling of dispossession to serious political and even military
recovery offensives. Relevant scenarios will be encountered in many of the cases
discussed in detail later. Here it is worthwhile listing some common, often
overlapping, categories of such misplacement. It must be stressed, however, that
although there are many obvious cases of dissonance that can be included, a
vast quantity of heritage is quite widely misplaced, often as a consequence of
fundamental processes of geographical diffusion of populations and cultures,
with no present dissonant consequences.

Relocated heritage
Much heritage is physically movable. Such artefacts can therefore be moved to
what at the time is felt to be their rightful place in accordance with the history
then being related, only to become misplaced when that interpretation changes.
Changes in ideology, or the rise of a competing national narrative, result in large
quantities of what would then be perceived by many to be misplaced heritage.
The imperial idea led to imperial capitals from Rome and Constantinople to
London, Paris and many more having a showcase function for the empire,
displaying its symbolic treasures drawn from its distant parts in support of the
concept of imperium. The rise and fall of empires could lead to some heritage
objects becoming distinctly peripatetic over the centuries. The bronze horses of
Venice have been equally at home in Constantinople and Paris as in the Piazza
San Marco where they now stand in replica. The crown of St Stephen, symbol of
the Kingdom of Hungary, was, despite its monarchist and Catholic associations,
required by the Communist regime as an underpinning for their legitimacy, but
was seized by the allies in 1945 and held in the United States as an assertion of
the illegitimacy of that government and as a symbol of opposition to the ruling
ideology in Hungary until 1978.
The idea of returning heritage objects to the place of their origin has an
attractive ring of natural justice. The treaty of Vienna in 1815 included a special
clause to ensure that the 2000 or so art objects looted by Napoleon were
returned. (Although in practice of course they were returned to museums who
had often themselves earlier acquired the objects as ‘loot’.) UNESCO, under
pressure from many newly independent ex-colonial states in need of heritage to
support their new identities, passed a resolution in 1970 requiring such
restitution. In practice, in the last 20 years co-operation between the museums of
newly independent countries and those in their former ruling countries has led
to much return, copying, lending and the like. However, attempts at repatriation
to resolve the political dissonance of such misplacements can be successful if the
objects concerned have significance to only one clearly identifiable group, and
thus the answer to McBryde’s (1981) question, ‘Who owns the past?’ is
undisputed. A case in point is the return of Champlain’s astrolabe, lost during
his seventeenth-century survey of the Ottawa Valley, from the Metropolitan
Museum of New York to the new Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa
in 1989 after discussion of a purely financial nature. This repatriation achieves
both national and local restitution, although France, his country of citizenship,
could conceivably have lodged a claim. However, such clear, unambiguous and
52 DISSONANT HERITAGE

monopolistic title to ‘ownership’ is as frequently not establishable. The question

of the nesting hierarchy of spatial scales alone encourages multiple claims upon
objects that could be considered local, regional, national or world heritage.
There is thus an enormous quantity of potentially misplaced heritage objects,
and repatriation would lead to an almost complete and, presumably continuous,
reshuffling of the collections of most national museums and galleries, as the
ordering of the primacy of the various claims is constantly reassessed, presum-
ing that such assessments could be made and that a body existed capable of
doing it. Also, as Eyo (1994) has pointed out in his argument for the return of
the ‘Benin treasures’ from Britain to Ghana, acceptance of any exclusive national
claim implies a denial of wider accessibility: the two claims need weighing
against each other.
Repatriation may occur between groups rather than places in the case of
cultural artefacts returned under policies of empowerment, rather than relo-
cation, to the control of ethnic or religious groups previously dispossessed.
Repatriation or relocation may clearly satisfy the demands of one group while
denying, actually or potentially, the rights of others.
A recent case demonstrates something of the historical, legal and diplomatic
complexity that can easily arise. The German archaeologist Schliemann took
what he believed to be the treasures of Troy that he had discovered in 1873 to
his native Berlin, having first paid the Turkish government the sum they
required and having been refused permission by the Greek government to lodge
them in Athens. They were subsequently looted by the Russians in 1945 and
recently revealed to be in the possession of the Russian state. Germany’s
demands for the return of ‘their’ treasures has been met by Russian suggestions
that they belong to all mankind and should if anywhere be displayed in either
Greece or Turkey (Walsh, 1993; Anon., 1993); ultimately no doubt they will be
included as part of a wider treaty on the return of looted heritage artefacts. Even
on-site display of immobile heritage does not necessarily avoid the problem.
Does the mosaic floor of a Roman villa, as in Fishbourne (UK), executed by
Greek craftsmen for a Celtic ruler in what is now southern England now
‘belong’ to the United Kingdom, Italy, Greece (none of which existed as political
entities at the time of its creation) or conceivably to the only sovereign state
claiming a Celtic foundation, namely the Republic of Ireland?
The longest running and best publicised example relates to the ‘Elgin
Marbles’, which illustrates the particular difficulties encountered when a new
national identity is reconstructed on a revived distant ancient past. The
Parthenon frieze from the Acropolis in Athens was collected in a ruinous state
by Lord Elgin between 1803 and 1812 and ultimately brought to the British
Museum, London, for conservation and display in 1816; being denounced by the
philhellene Byron as a ‘dishonest and rapacious vandal’. It has been claimed
with varying amounts of noise by the Greek government for more than 100
years: a claim firmly rejected by the British authorities (see Lowenthal (1987) for
a full account of the diplomatic exchanges and arguments). The irony is that
interest in classical Greece was a phenomenon of late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century Western Europe as part of a Romantic movement in which
the classical world was seen as the birthplace of many political and social ideas,
DISSONANCE AND THE USES OF HERITAGE 53
in particular the liberal democratic state. Classical languages, philosophy, art
and archaeology were thus seen as part of western heritage used to legitimate
Western European liberal parliamentary democracy. This in turn led to
considerable western sympathy, support and direct participation which was
critical in the creation of the modern Greek state in the 1830s. Moreover, for the
inhabitants of what became Greece, the nationalist idea in the nineteenth-century
struggle for independence from the Ottomans was rooted more in Christian
Byzantium than in a heathen Hellenism that the classical heritage represented.
The existence of the Elgin Marbles in London (like Schliemann’s Trojan treasures
in Berlin) was thus a reflection of, and stimulus to, the Western European
intervention in the creation of a Greek state which, once established, requested
the return of what had become, by that very establishment, national as well as
European heritage treasures. Israel, Ireland and Iceland are among similar cases
where heritage claims are motivated by subsequent nationalisms (Lowenthal,
1987).

Human bodies

Competition for possession of sacred objects can border on the macabre when
the object is a body which is by its nature both highly mobile, divisible, difficult
over time to identify accurately and associated with strong emotions. Disinter-
ment, transportation and reinterment of all or parts of individuals can lead to
disputes such as that over which city or even which continent has (most of)
Christopher Columbus. More subtly internal relocation of a body within a
country, such as Frederick the Great’s 1991 return from Hohenzollern Castle to
Berlin, can send disturbing signals to those who do not claim the body but are
potential political victims of its symbolic uses in a resurgent expansionary
nationalism.
The discovery, as a result of glacial retreat, of the ‘Ice Man’ just inside the
Italian Alpine border with Austria and its subsequent display in Innsbruck,
Austria, illustrates the extension of competition over bodies to the earliest
archaeological remains (Jaroff, 1992). The ultimately successful claim that he was
‘Italian’ by place of discovery was countered by the claim that the body had
been transported over the border by ice and was therefore ‘Austrian’. The fact
that the whole Tirol had been Austrian within living memory added an extra
political dimension despite the fact that the Ice Man died centuries before either
state existed.
Occasionally possession of a body can be more of an embarrassment than a
treasured symbol. The Allies were determined that the body of no major
German Nazi could become a place of pilgrimage for supporters of a resurgence
of that ideology. Similarly a shift in ideology has transformed Lenin’s embalmed
body and Red Square mausoleum from a venerated and central symbol to a
sensitive problem for a new Russian government, wishing to distance itself from
the old political system without provoking its remaining supporters or even
losing a valuable tourist attraction.
Against the demand for repatriation of a body to its ‘rightful’ motherland is
the contrary idea that the body claims the space in which it lies rather than the
54 DISSONANT HERITAGE

reverse. Rupert Brooke’s idea of ‘a corner of a foreign field that is forever

England ...’ uses heritage to extend a sort of emotional claim upon a place.
Although few would regard the Commonwealth War Graves Commission
cemeteries around the world as representing a political claim upon foreign
territory, the burial of Argentinians on the Falklands after 1982 with the
appropriate flags and ceremonies was seen by some as reinforcing the
sovereignty claims of that country.

Abandoned heritage
It is of course much more difficult to find satisfactory solutions for misplaced
heritage when it is intrinsically immobile and effectively abandoned by the
population that claims it. Shifts in population often leave previously central
heritage sites peripheral or even completely outside national territories. Kossovo
plays an important role in the Serbian story of national resistance to external
enemies as a result of the pivotal symbolism accorded to the battle of 1389, but
is now inhabited dominantly by people of Albanian ethnic origin. Self-
determination for the area based on current ethnic occupation contradicts the
heritage claim, would probably be fiercely resisted by Serbia on those grounds
alone, and thus poses a threat to the peace of the region. A similar case is in
Northern Ireland where many of the sites most critical to Irish Celtic Catholic
nationalism are located. These are used to legitimate the Irish Republic although
located outside that country in a dominantly Protestant and Unionist province
(Graham, 1994b).
The oldest and most influential of these lost heritage sagas must be the
Palestinian towns, sacred to Christianity, Islam and Judaism, currently inhabited
largely by Moslems and governed by a Jewish state. This has been a long, and
undoubtedly unfinished, saga of the conflicting claims of three world religions to
occupy their ‘Holy Lands’, i.e. places made sacred by the historic events that
occurred in them. It is worth noting here that the persistence of the problem has
led over the centuries not only to a succession of crusades, jihads and Zionist
struggles for recovery by force, but also to such solutions as guaranteed rights of
access (first negotiated in the twelfth century), extra-territorial rights, inter-
nationalisation, rotating site managements and many more. The first Israeli—
Palestinian agreement (1993) portends a further round of such attempts at
creative solution when the future of the common holy place, Jerusalem, is
ultimately negotiated.

Misused heritage
An extra dissonant dimension will occur when the heritage is felt to be not only
misplaced but misused as a result of that misplacement. Here it may not be the
heritage itself that is altered but the context in which it is placed or presented.
This may be the case with a building, such as Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, arguably
for 1000 years Christendom’s most sacred building. It was converted to a
mosque after 1453 thus offending Christians, and has been treated as a secular
museum since 1921 (within which prayer is officially specifically forbidden) thus
DISSONANCE AND THE USES OF HERITAGE 55

a a

Figure 3.2. Misplaced heritage: Hippodrome,

Istanbul, Turkey (GJA, 1994)

risking offending both Christians and Moslems. Similar fates have befallen many
of Eastern Europe’s former synagogues (Chapter 6).
Many western museums in particular assembled artefacts, and even body
parts, for anthropological study and display in a way that the societies from
which they were drawn find offensive to their values or beliefs. The question of
misplaced body parts has now become a generic heritage source of friction
between museums in Europe and the Western-settled countries and the
indigenous peoples from which they were derived. Such problems are, however,
not always the result of previous colonial relationships. The skull of John the
Baptist displayed as a museum exhibit in Istanbul’s Topkapi Museum may
offend many Christians for whom it is an object for veneration not curiosity.

Deliberately concealed or destroyed heritage

The eradication of the heritage of a defeated society by its conquering successor
has been a common method of consolidating and demonstrating such conquest.
The practice of deliberately selecting the sacred sites and even intact buildings of
56 DISSONANT HERITAGE

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Figure 3.3. Shinto shrine, Kyoto, Japan. Notice

says that visitors staying in named architecturally
obtrusive hotels are not welcome (GJA, 1994)

the conquered for the new symbolism of the conquerors demonstrates the
completeness and irreversibility of the succession. Christian churches on Aztec
or Inca sites, Moslem mosques on the sites of Christian churches in the Eastern
Mediterranean (Shaw and Shaw, 1977) and the reverse in Spain, create obvious
problems of dissonance when both groups later claim the site, as in the recent
Hindu temple/Moslem mosque conflict at Ayodhya in India where the
restitution of one was seen as requiring the destruction of the other.
Destruction may be not so much deliberate policy as a by-product. Such a case
arises in archaeology which almost inevitably destroys some layers of history in
search of those deeper. Israeli archaeologists in particular have been accused of
the destruction of Arab relics in their pursuit of earlier Jewish artefacts in
Palestine which can be used to legitimate their occupation, especially of the West
Bank (Kooij, 1993). Destruction by deliberate neglect rather than by design can
also occur. Post-1945 Poland, within its new frontiers, has been rightly praised
for its painstaking reconstruction of the Polish heritage of Warsaw but its
slowness to apply similar resources and expertise to the cities of East Prussia can
be explained by their essentially German nature.
DISSONANCE AND THE USES OF HERITAGE sy/
There is a related and general question about the extent of rights of owner-
ship. An argument often used to justify previous dispossession was the rescue of
objects from neglect or destruction. Taken further, if heritage can ‘belong’
emotionally to different individuals and groups, to what extent can an owning
individual or group deny access to others or even destroy a heritage object,
deliberately or through neglect, because its existence offends a particular tenet of
the ‘owners’ or is just of no particular interest? Much of the art that is today
considered to be common Western heritage could easily have been destroyed by
previous generations as offensive to political, theological or just fashionable
norms. Many contemporary ethnic or religious groups or individuals un-
doubtedly find many heritage objects offensive for one reason or another. We
thus arrive at the reverse of the injustice of dispossession argument with the
question of whether or not international agencies should intervene to rescue
threatened or neglected ‘world heritage’ and dispossess current owners, whether
individuals or countries.

Spatially extended heritage

The relationship between politically legitimating heritage and places can, on
some occasions, be reversed, leading not to attempts to move the heritage to
what is felt to be its appropriate place but to nationalise the heritage, thus
reducing the dissonance between the national ideology and the interpreted
history. A currently turbulent example of this is the use of classical Macedonian
heritage within Greece. The tombs of the Macedonian royal family and artefacts
related to historical figures such as Philip, Alexander and Olympia are clearly a
significant part of the heritage of the western world as a whole. The present
nation state of Greece, however, perceives a threat to its territorial integrity from
the idea of a separate Macedonian nation which it fears could be supported by
such heritage. The interpretation on site at Pella and in the Salonika museum is
designed to demonstrate the specifically Greek characteristics of these historical
personalities. Strident exhortations under the government-sponsored slogan
‘Macedonia is Greek — read history’ make the unsubtle point. The future
possible ‘repatriation’ demands from the ex-Yugoslavian Macedonian Republic
add an extra dimension of irony in the light of the Elgin Marbles problem raised
above.

Heritage, state building and spatial scale

Much of the above discussion has focused on the nation state with the
justification that this has been a demonstrably successful scale for the use of
heritage in support of state building and that the state has demonstrated its
capacity to ‘nationalise’ heritage. However, two major complications can occur.
First, the same objects, sites and associations can be used by competing
interpretations supporting different state ideas in the same space. Secondly,
heritage can be used to support political entities at any other level in the
hierarchy of spatial governmental units, which may add a further complication
to the problem of the political roles of heritage. Graham (1994a, 1994b) has
58 DISSONANT HERITAGE

illustrated the interaction of both these complications in the case of Ulster where
heritage has been used to link that area with two different external states as well
as to define quite different and conflicting political identities within it.
At one spatial extreme there is a strong cultural/aesthetic argument for the
existence of a ‘world heritage’ as the common property of all mankind. This
would stress the intrinsic internationalism of cultural movements and the
permeability of political frontiers to aesthetic ideas, which has resulted in a
cultural productivity that is both intrinsically international and, at least in the
visual arts and architecture, essentially intelligible without linguistic inter-
mediary. Such concepts are fundamental to the designation of World Heritage
Sites under the auspices of UNESCO (even though their possession is often
sought and exploited for purely national aggrandisement and their allocation
may not be free of partiality between nation states).
It is not chance that international tourism and heritage conservation have
historically evolved together and that their intimacy can be traced from the
Grand Tour of the eighteenth century to the culture-package holiday of the
twentieth century. It is not surprising then that much monument conservation in
poorer countries has often been motivated and financed by the requirements of
the richer tourist-generating countries. The visitors in a sense created the
resources that they had come to experience. It was visitors from Western Europe
who ‘discovered’ Imperial Rome in the eighteenth century, classical Greece in
the nineteenth century, and pharaonic Egypt in the twentieth and who conse-
quently preserved and presented these histories in their own image and for their
own purposes. The ancient world was used as the ‘cradle of our civilisation’,
justifying a wide range of contemporary structures and attitudes from political
constitutions and practices to artistic taste, much of which can have had little
relevance to the inhabitants of the countries which housed this heritage.
At the continental scale, one of the most important contemporary possibilities
of using heritage in state building is Europe’s post-war attempts to shape
supranational political structures. These require a reorientation from national
heritages underpinning nation states to non-national place identities which thus
need the support of a reformulated specifically European heritage interpretation
which would seem to require a substantial rewriting of national histories from a
continental perspective, whatever that might mean in practice. (The necessities,
possibilities and problems of this are related in Ashworth and Larkham, 1994).
One detail of this idea (related by Willems, 1993) is the choice by the Council of
Europe to focus archaeological interests on the Bronze Age, examples of which
can be found almost throughout the continent, as a pan-European topic.
Consequently such topics as the Roman or Viking periods were rejected because
they were regarded as being divisive, both in the sense of being not universally
represented but also because they raise, even after the lapse of so many
centuries, uncomfortable ideas of conquest and subjection of one part of the
continent by another.
At the other spatial extreme many socio-political arguments now stress that
heritage planning can support the preservation and enhancement of social and
regional variety. The national heritage fragments into the heritage of the regions
and cities, enhancing the role of heritage interpretation in shaping local identities
DISSONANCE AND THE USES OF HERITAGE 59
and even supporting political regionalism and local parochialism. This may or
may not contradict the use of heritage at other scales. Regional heritage can be
incorporated as a variant upon a national theme (Carr, 1994) or conversely be
used in support of regional political separatism in opposition to existing national
heritage; examples of both will be considered in Chapters 6-8.
Finally, not only can the different governmental scales make a claim upon the
same heritage, differences in economic interest, social composition, types of use
and ownership can all interact on a particular site, creating complex legal and
management problems. Chippendale (1990) found conflicting answers to his
question, “Who owns Stonehenge?’ among archaeologists, foreign tourists,
‘travellers’ pursuing an alternative life style, latter-day druids, English national-
ists, local residents and many more.

HERITAGE AS AN ECONOMIC RESOURCE

The treatment of history as a quarry of resource possibilities from which heritage

products can be created leads logically to the possibility of its commercial
exploitation. If collection serves various perceived social needs and national
heritage plays a role in the construction of political entities then the com-
modification of the past can equally provide tradable products for the economic
system. The surprise to many may be that this is only the third of the major
types of uses considered here and not the first or even exclusive use discussed:
the terms ‘heritage’ and ‘heritage industry’ are in practice used by many as
synonyms and certainly it is the latter that has popularised the usage of the
former in recent years.
The most visible and obvious of such economic uses is in heritage tourism,
which will be discussed in detail below as an archetype of direct commodi-
fication. However, before considering such direct uses, it is worth noting that
heritage has a much broader, if indirect, commercial use in its contribution to
place amenity, its exploitation in the projection of place images and thus its
influence upon the locational choices of economic actors other than those in
tourism.

Heritage as a locational variable

The indirect uses of heritage are most evident in two contexts, within which
heritage makes some contribution to the locational choices being made by
enterprises.

Heritage in place images

Aspects of heritage can be used within deliberately promoted place images
designed to shape the perceptions of a place as a suitable location for invest-
ment, enterprise, residence or recreation destination. The DATAR (1989) league
tables of European cities are typical of many such ‘beauty contest’ comparisons
of the competitive position of places as the location of economic activities.
60 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Information
Monuments
Historic trail
Museums
Historic narrative
Recreation
Coat of arms
Sports
Public services
Catering
Events
Commercial firms
Parks
Housing
Schools

10 20 30 40 50 60 70
% of towns

Town
Amersfoort
Bergen op Zoom
Delft
Enkhuizen
Goes
Gorinchem
Gouda
Harlingen
Hoorn
Leiden
Maastricht
Middelburg
Naarden
Roermond
Schiedam
Zwolle

20 40 60 80 100
% Historical information

Figure 3.4. Heritage in the official commercial promotional literature of 16 medium-sized

Dutch towns. (a) Content of promotional material from all towns. (b) Proportion of
historical information from different towns

Relevant here is that historicity is included as a contributing variable. Factors

relating to historical and cultural activities including museum, gallery, concert
and exhibition visits, can be related to many other variables so that cities with
similar synergies of activities can be identified as a cluster competing for similar
economic enterprises with a similar mix of attractions. Heritage can be combined
DISSONANCE AND THE USES OF HERITAGE 61
in various ways with other urban attributes to produce different combinations.
For example, there are culture festival cities, such as Bayreuth, Edinburgh or
Salzburg, education/research cities, such as Leiden, Cambridge or Padua, art
tourism cities such as Florence or Venice, multifunctional high-amenity cities
such as Norwich, Montpellier or Freiburg, and even heritage-enhanced seaside
resorts such as Brighton or Agde and many others.
At the local scale, Figure 3.4 illustrates how local heritage is used in pro-
motional literature specifically designed to attract exogenous commercial invest-
ment with no direct link to the heritage industry (Voogd and van de Wijk, 1989).
History is used to stress continuity and distinctiveness sometimes as a condition
deemed in some way relevant to economic production (for example, as evidence
of diligence and fortitude in the face of past adversities) and sometimes as no
more than a formal assertion of the unique existence and thus identity of a place.
The relevance of this to our argument is simply the possibility of conflict
between the images projected to different markets. Despite the lengthy dis-
‘cussion in this book on the differences between various users of the past, it is
noteworthy that in practice the local or national governmental authorities
engaged in such place marketing rarely have the skills or resources to make the
required distinctions between users (see Ashworth and Voogd, 1990). Therefore
the same information is being conveyed through the same media to quite
different potential heritage users (in the cases above to investors, residents and
tourists). For the limited objectives of place marketing to exogenous investors
this is only inefficient but when internal markets are also considered, as is
increasingly the case with so-called ‘civic consciousness’ campaigns, then con-
flicting messages are likely if residents perceive their heritage quite differently
from outsiders. At best the messages are blurred and confused, and at worst
residents may be presented with interpretations of the heritage of their localities
that is dissonant with their existing personal heritage.

Heritage areas and commercial land-users

Heritage expressed through the conserved physical fabric and its interpretation
and promotion confer certain attributes upon the specific economic activities that
locate in historic buildings or in any premises in historic areas. Such attributes
may be advantageous or disadvantageous to any particular activity depending
upon its capacity to reap the benefits and its willingness to bear the costs. An
atmosphere of historicity confers an aura of continuity and even of artistic
patronage upon activities located in it: an inference of reliability, integrity and
probity, conferred by association. However, historicity will also suggest an area
that is traditional, old-fashioned, and unresponsive to change. Similarly location
in conserved premises or areas imposes costs not only of maintenance of old
structures but of vehicle access, structural alteration, and external advertising
and display. These uses of the past by commercial enterprises are considered in
various urban contexts in Ashworth and Tunbridge (1990). They are reiterated
here because it is at this local level that most heritage management occurs and it
is undertaken as an integral aspect not of national or regional economic policy
but as one element in local land-use planning and local economic management.
62 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Heritage conservation in most countries in both Europe and North America is

generally executed as a part of an economic strategy in coalition with local
commercial interests. Such interests will often discount or be just unaware of the
grander cultural or political uses of heritage discussed previously. The funda-
mental point is that the most important local heritage producers (measured in
terms of number of outlets, customers or sales) are not the museums and
galleries but the antique, arts and craft shops, and similar traders of heritage
goods and services. Some conflict in messages with the cultural and political
users can be expected if only because heritage commerce has a tendency to
concentrate upon the rapidly recognisable, and simply reproduceable, symbols
and associations of the past and can thus be easily accused of bowdlerising
aesthetic values and insensitively trivialising political ones. Also the subsequent
local management of any such dissonance is most likely to be successful if
undertaken with at least the tacit co-operation of this commercial coalition.

Heritage as a tourism resource

The most obviously important use of heritage as an economic resource, at least
in its visibility and the support of a vociferous lobby, is as the basis for heritage
tourism. This can cover a wide range of activities that use aspects of historicity
in various ways. It may include types of ‘special interest tourism’ where existing
interests as diverse as steam engines or antique collecting are continued on
holiday; art-culture tourism related to specific performances or collections; more
generalised urban historic sightseeing and historic site visiting; and, at its
vaguest, just a ‘place-specific tourism’ where the attraction is the unique identity
of the destination to which heritage makes some contribution. Similarly, heritage
resources may be primary attractions motivating the entire trip or secondary
diversions on holidays primarily motivated by quite other attractions.
These activities, themselves only one part of a much wider tourism industry,
have an enormous quantity of literature, as befits their significance in economies
at all spatial scales from the local to the international (see Ashworth (1993a;
1995) for an account of the role of heritage in the wider cultural tourism). This
need not be summarised here, as what is important to our argument is only to
relate heritage tourism to potential dissonance. In this respect two questions are
of central importance: to what extent is the tourist the same sort of heritage
consumer as the other consumers already described, and does the tourist
consume the same heritage product as the other users? If the answer to both
questions is ‘yes’ then harmony rather than dissonance is more likely; if ‘no’ then
further investigation into whether such differences are likely to be sources of
dissonance is necessary.

The heritage tourist

The simple question, ‘Who is the heritage tourist?’ and its corollaries, ‘What are
the distinguishing characteristics, behaviour patterns and attitudes of such a
tourist in comparison with either non-tourists or tourists motivated by other
types of attraction?’ have long received equally simple, not to say simplistic,
answers in the standard texts on tourism. The significance here of answers to
DISSONANCE AND THE USES OF HERITAGE
63
such questions is that they may provide insight into how dissonance can be
managed and would certainly be a precondition for framing appropriate policy.
Existing evidence cited below suggests that such a tourist is likely:
to have received a better than average education,
to be in the age groups 20-30 or 45-60,
to be, especially in the older age category, of above-average income,
to be an actual or aspirant member of what in Britain is called the middle
class.
The trip to any one set of attractions is likely:
to be short, a matter of a few days or even hours in any one place,
to include a number of different places combined in a single holiday,
to be taken as an additional holiday,
to be taken throughout the year, or at least to have a less pronounced peak,
and stronger shoulder seasons than most other types of holiday.
Such a tourist:

e travels without young children and with one other companion,

e is experienced in foreign travel,
e chooses catered accommodation forms,
e has a relatively high per diem expenditure.
The holiday is as likely to be independently as collectively organised and has
usually been well prepared with a list of pre-holiday expectations and planned
visits. (See Burtenshaw et al. (1991) for a comparison of visitors to Western
European cities; Pearce (1987) for a comparison of the characteristics of types of
holidaymakers; Kosters (1981) for a Dutch set and Dewailly and Flament (1993)
for a French set of very similar conclusions; and Prentice (1993) for a description
of the structural characteristics of the heritage tourist in Britain.)
Such a description of the heritage tourist is a generalisation that emerges from
detailed surveys at sites around the world; it is, however, a poor guide to
understanding the relationship of the tourist to heritage and subsequently
planning for this encounter. The tourist is more heterogeneous, the trip more
varied and the attitudes towards the past more complex than such generalised
descriptions suggest. Heritage sites attract a wide variety of different tourist
groups, each a minority of visitors but equally collectively too important to be
averaged away. Visitors on business or conference trips have a high propensity
to include cultural and historic site excursions. Beach holidaymakers frequently
include heritage excursions as a diversion from their sea and sand _ activities,
especially in the temporary absence of the sun component. Formal educational
trips often contribute a majority of visitors to an historic or archaeological site.
Finally, ‘special interest’ holidays attract by their nature small, highly diverse
but committed heritage tourists whose aggregate importance is difficult to
appreciate because of that very diversity. How can we generalise about the
heritage use of those participating in veterans’ battlefield tours, seeking Kafka’s
Prague, Lennon’s Liverpool or Maigret’s Paris, or following in the footsteps of
Saint Paul, Bonnie Prince Charlie or Elvis Presley?
64 DISSONANT HERITAGE

A major problem that has bedevilled tourism studies is that the tourist is an
undefinable entity, at least in any sense that is useful in planning practice. Thus
the heritage tourist is similarly difficult to distinguish as a sub-category of either
tourists in general or other heritage users. The logic of this problem is that
tourism cannot be defined in terms of the activity itself, because any possible
tourism activity can also conceivably be pursued by non-tourists. The fact
that many, if not most, tourism studies have had little choice but to proceed as if
this was not the case and have frequently been able to reach enlightening
conclusions does not contradict the original assertion. Logically it is only the
motive for participating in the activity, and thus the type of benefits the
individual expects to gain from the experience, that distinguishes a recreation
activity from another, and the tourism dimension merely adds a fairly arbitrary
factor of distance between the home of the consumer and the place of
consumption. The customer for the tourism heritage product is thus only
distinguishable through the intent of the individual consumer at the moment of
consumption.
The value of appreciating an idea that is in most cases impossible to
operationalise lies in understanding two corollaries.
e The visitors to the same museum, historic site or theme park, participating
in identical activities, may be tourists, day recreationists, school parties or
local residents, and for most practical purposes any distinction will be
unimportant. The heritage facilities are multifunctional.
e Individuals may switch roles abruptly, even in the course of a single visit to
a locality, being successively or intermittently shoppers, business visitors,
beach tourists as well as heritage tourists. The heritage consumer is multi-
motivated.
The multi-motivated user of the multifunctional city has been approached by a
number of investigators with special reference to the role of historic attractions
within such associations. The classification of users of the historic city as
‘intentional’ (i.e. drawn by its distinctive historic attributes) and ‘incidental’
(Ashworth and de Haan, 1986) was developed by classifying the historic and
cultural resources of towns as fulfilling either ‘primary’ roles (i.e. providing the
motive for the trip) or ‘secondary’ ones (i.e. providing supportive or enhancing
services to those on trips not motivated by the existence of these services):
clearly the same heritage facilities can play different roles to different consumers
(Jansen-Verbeke, 1988). Such arguments arrive at the multi-selling characteristic
of all place-products mentioned earlier in a different context, and again whether
dissonance results from such multiselling depends upon the nature of the
markets and how they are approached.

Visitors’ attitudes to history

The long debate on the psychological basis for the need to take holidays can be
summarised as ‘the escape to fantasy’ and ‘the escape to reality’ schools of
thought. The former (see especially Dann, 1981; Cohen, 1979) argues that the
serious realities of everyday life provoke in reaction an attempt to enact various
DISSONANCE AND THE USES OF HERITAGE 65
fantasies on a holiday which is basically seen as unreal: the alternative, and
contradictory, view sees an increasingly complex and incomprehensible every-
day life necessitating a holiday search for a simpler more ‘real’ world. The
relevance here of these well-argued ideas is that heritage may play a critical but
significantly different role in each approach. History as fantasy reaches its
apogee in the themed entertainment park, the role play of medieval banquet,
‘good old days’ sing-along or even participation in battle re-enactments. The
objection that these are either not accurate in historical detail or even totally
ahistoric is thus quite irrelevant so long as the fantasy of the participant is not
disturbed by such matters. Heritage here is as authentic as any other product of
the creative imagination and in fact the two frequently become inextricably
confused as the visitor takes on the persona of Ivanhoe or Richard Lionheart in a
medieval castle, or Indiana Jones or David Livingstone on a safari in Africa.
Heritage tourism as the search for a past that was more real and thus more
substantial and satisfying than the present, however (see MacCannell, 1976), is
highly sensitive to the perceived authenticity of the object or the place and is
repelled by what is experienced as contrived heritage (Cohen, 1979); it is in this
that dissonance is most likely to arise.
Prentice’s (1993) survey among visitors to a selection of heritage sites on the Isle
of Man revealed a high level of consensus about the purpose of official
interpretation and an acceptance of the necessity and validity, at least in principle,
of such purposes. ‘Education about the past’ was supported enthusiastically by
most visitors and ‘conservation’ was endorsed as the most important function of
site managements. This need not necessarily contradict the rather more tentative
findings of these and other such investigations (such as Light and Prentice, 1994),
that visitors have only a very vague notion of what past is being conserved and in
which they are being educated. Clearly the idea of virtuous self-improvement, so
evident in the philosophy of the Victorian museum, is still present, and accepted
by visitors as proper, at the end of the twentieth century. Very few visitors found
entertainment or amusement to be a sufficient reason for the visit even when, as
was generally the case here, it was taken as an integral part of a longer holiday on
the island: pleasure had to be supplemented by some prospect of personal
betterment. It may be that respondents were telling interviewers what they
assumed they wished to hear: in which case the idea of self-improvement being
more acceptable than entertainment is assumed to be the proper position.
Such attitudes of visitors towards history have implications for the selection
and interpretation of heritage specifically designed for presentation to tourists
and also for the extent to which perceived dissonance can be tolerated.

The tourist’s heritage

From the earlier definition of heritage as customer-defined and the charac-
teristics of heritage tourists described above, it can be expected that their
definition of what constitutes heritage and their uses of that heritage are likely to
be significantly different from that of the other groups of consumers already
considered. In part this can be explained by such factors as that the tourist by
definition is likely to possess less disposable time, detailed local knowledge and
66 DISSONANT HERITAGE

local mobility than the resident. More fundamentally if heritage is a demand-

defined product, as argued earlier, then tourist-defined heritage will be selected
according to the expectations of the visitor. It can be assumed that these
expectations will be substantially different from those of the resident because
they will have been shaped by a quite different set of circumstances. We arrive
at the adage that ‘you cannot sell your heritage to tourists: you can only sell their
heritage back to them in your country’. The local experience has to be
incorporated into the visitor’s existing heritage. The unfamiliar is sellable in so
far as it can be reached through the familiar: if what is familiar is different then
so also is the heritage selected. This obvious point is the source of many
potential dilemmas, exemplified below, in official heritage selection not only
between tourism and other more local uses but also within heritage tourism
itself because the heritage tourist has by no means a uniform and homogeneous
set of expectations.
The above logically derived profile of the characteristics of specifically tourist
heritage, in so far as it can be identified, has received very sparse verification in
practical descriptive studies of what tourists actually do and how they react to
heritage sites. The only substantial accumulated body of evidence confirms the
general expectation that heritage selected by the tourist is different from that
selected by the resident in three ways (see the empirical studies of Ashworth
and de Haan (1985) in Norwich, van der Borg (1990) in Venice or Jansen-
Verbeke (1990) in Bruges):
(a) quantitatively: all the three major uses described in this chapter are quanti-
tatively selective, in that they make use of only a portion of the possible
heritage, but it is demonstrable that tourists use a particularly small portion
of the potentially available heritage sites, and resources;
(b) qualitatively: tourism tends to select the large, spectacular or internationally
unique over the smaller or more commonplace;
(c) spatially: tourism is particularly spatially selective in that it tends to cluster
strongly in relatively compact areas and be located within linked networks
of similar attractions at various spatial scales.
All three selectivities are explainable from the characteristics of the tourist
sketched earlier. The tourist’s behaviour can be seen as a form of collection,
which for heritage tourists involves checking off the heritage that has been
previously marked by visitor expectations (encouraged by guide books and
tourism brochures) as constituting the essential anticipated elements of the
holiday experience at that place. Tourists with differing interests, education,
experience or even time and mobility will of course have checklists that differ in
length and content but the process of collection will be essentially the same.
This selectivity, concentration and spatial clustering has important effects
upon the production and management of dissonance. Its most visible dis-
advantage is the enormous physical pressure of visitors it induces at particular
places and particular times. Conflict with other users of the heritage or of non-
heritage facilities at the same place powers much of the strong and growing anti-
tourism lobby. Complaints that tourists, seen as a menacing philistine horde,
both damage the exhibits and crowd out ‘genuine’ art lovers from the cities of
DISSONANCE AND THE USES OF HERITAGE 67
Italy, leading to demands for rationing or admission qualifications, were referred
to earlier and are heard in many cities (see Jansen-Verbeke (1990) on residents’
reactions to the spatial densities of tourists in specific parts of Bruges). Equally,
however, this very selectivity makes tourists relatively easy to manage through
the manipulation of their limited information and especially the pre-set
‘marking’ schemes that they are following. Not only will the tourist select
heritage from the wide range of historical resources on offer using a different set
of criteria from residents, but this will then also be incorporated, together with a
wide range of other activities and facilities, into a different aggregate experience
involving a package of facilities quite differently assembled within a distinctive
time-space pattern of behaviour (Dietvorst, 1994). The heritage sites and
facilities are only one of the elements (others being accommodation, catering,
transport and other support facilities) that comprise the holiday experience, and
in terms of time or money expended rarely the most significant item even with
heritage-motivated tourists.
The tourism uses of heritage are therefore in many respects more strongly
related to other aspects of the tourism package than to other uses of heritage,
which presents both opportunities and problems in its management. This can be
illustrated in just one, small-scale but recent and intensely felt controversy.
Shrewsbury, a medium-sized city on the border between England and Wales,
with many historic resources, is experiencing a sharp conflict between two
separate heritage developments on adjoining sites. One, managed by the Abbey
Heritage Enterprise Team, is engaged in maintaining the medieval abbey and
interpreting its historical significance: the other, proposed by the City Council
and supported by the ‘Heart of England Tourist Board’, is an idea to establish a
‘Cadfael Centre’ focused around the historical novels of Ellis Peters that are set
in the town. Heritage tourism potential generated by, and focused through, a
medieval world brought alive to millions through a literary character offers a
clear and concentrated marked heritage attraction. However, this is opposed by
the abbey as being ‘too close to "real" history’ both in its content and spatially
(Hills, 1993). The two sites are seen not as complementary but as confusing,
offering different messages derived from medieval history, to supposedly
different markets, one seeking entertainment and the other enlightenment. Such
cases are widespread and illustrate the asymmetrical relationship of tourism to
heritage resources, especially as is often the case in Europe, where tourism uses
of heritage are effectively the last of the three main uses to be manifested. Here
tourism becomes just one more use of existing heritage resources to be viewed
either as gratuitous economic gain or as a parasitical hijacking of resources
already discovered, preserved and maintained by others.
These points illustrate the potential for the tourist’s heritage to be dissonant
from the viewpoint of the resident in its selection of historic elements, in the
manner and intensity of its use and in the nuances of the messages projected
and received. Substantial dissonance potential exists between tourists and
residents, particularly in the often wide divergence between them with respect
to the cultural and political uses of heritage; this is most clearly the case
when tourists from rich, Western countries visit poor non-Western societies,
especially when a colonial relationship between them formerly existed. Aspects
68 DISSONANT HERITAGE

of this potential colour much of our discussion in the case study chapters that
follow.

HARMONY OR DISSONANCE AMONG TYPES OF USERS?

The declared purpose of this chapter was to examine the incidence of potential
dissonance within and between three major categories of uses. However, as the
discussion proceeded it became increasingly difficult to maintain the discrete
identity of each of the three sets of heritage uses reviewed. Cultural-aesthetic,
political and economic motives for accumulation and display can be separately
discussed and be seen to result in separate policies emanating from different
departments of state. However, collections begun out of scientific curiosity or a
love of artistic beauty have become endowed with political significance or found
themselves exploited, whether as willing partners or not, as resources for
important economic activities. The same artefacts, sites and symbolisms are used
in differently interpreted products for differently motivated consumers even if,
as is frequently the case, the producers are blithely unaware of the variety of
ways their products are being used. Multi-use is evident in many guises and at
many stages in the heritage production process.
This unavoidable and easily demonstrable multi-use has provoked two
widespread and contradictory reactions which have been echoed in much of the
preceding discussion. These can be summarised as the assumption of harmony
and the assumption of dissonance. Both can be labelled naive in the sense that
they draw absolute but opposite conclusions from the mere existence of multiple
uses of the same heritage resources. Both preclude further attempts at
reconciliation: the first assumption renders it unnecessary and the second quite
fruitless.
The naive assumption of harmony sees an automatic and self-evident sym-
biosis between the different types of uses. This is usually expressed in one of
two main ways. There is what could be called the ‘turnstyle model’ which
argues that from the point of view of the facility it matters little, or not at all,
who consumes the product on offer in fulfilment of whatever personal need. The
presence of customers at the museum, site or town is justification enough for the
producers. The objection to this facility-orientated approach is of course that
different customers will consume different products and to view it otherwise is
just to misunderstand what is actually occurring. The second argument can be
termed the ‘fortunate by-product model’ in which heritage created initially or
principally for one of the triad of major uses is assumed to be capable of being
exploited by the others at no extra cost and without modification. Most usually
it is tourism that is seen as the windfall gain available as a by-product of a local
culture that already exists in the service of other, often non-economic, demands.
Occasionally it is the local cultural needs that are seen as reaping the windfall
gain from heritage development for tourism. In either circumstance appropriate
resources are viewed as being freely available to, and unaffected by, uses
additional to those originally intended. The objection of course, as argued above,
lies in just this attitude to resources whose appropriateness, free availability and
DISSONANCE AND THE USES OF HERITAGE 69
invulnerability to any category of use are all questionable attributes which
certainly cannot simply be assumed to exist.
The assumption of dissonance takes the opposite and equally naive view that
because there are demonstrably different uses of heritage by consumers whose
motives and behaviour are quite different, then conflict is continuous and
inevitable. The only possible management reactions are thus either prioritisation
in favour of one of the categories of use or segregation of uses. This reaction
frequently merges into a more widely based attack on tourism or the tourist.
However, it must be stressed that multi-use is not in itself a sufficient cause of
dissonance. The potential for dissonance exists only if markets not only conflict
but cannot for various reasons be served separately.
The position adopted here is to assume neither automatic harmony nor
disharmony and consequent dissonance: neither position allows any place for
management. On the contrary, it is our contention that heritage is in general
especially amenable to goal-directed intervention. Each of the categories of use
‘considered are dependent upon resources which, compared with resources
required in most activities, are effectively ubiquitous, reproduceable and
frequently physically robust: they are flexible rather than immutable and often
highly mobile. Few products or activities are therefore so amenable to inter-
vention to mitigate the consequences of dissonance. How this can be achieved
through planning and management is the pervading theme of the second half of
the book, which must proceed with this examination through a series of detailed
case studies representing a wide diversity of dissonance contexts and a range of
difficulty in their potential solution through management. First, however, the
focus must shift from the uses of heritage to the users themselves and thus from
the ‘producers’ (whether cultural institutions, governments or enterprises) to the
‘consumers’.
4 Dissonant Heritage and
Human Diversity

THE INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE HUMAN VARIABLE

Chapter 1 examined the background to dissonance in the problems associated

with expanding meanings of heritage, its derivation from historic resources, and
its wider context. Chapter 2 defined dissonant heritage and argued that its roots
are intrinsic in heritage creation and marketing; and further pointed out the
visceral conflicts between human groups which may be involved, beyond
economic marketing considerations but sensitively interconnected with them.
Chapter 3 deepened and widened the discussion by focusing on uses, which
brings us logically to the present chapter which considers users and explores the
cultural, social and political geography of heritage dissonance. We attempt
below a structured examination of dissonance expressions resulting from human
diversity, sharpened by human inequality whether real or perceived; and we
examine their spatial characteristics of significance to our theme.
Heritage is ultimately a personal affair: this is implicit in much of what we
have already said. Each individual assembles his own heritage from his own life
experiences, within a unique life space containing reference points of memory,
and providing anchors of personal values and stability, which are not identical
to those of anyone else. Personal heritage relates intimately to a sense of place,
and an emotional and symbolic attachment thereto (Williams et al., 1992). It
relates to a network of points and spaces in both natural and built environments,
there being no necessary logic dividing these. It also concerns portable artefacts:
personal possessions do not normally enter the public space in which heritage
dissonance becomes an issue, but their dissonance potential is suggested by
contemporary controversies over the artefacts sacred to one group which
languish in the museums of another (Chapter 3) and most poignantly in relation
to aboriginal artefacts in ‘settler’ museums (Chapter 7). With respect to the built
environment, a seemingly mundane structure such as a suburban family home
will represent different heritages to its several occupants (even those residing
there simultaneously), none of which could be divined by outsiders, who might
regard it as a clone of its neighbours devoid of heritage identity. Among the
expanding meanings of heritage (Chapter 1), its personal quality throws into
particular question some conventional wisdoms of the heritage movement (and
of so-motivated inner-city gentrification): it obliges us to ask how far our
individual sense of heritage depends upon the existing environment, including
DISSONANT HERITAGE AND HUMAN DIVERSITY 71
vicarious experience of forebears’ life and work, and how we perceive these; and
how far upon the creation of our own, and our immediate associates’, environ-
ment. The ultimate personalisation of heritage is not only a stumbling-block to
much that has been written on the subject, but also a basic building-block of the
present volume: if everyone’s heritage is in detail different, the potential for
heritage dissonance appeared with the second human being — in the light of
what follows, some might suggest with Eve.
In practice, however, personal heritage can be seen as the most basic level of a
hierarchy of scales of heritage identity, parallel to that of heritage marketing
(Chapter 2). The shared experience of small human kinship groups substantially
aligns the heritage sense of the individuals within them; and in complex
contemporary societies at urban, regional and national scales, such groups find a
shared heritage identity along broad social and related parameters with others
who may be personally unknown. That some shared heritage identities reach the
global level, particularly in an era of mass communication, is evidenced equally
by radical Islamic solidarity against the alleged heresies of Salman Rushdie,
and by the worldwide collusion among aboriginal peoples’ organisations. The
parameters of alignment may be defined by one or more of the qualitative
community attributes with which this chapter is concerned, attributes which
continuously evolve and may gradually rearrange the group allegiance of
individuals. The contemporary concern of some with gender as a community of
interest obviously cuts right across the sexually paired or non-sexual framework
of life in most other respects, and thereby focuses the point that an individual’s
sense of community may be defined along more than one parameter simul-
taneously. Such larger communities of interest define the shared values and
experience and, with them, the shared heritage sense of the individuals they
contain — not the whole but frequently the dominant part of those individuals’
sense of heritage. Few societies are so homogeneous that no divided heritage
sense exists within them. Conversely many, especially polyglot metropolitan
populations as in New York or Toronto, contain not only a plurality of com-
peting community allegiances on several possible dimensions, but also cross-
representation of individuals on different dimensions such as ethnicity and class
simultaneously. Such polyglot metropolitan societies are increasingly the norm
in a world of expanding migration flows: upon them the dubious blessing of
heritage dissonance is commonly bestowed in abundance.
It is the broadly social dimensions of what we now term dissonance that have
been (or should have been) most clearly discernible in contemporary heritage
development since its inception. They were identified in the literature a decade
ago (Tunbridge, 1984) and their significance has been portended in the field of
urban heritage tourism (Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990). Furthermore, the few
studies to date which have researched, in effect, the mechanisms of dissonant
heritage creation have done so with respect to its cultural, social and political
content. Reference to two of these studies will prime our categorisation of the
elements of human diversity most relevant to heritage conflict; we adjust our
focus temporarily to these specific cases because they so clearly illuminate the
general argument. |
One of the most fertile environments for the development of heritage
72 DISSONANT HERITAGE

dissonance has been Ireland, different interpretations of its heritage and the
meaning of Irishness having given rise to conflicting nationalisms with tragic
consequences (Graham, 1994a). Johnson (1994) has closely researched the multi-
faceted discordance between incumbent and emergent ideologies with regard to
monument construction in nineteenth-century Ireland. She identifies dissonance
with respect to the actors and many other dimensions of the creation of
monuments and their changing interpretation over time. Relevant here is the
fundamental collision between British imperial and Irish republican nationalist
motivations and iconographies involved, and the relation of ideology to both
culture and social class.
A somewhat similar case is the US South. Radford (1992) observes the
enhancement of Southern identity by defeat, in monuments erected to the
Confederate ‘Lost Cause’ in an early twentieth-century romantic interpretation of
the old South. Gulley (1993) has specifically researched the creative mechanisms.
She associates the nationally dissonant regional identity, as defined by white
racial hegemony, with female-driven monumentalisation through the agency of
the United Daughters of the Confederacy, founded in the 1890s and custodian of
the memory of male heroism and sacrifice, with noble female support, during the
Civil War. She demonstrates the selectivity of the heritage, however, aside from
race: notably, poor white women were not eligible to participate, and those who
sought peace or survival rather than providing heroic support were likewise
disinherited. Memorialisation has been extended by state agencies in recent time,
but from origins thus predisposed towards a distinctive heritage interpretation
coloured by race, class, ideology and a particular gender perspective.
These cases, with earlier observations, preview some of the bases of human
selectivity and division which we now examine more generally with respect to
consequent heritage dissonance. People as individuals, and as members of
definable groups, may be disadvantaged, discriminated against, dispossessed
and ultimately disinherited (in heritage terms) on many cultural, social and
political pretexts. Human inventiveness precludes a definitive classification for
all time, and we make no claim that ours would suffice for other purposes; but
the following categories encompass the main expressions of heritage dissonance
related to qualitative human division that had arisen by the 1990s. They are not
neatly divisible and may be mutually causative or covariant with respect to
heritage dissonance; but they may also be in mutual conflict, as in the case of
persecuted cultural minorities who through wealth or conservatism are them-
selves intolerant of lower-class, feminist or other minority heritage aspirations,
thereby promoting kaleidoscopic patterns of dissonance which reinforce the
personal quality and even anarchic potential of heritage. The most pervasive
variable, cultural/ethnic division, is so fundamental and spatially manifest that it
is considered first and most fully, and provides the focus of the chapter and
indeed much of the book.

CULTURE/ETHNICITY AND HERITAGE DISSONANCE

We do not propose to engage in sterile debate over definitions concerning this
most fundamental basis of human diversity, or with respect to its evolving and
DISSONANT HERITAGE AND HUMAN DIVERSITY 73
perhaps contentious distinction from the more narrowly social dimensions
considered subsequently. Neither do we intend to dwell on the obvious, in
discussing variables of which the impact upon heritage dissonance, as the
Ayodhya example in Chapter 2 demonstrated, is massive and transparent.
The term ‘ethnic’ suffers from imprecise overuse: it properly defines a racial
and/or cultural basis for human distinction, reflecting the fact that race and
culture are often (but not always) closely interwoven, and we use it thus without
prejudice to varying interpretations. It is in cultural/ethnic terms that variation
in human appearance and behaviour is most visible; not surprisingly, therefore,
a divisive ‘them’ and ‘us’ is most readily defined in these terms, whatever other
dissonant baggage such division may carry with it. The range of cultural/ethnic
mixes giving rise to dissonant heritage outcomes is enormous, as will be borne
out in some detail by the three principal problem areas from which we draw
examples, in Chapters 6-8. But there are worldwide illustrations of disadvan-
tage, discrimination, dispossession and disinheritance inflicted by dominant
societies upon both long-established and recent minorities so defined. Perhaps
most feared and abused of all are those who have no ‘home’ state of their own
(such as Kurds, gypsies and, until 1994, Palestinians) and whose expression of a
dissonant heritage poses a perceived threat to the integrity of their state of
residence, especially where others of their kind live adjacent to its boundaries.
The existence of an Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation, holding
global meetings which attract media attention, is testimony to the scale of this
problem and the implicit potential for the use of dissonant heritage to effect
political destabilisation.

Race

The racial, or genetic, component of ethnicity is usually the most physically

distinctive, thus the greater contributor to the ‘visible minority’ status that is
now a global factor, particularly among metropolitan populations, in heritage
dissonance. But race is so difficult to define, to separate from the culturally
transmitted elements of ethnic identity, and to discuss in a satisfactory manner,
that it does not serve our purpose to look further for its distinctive significance.
Instead, as our main heading implies, we focus on the heritage significance of
the most obvious cultural components of ethnicity, religion and language; it
must be kept in mind, however, that race — whether tangible or a perceived
social construct — is seldom far from the heritage issues associated with these
and may well be responsible for dissonance extending beyond them.

Religion

Few geographical phenomena are as manifest as the centrality of religion to

human value systems, to incessant conflict between them, and to the sense of
heritage which is inseparable from such values and conflict. From Ayodhya to
Belfast to Cuzco, religious heritage is a flashpoint of intercommunal conflict,
even though the value systems that it expresses may disguise, or catalyse,
74 DISSONANT HERITAGE

conflict over other issues more or less covariant with religion, among which race
is often present.
A specific geographical issue which merits closer research attention is the
frequency with which invading and superseding religions secure their hegemony
by the deliberate destruction and on-site replacement of their predecessors. If the
preceding values survive, however, the most volatile possible heritage conflict is
thereby created, soluble only by a (very improbable) ecumenical rededication of
the site heritage, repressive continuation of cultural hegemony, or intercom-
munal violence. The brutal reclamation by Hindu extremists of the Muslim-
appropriated site at Ayodhya is simply a dramatic realisation of a generic
potential: in Spanish America, the systematic replacement of local temples by
Catholic churches, from Tenochtitlan/Mexico City onwards, is among the
clearest illustrations of this potential, recently evidenced in Cuzco, Peru, by a
movement to restore a lost Inca temple at the expense of its Catholic successor.
An alternative form of site replacement is a simple appropriation of the temples
of displaced groups, classically Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (Chapter 3) and various
synagogues in Eastern Europe (to medieval or later churches; Gruber, 1992). A
milder version of such hegemonic replacement may be marginalising juxta-
positions, as between dominant Jewish and subordinate Muslim use of adjacent
religious facilities at the site of the Hebron massacre (1994) in the West Bank,
Palestine.
More wide-ranging rivalry between religion-based cultural groups can be seen
in abundance. Religion is often part of larger cultural/ethnic identities in mutual
conflict, inseparable from a generalised indifference to, or marginalisation,
usurpation or destruction of, heritage between the parties. Religious heritage as
a specific focus of refuge/resistance and attack is classically illustrated by the
Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar, where an extremist rebellion was crushed by
the Indian army in 1984. Conflict potential involving religious heritage may also
exist, for example, in contemporary Ukraine where religion compounds with
larger senses of heritage identity to exacerbate political tensions between east
and west. In extreme cases of such larger identity conflict, the military
destruction of religious heritage may spearhead a general heritage destruction
for the purpose of demoralising the enemy: in the 1990s an astonishing number
of religious buildings have reportedly been destroyed in the former Yugoslavia
(Chapter 6).
Enough has been said to indicate that religion is the focus of culturally critical
heritage components; and that religious hostility whether or not compounded
with other perceived group distinctions generating animosity has been, and
continues to be, instrumental in the neglect, marginalisation, appropriation or
destruction of such heritage, often to the point of creating site-specific cultural
affronts to the disinherited.

Language
The cultural medium whereby most communication is effected and the collective
memory stored is central to the development of heritage identity in every
society, and an almost inevitable root of heritage dissonance with respect to
DISSONANT HERITAGE AND HUMAN DIVERSITY 75
other societies whose language differs. The cultural package of verbal and literary
expression and recorded achievement framed within a particular language has
proven to be the principal root of divided nationalisms, in their classic
development in nineteenth-century Europe; and the growth of national heritage
legislation in Europe over the past century has to a large extent been concerned
with asserting the heritage of linguistic identity (Ashworth, 1993a). The extreme
expression of linguistic nationalism glorifying a heritage grossly dissonant to its
neighbours was Nazism in Germany, the catastrophic consequences of which
muted but did not eliminate the link between linguistic heritage and nationalistic
identification.
However, it is well known that nationalism so defined marginalised linguistic
minorities and also others, notably the Jews, who were deemed not to fit the
overall language-based ethnic model despite their use of the majority language.
Thus an internal heritage dissonance was created within the new nationalisms,
particularly negative where alienated minorities bordered other nations with
whose linguistic heritage they could identify. Furthermore some languages were,
through historical circumstance, shared between several nations. Such discordant
interfaces between linguistic heritage and national identities are much further
complicated outside Europe, as a result of the colonial superimposition of
European linguistic heritages and ultimately national boundaries upon the
frequently kaleidoscopic indigenous patterns on other continents. Thus the
clearest manifestations of linguistic national heritages and the deviations and
dissonances associated with them are generally to be found in Europe, and in
the major Asiatic cultures which more or less escaped European colonialism,
China and Japan.
Linguistic heritage and its nationalistic overtones are not always clearly visible
in the built environment. Often only the presence of the language on a structure
can designate its heritage identity with the clarity of religious heritage, which is
usually identifiable by its iconography. Because of the international diffusion of
originally nationalistic architectural styles, the persistence within and between
nations of regional traits, and the palimpsest quality of many older buildings,
one cannot always read linguistic heritage identity clearly from the townscape.
This is classically true in many of the formerly German cities of Poland now that
all linguistic evidence, other than fragments in churches, on gravestones and the
like, has been removed from the townscape (but not from the tourism literature;
see Chapter 6). Buildings representative of linguistic identity are therefore less
likely to be dissonant flashpoints of conflict than those reflecting unambiguous
religious heritage. However, a non-European exception could be Quebec
(Chapter 7), where the French linguistic expression of the built environment is
manipulated by exterior-signage legislation, and attacks on English resistants
have occurred; this situation is however complicated by the fact that most
occupants of innately English-language heritage have complied with the law, but
also by subsequent softening of the legislation.
Linguistic/literary heritage is not reflected purely in the main built environ-
ment. By definition it exists in the collections of libraries and archives, and in the
monuments associated with cultural luminaries who have created in the
language in question. These can indeed be dissonant to other language groups
76 DISSONANT HERITAGE

unless their associations are of international stature, as with Shakespeare or

Goethe. But even Goethe could not protect Weimar in 1945, and Allied
indifference then to the heritage of the German language has apparently been far
exceeded by the deliberate destruction of Bosnia’s equivalent in the Sarajevo
library in the 1990s (Chapter 6).
The principal repositories of the heritage of nationalisms based, however
imperfectly, upon language are the major European capital cities. The symbolic
expression, even aggrandisement, of French nationalism in Paris and Versailles
and that of Germany in Berlin monuments such as the Reichstag (currently being
resuscitated) are enduring cultural statements which may prove difficult to
reconcile with an emergent European identity coupled with a linguistically
neutral reinterpretation of European history. These are critical issues to which
we shall return (Ashworth and Larkham, 1994).
Cultural/ethnic diversity is not only a function of the familiar variables
considered above. Without prejudice to the evolving profusion of variables
studied by cultural geographers, we may simply note that value systems extend
well beyond religion, particularly to legal codes and to the political ideologies
considered below; communication extends beyond language to music and dance;
and the artefacts of culture range from the tools and shelters that sustain life to
the manner of dress and beyond. All these expressions of culture, variously
intermixed with race, provide sets of elements collectively developing group
identity and perceived heritage in the process of their intergenerational trans-
mission, with evolutionary change often involving expansion and assimilation
occurring en route. In addition, especially in the popular culture of contem-
porary Western society, it would be possible to identify many life-style variables
which do not covary in this way, and which generate an ever-changing series of
heritage expressions, sometimes dissonant, among subgroups which constitute
minorities in these particular respects. Our purpose is best served, however, by
shifting our focus at this point to those human variables of a more specifically
social nature.

SOCIAL DIMENSIONS OF HERITAGE DISSONANCE

The heritage aspect of some of the social variables discussed below may appear
relatively trivial when set against the fundamental cultural issues just
considered, but their contemporary perceived and possibly greater future
significance requires us to give them disproportionate attention. This proviso
does not apply to the critical issue of class however.

Class

Social class is a pervasive socio-economic condition which is often closely

associated with cultural/ethnic variables. Subordinate groups whose heritage is
dissonant in those terms are commonly also marginalised as lower class, and in
the colonial context the resultant double dissonance often applied to majorities;
while these were characteristically non-white, in Ireland and Quebec European
DISSONANT HERITAGE AND HUMAN DIVERSITY jas

majority populations also experienced some cultural and class marginalisation.

Less commonly, ethnically marginalised groups have constituted relative socio-
economic elites and have characteristically been victimised from motives of
jealousy: notable examples are the Jews, Armenians and other trading minorities
in Europe and similar alien minorities attracted to colonial territories, such as the
East African Asians.
Class has become inseparable from social ideology, as the concept owes much
to Marxist thinking; and its heritage significance can broadly be seen in these
terms. Class is a powerful generator of heritage dissonance because of its
fundamental association through time with industrialisation and its generally
clear-cut expression in residential space. Both can be widely illustrated.
Proliferating interest in the heritage of the Industrial Revolution, closely
associated with the revaluation of Victoriana, has brought the issue of class-
based heritage identification and interpretation into sharp relief. Early indus-
trialisation was foremost a British phenomenon, and it is in Britain that its
‘material and socio-political legacy remains most prominent, particularly relative
to the reduced economic stature of contemporary British industry. Industrialis-
ation reordered national demographic patterns; transformed landscapes in the
Midlands, northern England and parts of Wales and Scotland; indirectly
impacted rural landscapes more widely by the investment of profits in the
construction and reshaping of stately homes; and radically transformed Britain’s
power relations with the rest of the world, among other impacts with heritage
implications. It is therefore not surprising that the exploitation of its heritage is
pre-eminently a British concern. Innumerable early factories and industrial
environments in Britain have been refurbished in the past two decades as
museums, with all the trappings of heavily marketed tourism attractions. Cities
such as Bradford have transformed themselves into heritage tourism destina-
tions; industry-based ‘ecomuseums’ such as Ironbridge in Shropshire have been
successfully promoted; and specific industrial complexes may be active working
and life-style museums, such as Styal in Cheshire, or may perpetuate associ-
ations with famous individuals, such as Owen’s New Lanark near Glasgow. The
characteristic tone of most of these museums stresses British entrepreneurial and
technological prowess of the time.
Numerous critics have assailed the British industrial museum phenomenon.
Some have seen dissonance in the excessive scale of retrospection as a distraction
from contemporary challenges (Hewison, 1987), or in a naval context in ex-
cessive imperialistic jingoism (Bradbeer and Moon, 1987). However, others have
attacked the capitalist/elitist interpretations of this and of nineteenth-century
British heritage more generally. Elitist industrial interpretations were abetted by
technical explanations deriving from industrial archaeology, which was popu-
larised in Britain in the 1950s (Hudson, 1981), spreading to continental Europe
and beyond in the 1970s (Nijhof, 1978). The use of technology as a structuring
and causative instrument gave an aura of socially neutral inevitability to the
industrialisation process, and a pervading theme of progress legitimated what
had occurred and marginalised many of the negative social impacts. Further-
more, the successful revitalisation of industrial urban areas has been protested as
a disinheritance of the present-day working class, for example in Glasgow (Boyle
78 DISSONANT HERITAGE

and Hughes, 1991) and implicitly in Nottingham (Bartrum, 1993; Daniels and
Rycroft, 1993).
In reaction, many have pointed to a revisionist interpretation in which the role
and relics of the oppressed industrial proletariat are placed at centre stage. Many
northern British industrial towns have refocused their heritage interpretations
from the march of technological progress to the tribulations of the working man,
and the poor living conditions of his wife and family. The validity of the original
criticism, thus the case for revisionism, can in fact be seen to vary: social reform
is stressed in New Lanark, for example, and principal heritage agents such as the
National Trust reveal a range of social awareness in their interpretations, from
little in stately homes such as Penrhyn, North Wales, to much in Styal. From our
perspective, the key point is the existence of controversy over class dissonance
and of some efforts to address it. In detail the controversy has several faces: at
issue are the commemoration of free enterprise or capitalist oppression, the elite
or the working class, and provincially/colonially ruling classes or the exploit-
ation of peripheral/subject populations, from Wales (Carter, 1989) through the
colonies and beyond; all constitute bones of dissonant heritage contention.
Industrial heritage is now extensively developed throughout the long-
industrialised world (see, for example, Soyez, 1986). Its dissonance potential is
rarely as extreme as in the principal country of its origin; in Canada, for
example, it is often associated with the process of national maturing, a benign
view of its nationalist significance. None the less, the class overtones of capitalist
industrial heritage are inescapable and may be complicated by the different
ethnic identity of elite and proletariat, as in Quebec and some mill towns of
adjacent New England (typically English versus French). Lowell, a mill town in
Massachusetts, is particularly prominent as the first industrial centre in the US
and, in a classic rescue from economic decline, the first urban National Historical
Park (Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990; Fleming, 1981). Its underlying interpret-
ation in the context of technological progress has become sensitive to the labour
force, which was initially New England country girls accommodated in boarding
houses; their lives were controlled in a manner presented as non-dissonantly
wholesome, if paternalistic, necessarily benign as a result of the labour shortage
which existed, before the advent of the Irish around 1850 permitted more overt
exploitation. (See also Ryan, 1989.)
Class dissonance is also prominent in the broader heritage of the urban area.
City centres are characterised by the political and economic instruments of
power in the hands of elite groups, and it is unsurprising that their overt
heritage expression usually projects ‘establishment’ perspectives and memorial-
ises elite individuals. The appropriation of former industrial districts for new
white-collar or leisure functions can be considered, as we have noted, to
accentuate the disinheritance of the working class from the symbolic heart of the
city. In residential areas it is predictable that the imposing and durable struc-
tures of the social elite will be the disproportionate focus of heritage designation.
The heritage of lower classes has been increasingly confined to their own
residential areas, into which mainstream heritage designation has traditionally
seldom reached. The frequent corollary of some two decades of gentrification, in
the English-speaking world at least, has been the belated recognition of
DISSONANT HERITAGE AND HUMAN DIVERSITY 79
residential heritage in selected lower-class areas, but simultaneously the dis-
inheritance of its incumbent occupants along with their physical dispossession.
Class tensions have been greatly exacerbated by this process, and social stress
has become focused especially upon the area recently most favoured for elite
recolonisation: the waterfront (Tunbridge, 1988). Revitalisation of the waterfront
may entail the reuse of formerly industrial land, connecting with our preceding
discussion, but it may also involve appropriation of blue-collar residences, either
directly, or by demolition in favour of luxurious accommodation suitably
equipped with the accoutrements of a waterfront life style. More subtly it may
disinherit the poorer classes by eliminating their landmarks and service network
in favour of a blatant reimaging and refurbishment for leisure living and tourism,
which recasts the function and heritage identity of the historic pubs, churches
and other buildings that are retained. This process has been documented in
London Docklands by Short (1989), who dichotomises the ‘yuppies’ (young
urban professionals) and ‘yuffies’ (young urban failures) as the focus of mutual
tension and trauma. Likewise Merrifield (1993) recounts the struggle over place
between largely blue-collar incumbent residents and elite-oriented capitalist
interests seeking to redevelop a vacant site on the Baltimore waterfront. Through
gentrification and the closely related exploitation of newly recognised urban
amenities for tourist/leisure consumption, the expansion of what is perceived
and marketed as urban heritage has almost invariably meant the diminution of
that of the lower classes, the question ‘whose heritage?’ being seldom aired until
recently. It should further be noted that urban artistic taste leaders (Chapter 1)
are likely to be identified with the social elite, implicit in Ley’s (1993) term
‘aestheticisation’ to describe postmodern city trends, with which the above
developments at the expense of the urban poor are centrally associated.
In referring to class heritage dissonance chiefly in industrial and urban terms,
we should not lose sight of the importance of class at the scale of national
heritage. In the case of Australia, the very foundation and ideology of the nation,
expressed in such mythical and monumentalised figures as the Jolly Swagman
and the Wild Colonial Boy, is imbued with notions of class oppression; both in
England in generating its convict ancestors and in Australia in defining relations
between proletariat and elite (the proverbial ‘squatter mounted on his
thoroughbred’). We return to this and other Australian heritage dissonance in
comparison with Canada, in Chapter 7. More normally than Australia (until
recent years relatively homogeneous in its mainstream ethnic background), such
national class dissonance is closely connected with a clear-cut cultural/ethnic
dissonance, in the context of former colonialism which Chapter 8 particularly
elaborates.
The role of class in heritage dissonance is profound: it is a central focus in the
identity and interpretation of heritage. Notwithstanding the encroachment of
elite values that we have described, class is now implicated in a significant
movement to rewrite history and redesignate heritage, by which disinheritance
may be realigned as much as redressed. This movement, in its early-1980s
origins labelled by its supporters and observers (but now by its critics) as
‘political correctness’, is associated with the late twentieth-century promotion of
eclecticism and diversity often under the banner of ‘postmodernism’ (Chapter 1);
80 DISSONANT HERITAGE

it seeks to elevate the status and therewith the heritage of a series of perceived
disadvantaged social groups (as well as ethnic minorities) initially through
insisting on specific linguistic labels and denying the use of others. In so doing it
seeks a realignment of power away from at least the core of the established
social elite. Our remaining categories of social heritage dissonance relate to these
perceived groups, who are now actively attempting its redress. Class dissonance
is strongly linked to our final category, political dissonance, by virtue of its
ideological centrality; and the emergence of the following self-designated social
groups as heritage contenders also has powerful interconnected political
implications, in so far as the protagonists of these groups identify themselves
with ‘progressive’ political perspectives.

Gender

This is at once a particularly nebulous and very fluid basis for heritage
dissonance. The reality that men and women usually cohabit causes its spatial
expression to be nebulous. However, there is some identification of both
advanced age and poverty with a preponderance of females, which means that
urban districts where the elderly poor are concentrated can be interpreted as
gender-disadvantaged, if gender rather than age is regarded as the critical
causative variable. Other districts have been argued to reflect gender-biased
enterprise; for example, female influence upon gentrification patterns in areas of
Montreal (Rose, 1989). Gender is fluid because of its recency as a recognised
issue and the consequent lack as yet of clearly agreed and identifiable
assemblages of heritage artefacts. However, several emerging heritage themes
can be discerned, including those described below. Some are cultivated by the
feminist movement that has promoted gender recognition, while others may
ironically be dissonant to this movement and thus divisive among women.
Squire (1994) has studied the influence of gender on heritage interpretation
with respect to mainstream heritage tourism. She identifies in the context of
Beatrix Potter’s home, a National Trust property in the English Lake District, a
feminine perspective which concerns the perpetuation of established family
values, and does not usually relate to feminist interpretations of Beatrix Potter
even though such have been made. A conventional feminine viewpoint may
none the less diverge from a masculine equivalent, and such dissonance
potential is the more significant in so far as it represents the mainstream. Squire
suggests a need to examine such divergences within mainstream heritage
interpretation more generally, a need which is the greater in view of the
enduring disproportionate female role in the intergenerational transmission of
cultural values. This is a fundamental issue essentially distinct from those
concerning new feminist perspectives.
A major difficulty in endeavouring to provide a feminist alternative to the
‘great men of history’ approach is that the very numerical dominance of men in
the institutions of political, economic and social life in most centuries makes an
alternative ‘great women of history’ rather artificial and sometimes trivial.
Furthermore, such historical figures as Florence Nightingale or Grace Darling are
so recognised in the role of women dedicated to the care of men. Conversely
DISSONANT HERITAGE AND HUMAN DIVERSITY 81
some recognised in dominant but conservative roles, such as Margaret Thatcher,
would be equally unlikely to attract (or favour) feminist recognition. An
alternative approach, of inherently contentious feminist value, is the generic
recognition (but individual disinheritance?) of the invisible women of history as
the bulwark of society, especially through times of trial and stress: we have
noted female self-recognition in this role in the post-Civil War US South;
examples of recent recognition of this kind are a memorial to pioneer women in
Perth, Australia, and one to women as the protection against implied colonial
oppression, on the waterfront in Nassau, Bahamas. This confronts cruise
passengers with a heritage quite dissonant from Nassau’s otherwise orderly
colonial-to-independence monumentalisation; however, Palmer (1994) alleges a
reciprocal dissonance of the tourism-friendly colonial iconography to the
development of Bahamian national identity, from an anti-colonial perspective
which touches on various human dimensions considered in this chapter and
which demands our further attention to this case, particularly in the context of
dissonance management in Chapter 9. A perverse variant on woman as both
pioneer and protector is a 1930s representation of the Boer woman in front of the
Voortrekker Monument overlooking Pretoria, South Africa, which is now a
paradoxical representation of woman as racial oppressor. There are, however,
themes of more unequivocally feminist value, the most obvious highlighting the
various sites associated with prominent campaigners for women’s equality.
Feminist concerns might logically add to these the places of refuge to which
women-as-victims have resorted, in for example Victorian London and in many
more recent settings: gender may prove a particularly contentious basis for
dissonance in this victim context because its heritage will include sites of crimes
which are alleged but not universally accepted to constitute specifically male-on-
female outrage, and it may invite contention with respect to coercion involved in
prostitution, for example. Perhaps most significant, however, is the feminist
effort to reinterpret history more generally, and thus to recast (if not to
appropriate) mainstream conceptions of heritage so as to magnify the female
role; literary debate to this end is exemplified by a recent exchange concerning a
feminist historiography of geography (Domosh, 1991a, 1991b; Stoddart, 1991).
In North America, where the gender issue originated and is most stridently
developed, there is now a widespread concern among civic officials over the
imbalance of memorialisation of men and ‘men’s’ concerns (such as war) over
women, and the process of redress will involve such historical reinterpretation as
well as new identification of significant women and ‘women’s’ issues. Because of
the North American emphasis, exemplification of these and other potentially
dissonant developments in gender heritage is deferred to Chapter 7. However,
the issue of ‘heritage masculinisation’ has certainly been raised in the European
context (Edensor and Kothari, 1994).
The gender concept has been subject to rapid geographical diffusion from its
North American core. At the time of writing, there is evidence that post-apartheid
South Africa may be the most fertile area of proselytisation (Christopher,
personal communication 1993), having formerly been an unequal society in all
dimensions, and it is predictable that women will be prominent in the new South
African monuments (Chapter 8). We may further expect that South Africa will act
82 DISSONANT HERITAGE

as a powerful conduit for the reinforcement of gender sensitivity, as already of

other Western intellectual enlightenment (or imperialism?), elsewhere in Africa
(Henkel et al., 1984; Wellings and McCarthy, 1984). Conversely in Central Europe
(Chapter 6), media reports of the marginalisation of women through socio-
economic stress imply a need to reassert the gender equality at least nominally
accorded by the failed socialist regimes. In neither case, however, can the gender
identity of heritage be the prime social concern.
Ultimately we must put the discussion of gender and heritage into perspective
by pointing out the characteristic dominance of women in organisations actively
defending what others might regard as ‘patriarchal heritage’, of whom the
archetype was Octavia Hill in England, principal founder of the National Trust
and a central image in its 1995 Centennial. This is a matter on which the
protagonists of gender have apparently had little to say. Such women may in
fact promote a gender perspective, but by no means always do so.

Sexual orientation

The wide variety of possible human sexual experience, together with the central
role played by sexual morality in most systems of social ethics, has almost
guaranteed that society would draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable
practices and that the location of that line would oscillate over time. This has
two main consequences for us. First, the acceptable will figure prominently in
mainstream heritage, which will be dissonant for those with currently unaccept-
able orientations, who are to that extent disinherited. Similarly, attempts to
introduce a heritage of sexual orientations unacceptable to the majority will raise
similar dissonances among the majority. Secondly, the inevitability of change
over time raises the additional complication that what is tolerable or even
praiseworthy in one period is taboo in another. The statue of Sappho in Mytiline
creates uncomfortable ambivalence in many twentieth-century visitors attempt-
ing to appreciate classical Lesbos.
Although it would be conceivable to discuss a heritage for fetishist, paedo-
philic, necrophilic, bestial and many other sexual orientations, the most vocal in
modern society is homosexuality. Until the past decade the focal points of
homosexual life could scarcely have been regarded in heritage terms, as
residences were dispersed and meeting points low profile, designed to be as
ephemeral as harassment by the rest of society demanded. With the growing
openness of a homosexual life style in the context of ‘gay pride’, however,
prominent focal points such as districts in San Francisco or Amsterdam are not
merely known but have acquired a ‘pioneer’ patina which may be conducive to
heritage status for the group in question. As with the feminist cause, sites
associated with the homosexual civil rights struggle now also constitute an
incipient heritage, for example in New York (Chapter 7).
An early attempt to achieve acceptability, if not respectability, was the
revelation and promotion of the ‘great homosexuals of history’, which if nothing
else may have reduced individual dissonance by providing heroic role models
for homosexuals. The sacralisation of the grave of Oscar Wilde in Pere Lachaise
cemetery, Paris, which has become a goal of pilgrimage adorned with personal
DISSONANT HERITAGE AND HUMAN DIVERSITY 83
messages, is a case in point. Homosexual identity as an incidental admission has
also become acceptable in more conventional heritage, and provides alternative
role models for those who wish to reconcile homosexuality with mainstream
social participation rather than ostentatious group identification, a need which is
presumably felt among many supposed members of the various groups of
specified disadvantage. An impressive example is Firefly, Noel Coward’s home
and grave near Port Maria, Jamaica, which in other respects captures the spirit of
an icon of the international social elite.
A contentious attempt to claim homosexual heritage has been the homage of
Jewish homosexuals at the Israeli Holocaust Memorial (1994). This illustrates
overlap between our social and cultural/ethnic categories of dissonance and also
the tensions that such overlap may cause: Israeli authorities subsequently
disavowed the attempted appropriation of this collective Jewish heritage by
special interests. It also illustrates the association of particular social as well as
cultural groups with atrocity (Chapter 5), homosexuals in general having been
victims of Nazi persecution.
A sombre issue which appears likely to colour homosexual heritage is the
disproportionate tragedy of AIDS in this community. Acceptance by many in
the larger population has unfortunately been compromised by the perception of
this greatly feared disease as the ‘gay plague’, and homosexual heritage could
experience a lingering dissonance in part because of this association. Notwith-
standing, it has at least acquired a basis for existence. Although they are not
gender-specific, issues of sexual diversity are often linked with gender issues; and
since political alliances between perceived marginalised groups have not surpris-
ingly also emerged, an overlap with gender heritage issues is to be expected.

Disability
The disabled constitute a third identifiable, if very diverse, group relating to
whom a recognisable heritage is very tentatively developing. As with the above
groups and any such attempt to segmentalise society, however, it is an open
question as to how far people potentially so labelled wish to be designated as a
distinctive group, or whether they would rather be accepted as part of the whole
— surely the point of contemporary concerns for physical and socio-economic
access for the disabled. The manifestation of a disabled heritage is, like the other
groups considered here, particularly a North American phenomenon; and since
it is limited, exemplification and further discussion can expediently be deferred
to Chapter 7.
The contemporary North American-focused obsession with identifying
deprived groups does not end with the above categories (Hughes, 1994). For
example, ‘speciesism’ refers to the disadvantaging of other species and it would
in principle be possible to speak of the heritage dispossession of non-humans;
indeed it could be argued as a salutary reminder that humans need less
preoccupation with their own kind and more with the natural environment
around them (though some feminists seek to appropriate the issue), not to speak
of the recognition of domestic animals as creatures with identities beyond the
fulfilment of human needs. However, for our purposes it suffices to sensitise
84 DISSONANT HERITAGE

ourselves to the reality that heritage recognition, and with it dissonance

potential, has extended explicitly beyond those who are white, elite, male, and
otherwise conventionally ‘normal’, and that this trend could possibly intensify.
We have acknowledged that social categories apart from class may appear
relatively trivial by comparison with cultural/ethnic factors. In the social sphere
more than any other, however, our text cannot be divorced from its time and
place of writing. Recognition of the ‘politically correct’ groups is too recent for
their heritage potential and its dissonance from established patterns to be clearly
visible; especially since this recognition remains fluidly contentious in society at
large and among the ostensible members of the target groups themselves, even
in North America (see for example the exchange between Berry (1993, 1994) and
Dear (1994)). Ultimately the future of heritage in these terms will depend upon
the market that exists for it. Events in 1994, such as the feminist-versus-
fundamentalist confrontation at the UN International Conference on Population
and Development in Cairo, and controversy especially from Asia regarding the
continued inclusion of the disabled in the Commonwealth Games after Victoria,
Canada, suggest the limits beyond which the global diffusion of these values
and their heritage implications will not extend.

POLITICAL IDEOLOGY AND HERITAGE DISSONANCE

Political allegiances are to a large extent the aggregate expression of the human
diversity in a particular society, as different elements compete with one another
for access to power. This is not to deny human individuality in response to the
kaleidoscope of political issues, or to overlook the greater scope for both group
and individual expression in a democracy as against a totalitarian regime. In
detail, of course, opportunistically changing coalitions between different groups
can produce unique political outcomes in response to particular circumstances;
and long-term evolution is simultaneously occurring in group political allegiances
as conditions change. None the less, the association between advantaged groups
and conservative political parties, as against disadvantaged and radical, is a
persistent tendency despite situations in which the reverse may occur. Ideology,
which is inseparable from class, implicated in the recognition of other social
categories, and frequently associated in complex ways with cultural/ethnic
distinction, finds its ultimate power expression in the political arena.
Thus dissonance in political heritage expressions cannot be separated from
underlying human diversity. Nevertheless heritage dissonance directly expressed
in terms of political ideology demands distinct attention as a critical feature of
the landscape, especially the cityscape, fundamentally because the prime (even
exclusive) power to physically interpret, designate and monumentalise lies in the
hands of the incumbent political authorities and its dimensions are set by
currently acceptable political ideologies. Much more could be said; we propose
only to accentuate awareness of the political expression of dissonance and to
exemplify it in some widely differing contexts.
The commemoration of political figures and values in public iconography is
universal; so apparently is its monopoly or disproportion in favour of victorious
DISSONANT HERITAGE AND HUMAN DIVERSITY 85
parties. Monopoly is the trademark of totalitarianism: one need only con-
template (as of 1992) the massive head of Karl Marx in Chemnitz, Germany,
reinforced by his socialist message emblazoned across the building behind and
former usurpation of the city’s name, to realise the power of absolute ideological
appropriation/manipulation of heritage; a power rendered the more pervasive
in this case by the wartime obliteration of most of the former city centre. While
heritage control by dictatorships is comparatively well known, the changing
heritage fortunes of parties in democratic societies has not escaped notice either:
it is no accident that, even in such a committed democracy as Canada, former
Prime Minister Diefenbaker’s statue on Parliament Hill in Ottawa had to await
the election of a conservative government (Kalman, 1982; Tunbridge, 1984).
Whether brutal or subtle, heritage dissonance induced in opponents of
favoured political ideologies is pervasive; but not of course immutable. The
periodic displacement of heritage and the likely reversal of dissonance where
ideologies shift is a historic and widespread fact of life, especially in cities. Where
totalitarian regimes are involved such shifts may be sudden and dramatic, as the
many redundant statues of Lenin circa 1990 eloquently testify. Shifts may
enshrine former centres of ideological opposition with a particular heritage
significance, such as St Nicholas Church in Leipzig which was the focus of the
peaceful resistance which overcame the DDR regime in 1989. Shifts may be
equally sudden in decolonisation scenarios, in which case there is usually a direct
association between political ideology and culture/ethnicity (Chapter 8). In
democracies, the heritage increments of alternating political ideologies cannot
normally delete their predecessors without express public consent; but the
evolving composite heritage expression may subtly shift as additions gradually
marginalise incumbent values. This is especially likely where, in the normal
process of social evolution, ideologies initiated by one political party become
more pervasive and thereby withstand its loss of power. The most fundamental
illustration is that urban and regional planning for collective goals, and especially
the curtailment of private property rights in favour of the basic principle of
heritage preservation, was in itself originally a party political platform but
became more widely accepted so as to form a consensus that in its essentials has
outlived any particular party’s term of office. With respect to the ideological
content of heritage, in Canada the federal government and especially the socialist
government of Ontario in the early 1990s have promoted the diffusion of
‘politically correct’ values as an active heritage priority which may similarly be
able to outlive political mandates, notwithstanding their dissonance potential for
much of the electorate.
The question of geographical shifts in both populations and heritage perspec-
tives now requires more general consideration.

HUMAN GEOGRAPHICAL CONTEXTS OF HERITAGE DISSONANCE

A categorised consideration of the fundamental heritage dissonance resulting

from human diversity cannot fully comprehend the issue. We need now to
consider briefly the geographical interplay between human variables and
86 DISSONANT HERITAGE

heritage that gives a cutting edge to dissonance, and we need to comprehend

this at different scales. At the national/regional scale, the relevant human
variables are cultural/ethnic and political, and our principal concern is to
examine dissonance arising through wholesale spatial shifts in the relationship
between people and heritage. At the urban scale, the human variables derive
from all three of the categories we have discussed, the social component,
specifically class, providing the principal geographical framework for human
differentiation within the city; again we note heritage dissonance arising from
spatial shifts, but we focus on that associated with enduring and repetitive
patterns, actually relating to cultural/ethnic identity more than to class, which
contain the potential of dissonance costs but also of diversity benefits.

Migration and ideology shifts at the national/regional scale

There are two repetitive scenarios in which the relationship between population
and heritage context of specific areas is subject to more or less total change,
causing dissonance to the extent that the long-term stability of the state may be
in question unless convincing reinterpretations can be made. This may arise
through a spatial shift of either population or perceived heritage. Accordingly
we revisit the Chapter 3 discussion on dominant ideology and misplacement.
In the case of population migration, a mismatch arises between all or most of
the present inhabitants of an area and the inherited past symbolisms of their
built environment. It arises through either sudden or gradual population
displacement. The first results primarily from war and its aftermath, the best-
known illustration being the massive relocations of people in Central and
Eastern Europe following the Second World War; a phenomenon tragically
repeated in the break-up of Yugoslavia 50 years later. The cases of Polish and
Russian appropriation of previously German heritage are developed further in
Chapter 6 but require brief mention here. In the long run, the new population in
such cases acquires a legitimacy through heritage creation and adaptation, even
where it had no earlier roots. Furthermore, in Kaliningrad there is a remarkable
attempt to appropriate the heritage of its prior incarnation, Konigsberg, after the
perceived failure of its Soviet/Russian identity. There is in any case considerable
architectural and functional continuity across Central and Eastern Europe, so
that replacement populations may not have difficulty identifying with the pre-
existing built environment (to the point of meticulous restoration in Poland);
especially since historical vicissitudes typically enable them to identify some past
link with it. Thus essentially the same urban morphology in the formerly
German parts of Poland can be used to conjure associations with Copernicus as
might formerly have been used to identify with Frederick the Great. A different
case, with some resemblance to Yugoslavia, is the religiously selective reciprocal
migration between newly independent India and Pakistan in 1947, which
resulted in more extreme marginalisation of residual Muslims and Hindus
respectively, a background factor in our earlier case of the Ayodhya mosque
demolition.
Misplaced heritage can arise not only from sudden movement of populations
but also from gradual migration, usually of a hitherto dominant element only, in
DISSONANT HERITAGE AND HUMAN DIVERSITY 87
the face of unwelcome political or other change. The resultant progressive
misplacement of heritage is often connected with the replaced ideologies
discussed below. The rise to political power of French Canadians in Quebec,
which involved an ideological shift away from imperial values as well as a
cultural shift in control of power, has been followed by progressive haemorrhage
of anglophones out of Quebec, particularly since terrorist activity precipitated a
political crisis in 1970. This has left a trail of declining or redundant Protestant
churches and other cultural heritage to be marginalised, linguistically relabelled
or adaptively reused, and perhaps reinterpreted. The anglophone retreat is
particularly clear in Quebec City, discussed in Chapter 7. The retreat of whites
from newly independent southern African countries, such as Zimbabwe, is
somewhat similar. This has again been associated with an ideological shift, away
from imperial and white settler values; in this case church redundancy has not
usually occurred, but white heritage has otherwise been substantially
marginalised in a more complex heritage adjustment, discussed in Chapter 2
and developed further in Chapter 8. (However, the flight of Portuguese from
Angola and Mozambique, following their independence in conditions of war
and anarchy, exemplifies the sudden population shifts discussed above with
respect to this formerly dominant minority.) Generally in cases of gradual
migration it is likely that a residue of the migrating group will remain,
maintaining a minority affiliation with the newly dissonant heritage.
In the case of heritage context shift, the central concern is the replacement of
ideologies: while the replacement of population and of ideology may be linked
and concurrent, a more general scenario is an essentially constant population
subjected to a wholesale rewriting of its history and reinterpretation of its
heritage, upon the succession of a new ideological order which, like population
shift, may be sudden or gradual. Historically, the supplanting of religious
ideologies has been seen above to result in some highly specific heritage
replacements. A gradual heritage shift has been occurring in Western democratic
societies with the recognition of lower class values, and subsequently the advent
of the new socio-political values regarding disadvantaged groups. Much more
abrupt replacements involving totalitarian ideologies overlie the cultural/ethnic
issues of Central and Eastern Europe, and reach an extreme expression in the
former Soviet Union. The impact of drastic ideological change on heritage
suppression and periodically altered re-creation, and the psychological dis-
orientation connected with this, was associated above with Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty-Four (Orwell, 1949). The case of post-Soviet Russia suggests, however,
that the heritage of the replaced ideologies may ultimately prove too strong to
be suppressed and may contribute to the precipitate collapse of their successors.
The case of the former East Germany is particularly interesting in light of the
fivefold ideological reorientation it has endured during the twentieth century:
authoritarian nationalist German Empire, democratic Weimar Republic, Nazi
Third Reich, communist/state socialist German Democratic Republic (DDR), and
a democratic Germany reunited into a newly convergent if uncertain European
order of liberal democracy. Such comparatively rapid reorientation promotes a
confusion of incompletely adjusted heritage messages; indeed some of the
symbols of the Third Reich carried over into the DDR, either unconsciously or
88 DISSONANT HERITAGE

with deliberate retargetting, such as Sachsenhausen and other concentration

camps (Chapter 5), belying the state’s similar accusations directed at its western
counterpart. None the less, it is possible to identify a distinct heritage
perspective which evolved in the DDR and to consider (in Chapter 6) its need
for adaptation in the wake of the state’s demise.
In all cases of heritage misplaced through population shift, a potential conflict
exists between the desire to capitalise on the tourism trade such a resource can
generate, particularly by selling culturally compatible visitors in effect their own
heritage, and the desire to suppress awareness of it in the perceived interests of
the now-ruling group. Ideological shift may also induce conflict, over the selling
of an actively unwanted heritage to tourism; this can be particularly acute, since
fundamental value systems may be affronted, and substantial selectivity and
reinterpretation may be required in order to reconcile such heritage with the
political status quo. This cardinal issue of potential or active tourism conflicts
recurs in the following chapters, notably in all three regional case studies with
respect to cities as mutually remote as Gdansk, Quebec and Harare. A third type
of geographical shift, fundamental to cultural geography, is the physical
diffusion of artefacts and associated values to formerly alien locations: the
familiar generic diffusion of house styles, religions and great literature to
erstwhile colonies has been followed by ostentatious specific relocations, such as
of London Bridge to Arizona, and various kindred alien reconstructions and
creations. In this case, however, the heritage is normally transferred either by or
with the consent of its immediate inheritors, and does not constitute a dissonant
issue between them and others; it does, however, if one of our two main shift
scenarios is simultaneously involved, or if artefacts are transferred without
consent, such as war booty as in Europe in 1945. It is also quite possible for
some such relocated heritage to be dissonant to a tourism market which
perceives it to be out of place.

Dissonance versus diversity at the urban scale

The internal human geography of the city has a direct bearing on the dissonance
of the heritage within it. While social variables such as gender, sexual orientation
and disability reflect qualities distributed throughout the entire population and
can have only limited spatial expression distinct from the whole, class exhibits
marked intraurban spatial patterns which have long been the subject of
extensive theoretical investigation. We have alluded to dissonant class impacts
upon heritage within the city and it is essential to return to them below. Our
principal concern at this scale, however, is the long-standing tendency to spatial
clustering of cultural/ethnic minorities in inner-city locations, and what this
means for the problem of dissonance versus the alternative socio-economic
opportunity of exploiting diversity.
In Europe particularly, inner-city cultural/ethnic clusters have existed for
many centuries. Vance (1977) has discussed the medieval urban ‘quarters of
tolerance’ in which alien minorities were allowed circumscribed living space,
perhaps in less salubrious areas (Golding, 1938) and predictably marginal to the
centres of power, in return for trade or other economic advantages, which they
DISSONANT HERITAGE AND HUMAN DIVERSITY 89
brought to the host society until it became strong enough to dispense with their
extraterritorial privileges. In these areas, specifically in the Jewish quarter of
Venice, originates the term ‘ghetto’. In such autonomous quarters, Italian
Lombards (early bankers), Germans (notably merchants of the Hanseatic League
scattered as far as Bergen and Novgorod) and Jews, among others, settled in
many alien cities particularly in Northern and Eastern Europe. Some, such as the
Lombards, are now historical curiosities who, if remembered at all, may be
marked in the existing city without overtones of dissonance. Others, such as the
Germans in the east and the Jews generally, either still exist or did so in living
memory — but as the focus of suspicion reactivated during this century’s
conflicts, which has kept them and/or their heritage peripheral to urban power
and acknowledged identity. The Jews appeared in European cities with
civilisation itself and tended to remain in large spatial clusters, on account of
their religious observance, their need for cultural survival in a condition of
statelessness, and the intermittent persecution they suffered because of both;
even though they were widely allowed locational freedom between the eras of
Napoleon and Hitler (Golding, 1938; Vance, 1977). The tradition of marginalised
quarters in which these perceived aliens have mostly lived is now in effect being
carried over to new minorities currently flooding into European cities, as we
discuss below. Notwithstanding the assimilation of some historic minorities, the
continuing marginalisation of others in person and/or in recent heritage
(particularly applicable to the Jews), with the arrival of new minorities, suggests
that European cities will be found to contain plentiful and growing elements of
dissonant heritage located peripherally to their central areas.
Central and Eastern Europe possess particularly significant elements of such
heritage dissonance. Of the various groups who have been socially marginalised
in the region’s history, the most widespread have been the Jews; their heritage
provides an especially prominent illustration of dissonance relative to the central
iconography of the city, the more so in the light of their virtual elimination
during the Second World War and the consequent absence in most cities of a
strong protagonist of their heritage. However, interest in that heritage has
become more prominent as the practical opportunities for visitation by its global
market have greatly increased, following the end of the Cold War (Gruber,
1992). Thus evolution of the inner city in relation to Jewish heritage interest,
and the parallel need to accommodate rapid general growth in tourism, is
highly topical. We consider the specific cases of Prague and Krakow in Chapters
5 and 6.
However, the Jews are not the only minority to occupy off-centre inner-city
locations and there create a heritage dissonant to the mass of the population,
even though their religious, commercial and often legal distinctiveness has made
them an outstanding case. Armenians in Middle Eastern cities and Central
Asians in Russian cities are among countless other examples. Accordingly there
is a more general need to examine such minority heritages and, where they
identify themselves as distinctive, acknowledge and use them as a means of
expanding and decongesting the intraurban space which is of tourism interest.
This is especially pertinent to post-Cold War Central and Eastern Europe, but
applies more generally not only across Europe but in the many cities worldwide
90 DISSONANT HERITAGE

in which both minority cultures and tourism are now growing concerns, for the
‘aliens’ have not stopped coming: one of the most difficult political problems of
the developed countries is the rapid increase of refugees and other migrants
seeking entry to their cities, reaching crisis proportions in reunited Germany
and more generally flowing into Europe mainly from points east and south
(Chapter 6). Many are destined to form new inner-city clusters and to begin the
process of creating their own, initially very dissonant, heritage. Even before they
imprint the physical fabric of the city, their cultural heritage impresses the
streetscape with exotic attire, markets, foods, signs, and the like. Already both
political and economic imperatives have sought inclusion of Indian elements in
the newly promoted tourism attractions of Bradford, northern England; and
the appeal of exotic restaurants in ‘ethnic’ inner urban districts has become
commonplace in Western-world cities. Such developments are particularly
conspicuous in Canada, where multiculturalism has become an avowed tenet of
the federal government, and tangible new and ‘adaptive’ heritage is now
cultivated (Chapter 7). In virtually all cases of recent ‘aliens’, and in the cases of
those yet to come, there is a potential for dissonant marginalisation, and a
contrary potential for absorption into an expanding heritage tourism asset in
simultaneous pursuit of socio-political and economic ends.
Colonial urban environments in which the colonisers constituted a small elite
have often left spatially contrasting patterns of cultural/ethnic minority heritage
dissonance. In this case the minority determined prevailing heritage values and
more or less marginalised those of the majority, and those of subordinate alien
minorities whose immigration was frequently sanctioned. Where an urban
society predated colonialism, ruling minority ghettoes were created, from the
Venetians in the Mediterranean to the French in Morocco and the British
cantonments in India; sometimes under the pretext of preserving the indigenous
heritage, as in Morocco, a social apartheid was typically instituted which
generated a distinct heritage identity (Abu-Lughod, 1980; Christopher, 1992).
Where no earlier city existed, urban form was explicitly dictated and heritage
appropriated by the minority, classically exemplified by South Africa and
adjoining states. The process of post-colonial heritage adjustment, in which
marginalisation has essentially been reversed, concerns us along with its tourism
implications in Chapter 8, with particular reference to the South African case;
however, the recent immigrants to Western countries are frequently a legacy of
colonial ties and in this broad sense are also part of post-colonial heritage
adjustment. Note that quasi-colonialism has extended beyond formal empires:
the ruling Israeli minority in the West Bank have created broadly similar
patterns by excluding Palestinian Arabs and marginalising their heritage, an
ironic inversion of the Jewish ghetto experience in Europe.
We now return briefly to the fundamental issue of social class, which spatially
structures urban society irrespective of other variables (but which may also be
associated with culture/ethnicity). We have noted that conventional conceptions
of urban heritage have emphasised the elite associations of the city centre and
high-class residential areas; however, there has been some broadening of class
recognition even in establishment circles by the acknowledgement of ‘vernacu-
lar’ heritage (Chapter 3), paradoxically either through attempts to recreate the
DISSONANT HERITAGE AND HUMAN DIVERSITY 20
‘everyday’ in pre-industrial society or through a growing interest in the
industrial environment. But there remains scope for the urban heritage industry
to more broadly exploit its social resource base (even short of accepting
revisionist ideologies which may be tourism-unfriendly) and in so doing reduce
its dissonance in class as well as in cultural/ethnic terms.
It is with respect to class, however, that a dissonance-inducing heritage shift
has occurred within selected poorer areas of the inner city. This has resulted
from the gentrification of areas deemed to possess an architectural, historical or
other amenity potential, which has dispossessed and disinherited incumbent
occupants in an intraurban analogy to the population shifts we have discussed
at the national/regional scale. Commonly the amenity sought is geographically
specific to a waterfront, giving rise to the class conflicts over the identity of
waterfront areas which we have exemplified in London and Baltimore. In fact,
the agencies of revitalisation often make efforts to appease the survivors of the
disinherited class by belated heritage recognition, such as marking Gandhi's visit
to the working people of London Docklands, and provision of some relevant
amenities and events; but there typically remains a trenchant creation of
dissonant heritage in the capitalist revalorisation of declining areas, particularly
waterfronts.
A US case especially ironic in the context of population/heritage shifts is the
Oakland (California) waterfront, which makes use of an archetypal working-
class white male hero (Jack London) to provide the heritage associations of a
working waterfront, in order to develop specifically middle-class facilities
(restaurants, marinas, congress centre) inserted into a working-class neighbour-
hood that is now principally black or Chinese.
Grotesque physical class juxtapositions may occur during the process of
displacement, inviting crime against tourists as well as elite residents. A
poignant special case is the former Royal Naval Dockyard in Bermuda, which
has been heavily promoted as a new tourist focus, with the familiar assemblage
of historical interpretation, museum, recreational amenities and leisure retailing.
No reference is made to the fact that a maximum security prison is still located
in part of what was traditionally a socially low-grade environment; in 1992 the
murder of a woman tourist, apparently by a prisoner on day release, revealed to
shocked tourism interests how thin the facade of revitalisation may be over a
dissonance not only of heritage but of related outlook, interests and accessibility.
Our consideration of the intraurban scale of the heritage dissonance which
results from human diversity has developed the theme that a serious socio-
economic cost might be converted into an important socio-economic asset by its
recasting (as far as possible) as the positive attribute of heritage diversity. This is
arguably an imperative in the light of the growth of economic dependence upon
the urban tourism economy, especially in those areas most affected by the end of
the Cold War. However perceived, heritage and its dissonance are most
concentrated, most prominent and ultimately most manipulable for the tourism
market within cities. In the ‘tourist-historic city’, a model already exists with
which to comprehend the mechanisms of spatial growth in urban heritage and
tourism, and to structure the promotion of human heritage diversity as a growth
component (Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990). This model has been subsequently
92 DISSONANT HERITAGE

extended to integrate the recent and contested transformation of the urban

waterfront (Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1992). In our concluding chapter, after
discussion of numerous relevant cases in Chapters 6-8, we return to the tourist-
historic city as a model of fundamental significance to both the conceptualisation
and the practical creative management of a major component of dissonant
heritage, particularly but not only that which is rooted in human diversity.

WHOSE HERITAGE? CONCLUDING PERSPECTIVES

This chapter has considered the central issue of ‘whose?’ within the larger
phenomenon of heritage dissonance. We have attempted to capture the
complexity of the issue but do not pretend to have exhausted it. The above brief
sketch of some of the wide range of possible human dimensions that can
contribute to heritage dissonance is no more than an incomplete inventory of
themes seen as relevant at the end of the twentieth century. It would be
misleading, however, to leave the listing of discrete categories which has
constituted most of this chapter without commenting further on the existence of
relationships between them.
Individuals can rarely be assigned exclusively to any one category in any one
dimension, or classified as simply dissonant or non-dissonant. Each individual is
likely to experience a varying intensity of heritage dissonance in a selection of
the above categories. Similarly, at the instrumental level it must be remembered
that ideological or practical ad hoc political alliances tend to occur between
pressure groups representing the interests of different categories; in this respect
there are clearly sets of ‘progressive’ and ‘traditional’ causes, notwithstanding
disagreement on the details of inclusion. Conversely, contradictions between the
categories often lead to particularly intense and embarrassing dissonances: that
persecuted Kurds may also historically have been persecutors of Armenians,
Jews may on occasion have been capitalist exploiters, oppressed Islamic
minorities unacceptably sexist, or even Native American Indians environmen-
tally damaging, may be manageable in heritage interpretation only by selective
amnesia. The attempt to correct one perceived misinterpretation or undesirable
disinheritance has the unforeseen effect of reinforcing another in a different area.
Furthermore, the attempt to achieve what could be termed ‘heritage justice’ is
likely to be frustrated by changes through time in the assessment of the nature
of the injustice and the dispossessed or misinterpreted group. Progressive
interpretations can make heroes out of villains and then villains from the heroes:
thus the South African Boers, who were reinterpreted in liberal eyes from
Britain’s stubborn, backward enemy of 1900 to God-fearing, courageous
opponents of the imperial juggernaut, descended again to narrow, repressive
racists in the progressive reinterpretation of two generations later.
Just as there are few human groups which are discrete in all possible heritage
dimensions, so there is rarely a simple or exclusive relationship between a group
of people, however uni- or multidimensional, and a heritage artefact. The
same piece of heritage can be interpreted and received by different groups in
quite different ways. However, in both initial identification and evolving
DISSONANT HERITAGE AND HUMAN DIVERSITY 93
interpretation of a heritage resource, that which is dissonant to prevailing
hegemonic values may be ignored, suppressed or destroyed. Since many older
structures become palimpsests of architectural expression and _ historical
association, the scope for sectionalisms and nationalisms to seek to appropriate
them allows for much creativity. Archaeological remains are subject to still
greater flexibility of interpretation, from Germans versus Slavs or Jews versus
Palestinians across the spectrum of human dimensions to men versus women.
Dissonance resulting from hegemonic assertion and appropriation of heritage is
moderated in the Western democracies by their recent tendency to accommodate
and in some cases actively to cultivate minority perspectives; but even in the
West, and much more so in less open societies, we must remain mindful of
the implications of continuing dissonance over heritage identification and
interpretation.
Where antipathy or ignorance between human groups results in active
dissonance between their heritage perceptions, its socio-economic costs are all
too apparent. From our first example of the Ayodhya mosque destruction, with
its huge attendant loss of life, to the most subtle marginalisation of an ethnic
Indian’s heritage in Bradford, society overall is the poorer by human pain and
material loss; in the dominant case of built heritage, the normal processes of
structural decay will be more or less advanced and the potential socio-economic
utility of the heritage to foster social harmony and economic gain will be
foregone. Hence the importance of cultivating a view of heritage which accepts
human pluralism, though whether or not a formalised multiculturalism is a
suitable vehicle is open to question (Chapter 7). The priority accorded to tourism
in contemporary economies points clearly to the harnessing of pluralistic
heritage within, particularly, the tourist-historic structure of the city. An
important caveat is necessary here, bearing repetition when we return to this
theme: all heritage elements must be promoted with sensitivity to their prime
inheritors, or the process of tourism marketing will engender a too-familiar
dissonance of its own.
Not all dissonant heritage in the built environment which arises from human
diversity can be subsumed within a tourist-historic urban spatial framework.
Much is subject to regional shifts of population or ideology, some is not urban,
and some has no apparent spatial logic. The following chapter considers the
most extreme manifestation of heritage dissonance rooted in antipathies between
human groups, that of atrocity: in this case there is some evidence of a spatial
logic discordant with any other, that of remote or periurban locations of
concealment and denial.
5 The Heritage of Atrocity

DISSONANT HERITAGE AND HUMAN TRAUMA

The need to consider atrocity
The discussion of the last chapter attempted to identify the important socio-
political and spatial contexts in which dissonance is likely to arise from heritage
interpretation. However, there remains a particular category of heritage that has
not been specifically discussed and yet is so profoundly significant in this
context that it demands separate consideration. This is the case of deliberately
inflicted extreme human suffering that can be labelled atrocity. Such suffering
might be regarded as an extreme example of the individual distress associated
with the categories of dissension and dissonance considered in Chapter 4 but
there are two cogent reasons for its separate consideration here.
First, it is disproportionately significant to many heritage users. Its memory
can so dominate the heritage of individuals or social and political groups, as to
have profound effects upon their self-conscious identity to the extent that it may
become almost a sine qua non of group cohesion in sects, tribes or states,
powerfully motivating their self-image and aspirations, over many centuries.
Equally the curiosity of people about the suffering of their own kind appears to
be insatiable, and motivated by empathy, excitement and other psychological
stimuli of varying moral worth (Uzzell, 1989). Thus the tourist appetite for sites
and artefacts relating to tragedy is substantial. The discovery by Madam
Tussaud that horror was a highly saleable commodity can be combined with the
well-meaning intention that lessons can be learned about the avoidance of future
atrocity through the presentation of previous occurrences. ‘If a museum or a site
is to have an educational value . . . they must also honestly represent the more
shameful events of our past ... if interpretation is to be a social good then it
must... alert us to the future through the past’ (Uzzell, 1989: 46). Such bland
well-meaning statements raise many questions about ‘whose honesty?’ or ‘whose
shame?’ and, more cynically, whether the lesson learned will be how to repeat
rather than avoid future atrocity. In addition, the presenters may well have
altruistic intentions in their interpretation while the visitor has possibly less
morally valuable motives than the avoidance of repetition. However, the
widespread assumptions of an imperative contemporary purpose among many
presenters of past horrors is clear. Thus entertainment and education are
effectively and often inextricably combined to render atrocity one of the most
marketable of heritages and one of the most powerful instruments for the
transference of political or social messages.
THE HERITAGE OF ATROCITY 95
Secondly, the dissonance created by the interpretation of atrocity is not only
peculiarly intense and lasting but also particularly complex for victims,
perpetrators and observers. The reactions of those who suffered and those who
were to blame, together with the rest of humanity who might under different
circumstances have fallen into either category, are complex. Furthermore, highly
charged controversy with respect to the identity of both victims and perpetrators
creates a heritage dissonance problem without parallel and any attempt to
resolve it can have profoundly unsettling, if not dangerous, political
consequences. All of this makes the interpretation of the heritage of atrocity
especially influential but also especially sensitive and difficult to undertake.

Difficulties of consideration: What atrocity? Whose atrocity?

Any analysis of atrocity faces problems of definition that are far more intractable
than the usual academic delimitation of a topic for discussion. There are two
main difficulties in delimiting atrocity from ordinary suffering: first, it appears in
an ingenious variety of forms, as will become apparent below and, secondly,
because of its attractiveness to potential users there has been an inevitable steady
extension of the term to cover more and more occurrences until in popular usage
it has come to mean any event that is just abnormally bad (such as ‘atrocious
weather’). These overstatements will be avoided here and atrocity recognised as
being defined in two overlapping ways. First, we take it to mean acts of singular
cruelty, wickedness or ruthlessness deliberately perpetrated by people against
people. Secondly, it means occurrences which are especially shocking or
horrifying to others. Both elements need to be present and at a certain level of
intensity or width of occurrence, or both, to be considered here. The questions
how cruel, how shocking and how widespread events have to be to qualify as
atrocity are admittedly unanswerable.
It should be stressed at the outset that it is not our intention to attempt an
account of the long history of deliberate human unpleasantness nor to erect a
classification of its remarkably wide variety, but only to examine the main uses
made of the atrocity experience in heritage. The topic is inevitably highly
sensitive and emotionally charged; we are therefore pleased to be relieved of the
otherwise onerous responsibility of determining historically what was atrocity,
let alone who did what to whom. Our concern is the use of the heritage of
atrocity as it is apparent in relict artefacts, buildings, sites and place associations
and the dissonance issues such uses raise. As in other types of heritage the users
alone answer the defining questions for their own purposes. However, even this
attempt to distance ourselves emotionally from the topic is inevitably flawed as
both authors and readers cannot be personally immune from the powerful
emotions associated with past atrocity: our selections and comments on human
actions, although intended to be Olympian external appraisals, cannot fail to
reflect the biases of our own humanity in the construction of our personal
heritages. This is especially unsurprising since the existence of a particular
atrocity heritage, or lack of it, cannot be separated from the problem of who
allegedly did what to whom.
96 DISSONANT HERITAGE

THE VARIETY OF ATROCITY

A brief, and certainly neither exhaustive nor discrete, review of some major
types of atrocity is needed, not only to sketch the width of the historic resources
available for this sort of interpretation but also to outline some of the
characteristics that will affect such later interpretations. They are arranged in a
rough sequence from the general to the more particular.
We identify some general categories:

e atrocities arising from the aggravation of natural or accidental disasters by

alleged human action or neglect;
e atrocities interpreted as being perpetrated by an entire category of people on
another entire category as an automatic concomitant of such group
membership;
e atrocities arising from war or from within the context of war.

There are more specific categories, including:

atrocity now perceived to have existed in former judicial systems;

atrocity associated with the persecution of racial, ethnic or social groups;
atrocity arising from large-scale killing or massacre;
atrocities that can be placed in the most extreme category of genocide.

These categories will not and should not, given their varying seriousness, receive
equal treatment here. They of course overlap and a single incidence could fall
under a number of such headings.

Natural and accidental disaster

Natural disaster has always been the lot of humanity. Floods, plagues, fires and
earthquakes are part of the common heritage of mankind but rarely in them-
selves can be seen as atrocities in so far as there is no human perpetrator; and
even when there is, as in an accident, the lack of deliberate intent or motivation
gives limited scope for heritage dissonance through the allocation of blame.
However, disasters and accidents link this theme to the literature on natural and
human hazards (Yin and Moore, 1985; Oliver-Smith, 1986; Platt, 1986). It can
also be a short conceptual step from disasters to the compounding of the effects
of natural events or human error by a perceived culpability: this culpability is
susceptible to dissonant interpretations.
Famine can be treated as atrocity if a lack of foresight or mitigation of its
consequences can be argued and blame then allocated to a group other than the
victims. A notable example that lives on in folk memory is the widespread
European potato blight of the 1840s which caused famine in those parts of north-
western Europe that had become dependent upon this crop. The consequences of
this originally natural disaster could in the Irish case be blamed by nationalists
upon the land tenure system, or more widely upon an unsympathetic ruling
group that could be identified as being of a different class, religion and even
THE HERITAGE OF ATROCITY 97
nationality. Similarly the Ukrainian famine under Stalin or a number of recent
famines in Africa under oppressive regimes have been treated as atrocities by
opposing political interests.
In the same way, plagues and epidemics may be interpreted as possessing an
element of atrocity. There are many cases of the deliberate encouragement of the
spread of disease among a population in pursuit of a military objective; indeed
this was for centuries a standard technique of siege warfare. More tenuously the
‘old world’ threatened the extinction of the native inhabitants of the ‘new’ with
their imported germ pool, including influenza, but equally the new repaid the
old with syphilis. Accusations of unwitting, or even deliberate, continental
genocide are sometime heard flying in both directions. A modern variant of this
may surround much of the discussion about AIDS because this is an epidemic
that has affected disproportionately specific and identifiable groups of victims.
These in turn may feel that their suffering is perpetuated without cure through
the indifference of a society to a disease that seems to affect marginal groups
(especially homosexuals and intravenous drug users subject to widespread social
disapproval). Thus some element of atrocity may be perceived by members of
these groups.
Finally, even accidents quite clearly caused by unintentional human error can
be interpreted as atrocity. The SS Titanic’s collision with an ice flow in 1912 was
caused by a combination of natural hazard and human inattention, but the
maldistribution of casualties between the classes allows an interpretation of
atrocity by rich on poor and even of Protestant Belfast shipbuilders on Catholic
steerage passengers. Curiously the opposite reaction, namely that of poetic
justice having been meted out to the rich, white ruling elite, has been noted by
Scott (1992) as being prevalent among some groups in the United States.
Similarly reaction in India to the Bhopal chemical plant explosion of 1984
contained elements of perceived class and even racial atrocity. In these, as in all
categories of natural and accidental disaster, dissonance regarding culpability is
a matter of perception but is none the less real in its consequences.

Broad-group atrocity

There are a number of wide general conditions which some would attempt to
identify as atrocity, and use for contemporary political purposes, which were
perpetrated on very large groups by equally large categories of people.
Membership of the group of victims or perpetrators is automatic and compulsory
rather than a result of individual circumstance or judgement. These would
include colonialism, racism or sexism, in which all members of one country, race
or gender are sui generis victims or perpetrators, even inheriting the status of
victim or perpetrator from events that occurred many generations earlier.
Few of these ideas make for effective atrocity interpretation if only because the
wider the net is spread, the less effective is the identification with either victim
or perpetrator. Indeed these are frequently examples of the terminological
inflation eschewed earlier, which does not negate the occurrence of specific
atrocities within or following such general conditions (arguably, such as the
98 DISSONANT HERITAGE

massacres at Amritsar in colonial India or Sharpeville in apartheid South Africa).

However, some have a wider political significance which demands attention
here.
A case in point is the so-called ‘reparations’ movement for slavery which has
recently surfaced primarily among urban black populations in advanced
Western countries. This is a self-identification as victims of the suffering of
African slaves some centuries ago in a different continent. Equally it identifies as
perpetrators, or at least as accomplices, the modern white inhabitants of
countries in Western Europe or North America rather than the inhabitants
of West African (or Middle Eastern) states. This shaping of a heritage of past
oppression, perhaps as a reaction to the perceived contemporary problems of
these groups, creates obvious dissonance possibilities in the interpretation of this
historical period; especially since it could be considered to be historically
selective in its disregard of the role of subsequent generations of Europeans in
the suppression of African slavery. The increasing strength of the kindred
compensation and land claims by aboriginal populations against settler societies
in North America and Australia depends not only upon the successful self-
identification of these, often small minority, groups as victims but also the
acceptance by the majority settler population of their role as perpetrators or at
least beneficiaries of past group atrocity (see Chapter 7).
This sort of atrocity by virtue of victim-group membership is often by its
nature difficult to link directly and exclusively with specific sites and buildings.
However, it can complicate specific heritage interpretations, sometimes in
unexpected contexts. The Bristol museums service, for example, has recently
been criticised by representatives of existing ethnic minorities in that city for
failing to stress in its exhibits on urban development the origins of much of the
seventeenth and eighteenth century wealth of Bristol in the ‘triangle’ trade with
West Africa and the Caribbean: a classic minority heritage exclusion rendered
more poignant and emotive by the element of atrocity associated with slavery.
This criticism is being met in some parallel European cases such as in recent
exhibitions in Nantes and Liverpool (Mitchell, 1994).
Noteworthy exceptions to the problem of place specificity in memorialising
broad-group atrocity are recent museums of black American oppression. The
National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, is a transformation of the
motel in which Martin Luther King was assassinated, and the Birmingham,
Alabama, Civil Rights Institute is opposite another site of black killing: both
create a conceptual link with global human rights struggles beyond the US
South but simultaneously generate major tourism economic multipliers for their
specific locations (Antoine, personal communication 1994).
Perhaps the widest possible definition of atrocity is the idea of environmental
atrocity in which all or part of humanity is held responsible as long-term
perpetrator and the planet, or the rest of creation, is treated as victim. The oil
spillage from the Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1989 could be
interpreted not as an unfortunate accident caused by regrettable human error
but as an atrocity perpetrated on an innocent nature by greedy capitalist firms or
even uncaring consumers in far-away countries. Atrocity interpretation is
already potent with respect to the extinction of large mammals, for instance the
THE HERITAGE OF ATROCITY 99
African black rhinoceros and the Siberian tiger, threatened chiefly by the
deliberate perpetuation of traditional Oriental medicines.

War as atrocity: atrocity in war

War has been an almost continuous and permanent human condition domi-
nating the historical chronicles. It has entailed the deliberate infliction directly
and indirectly of widespread suffering (20 million battle deaths and 100-150
million total deaths, according to Sluka (1992), in the period of world peace since
1945) on populations that can to varying degrees claim innocence. It therefore
provides an almost inexhaustible source of potential atrocities. However, short of
declaring that all war is by definition atrocity and thereby reducing all humanity
to the twin roles of victim and perpetrator, the problem has always been to
determine the point at which the horrors inherent in war become atrocity. The
-scale of death and destruction is rarely in itself the determining factor:
individual events involving quite small groups of people may be seen as atrocity
when the deaths of hundreds of thousands in other circumstances are not. Thus
war is rarely regarded as atrocity in itself but is probably the most important
source of various more specific types of atrocity considered below. In particular,
the Second World War and the global shock-waves in its aftermath provide the
principal context of living-memory atrocity and the most contentious arena of its
heritage interpretation.
A simple dichotomy can illustrate the complexities and biases. The first half of
the 1990s is witnessing the fiftieth anniversaries of the events of the Second
World War. Among these are many events which could be interpreted as
atrocity by some people. In 1992 a statue of Sir Arthur (‘Bomber’) Harris was
unveiled in London’s Strand, balancing that of Lord Dowding of fighter
command. In the same year the launching of the first “V2’ rocket was
commemorated at Peenemtinde. To their protagonists these were just recognition
of the honourable role played by airmen, many of whom lost their lives, or of
the birth of space technology respectively. Obviously the victims of the bombs
and rockets would see such commemorations quite differently, remembering the
‘Butcher of Dresden’ and an instrument of slave labour and indiscriminate
death. The museum at Peenemtinde makes an uneasy attempt to accommodate
both sides of its interpretation.
It is not our task in this book to determine whether a British bomber pilot or a
German U-boat captain (commemorated at the U-boat memorial outside Kiel)
was either hero or villain or both simultaneously; and whether relativism at the
individual scale can be compensated by the absolute values of the cause for
which individual actions were perpetrated. Our brief is just to demonstrate the
different atrocity interpretations that can be, and are being, made with respect
to the Second World War, or could be made when losing sides find it politic to
make their hitherto ignored case, as with the deaths of German refugees or
Japanese forced labour in 1945 (Keegan, 1989; de Zayas, 1993). The coincidence
of fiftieth anniversaries, the demise of the ensuing Cold War constraints, and
renewed assertive strength of Japan and united Germany, portend dissonant
100 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Figure 5.1. The ruins of Dresden, Germany: castle complex under reconstruction (JET,
1992)

adjustments to the heritage interpretation of atrocity (if not officially then among
certain groups) in the formerly defeated powers.
The planned issue (August 1995) by the United States Post Office of a
commemorative stamp depicting a mushroom cloud, with the words ‘atomic
bombs hasten war’s end’ was abandoned following denunciation by Japan and
its survivors of the bombing as, to say the least, insensitive (Anon., 1994). Our
dispassionate perspective must note such developments especially as the end of
the Cold War is dramatically quickening the pace of tourism marketing at the
sites of conflict and atrocity associated with the Second World War. This can be
compounded by feminist reinterpretations such as of the rape of German women
by Soviet troops (Sander, 1992) and bombing victims in Turin (Senese, 1992).
Such heritage reinterpretations, by even an element in the population, may have
destabilising political consequences, particularly if they should lead to a
discounting by some Germans or Japanese of their respective atrocities against
Poles or Chinese (among many others); or in the feminist context of Japanese
enslavement of Korean ‘comfort women’. However, reinterpretation may be
inhibited, as in Dresden, by fear of offending the English-speaking tourism
market (Figure 5.1). Such cases could be replicated throughout the centuries.

Persecution and judicial process as atrocity

Persecution may be part of the more serious massacre and ultimately genocide
but also includes mere harassment and systematic discrimination with victims
being selected by cultural as much as racial attributes. Many cultural organis-
ations make widespread use of past persecutions in developing nationalist
 THE HERITAGE OF ATROCITY 101
ideologies. The exclusion of linguistic groups from official functions and the
official discouragement of the use of local languages is a central component of
the heritage of regional identity as victim in Flanders, Wales, Brittany, Occitania
and Catalonia, among other regions. Similarly, the idea of cultural persecution is
used to support irredentist claims on neighbouring states such as in the South
Tirol, Trieste/Istria, and, as discussed in Chapter 6, throughout the Central
European Hapsburg successor states. A heritage of persecution certainly creates
dissonance between or within countries and may lead from the persecution of a
group to the murder of its members, and from individual murder to massacre.
However, it must be doubted whether this ‘cultural atrocity’, that is atrocity
aimed at the destruction of a culture rather than the killing of people, conforms
to our definition of atrocity given earlier.
Similarly, there is the case of historically legal methods of judicial punishment.
Here the ‘past is a foreign country’ to the extent that modern observers may
perceive these so differently from contemporaries that a social dissonance to the
- point of atrocity may exist in which elements of class, racial or national
oppression may be present. Perceived judicial atrocity may create a tourism
entertainment attraction, as we consider below. It can also contribute to con-
temporary nationalisms, as in Australia where convict transportation, a humane
alternative for capital offences in the eighteenth century, may now provide white
Australians with the excuse of being victims alongside Aborigines, rather than
perpetrators of atrocity upon them (Chapter 7).

Massacre as atrocity
Massacre may be part of a wider strategy of genocide or persecution but also
may have purely local and temporary significance. It has historically been used
to deliberately generate a collective memory in pursuit of three types of
objective.
First, it has been used by perpetrators to intimidate enemies and thus weaken
their will to resist further or again. Thucydides records the Athenian public
debate, which eventually decided by a majority vote to massacre the population
of Melos in 416 BC so as to discourage imitation revolts in other parts of the
Athenian Empire. Alva’s massacre of the populations of Naarden (1572) and
Haarlem (1573) were deliberately perpetrated to discourage further resistance.
Cromwell justified his 1649-50 Irish campaign (Buchan, 1934) as a humanitarian
action, ie. a means of actually reducing overall casualties, including among
civilians, by discouraging further fruitless resistance. (Irish nationalist interpret-
ation is, of course, quite different.) In all these cases the atrocity is managed to
achieve maximum impact and maximum subsequent publicity.
Secondly, a contrary use of the same folk memory is by victims to inspire
further resistance or even counter-attack under the slogan ‘Remember ...
(Magdeburg/The Alamo/Drogheda/Antrim/Cawnpore/bloody “day of the
week”, etc.)’. One of the difficulties of deliberately disseminating and attempting
to use atrocity is that it may result in either strengthening or weakening the
resistance of the victims. However, it might be that a heritage of atrocious
massacre is almost essential if modern citizen armies, as opposed to professional
102 DISSONANT HERITAGE

soldiers, are to be sufficiently motivated to fight at all. We are now aware that
there existed official departments on all sides in the First World War whose task
was to generate massacre heritage (Knightly, 1975) to inspire citizen volunteers
to avenge alleged atrocity.
Thirdly, and more rarely, it may be used by either side to influence non-
involved observers presumably into reacting favourably. The Second World War
massacre at Katyn of 6000 Polish officers was used initially by German
propagandists and subsequently by Soviet propagandists to discredit the other
in the eyes of the Polish population and the rest of the world. (In contemporary
Poland its memorialisation testifies to the national symbolism it has acquired for
the victim population.)
Frequently the impact of atrocity is most effective on those indirectly rather
than directly involved. The 1968 My Lai massacre which involved a small
number of US troops and Vietnamese civilians had an enormous impact upon
public opinion in the United States, aided by the use of television, out of all
proportion to the actual numbers involved. Even before the television age,
during the Dutch ‘police actions’ in the Indies in 1947-48 pacification methods
in Makasar involved the arbitrary execution of terrorists and destruction of their
villages. This highly efficient local military reaction was publicised in the
Netherlands and provided a personalised atrocity story that had a strong
influence upon home public opinion. The discrepancy between the Dutch
national self-image as a peaceful, reasonable and democratic society newly
liberated from an occupying tyranny and the publicised image of colonial
atrocity created a popular unease which seriously weakened the political resolve
of the colonial power (L. Ashworth, 1990).

Genocide as atrocity
Genocide was a term coined by Lenkin in 1944 in an attempt to describe the
uniquely horrible events becoming evident at that time. It was adopted by the
United Nations and defined as ‘actions committed with intent to destroy in
whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group’ (United Nations,
1949). It thus extends the massacre of particular groups or places to encompass
the deliberate attempt to exterminate specified groups which may be defined
racially or in terms of some cultural characteristic including, in the case of
gypsies, just differences in a way of life. Various attempts have been made to
subdivide and specify the type of genocide (Melson, 1992). These include
‘politicide’ as the elimination of a political class (for example, the richer ‘Kulak’
landowners in the Soviet Union in the 1930s or more recently the elimination of
communist sympathisers in Indonesia in 1965). ‘Autogenocide’ describes the
mass murder of Cambodians by their compatriots in the Khmer Rouge during
1975-78. ‘Ethnocide’ has been used by Bodley (1992) to describe the deaths
(which he estimates as being around 50 million in the nineteenth century alone)
of whole tribes of native peoples after their contact with settler civilisations.
Presumably it could also be used to describe recurrent slaughter such as that in
Rwanda/Burundi resulting from tribally associated conflict between Hutu and
Tutsi.
THE HERITAGE OF ATROCITY 103
Melson (1992) has even suggested a scale of seriousness which runs from
massacre and pogrom (which so long as it aims at expulsion through terror is
not really genocide proper), to ‘partial genocide’ and ‘total genocide’ as defined
and distinguished by the UN; the former eliminating a group in a particular
region or country (such as the Armenian genocide of 1915), and the latter aiming
at the total extinction of the group everywhere. A final category, ‘holocaust’, is
usually reserved for the attempt to kill the Jewish people, regardless of their
actual religious or cultural affiliations and regardless of where they lived, as a
policy of total universal elimination. This attempt to eliminate the Jewish people
of Europe between 1933 and 1945 has become the most well-publicised and
documented case of genocide, allowing the word ‘holocaust’ to be appropriated
to describe it. This case is one of the most clear-cut in that all Jews were
potential victims by virtue of their immutable membership of that group which
was biologically, not culturally, defined.
As genocide is the most serious atrocity and thus emotive label that can be
applied to an historic event, it is prone to be over- and incorrectly used and
raises the questions of how many, how complete and how deliberate do
massacres have to be in order to qualify as a genocide or as an attempt at
genocide. Much of the Highland Clearances of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, for example, were not attempts to kill Highlanders as such but to
eradicate an economic and social system, although indifference to the fate of
those dispossessed undoubtedly led to many deaths. The Ibos killed in the
Biafran war (1967-70) by massacre and blockade could be labelled mass murder
but not genocide as it was Nigerian policy to crush the rebellion not exterminate
the tribe. More generally, in 1993 the European Union as a whole has been
accused of genocide, or at least complicity in genocide, through inaction, by both
Bosnian Muslims and Serbs in their conflict in ex-Yugoslavia. Ironically this
follows long-standing and recurrent accusations of genocidal atrocity between
Serbs, Muslims and Croats, as at Jasenovac concentration camp in the Second
World War and Ugar Gorge in 1992 (Keegan, 1989; Graff, 1992) within a much
larger dissonant heritage of outrage and revenge (see Chapter 6). Broadening out
the definition still further, the survivors of many aboriginal groups have accused
settler societies of genocide in North and South America, Australia and South
Africa; cases such as the Caribs, Tasmanians and Beothuks (Newfoundland)
lending credence to a charge that is receiving increasing response (Chapter 7).
To qualify as genocide, events must, at the very least, be on a sufficient scale
to affect a whole group; must be a deliberate act of policy rather than just
incompetence or random violence; and must aim not merely at the eradication of
a culture but at the eradication of a people.

INTERPRETING ATROCITY: STRATEGIES OF MANAGEMENT

The conceptual link between all of the preceding discussion of types of atrocity
is the extremity of heritage dissonance that they are likely to create. It might be
thought that the main goals of management of involved parties was to reduce or
to avoid altogether such dissonance. More subtly, it could be assumed that in
104 DISSONANT HERITAGE

terms of realpolitik the objective would be to evade the opprobrium of perpe-

tration whilst advantageously appropriating the martyrdom of victimisation.
This may be broadly the case but as will be discussed below, both strategies
have their limits. The motive behind both strategies may include the manipu-
lation of this essentially sensitive heritage so that it contributes to a variety of
contemporary goals even though these may historically have had little relevance
to the original atrocity events.
However, certain characteristics of the atrocity itself will influence the
effectiveness of any interpretive strategy and should be first reviewed.

The ‘usability’ of atrocity

The focus of the argument upon how atrocity is incorporated into heritage in
pursuit of specific objectives raises the obvious question of the qualities of any
atrocity that render it usable in this way. The effectiveness is likely to be
determined by the interplay of five factors.
1. The nature of the cruelty perpetrated. This favours the unusual or spectacular
over the rather more commonplace; death by dramatic immolation (e.g.
burning of the Jewish refugees in the Clifford Tower in York in 1190) or
mass drowning (Vendeeans at Nantes in 1793) is more memorable and
shocking but no more effective than death by influenza or long-term
malnutrition. A major motive of perpetrators, as argued earlier, may be the
creation of just such spectacular memories of shocking events.
2. The nature of the victims. These should be characterised by innocence,
vulnerability and non-complicity in the occurrence. Numbers as such have
little relevance if only because the human imagination has trouble extending
empathy beyond small groups. The 1692 massacre of Glencoe, involving 13
victims, has been used as an important national atrocity heritage helped by
the late nineteenth century romanticism of the Jacobite cause, and even
perhaps by the evocative physical scenery. Half a million casualties in the
1916 Somme offensive is rarely considered to be an atrocity. However, if the
victims of the latter had been unarmed, or better had been women and
children machine-gunned, then a claim of atrocity would be likely regardless
of the numbers involved. Conversely if the victims are suspected of
complicity or provocation they forfeit much of their wider appeal as atrocity
victims. Unpopular or unfashionable minorities provide obvious examples.
For example, three million Sudeten Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia
in 1945, suffered around 200000 deaths which largely passed without
outside notice let alone sympathy because of world memory of the role this
group played in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938. As we
noted above, however, the victim status of unpopular losing sides may
change if their subsequent resurgence of power or fashionability should
provoke a reinterpretation of atrocity in their favour. On a different plane,
‘misfit’ groups such as homosexuals are susceptible to changing popularity
in terms of their heritage significance as Holocaust victims (Chapter 4).
3. The nature of the perpetrators. Those who committed the crime should be
THE HERITAGE OF ATROCITY 105

unambiguously identifiable, preferably as a distinguishable group, different

from the victims and ideally also from the observer for whom the event is
interpreted. The most effective approach is to demonise the perpetrators (as
‘SS’ in Nazi Europe, ‘Selous Scouts’ in Rhodesia, ‘Ustasha’ in Croatia, ‘Black
and Tans’ in Ireland, etc.), thus preventing identification of observers with
the perpetrators who quite clearly are portrayed as not people like us (or
ideally not ‘normal people’ at all). Once again, however, the nature of the
group in question is vulnerable to revisionist de-demonisation.
4. The high-profile visibility of the original event. Memorability and effectiveness
are not necessarily time-bound, as can be seen in the extremely long
memories of injustice in many group heritages, but recentness may help. It
may be not so much the nature of the documentation and verification
(which technologically favours the recent) so much as the effectiveness of the
promotion, particularly when the event is within living memory of partici-
pants and observers. Even in times of pre-electronic media, broadsheets,
poems, songs and political speeches were essential instruments in stimulat-
ing popular indignation, which in turn led to official or unofficial action
(witness Milton’s sonnet ‘On the late massacre in Piedmont’ (1655) or
Gladstone’s “Bulgarian atrocities’ speech of 1876, for example). However,
modern information technologies extend the range, immediacy and popular
impact. The recent (April 1993) television reporting of the massacre of the
c. 200 inhabitants of the village of Ahinice, Bosnia or the seemingly random
killing at a distance of civilians in Sarajevo, had an impact upon popular
sentiment in the West that appears to have had an effect upon policy in a
way that other events earlier in the same war did not. Television allows a
‘massacre in the living room’ in that it can relate the deaths of ordinary
people doing ordinary things to other ordinary people. The impact of this
relatively recent possibility is enormous, if as yet little understood, but
equally could be dangerous if ‘sympathy-fatigue’ sets in amongst observers.
It is also highly selective in the choice of victims: the lack of an immediate
world reaction to the Hutu massacres in Rwanda or the estimated 200 000
victims of Indonesian violence in East Timor can be simply explained by the
absence of a BBC camera team: indeed world interest in East Timor was
stirred only after the broadcast of a 1990s videotape, some 15 years after the
violence had begun.
5. The survival of the record. So far no comment has been made on the seemingly
obvious point that the usability of an event will be influenced by the
quantity and quality of the surviving records of it. On the one hand it is
likely that perpetrators of many types of atrocity will go to some lengths to
eradicate all vestiges of what occurred, whether physically by the destruc-
tion of buildings and levelling of sites, or whether in terms of documentary
evidence and even surviving potential witnesses. This may be because such
annihilation of all traces is part of the objective of genocide or because of a
fear of ultimate retribution. In addition, it may be in the interests of many
survivors and their descendents, whether perpetrators, victims or by-
standers, to conceal and allow such events to be forgotten in the name of
reconciliation, social unity or just individual psychological recovery.
106 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Managing victimisation
Personalisation
People have enormous difficulties in grasping the scale of atrocity and find it
easier to identify with specified individuals or small groups as a symbolic
representation of the wider situation. Christianity has long recognised the value
of the individual martyr to serve as case and example to others. Anne Frank
made more vivid the systematic persecution of the Jewish people during the
Second World War than any numerical total of victims. It is not even necessary
for the personified victim actually to have existed; a literary character can
equally serve. Evangeline, Longfellow’s tragic fictional poetic heroine, so
represents the expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia in 1755 as to be
commemorated by the only on-site statue in the Grand Pré National Historic
Park dedicated to this event.

The group as victim

The self-identification of an entire ethnic group as collective victim can be a
powerful instrument of state-building. The ‘all hands against us’ model not only
shapes an internal cohesion but powers a belief in independent self-reliant
action.
The Afrikaners developed a heritage of conflict not only with the indigenous
peoples of South Africa but also with other whites, especially the British. The
self-reliant Boer had as folk enemy not only the ‘swaartgevaar’, the threat of
being numerically overwhelmed by blacks, but also being subverted by the
interfering liberal imperialism of British colonial governments. An _ ethnic
solidarity could be built upon the heritage of a succession of assaults from the
Zulu wars (e.g. ‘the massacre of Dingaan’s kraal’), the two major wars against
the British (especially the heritage of British anti-guerrilla scorched-earth
operations of 1899-1902 involving the internment of civilians) and later the
economic and cultural sanctions campaigns of the Commonwealth and the
United Nations. The victimisation was thus almost complete and continuous and
culminated in the doctrine of ‘total onslaught’ against South Africa in the 1980s.
The concept of the ‘volkslaager’ (memorialised in ‘trekkersdag’) was aided not
only by the existence of external enemies but by the non-existence of external
friends, as for example any link with an original Dutch motherland.
The South African case (see Chapter 8) is dramatic and was far-reaching in its
effects, creating a dominant ideology that governed a state in its extreme form of
apartheid from 1948 to 1991, and was a major focus of world attention because
of its contradiction of prevailing ideas on the political and social implications of
race. There are, however, many similar if less influential cases of strong group
identity being formed by the heritage of past atrocity endured, leading to the
defensive ‘laager’ against a hostile world. The Rhodesian white settler minority,
for example, schooled on the heroism against numerical odds of the Matabele
wars, and on the betrayal of the outside world exemplified by the dismantling of
the Central African Federation by the UK, seized power in 1965 in defiance of
the colonial government, the black majority and the world community.
THE HERITAGE OF ATROCITY 107
A case powered by political and religious identity rather than race would be
another currently unfashionable minority, Northern Irish protestants. A fear of
being overwhelmed numerically by internal enemies (again fostered by a
heritage of heroic resistance against the odds) and of a lack of understanding
and even betrayal by external powers (especially the UK from the Irish treaty of
1922 to the suspension of Stormont 50 years later) combine to produce a
powerful group cohesion that has been a major factor in the intractability of the
constitutional future of Northern Ireland. Aspects of the same fears are likely to
explain Serbian intransigence in reaction to various externally devised negotiated
settlements in the conflicts in former Yugoslavia, with evidence of a world
conspiracy being provided by United Nations sanctions, Nato airstrikes, and
even Muslim volunteers and finance (Almond, 1994)
The most clear-cut case of victim-group identity, based upon the experience
of atrocity underpinning a political idea, is Jewish Zionism promoting the
return to Palestine and the subsequent use of the Holocaust to establish the
state of Israel in 1948. Not only did the Holocaust help to obtain critical foreign
support from the United States and Western Europe, as some form of com-
pensation for the perceived compliance of these countries in the atrocity; it
provided a determination among those establishing the state that this was the
only means of preventing a recurrence. The Holocaust was so used notwith-
standing dissonance within Israel regarding its significance: the pre-Holocaust
Zionist settlers were initially reluctant to identify with the victimisation of
kinsfolk who remained in Europe rather than resolve the centuries-old ‘Jewish
problem’ by returning to the original homeland (Golding, 1938); recognition of
the Holocaust as the cultural property of all Jews thus encountered internal
ideological tension (Drainie, 1992).
It is in several respects evident from the Israeli case that statebuilding on the
basis of group victimisation has limitations. It makes a claim to atrocity
victimisation that not only requires group solidarity but has tended to exclude
others. This makes identification with the victims difficult for non-Jews: virtually
the whole happening being projected as a specifically private Jewish event rather
than one with which everyone could associate. It may make such identification
dependent upon acceptance of its political results in the state of Israel and even
provide some justification of antisemitism by demonstrating that the loyalty of
Jews was to another state. Perhaps most significant, it may conceal other
‘holocausts’ through its insistence on the uniqueness of these events rather than
their intrinsic nature within the human condition. Equally the founding of a
national self-image on the basis of victimisation has disadvantages for that state:
there are limits to the effectiveness as a national idea of adopting the permanent
role of victim. There is a requirement for renaissance to grow out of the tragedy
and to supersede it. There was thus an early rejection by Israel of what were
seen as the attitudes of the ghetto victim (symbolised by the adoption of
Hebrew, the language of the historically successful biblical Israel and not
Yiddish, the German variant of the European ghetto, as the official state
language). The accommodating, passively accepting, self-deprecating ghetto Jew
was replaced by the active self-confident ‘shabra’ of the kibbutz, as a national
stereotype more in keeping with the Zionist ideal.
108 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Acceptance of blame by the victim

One relatively rare method victims have of managing atrocity experienced by
them is to place events in some comparative context that explains if not
exonerates. Almost every German city above a certain size and economic
importance suffered aerial bombardment in the period 1942-45 as part of a
deliberate allied strategy to ‘dehouse the German worker’ and destroy urban
economic production (Hewitt, 1983). The results of this policy are visible in the
new building in every inner city and thus difficult to ignore, presenting a
problem of interpretation for the successor governments in the post-war federal
republic who wished to avoid casting their new western allies in the role of
villains. There are many attempts at local management other than just ignoring
the historical period. Among these are the provision of contexts. Rostock
cathedral, for example, describes its destruction by allied bombers alongside a
description of the destruction of Coventry cathedral by the Luftwaffe. More
subtly the town hall at Kassel exhibits two commemorative plaques, one listing
the loss of life and property during the war and the other the election results of
1932 which returned a National Socialist majority (Ashworth, 1991a). In a similar
vein at Peenemtinde the victims of allied bombing are remembered alongside
those of German rockets in a 50th anniversary chapel rededication under the
simple rubric ‘du sollst nicht toten’. Furthermore, the Peace Memorial Museum in
Hiroshima has been redesigned (controversially) to address Japanese aggression
in the Second World War. The latter is of particular significance in the light of
the controversy in the United States over the aircraft ‘Enola Gay’ which dropped
the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. An interpretation focusing on the victims
aroused protests from veterans who felt they were being recast from heroes to
perpetrators of atrocity, which obliged the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington to revise its presentation. In both cases the consumer is expected
to place the atrocity in a wider explanatory context in which the victims become
at least in some sense accomplices in the act of their own victimisation.

The management of perpetration

If victims of atrocity have the problems inherent in interpreting their heritage of

victimisation, perpetrators also have difficulties in deciding how to interpret
their heritage of perpetration. Since it is generally better to perceive oneself a
victim than a perpetrator, it is unsurprising that the management of victimis-
ation may tend towards its inflation and that of perpetration its denial.
One obvious defensive group strategy is deliberate collective amnesia. The
events are ignored in official taught histories and public commemoration and a
popular consensus is encouraged that regards the events as too distant and too
irrelevant to more pressing current concerns to be worth further consideration.
The most obvious recent case is the generation of West Germans and Japanese
concerned with the economic and social reconstruction of their countries after
1945 and their political realignment from enemies to reliable allies. It was in the
interest of neither conquered nor conquerors to dwell upon the atrocities of
1933-45. In the case of East Germany, amnesia was supplanted by victimisation
THE HERITAGE OF ATROCITY 109
through the device of blaming nazism and capitalism for German atrocities and
furthermore for allied atrocities against Germans.
Deliberate amnesia is a management strategy that is in the interests not only
of the direct perpetrators but also those who actively or passively collaborated.
Most countries of post-Second World War Europe had a majority, certainly of
the influential classes, who had either profited from collaboration or merely
survived through a tacit collaboration or at least absence of active resistance.
Understandably there was a post-war consensus that there was nothing to be
gained by digging up a past best forgotten in the interests of a harmonious
future. Even returning resistance fighters or deportees found that their best
strategy lay in silence among their neighbours and work colleagues. Amnesia
was especially imperative in a case such as Ukraine, in different parts of which
resistance and collaboration had variously occurred with respect to both Nazis
and Soviets.
The complexities of amnesia in practice are illustrated by the Channel Islands,
-where the existing authorities, officials and police, as well as the civilian
population, were explicitly instructed by their home government not to offer
resistance but to collaborate with the occupying German power in the interests
of the welfare of the civilian population. Some Jews were deported and foreign
conscript labour was employed with the knowledge and connivance of the local
authorities and population. Immediate post-war attitudes were therefore
complex. Collaborating officials were formally rewarded for carrying out their
duties, not blamed for conniving at atrocity (Cruickshank, 1980), and there was a
clear popular consensus that the events of the occupation were best neither
remembered nor commemorated.
The success of policies of deliberate amnesia becomes less likely in second and
subsequent generations who have less personal reasons for concealment and
more potential curiosity about gaps in the historical record which delayed-
release archives can often fill. Deliberate amnesia thus appears likely to be
successful only in the short term, to which 1990s post-Soviet nationalist re-
evaluation in Ukraine and media attention to the Channel Islands archives bear
witness. With respect to collaboration in the extermination of the Jews in both
cases, subsequent relations with the state of Israel have pressured the end of
amnesia. Whether a balanced assessment of heritage so affected can be attained
within living memory remains a moot point however.
If collective amnesia fails and complicity in past atrocity must be confronted
there are two, logically contradictory, management strategies possible: one can
be labelled relativism and the other demonisation.
The first seeks to mitigate blame by extending the group of perpetrators as
widely as possible. Simply put, if everyone is guilty then no-one can be blamed.
Such relativism can spread blame thinly through the entire society or country
(‘everyone was doing it’) and beyond by citing similar events elsewhere (‘if we
were doing it, so were you’). It was the wartime radio broadcasts of Goebbels,
together with the 1941 wartime propaganda film ‘Ohm Kruger’, that spread the
idea of British ‘concentration camps’ in the South African War while the German
final solution for the Jews was in progress.
The dangers of diluting individual responsibility by assuming a broad
110 DISSONANT HERITAGE

collective guilt can be compounded by introducing deterministic economic or

social explanations. If unseen and uncontrollable external forces can be invoked
then all individual morality can be reduced to automatic, and thus individually
blameless, reactions. The Great Depression can be credited with causing the rise
of Hitler and thus the extermination camps can be explained by blind economic
forces rather than evil people.
The second defensive strategy is to limit blame to a specific group separate
from society as a whole who can then be demonised as solely guilty, thereby
exonerating the rest. Such a demonised group should ideally be capable of being
labelled and then distanced from society, or even if possible from humanity itself
(‘It wasn’t us; it was the ruling class, the Communists, the Nazis, etc.’). It is best
if members of such a group cannot be physically brought to witness: that raises
the danger of revealing their all too obvious humanity and thus links with the
rest of society, but also exposes the danger of a wider complicity being
demonstrated. This can be a highly successful strategy if such a guilty group can
be found, fixed in the popular imagination and then distanced and disowned by
present society. The post-war German Federal Republic is the obvious case,
where the interests of the victorious allies coincided with the defeated German
population and rebuilding the country necessitated reducing the atrocities of the
immediate past to the antics of a group of Nazis who were probably insane,
divorced from the majority of past and present populations and anyway no
longer existed. Conversely, East Germany located the same demonised group as
alive and well in the Federal Republic. Now a united Germany is faced with the
problem of how to commemorate German resistance to Nazi atrocity: who, apart
from now unpopular Communists, can legitimately cast the first stone at the
‘demons’?
The danger of demonisation is of course that it fails to recognise the causes of
specific atrocities, and more broadly dehumanisation fails to acknowledge the
human flaws that cause such events and thus makes their repetition more likely.
The visitor to concentration camps, for example, may find it possible to identify
with the victims as portrayed but next to impossible to identify with the
perpetrators, who are presented as sub-human SS and therefore ‘not like us’.
A more aggressive strategy, which mirrors the idea of victim acceptance
described above, is to blame the victims for their own plight. The argument
is that they, in whole or more usually in part, brought the atrocity upon
themselves by their own actions or even lack of avoiding actions. The very
identification of the victims as a specific group necessary for their successful
victimisation can be used as a justification by demonstrating their separateness,
their failure to assimilate to the majority society and thus a veiled threat to it.
A single case that illustrates a number of these interpretive strategies because
it is relatively well documented is the forced displacement and death of a large
proportion of the Ottoman Armenian community between 1915 and 1920.
Official Turkish reactions to the Armenian genocide have varied over the past 70
years and have at various times taken the following lines.

(a) It never happened. Various necessary compulsory migrations and the

inevitable difficulties these caused were exaggerated and used by external
THE HERITAGE OF ATROCITY 111
groups to further their political claims on the Turkish republic. Thus no-one
is to blame because no atrocity happened. This was the defence of the
accused members of the Turkish Committee for Union and Progress brought
to trial in Turkey after the First World War, largely as a result of allied
pressures.
(b) It did happen but it was neither unique nor deliberate. It was a widespread
and understandable concomitant of wartime disruption, especially in remote
areas. No-one in particular is to blame, just the general condition of war.
(c) It did happen but so did the displacement and massacre of large numbers of
the Turkish Muslim population in Russia and the Balkans before 1914. Many
of these dispossessed groups had actually been settled in Armenian areas
and retaliation was understandable if not condonable. Foreign condemna-
tion of Turkey ignores the results of the Greek intervention (1921-22) and
subsequent officially sanctioned ‘ethnic cleansing’ population exchanges
(Treaty of Lausanne 1923) in Thrace and Anatolia.
(d) It occurred under the Ottoman regime and not its successor, the Turkish
Republic, therefore a defunct government is to blame.
(e) It was at least in part the fault of the victims. They were a separate
commercially prominent community and this provoked dislike or just
indifference among Turkish peasant populations. Some Armenian separatist
groups deliberately provoked the Turkish authorities into an over-reaction
which would raise internal dissent and external sympathy. During the war
they agitated for the defeat of the Ottomans and union with their co-
religionists in the Russian Empire. They were actual or potential traitors and
thus the victims provoked, deliberately or unwittingly, the atrocity. This is
the ‘provocation thesis’ advanced, at least in mitigation, by some outside
observers (see, for example, Shaw and Shaw, 1977).

Equally the Armenians themselves have subsequently reacted ambiguously to

their position as victims. The events of 1915-20 have been used for a number
of different purposes. In the Soviet Armenian Republic, and now its successor
state, they are interpreted publicly in a ‘classic’ state-building way. The relict
Armenian community in Turkey, however, prefers a more low-profile defensive
interpretation that does not antagonise the majority among the secular state
in which they live. Finally, Armenians in exile, especially in the United States,
were in a particularly ambiguous position. The Turkish perpetrators were now
dependable national NATO allies, while the Soviet liberators from the Turks,
including the only existing Armenian state, were national ideological enemies.
However, ambiguity has not prevented repeated acts of Armenian-Turkish
terrorism extending into remote times and places, as in Ottawa, Canada, in the
1980s (see Chapter 7).

Strategies of reconciliation through reinterpretation

If the perceived experience of atrocity is so deeply felt and enduring through

time as is evident from many of the cases already discussed, then a deliberate
policy of reinterpretation of events in order to arrive at a quite different position
112 DISSONANT HERITAGE

is likely to be particularly difficult to pursue. However, the imperatives of

changed political/economic alignments may be compelling. Franco-German
post-1945 political rapprochement is echoed in the Douaumont ossuary and
museum at Verdun and there could be other attempts at reinterpreting
battlefields in terms of reconciliation of the countries involved on the basis of
shared suffering. In the most cataclysmic case with the most profound ultimate
political and economic significance, the 1941-45 Eastern Front between Germany
and Russia, no such reinterpretation has yet occurred (Smirnova, personal
communication 1994).
However, it must be remembered that contemporary reinterpretation can
involve reversing the atrocity perception: what was seen as atrocity suffered
becomes atrocity committed on others. This is a characteristic settler—native
scenario in the societies discussed in Chapter 7 and also in Chapter 8 (when settler
minorities lose control over interpretation). In this situation, in the field or in
museums, an atrocity interpretation may need to be created before reconciliation
can occur.

Difficulties in the practice of atrocity heritage interpretation

Whatever strategy is adopted there is a series of problems particularly apparent
in the interpretation of atrocity. Underlying these problems is the fundamental
sensitivity of atrocity heritage, not only in its multiple dissonance but most
particularly in the potential for memorialisation to provoke glorification, a
disturbing political issue to which we return in conclusion below.

Intended and received messages

The messages conveyed through the selection, packaging and interpretation of
atrocity heritage can be seen in terms of those projected by various producers
and those received by visitors. These are unlikely to be the same in every respect
as transmission itself is imperfect and they can on occasion differ dramatically.
This is true of all heritage, and was central to the discussion of museum display
policies in Chapter 3, but with atrocity there is reason to suspect the discrepancy
will be wider.
The intensity of emotion evoked by the events may create protective barriers
against their understanding. The individual raises defences blocking the
reception of realities which would otherwise be overwhelmingly horrific. Con-
versely, but not necessarily contradictorily, many aspects of human unpleasant-
ness exercise an attraction. Horror, if presented in a suitable context, is a popular
topic of which literature and film are obvious manifestations. ‘Horror tourism’,
the visit to the castle dungeons or a ‘Jack the Ripper’ trail through London, may
be extended to encompass the sites of more recent atrocities and disasters. We
do not propose to discuss the complexity of psychological motivations for this
nor to find an acceptable line between the enjoyment of the fairground thrill of
proximity to exciting events and more serious psychiatric conditions. However,
the point is relevant here in so far as the messages being projected by site
managers, however well meaning and earnestly expressed, may have little to do
with the motives, expectations or experiences of some visitors to such sites.
THE HERITAGE OF ATROCITY 113
The event and the site

Attempts to interpret the events of atrocity may be complicated by the nature of

the sites associated with them. Many massacres occurred on sites that were
deliberately inaccessible. Some may not be locatable to any site or were so
widespread as to be difficult to associate with any single site. In the case of the
Holocaust, innumerable sites are involved, from the symbolic beginning at the
Wannsee conference villa outside Berlin, to sites of specific slaughters committed
by German Einsatzgruppen, often with local collaboration, such as Babi Yar,
Kiev, through inner city ‘holding tank’ ghettoes, to concentration/death camps
considered below; overall a continental-scale industry of death which is a
changing multijurisdictional interpretive nightmare. In such cases interpretation
to visitors may be both very difficult (particularly in so far as interpretations in
one location imply a critical reflection on those elsewhere) and very susceptible
to creative locational manipulation for social, political or economic ends.
-A dramatic illustration of locational creativity is the US Holocaust Memorial
Museum, established in the 1990s adjacent to the Mall in Washington, DC. Its
primary purpose (according to the ‘visitors’ guide’) is to inform Americans,
memorialise the atrocity to Jews and other Nazi victims, and ‘inspire visitors to
contemplate the moral implications of their choices and responsibilities as
citizens in an interdependent world’. Its location apparently remote from the
events it commemorates is in fact highly strategic: it is accessible to the world’s
largest surviving Jewish population; it reinforces a central message of global,
notably including US, responsibility; and at the nerve centre of US iconography
and global democratic power, it provides the best guarantee that its
interpretation will survive living memory through a future fraught with political
uncertainty (the US President’s opening address to this effect being prominently
displayed). The reliance of this interpretation upon film, documentation, oral
history and reconstruction, more than upon original artefacts or a sacralised site,
in no way weakens its impact or its locational significance. Market-driven
locational creativity of Holocaust museums extends even further, however, e.g.
the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance.
Some actual sites of atrocity although identifiable and accessible possess no
surviving attributes or physical artefacts that link the location with the events
commemorated. Interpretation through a marker may be at best ineffective in
evoking the events, while reconstruction or pictorial re-enactments will be
difficult to handle since the entire process of re-creation must necessarily be
value-laden.
Similarly the present land uses or activities may bear no relationship to the
events to be interpreted and indeed may detract from such interpretations. Many
rural atrocity sites are tranquil pastoral scenes that do not immediately evoke
horror — the 1914-18 battlefields of Picardy and Flanders being the classic
illustration; and the Umschlagplatz from where the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto
were shipped to Treblinka bore scant resemblance to the public transport depot
which succeeded it, its memorial notwithstanding. Conversely, current users
may find the use of the site to interpret atrocity distasteful or undesirable.
Dachau is a pleasant residential suburb of Munich whose inhabitants would no
114 DISSONANT HERITAGE

doubt rather not be associated with the camp. The French village of Oradour-
sur-Glane, the site of the massacre of its inhabitants in 1944, has recently decided
to downplay the commemoration so that the events of more than 50 years ago
no longer dominate the consciousness of the place and its present inhabitants
(Keegan, 1989; Uzzell, 1989).
The case of the commemoration of the expulsion of the Acadian inhabitants of
the Canadian Maritime provinces in 1755 illustrates a number of these points
simultaneously (see Chapter 7 and at length in Ashworth, 1993b). The event is of
central importance to the self-consciousness of modern Acadians who have used
their self-identification as victims to consolidate group cohesion, defend their
language rights and generally power their renaissance in economic and political
life. The difficulty has been to associate these events with specific sites which can
be used to project these interpretations. The events themselves occurred over a
wide area and very few physical artefacts have survived: partly because Acadian
society produced little architecture and partly because most of the settlements
were deliberately destroyed. The most notable and distinctive technological
attribute was the water control system which by its nature is almost impossible
to present to visitors. Commemoration has been officially concentrated at two
sites (Grand Pré, Nova Scotia and Memramcook, New Brunswick); both are
Canadian National Historic Sites which contain representations and memorials
to the events, but neither relates specifically to the locations in which they were
set. Conversely, the iron cross marker on the actual site of major deportations
near Grand Pré has no official government recognition and is inaccessible except
on foot through private land. Finally, the sites of pre-1755 Acadian settlement
were frequently almost immediately reoccupied by new and English-speaking
settlers, while Acadians returning after 1760 settled other areas. Thus the
locations of the events and those of the present population to which they relate
are now frequently spatially separate.

Atrocity as entertainment attraction

Strange and distasteful as it may seem when expressed so baldly, it is clear that
aspects of human unpleasantness can become, and can be deliberately used as, a
source of entertainment rather than embarrassment. The castle, battlefield,
massacre site and even concentration camp can become the object of a rec-
reational trip and be promoted as a tourism attraction. From the Tower of
London to prisons of recent vintage, there is much of gruesome fascination for
tourists and it is not coincidental that some of the most infamous nineteenth
century penal colonies have become tourism attractions after their abandonment.
These include Port Arthur in Tasmania, Alcatraz off San Francisco, Devil’s Island
in French Guiana and most recently Robben Island near Cape Town (Chapter 8).
The passing of time may remove much of the horror, leaving only a compelling
story from a distant past to be related as entertainment, or even a contest of
skills that can be reduced to a computer game. The visit to the castle dungeons,
always the most popular part of any castle, and the visit to the concentration
camp are separated by the scale of the atrocities that occurred but also by time.
The elapse of time may not only soften the events themselves but alter the
THE HERITAGE OF ATROCITY igi)
responses of visitors who are no longer personally involved in the events being
viewed and thus do not suffer dissonance.
If such healing is a matter of time then when does atrocity become acceptable
entertainment and for which groups? The cultural memory of some victims may
perpetuate a quasi-personal involvement for generations; others may distance
themselves rapidly from past events. Are these recreational developments to be
welcomed as a sign of a healthy emergence from a barbaric past which can now
be viewed with detachment, or are they to be condemned as in doubtful taste
giving offence to some and dehumanising all? Such treatment by the Thais of the
infamous Bridge on the River Kwai reportedly gives offence to both Japanese
perpetrators and Western victims of the slave labour that built it; this suggests
that living memory must expire before the question can be dispassionately
weighed.

_The case of urban walls

Almost all continental European towns were at one time walled, and walled
towns make high-profile tourism attractions. The possibility of selling walled
towns more effectively to tourists has been grasped by the European Walled
Towns Friendship Association which consists largely of those smaller European
purpose-built fortress towns with intact defensive systems. The wall is deliber-
ately stressed as a tourism advantage, enclosing and bounding the tourism
product, allowing orientation and if possible a tourism routeway on top or beside
it. Further, the symbol of the wall is interpreted as a sign of friendship, containing
and accommodating the visitor but also representing the network of such towns
bound together in co-operative marketing. The historical fact that such walls were
often built either to keep enemies out or to contain and control untrustworthy
populations, having police, customs and taxation functions, is overlooked.
Historically they represent either the national or dynastic enmities or local tyranny
and oppression: such towns include the English Edwardian fortresses built to
consolidate the conquest of North Wales, the Venetian colonies in Lombardy and
the Adriatic, and various French royal attempts to centralise religion and
administration in the provinces. None of these historical topics, which frequently
if not always imply atrocity, would seem intrinsically entertaining. However, this
does not appear to be a cause of dissonance among tourists, although it can be
among the agencies responsible for the conservation of the artefacts themselves
who are aware of the original social and political uses of such heritage.
The Berlin Wall of the Cold War (1961-89), as an internal barrier across the
city, may appear unrelated to the historical phenomenon of walled towns.
However, its arguably atrocious consequences, in the many deaths of those who
tried to cross it, may well symbolise the human cost, now lost in oblivion, of
earlier town walls. The Berlin Wall was at once the archetypical symbol and
ultimate perceived atrocity of the ideological division of Europe (see the
discussion of Berlin in Chapter 6). Its heritage has been recorded by the Haus
am Checkpoint Charlie, which maintains in effect a monument and a museum of
atrocity (Hildebrandt, 1990), and in memorials along its former line outside the
Reichstag and on a nearby remnant of the wall itself. Ironically its creation left
116 DISSONANT HERITAGE

the power centre of the preceding regime, Hitler’s underground bunker, stranded
in the adjacent cordon sanitaire, leaving a subsequently reunited Berlin to wrestle
with the dilemma of interpreting this, the final heritage of Nazi atrocity. A centre
of disarmament studies was proposed for the site in 1990 but it remained an
undeveloped and unmarked mound disfigured by detritus. A suggested under-
ground museum in the bunker remnants had raised the spectre of neo-Nazi
enshrinement; redevelopment for government buildings was however challenged
by preservationists and awaited parliamentary resolution in 1995.

The durability of the artefacts of war.

One of the complicating factors in managing the heritage of war is the relative
durability of many military artefacts. This stems in part from the nature of
fortification systems which were built to resist physical assault, in part from the
nature of military technical investment which has tended to conservatism if only
because of the costs of re-equipment involved and consequently in part from the
sheer difficulty of demolition and eradication. Military works therefore tend to
survive long after they become technically obsolete and have proved more
resilient than the relics of other functions. Consequently castles, walls and even
bunkers are vastly over-represented in the building stock of particular historical
periods; often, as in Kénigsberg (Chapter 6), being the main or only physical
survivals of a particular society (Ashworth, 1991a). The over-representation of
the survivals leads in turn to an over-representation in the interpretation of the
historical record and in the popular imagination, leading to the idea that
organised physical conflict is the normal condition of humanity. However,
resilience, coupled with their high-profile visibility, renders the interpretation of
the artefacts of war unavoidable, whether or not considered desirable or indeed
aesthetically pleasing. The case of Hitler’s ‘Wolfsschanze’ in East Prussia, blown
up by the Germans in 1945 but persisting as a dangerous and ineradicable ruin,
is a dramatic and eloquent testimony to these points (Figure 5.2). The Poles have
made a virtue of the absence of practical alternatives by promoting its devel-
opment as a German-oriented tourism attraction, recalling both atrocity but also
resistance in the case of the Stauffenberg bomb attack on Hitler, if at the risk of
attracting neo-Nazis. The contemporaneous Atlantic Wall, primarily along the
French coast, is probably the supreme example of durable fortifications; being
largely intact it has been subject to a wide range of adaptive reuses not restricted
to historic tourism.

The interpretation of battlefield sites

The sites where battles occurred are usually rather difficult to treat as heritage
and interpret to visitors. They are nearly always too extensive to appreciate and
have changed over the years in their appearance and land uses. The more recent
the battle, the wider its extent, and the older smaller-scale battle sites are likely
now to be a terrain that is all but unrecognisable, as visitors seeking the narrow
pass of Thermopylae or coastal plain of Marathon have long discovered. The
nature of the physical site together with the scale of the battle may be critical in
THE HERITAGE OF ATROCITY TL7.

Figure 5.2. Hitler’s Wolfsschanze, East Prussia, Poland (JET, 1992)

determining the potential for interpreting the struggle as a whole. At El

Alamein, the desert terrain is hostile to the survival of evidence (beyond graves
and a small museum) and in the long run the dissonance of its quasi-colonial
setting to all combatants may prove equally hostile, a problem common to many
battles in ‘third party’ cultural environments. In terms of physical site, compare
also the near impossibility of overlooking, let alone understanding, Borodino
(1812), with the battle in the same year at Queenston Heights, Canada, which
allows the whole of what was a small-scale skirmish to be appreciated,
permitting the latter battle to have achieved a mythical importance in the
creation of Canadian identity (Berton, 1980).
Given the number and historical importance of battles it is remarkable that
very few are in fact commemorated effectively or at all. Many historically
decisive fields have no marker or only a message that around here a battle took
place. At the other extreme the marking and interpretation of United States Civil
War battlefields is almost universal and highly effective, with enormous
attention being lavished on multi-media interpretations. The explanation lies in
the use of these for underpinning national unity and the tragic costs of rejecting
that Union which must not be repeated.
A dirigiste variant on reinterpreting battlefields has long been present in
Flanders, but given the new language-based political structures in Belgium it is
now being actively pursued. The battles of the Ieper salient from 1914 to 1918
are generally interpreted now by British and German sources in terms of the
enormity of the casualties, typified by the daily trumpeter at the Menin Gate.
However, the battle took place in Flanders with the participation of the
surviving Belgian army (the ‘Army of the Ijzer’). Flemish nationalist groups now
118 DISSONANT HERITAGE

interpret this as part of a wider oppression of Flemish-speaking soldiers by a

French-speaking government and officer class. The Diksmuide monument,
amongst others, has become a pilgrimage destination for the assertion of Flemish
nationalism (as well as attracting neo-fascist groups from elsewhere in Europe),
rather than the futility of war and particularly the clash of nationalisms that
caused the First World War, with the ‘enemy’ being the Walloons as much as
the Germans.
A curiosity is the failure to use Waterloo for the purposes of European
reconciliation. One of the last battles capable of being visually appreciated and
understood on the ground, involving troops from many countries of the existing
European Union, and fought close to the modern centre of the European idea at
Brussels, for causes on both sides that now have little meaning, it would seem
an ideal candidate for interpretation as the folly of warring European national
states and the wisdom of union. Its active exploitation, however, is in the hands
of many different, often private interpretation producers for whom the imperial
glories of the Napoleonic vision or the military skills of Wellington and the
steadfastness of British infantry make better marketable products than casualty
lists or sermons on the value of European political integration.

The interpretation of city bombardment

Urban bombardment and annihilation is a difficult subject for commemoration
for a number of reasons. On a purely technical level, unlike a castle or a camp
there may be nothing left to serve as a commemoration, and a marker in a
rebuilt city referring to its earlier destruction conveys only inert information. The
solution of leaving one ruined structure or part of one to symbolise the wider
destruction is a common compromise. Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtniskirche,
Coventry’s cathedral or Hiroshima’s ‘Ground Zero’ monument are well-known
examples. A problem in the interpretation is that a memorial to the sufferings of
civilians alone leaves unanswered the questions of the wider context such as
who did it and why. As we have considered above, these invite a major
interpretive dissonance in cities such as Guernica, Rotterdam, Turin, Leningrad
and many more. Vietnam, Japan and Germany, however, have been the main
victims of aerial bombardment (Hewitt, 1983). Vietnam, as far as it can be
ascertained, employs a straightforward victimisation interpretation, Japan largely
ignores the episode, with the exception of the two atomic bomb locations, but
Germany has to reconcile past enmities with present friendships and future pan-
European ambitions. The united Germany of 1990 inherited a confusing range of
interpretations from the eastern formula of Anglo-American-Nazi demonisation/
Soviet rescue (Bach Haus in Eisenach, Zwinger in Dresden) through ambivalence
such as Kassel’s to non-explanatory mural depictions of the buildings lost, as in
Stuttgart.

War memorials as heritage

Perhaps the most ubiquitous, and through their ubiquity often almost invisible,
memorials to war are the statues, plaques or shrines that serve as local war
THE HERITAGE OF ATROCITY 119
memorials in almost every town and village in Europe and beyond (Mayo, 1988).
These can be seen as a glorification of a noble cause, or even of war itself, and
sometimes were quite clearly designed as such. The grandiloquent and massive
memorial to the Spanish nationalist cause at Valle de los Caidos (‘The Valley of
the Fallen’) near Manzanares, the Italian First World War monument on the
Piave, or the Soviet memorial at Treptow Park, Berlin, are all designed on a scale
to evoke awe and reverence in the observer in the face of righteous struggle and
sacrifice. Most, however, are memorials to those individuals who, willingly or
not, participated and frequently died in a cause whose significance now has little
relevance to most people. Europe, and especially its capital cities, is littered with
memorials to wars long forgotten or to many best forgotten but there are very
few cases of dismantlement or reinterpretation. This tension between a memorial
to a cause and to individuals who suffered is now manifest in local indecision
about the future of Soviet memorials scattered through Central and Eastern
Europe. Towns and villages in Hungary, for example, have quickly and often
spontaneously removed Communist symbolism and inscriptions about ‘liber-
ation’ but are more ambiguous about removing names and even bodies of Soviet
troops who died achieving it. These local controversies are reflected symbolically
in the capital: the impressively dominating Soviet memorial that crowns Gellert
Hill overlooking Budapest has been successively dismantled and stripped of
Soviet heroic statuary and declarations of the anti-fascist struggle, but the
authorities are now ambiguous about further dismantling of what remains a
memorial to many thousands of individual Red Army personnel. An enormous
and largely anonymous monument now remains, partially vandalised both
officially and unofficially, awaiting presumably some new interpretive dedication
that will reflect current Hungarian views of the period.
This tension may occur not only with existing memorials but can create
controversy about whether a particular war should be commemorated. The US
participation in the Vietnam war between 1964 and 1972 was not nationally
commemorated until 1982. The initial failure to commemorate 58 000 US dead
compounded the feelings of alienation and rejection of veterans by a society
determined to put a very divisive period of history behind it. Unease over the
justice of the cause as well as over the ethnic inequality of the sacrifice led to
delay and indecision about what and how to commemorate, and subsequently
to much controversy about the result in the Washington Vietnam Veterans
Memorial (MacCannell, 1992). However, the Memorial’s intent was explicitly to
commemorate every human loss without making any political statement and
thereby to promote national reconciliation (Figure 5.3).
The practice by British Commonwealth forces of burying battle fatalities on
site has created, probably inadvertently, very powerful memorials to the
suffering of war. Neatly kept, simple and standardised cemeteries all over the
world convey almost no message about the cause but an unavoidable and,
especially in the massed ranks of headstones in Flanders or the Somme,
overwhelming message about the personal costs of war. Equally evocative are
the local First World War memorials in towns and villages around the world:
while grandiose dedications to King, Kaiser or Tsar may well now appear
dissonant or just inexplicable, the long lists of local names still make a powerful
120 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Figure 5.3. Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, DC, USA (JET, 1989)

point. Finally, a novel attempt to overcome the inherent ambiguity of the

messages of war memorials is the Ottawa ‘peacekeeping’ memorial (discussed in
Chapter 7) which accords public recognition to the professional military in a
non-militaristic post-imperial society.
One of the clearest cases of war memorials as the implicit heritage of atrocity
is Pearl Harbor in Hawaii (Figure 5.4). The sunken remains of USS Arizona
constitute the graveyard of most of the ship’s company, killed by the Japanese
attack on the ‘day of infamy’, 7 December 1941. A memorial built across the
sunken vessel recording the names of the dead is simultaneously a hallowed
place of pilgrimage and the focal point of the National Historic Landmark. It has
acquired a significant role in US-Japanese reconciliation, aided by its location in
the mid-Pacific, juxtaposed to Honolulu International Airport. There is a wider
heritage interpretation of Pearl Harbor, as the lever which enabled Roosevelt to
send the US to war and thereby guarantee ultimate Allied victory, for which the
‘atrocity’ had been a small political price (‘So we had won after all!’: Churchill,
1950: 539); this, however, requires study of the interpretive literature to grasp.

Museums of war or of peace?

The collection and presentation of the artefacts and records of war creates
particular problems. Given that war has played a major role in determining the
path of human history and is a major obsession of people even in peacetime, it
occupies a prominent role in heritage displays and fills the largest number of
museums specialising in particular human activities. The interpretation of this
heritage therefore merits special attention.
THE HERITAGE OF ATROCITY pa

Figure 5.4. Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, USA: Memorial on sunken USS Arizona from access
ferry (JET, 1988)

National military museums have most usually conveyed messages validating

and honouring the use of national armed force and even through such
interpretations played a major role in justifying specific political regimes. The
Invalides collection in Paris is perhaps the oldest and most typical but its stress
on glittering weaponry and fine uniforms, and more deeply the performance of
duty in far flung conquest, is echoed in many other capitals and regional cities.
The interpretation of war has changed as social values and expectations have
changed (see Kavanagh’s (1994) study of museums of the First World War) but
attempts to introduce alternatives raise a number of problems. To take two
extremes, interpretations relying upon the ‘scientific approach’ through the
evolution of technology or military science as an abstract management system
dehumanises the condition of war, reducing it to sets of processes unpeopled by
casualties. On the other hand, interpretations based upon the ‘horrors of war’
approach can induce unintended reactions including an anaesthetisation and
indifference through familiarity with suffering.
There have been a number of attempts to reinterpret the events and artefacts
associated with war quite differently. Although the ‘Guide to Museums of
Europe’ (Hudson and Nicholls, 1991) has a thematic listing of many hundred
possible types of museum, there is no inclusion of ‘peace’. However, a few self-
consciously labelled ‘peace museums’ frequently attempt to interpret events in
terms of the reactions and experiences of the individual participant rather than
sides and causes, with the implicit goal of reconciliation through common
suffering. The Battle of Normandy Memorial at Caen is a clear example of such
dedication to peace rather than description of war. Historical revisionism, which
can be seen as a permanent condition of all museums, may be expected to have
122 DISSONANT HERITAGE

a continuing impact upon this especially emotive category; in the contemporary

zeitgeist the feminisation of achievement and/or suffering is one area among
others where change can be anticipated (Senese, 1992).

THE CONCENTRATION/EXTERMINATION CAMP AS THE

HERITAGE OF GENOCIDE (FIGURES 5.5-5.10)

The most obvious, largely still visible and emotive heritage of genocide are the
camps designed for the collection, holding, transfer and eventual killing of
specified groups (including Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and political dissidents).
The place names themselves have become indelibly associated with atrocity and
thus even if no physical trace of these camps remains the heritage of the past
would still present a problem of interpretation. In fact despite demolition
attempts much remains at many such camps (e.g. Auschwitz), some have been
marked (e.g. Treblinka), and some partially reconstructed (as at Auschwitz,
where this is a matter of current contentious debate). Many contain museums
and interpretation centres and the more accessible are now major visitor
attractions, especially with the opening of Eastern Europe to mass tourism since
the end of the Cold War, from which a plethora of heritage reinterpretations
could also ensue.
There was distinction between concentration camps, designed chiefly for
political prisoners in pre-war Germany, and extermination or death camps, the
wartime means of genocide primarily in Poland (Keegan, 1989); all, however
perpetrated atrocity in varying guises. Subsequent interpretation has, however,
varied widely. Interpretation in the West German camps, especially Belsen and
Dachau, was not obviously ideological but tended to blame the Nazis as a
species now extinct. Camps located in the Soviet sphere of influence, most
especially Buchenwald and Auschwitz, identified the perpetrators not so much
as a national group but as a social class. Blame in this case was ideological, i.e.
anti-Nazi and anti-capitalist. Interpretation was thus linked to the Cold War
confrontation as we have seen in the broader context above. Its subsequent
interpretation is changing extensively and variably however.
Buchenwald in the former DDR was one of the original concentration camps,
associated with slave labour, medical experimentation and inhuman cruelty with
the end result of over 50 000 deaths. Its victims were initially political prisoners
but ultimately included a wide diversity of nationalities, including prisoners-of-
war. The DDR interpretation stressed the collaboration of capitalists still extant
in West Germany with the Nazi perpetration, and the international nature of the
victims, prominently including Germans; it particularly stressed Communist
leadership of ‘humanist’ resistance in Buchenwald, memorialised the murder
there of Communist leader Ernst Thalmann, and magnified Soviet involvement
(Red Army prisoners having been murdered there). By 1994, however, the DDR
exhibition was closed for reinterpretation. The removal of both conspicuous
marking condemning capitalist involvement and the principal memorial to
Thalmann together with archaeological investigation, indicate the end of the
DDR’s simplistic ideological extremism, though capitalist collaboration and
THE HERITAGE OF ATROCITY 123

Figure 5.5. Buchenwald concentration camp, Germany: entrance gate, with the clock
stopped at the time of liberation (JET, 1990)

be

Figure 5.6. Buchenwald: DDR memorial to Thalmann outside crematorium, reduced to

plaque only by 1994 (JET, 1990)
124 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Figure 5.7. Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Germany: gallows site, museum hut
(right) and Stalinist memorial (JET, 1994)

Communist-led resistance continue to receive limited acknowledgement in the

revised guidebook, as at Sachsenhausen and elsewhere, within a larger perspec-
tive yet to be determined. However, a preliminary exhibition interprets the
continuation of Buchenwald from 1945-50 as a Soviet/Commuunist crime, to the
extent that the denazification function of concentration camps, approved by the
Allies, was arbitrarily applied, often to political opponents, with large resulting
mortality.
In the reinterpretation of atrocity heritage the question ‘whose interpretation’ of
course remains critical: in Germany it is in the hands of autonomous historical
commissions at the state (Land) level, which are co-funded by federal and state
governments at a democratic arm’s length. Interpretive collaboration between, in
this case, the Thiiringen authority with others such as Niedersachsen has
occurred. In the case of Sachsenhausen, the Brandenburg Monument Commission
is conducting a reconceptualisation parallel to that in Buchenwald, and expects to
consult historical authorities, survivors’ organisations and a diversity of
interested parties, in total contrast to the DDR’s ideological superimposition but
interpreting this as one historic phase (plans and problems in Morsch, 1994).
However, the interpretation of the former DDR concentration camps is a delicate
problem for a united Germany vitally concerned with its international image,
particularly with respect to the reconciliation of Germans as perpetrators and as
victims, and significant participation of European/international bodies will be
required if the horrific symbolism of Buchenwald, in particular, is to promote
international reconciliation rather than dissonance. In this context, the inter-
national victimisation and solidarity stressed by the DDR is likely to accord with
the new European realities, especially here since the Buchenwald memorial tower
THE HERITAGE OF ATROCITY 125
aicegsssnss

Figure 5.8. Sachsenhausen: post-DDR memorial to 1945-50 ‘Special Camp’ inside wall
(JET, 1994)

overlooks Weimar, an aspirant ‘cultural capital of Europe, 1999’, the humanistic

traditions of which are jointly marketed with Buchenwald internationally as the
essential German cultural contradiction (Tunbridge, 1994). The enduring potential
for the heritage to be manipulated has been illustrated locally by neo-Nazi
demonstrations and even for distant political ends by an attempt in the film
media to magnify the role of US black troops in the liberation of Buchenwald, in
order to promote American Jewish-black reconciliation, even though this was not
primarily a Jewish issue (Goldberg, 1993).
Auschwitz, near Krakow, was the most infamous of the ‘death camps’
established in occupied Poland, becoming, after an initial emphasis upon Poles,
the principal site for the extermination of over a million Jews and others. No site
of atrocity has focused more dissonance with respect particularly to the number
and identity of its victims, and to the manner in which the heritage has been
projected and should be perpetuated, as it is a World Heritage Site this is of
particular significance. The establishment of an adjacent Catholic convent in 1984
attracted Jewish opposition, leading to papal closure (Charlesworth, 1991); and,
in general, controversy has focused upon the Jewish identity of the atrocity and
in the case of Auschwitz 1 (in contrast to Auschwitz 2/Birkenau, 3 km distant),
on the display of victims’ artefacts and sanitisation, e.g. by tree planting. Polish
Communist interpretation had emphasised Polish resistance and the diverse
legal nationality of the victims in order to stress the international anti-fascist
perspective; it had played down the overwhelming predominance of Jews prior
to the creation of a Jewish exhibition at which the 1992 visit of the Israeli
the
president is prominently marked. Polish-Jewish tension is unsurprising in
light of the long-standing antisemitism in Poland. The implications of this topic
are discussed more fully in Chapter 6, but a pogrom as late as 1946 in Kielce
126 DISSONANT HERITAGE

caused most surviving Polish Jews to emigrate (Gruber, 1992). However,

following recent research, plaques that inflated the overall number of victims,
and especially overstated Polish and understated Jewish victims, were removed;
it is now made clear that 90% of the victims were Jews, followed by Poles,
gypsies and Soviet POWs (Piper, 1992). This authority acknowledges that the
pre-eminent heritage of Auschwitz is as the principal centre of Jewish extermi-
nation, but not to the exclusion of its special symbolism for Poles and gypsies or
of its warning against racial hatred for humanity as a whole. Dissonance
stemming from victimisation may be resolved in these terms, but, aside from
perpetration, dissonance remains over the question of whether such heritage
should be reconstructed, preserved as found in 1945, or left to disintegrate
(McKinsey, 1994). The 1995 anniversary of liberation accentuated dissonances.
There are cases where the genocide of the Jews and other groups targetted by
the Nazis is interpreted in a broader argument of direct contemporary relevance.
The Dutch transit camp at Westerbork, for example, makes explicit links
between the wartime events in the camp and anti-semitism as a popular attitude
both then and now, and then makes the further connection between anti-
semitism and other forms of ethnic, religious or racial discrimination. The
interpretation centre provides illustrative material and documentation on current
social and ethnic conflicts and official policies. It is difficult to evaluate the
success of this sort of attempt to encourage the visitor to identify the victims as
modern stereotypes rather than historical characters and to draw contemporary
policy lessons from past atrocity, but it can provoke opposition from those who
see it as an attempt to hijack their history and their suffering for use in the
contemporary political arena. However, persistent efforts worldwide to deny the
Holocaust indicate that the perceived need for such policy lessons will not
disappear.
The other face of Holocaust heritage is the primarily East European inner city
districts from which the Jews were taken, typically after the reconstitution of the
ghetto as a ‘holding tank’ prison in which many died of starvation (Gruber,
1992). At Theresienstadt (Terezin, Czechia) the eighteenth century planned town
was converted into a ‘model’ ghetto, in part for use in external propaganda; in
Warsaw the ghetto was ultimately obliterated after the revolt of its inmates
(Figure 5.9). The Jewish museum at Terezin, and the path of remembrance
linking the Warsaw ghetto site and memorial to the rail shipment point
(Umschlagplatz’), address the heritage of atrocity as eloquently as the death
camps; and in the case of the ghettoes the identity of the victims is not in
dispute. Similarly eloquent is the collection of drawings by child victims of
Auschwitz exhibited in one of the various synagogues constituting the Prague
Jewish museum (ironically selected by Hitler as a museum of an extinct race,
where treasures looted from elsewhere in Central Europe had been collected).
Arguably the most poignant heritage, however, is the ghostly absence of life,
apart from a few tourists often from former Jewish quarters, in and around
the Jewish libraries, synagogues, cemeteries and schools, now sometimes
preserved (Gruber, 1992). The centrality of the ghetto to Holocaust heritage was
reaffirmed during the fiftieth anniversary commemorations in 1993, of which
that at the Warsaw ghetto attracted the highest-ranking diplomatic participation
THE HERITAGE OF ATROCITY 127

Figure 5.9. The Warsaw Ghetto memorial, Poland (JET, 1992)

in specific recognition of the ghetto uprising there. However, the preservation

or even marking of the old ghetto as a whole presents a series of social and
cultural difficulties considered in the detailed case of Krakow-Kazimierz in
Chapter 6.
Discussion of concentration and ‘death’ camps necessarily returns us beyond
ghettoes to the Holocaust as a whole, which inevitably forms a recurrent thread
through any analysis of the heritage of atrocity. As we have noted, its emotive
importance has resulted in its commemoration in places other than where it was
explicitly perpetrated. The spatial discrepancy of atrocity and survivors is of
course made more complete by the very success of the extermination policies.
The largest communities in need of commemorative heritage are in Israel, the
state founded in the wake of the genocide, and in the United States, the home of
a powerful Jewish minority; it is therefore unsurprising that two of the principal
memorials to a genocide of ultimately global responsibility and consequence
should be located in those countries.
A heritage dissonance problem similar to the Nazi concentration camps exists
regarding the former Soviet labour camps, termed the ‘Gulag’ by Solzhenitsyn
(1974-78) even though their purpose was the containment and slave labour of a
series of currently undesirable socio-political groups rather than clear-cut geno-
cide. Again a successor state, Russia, is faced with the problem of interpreting an
apparently unacceptable heritage, and dissonance for perpetrator and victim,
together with whatever extenuating circumstances can be argued, is central to the
issue (Gray, 1992; Smirnova, personal communication 1994). The system broadly
predated the Soviet period, and perhaps served a strategic function during the
wartime emergency, but remains an atrocity of serious consequence to Russia’s
image in a period of great national instability: after its specifically Soviet initiation
128 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Figure 5.10. US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, USA: Auschwitz exhibit
(JET, 1994)

at Solovki in the White Sea in 1923, the Gulag held up to 20 million inmates of
whom at least one million were executed apart from other deaths. The heritage is,
furthermore, only the tip of an iceberg of perceived atrocity committed during the
Soviet era, much of it at the expense of the non-Russian nationalities with most of
whom Russia must now deal as independent neighbours.

CONCLUSIONS: ATROCITY WITHIN WIDER HERITAGE

DISSONANCE
This long and difficult chapter has touched on a number of aspects of atrocity
that relate to aspects of heritage dissonance referred to earlier and are reflected
in various case examples in the following three chapters. As the extreme
response to dissonance perceived between human groups, it is predictable that
atrocity should produce a heritage representing the extreme circumstances of
heritage dissonance, with the controversies associated with perpetration, by-
standing observation and victimisation which we have discussed.
So emotive is a multiple atrocity on the scale of the Holocaust that the
apparent glaring division between perpetrator and victim can become blurred:
the mere fact of survival when others perished can lead ultimately to suspicion
of clandestine collaboration. The peculiar consequence of the scale and
multiplicity of participants in such extreme atrocity is a heritage dissonance with
an elastic capacity for reinterpretation in national, racial, religious, ideological,
gender or other group or individual terms. Interpretation and reinterpretation
may vary widely in space and time, far beyond the scene of the crime and the
lifespan of its surviving participants.
THE HERITAGE OF ATROCITY 104g)

Yet this dimension of heritage is often more lacking in tangible remains than
practically any other. Atrocity characteristically involves desecration, destruc-
tion, Vernichtung: physical evidence is very likely to be destroyed or concealed,
as at Buchenwald outside Weimar, Majdanek outside Lublin, and Babi Yar
outside Kiev; and each group of perpetrators, victims and bystanders have their
own reasons for denying or forgetting. The very intangibility of so much of the
heritage of atrocity serves both to augment its human fascination and to
compound the elasticity of its interpretation. Since there may be no inheritors
other than tourists, interpretation may have still greater latitude.
Against such a background, the problem of the management and marketing of
the heritage of atrocity is the cardinal dilemma of dissonant heritage. The simple
fact of memorialisation can lead to glorification by those who identify with the
perpetrators or their motives, as potentially with sites associated with Hitler
in Nuremberg and Berlin, where the authorities have generally neither
memorialised nor confronted the issue; indeed, failure to officially mark may not
suppress this, as witness media reports of a neo-Nazi shrine at Hess’ landing
place in Scotland. In some African eyes similar comments might apply to
Rhodes’ grave and similar memorialisation in Zimbabwe and South Africa
(Chapter 8). Beyond the visceral fear for socio-political stability there is the
positive, but very difficult challenge of memorialising the atrocity as an
instrument of reconciliation between the descendants of perpetrators and
victims. Further to this crucial socio-political marketing there is the economic
incentive to benefit from the ‘horror tourism’ market, discussed below, without
alienating those, including some tourists who feel the atrocity to be a personal
inheritance, for whom the recreational and socio-political functions of the
atrocity heritage cannot be separated. To achieve these ends without the
notoriety of unwelcome controversy at best, and the security cost of desecration
and violent demonstrations at worst, may be beyond the capacity of most
contemporary mechanisms for the management of heritage. Naturally this
‘nightmare scenario’ is most applicable to living-memory atrocity.
We have seen that the principal living-memory atrocity is that associated with
the Second World War. The end of the ensuing Cold War hostilities has
permitted atrocity re-evaluation to the extent of apologies by East Germany and
Poland to Israel; the former Soviet Union to Poland; Japan to East Asia;
and (derivatively) South African whites to blacks. Some heritage dissonance has
thereby been resolved; but we may expect that much will intensify further, as
power realigns, and the legatees of atrocity establish or adjust their claims
as opportunity arises. Sites of destruction and concealment may become more
prominent, especially in Eastern Europe as nationalist reinterpretations occur in
an environment of rapidly increasing tourist access; sites of mass slaughter
associated with both Nazis and Communists outside Ukrainian cities (such as
and
Babi Yar) are predictable focal points of heritage dissonance (Ashworth
War have
Larkham, 1994). Furthermore, the ricochet effects of the Second World
Hebron
continued to fuel atrocity, as in Yugoslavia and Palestine (e.g. the
posterity to resolve
massacre of 1994), which is breeding heritage dissonance for
constitute a particu-
as best it may. Sites of living-memory atrocity are likely to
ent/
larly intense form of sacralised space: recent controversies over redevelopm
130 DISSONANT HERITAGE

reuse bordering Ravensbruck and Sachsenhausen concentration camps (Glancey,

1993) have testified that, irrespective of other grounds, this may prove an
intractable focus of dissonance and a major challenge to creativity.
The ‘horror tourism’ phenomenon has recently been discussed, for example in
the context of obstructing earthquake relief in Maharashtra State, India, in 1993.
As we have noted, we cannot control the motives of tourists or their received
messages; the management of atrocity heritage is very vulnerable, therefore, to
this potentially disruptive economic windfall. As this chapter has identified,
there is no clear divide between natural disaster and human culpability in
atrocity, and it is to be expected that the spectacle value of both may appeal
equally to the tourist motivated by sensational disaster. The significance of
this ‘loose cannon’ for the management and marketing of atrocity heritage
unquestionably demands further investigation.
6 Central Europe: Managing
Heritage in the Maelstrom

INTO THE MAELSTROM

Later chapters will consider the difficulties and tensions surrounding the
establishment of new identities and political units through the shaping of
heritage in colonies of settlement in North America and post-colonial successor
states in Africa. In terms of their complexity these are as nothing compared to
the issues surrounding the management of the heritage of an ‘old’ continent
such as Europe: indeed some of the difficulties considered later are just
extensions of the rivalries and conflicts whose epicentre was in Europe but
whose ripples washed up on the shores of distant continents. Western
Europeans in particular, having basked in a half century of peace, prosperity
and liberal cultural and political values, need reminding that this is a brief and
quite untypical aberration in space and time in what over the past 2000 years
has arguably been the least ideologically, culturally and politically stable of
geographical units. The typical pattern has been fierce intra-European wars
about once a generation interspersed with an intervening uneasy peace of
rumbling revolt and ruthless suppression which, since the sixteenth century, has
included extra-European expeditions or proxy encounters. The peace since 1945
was one of exhaustion after two major European wars in a single generation
and was a period dominated by the preparation for a third war to be fought
across the heart of the continent, and punctuated by the ‘savage wars of peace’
which led Britain into 25, and France into 16, overseas conflicts since the end of
the Second World War.
An explanation of the reasons for this European tradition of conflict would fill
many books: the variety of the cultural and ethnic mix of peoples, the fertile
generation of often conflicting ideologies, the consequent political and social
fragmentation and the resulting intensity of interactions in a small space over a
long period has provided a wealth of heritages, among which it is almost
inevitable that some will be dissonant to some people at some times. This is far
too complex a pattern, with too long a history, to be comprehensively reviewed
but equally it cannot be ignored. It has provided a majority of the examples
already discussed above and continues to offer the world’s fullest reservoir of
potentially explosive cases of political dissonance, as well as fueling a creativity
in aesthetic, ethical and social ideas and supporting the world’s product leaders
in heritage tourism. A solution to this paradox is sought in a concentration on
132 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Central Europe which can provide a graphic and more widely applicable
illustration of most of the types of dissonance discussed earlier.

DISCERNING PATTERNS IN THE MIX

Central Europe is a political concept rather than a subcontinent delimitable by

any ‘limites naturelles’ and as such it has shifted, expanded and contracted over
the centuries. It extends over the North European Plain which has acted as a
funnel usually for movement from east to west but on occasion in reverse; and
to the south includes the Pannonian Basin within a Carpathian rim that,
historically, has rarely offered a barrier to penetration. In the first half of the
twentieth century it formed the arena into which the surrounding powers
projected their political and military force and into which they were eventually
sucked; for most of the second half of the century it had ‘contracted to a line of
barbed wire’ (Fischer, 1956: 62) separating the Atlantic from the Eurasian
powers; and in the final decade of the century it has re-emerged, with previously
suppressed ancient enmities, fears and dreams intact, ready both to revive old
heritages and create new, poised as a zone of political and economic uncertainty
between East and West.
The concept of Central Europe has been principally a German idea, conceived
as a ‘Mitteleuropa’ (Naumann, 1915; Fischer, 1956) that was a vision from the
west of a frontier that was simultaneously a perennial threat and a beckoning
opportunity. Eastwards were non-Germanic, principally Slavonic, peoples that
periodically through history had descended upon the ‘civilised’ west but equally
could be seen as a pioneer zone to be penetrated and tamed in a ‘drang nach
osten’ of economic and ideological colonisation.
Its eastern boundary is particularly elusive and has retreated eastwards with
astonishing speed in the last few years. Until 1990 the belief that ‘Asia began at
the Elbe’ was an understandable reaction of an Atlantic world in ideological
confrontation with a Eurasian empire whose power base was the ‘heartland’ of
Mackinder’s ‘World Island’. The re-establishment of Germany as the demo-
graphically, economically and ultimately politically dominant European state
shifted the eastern border to the Oder—Neisse rivers; the liberal democratic, and
thus westward orientated, successor states of the Soviet Empire shifted it farther
to the Niemen and the Black Sea, and arguably farther still with the break-up of
the Soviet Union itself. Not only do Budapest, Prague and Krakow now market
themselves as Central European cities, but increasingly so also do Bucharest,
Lwow and Minsk. In a Europe which according to Michaelis’ vision now
stretches from Vancouver to Vladivostock, Central Europe includes Belorus and
Ukraine as well as Hungary and Czechia.
A major difficulty of geographical description is not just that every place has a
selection of names drawn from diverse languages and thus implicitly
recognising the significance of specific peoples in the past and their potential
claims in the present and future. More fundamentally, the very act of identifying
and naming a particular group has in itself a deep political significance as the
nomenclature is central to the creation, reflection and projection of a heritage.
CENTRAL EUROPE: MANAGING HERITAGE IN THE MAELSTROM 133
Even the broad cultural labels used so freely in this chapter, such as ‘Germanic’
or ‘Slavonic’ can be, and on occasion have been, elevated to the status of a state-
building mythology that recognises singular racial or cultural virtues in
‘Germania’ or ‘Panslavia’, usually as a prelude to conquest. Even to discuss the
existence of a ‘Central Europe’ is to accept (according to Fischer, 1956) a German
legitimation of ‘a programme of economic and political conquest’ of their
Slavonic neighbours who inhabit regardless of their ethnicity what is never-
theless a ‘German cultural soil’ (Hassinger, 1930) and a ‘German realm’ (Pounds,
1947).
The naming of ethnic groups within this area also has political consequences
because the nations were created by social groups focusing upon a distinguishing
cultural characteristic and gaining thereby legitimation, internally and externally,
for their existence and thus ‘rights’ of separate state representation or links with
other states populated by the same nation. The interest of existing states was of
course to deny such legitimacy within their own borders while extending their
sovereignty by encouraging it externally. To the Russians, the inhabitants of the
Ukraine and Belorus were ‘Little Russians’ and ‘White Russians’ respectively,
while the Ukrainian-speaking peoples of the Sub-Carpatho-Ukraine and south-
eastern Poland were called ‘Ruthenes’ by Poles and Magyars, thereby denying a
potential irredentist claim by neighbours, especially the Ukraine. Speakers of the
Romanian language described themselves in the course of the nineteenth century
through their nomenclature as legatees of Roman heritage, while to governing
Magyars they were merely ‘Vlachs’, i.e. former inhabitants of the territory of
Wallachia, and to expansionist Greeks they were wandering Thracian herdsmen.
The Slav speakers of the North Carpathian rim were ‘discovered’ by two com-
peting groups of scholars in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Czech intellectuals stressed the similarities of Czechs with Slovaks and thus
gained legitimacy for a new state stretching from the German to the Ukrainian
border (Wanklyn, 1954). At the same time, Magyar scholars denied the existence
of any such cultural link and stressed the separate distinctiveness of Slovak
cultural expression. Post-Cold War instability has revealed that the process of
nation discovery and naming is by no means complete. The successor ‘nations’ of
Yugoslavia included the firmly established national idea of Slovenes, Croats and
Serbs but not ‘Montenegrins’ or ‘Dalmatians’. The idea of Bosnians (let alone
Hercegovinians), however, seems to have failed to be accepted by any save
Moslem inhabitants; while ‘Macedonians’ have been defined according to their
respective national political interests, as Southern Serbs by the Serbs, Western
Bulgars by the Bulgarians and completely non-existent by the Greeks, while a
state of that name includes some, but not all, of those defining themselves as
Macedonians, as well as many who do not. States in search of national identities
exist as well as national groups in search of states: Belorus, for example, is a state
whose people have so far shown little inclination to define themselves in national
terms.
These and many more such cases only make the point that heritage is used
not only to project the character and promote the claims of an existing ethnic
group, it is the means by which such groups achieve an awareness that they
exist at all.
134 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Some patterns in space

The description of the patterning of peoples in this shifting space has long been
simplified by geographers who label Central Europe ‘a shatter belt’ (Bowman,
1924) or ‘European Marchland’ (Wanklyn, 1941), or more realistically, more or
less overlapping superimposed multiple shatter belts where different peoples
and their ideas have met, intermingled, cross-fertilised and conflicted. In broad
continental spatial terms it is where Atlantic-maritime Europe orientated to the
North Sea, Baltic or Mediterranean meets Eurasian-continental Europe. It has
been graphically described as ‘the tidal lands of Europa’ (Gottman, 1951)
experiencing the ebb and flow between two of the most numerous European
culture groups, the Germanic and the Slavonic peoples, resulting in contact,
interaction and intermingling. Neither of these groups, and especially the Slavs,
are by any means homogeneous; they are divided by variations in language,
religion and even alphabet and also spatially by the insertion at various
historical points of other ethnic groups which have been numerous and concen-
trated enough to have national aspirations, especially Hungarians, Romanians
and the Baltic peoples. In addition, there are non-national groups, that is groups
with considerable cultural distinctiveness but a dispersal through space so that
they lack national territorial aspirations: amongst these the Jews, defined by
religious and social observances, and gypsies, often more vaguely defined by a
life style that does not conform to the settled majority, are the most obvious.
The description of Central Europe as a broadly north-south aligned zone of
cultural contact between Germanic and non-Germanic peoples rarely corre-
sponds precisely to other major cultural and ideological fault lines, and it is this
lack of correspondence that multiplies the possible combinations of attributes
and thus cultural groupings. Central Europe was for more than 500 years the
zone of advance of, and assimilation into, the Moslem world and thus equally of
the resistance and partial reconquest by a revived Christendom. (To Metternich,
the Balkans, and thus the Muslim world, ‘began at the Eastern gate of Vienna’.)
Within the Christian world, the Catholic/Orthodox boundary, separating a
westward from an eastward orientation, cuts west—east across Central Europe
before turning north through the Ukraine, corresponding almost, but not exactly,
with the usage of Roman and Cyrillic alphabets. Into this pattern are inserted
Protestant and Jewish enclaves. From 1917 to 1990 the two proselytising and
expansionist ideologies of communism and capitalism imposed an east-west
polarisation whose boundary moved westwards from the Russian border with
the Ukraine, Poland and Baltic States up to the famous Stettin—-Trieste ‘Iron
Curtain’ where, after some adjustment, it remained for almost 50 years.

Some patterns in time

It is fortunately not our task to write a coherent summary of the oscillations
across Central Europe through historical time of the peoples, languages,
religions and political ideologies that have resulted in this ‘Muddle Europe’ (to
use Sellars and Yeatman’s (1930) impatient Western dismissal of its unintelligible
complexity). For our purposes we can conceive of the existence of a ‘heritage
CENTRAL EUROPE: MANAGING HERITAGE IN THE MAELSTROM 135
pendulum’ that has swung, with varying speeds and insistence but also some
discernable regular rhythm, between the two extreme poles of national and non-
national heritage interpretations. This allows us to identify four periods, labelled
as follows, and comment on the potential dissonance associated with each.

The clash of empires

The state based upon a personal feudal allegiance or adherence to a dynastic
idea which often has religious or ideological overtones was the official Central
European norm until 1919. Much of our interest in Central Europe lies in the
relatively late survival of these multinational imperial political structures, at least
compared with Western Europe. Until the First World War official heritage was
harnessed to the support of ruling non-national dynasties, whether Hapsburg,
Romanov or Hohenzollern, most obviously in the imperial showcase capitals.
The heritage of the built environment in Vienna (for example, the Schénbrunn
Palace, the public cultural buildings but also barracks of the ‘Ring’) or Budapest
(the royal palace/castle complex of the Var) are the archetypical statements of
the alliance of government, church and military as the pillars of Hapsburg
dynastic power through especially the second half of the nineteenth century.
Heritage conflict was rarely between the imperial and local ethnic identities,
indeed much of the imperial strategy was to recognise the existence and
encourage the expression of a myriad of local cultures in order to ‘divide et
impera’. The nationalist threat was a product of the discovery of nations,
principally by small intellectual elites over a period of around 150 years.
Languages previously spoken as varied local dialects were given standardised
grammars, lexicons, dictionaries and ultimately literatures. Cultures were
assigned names and histories so that people discovered that they were
Romanians, Slovaks or Poles, who had a distinguished heritage of resistance to
the Turks, the Teutonic Knights, or the Russians, often through a newly annexed
pantheon of historical heroes (whether Nevsky, Sobierski or Vlad the Impaler).
This self-identification could be in addition to non-national identification but
increasingly came to compete with it, often encouraged by outside nations
already ‘free’.
The heritage ambiguities resulting from this conflict between the imperialist
and nationalist ideas through the nineteenth century are clearly seen in the case
of Kraké6w where the nationalisation of heritage has always been incomplete.
The inherent contradiction was that this city was enabled to fulfill its role as the
cradle of the Polish national revival largely as a result of its position within a
multinational Empire. Its status, first as a ‘free city’ and later as the major urban
centre (although not administrative capital) of the self-governing province of
Galicia, allowed Polish language and literature to not only survive but to shape
the political aspirations of an educated middle-class in a way that was not
possible in the more repressive regimes of Prussian or Russian-occupied Poland.
Hapsburg policies of encouraging, or at least tolerating, local cultural expression
within Austrian Galicia allowed a Polish intellectual and literary middle class to
flourish and thereby ultimately create the national Poland of 1919.
However, this new nation state did not value much of the intrinsically
136 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Hapsburg heritage of Krakow that preceded it. The wonder at what remains in
this city that contains more UNESCO designated ‘world heritage’ buildings than
any other, conceals the quantity that was lost (Purchla, 1993) largely due to the
change in political and ideological scale from the imperial to the national. It was
not the 16 sieges and 28 major fires that damaged the nineteenth-century inner
ring developments and Austrian fortress complex but changes in dominant
tastes and values which have led to neglect and piecemeal demolition over the
past 80 years.

The nationalisation of heritage

As has been asserted many times above, and especially in Chapter 3, the link
between the nation state and national heritage has been strongly forged. Indeed
the link has been so strong that it is difficult for many to see the former as other
than the correct and normal form of relating peoples to states and the latter as
other than the outcome of some inevitable natural law which people can only
accelerate or delay, not change. Indeed a theme of nationalist interpretations of
heritage has usually been the idea of inevitable and steady progress, ‘the
evolutionary struggle that marked the rise of mankind from the primitive to the
present’ (Bowman, 1924: 11); which culminates in the full and just expression of
national identity in the nation state. Both the war-weary cynics (principally from
Western Europe) and the impractical idealists (principally from the United
States) who redrew the borders of Central Europe in 1919 on the principles of
the nation state were convinced that “The world is at one of the turning points of
its career; new nations are springing up; men begin to talk about a New Europe’
(Bowman, 1924: 5).
The political nationalist movement that triumphed in the Versailles and
related treaties had been born of the national cultural heritage movements of the
preceding century. However, earnest plebiscites and meticulous cartography
merely revealed that lines could not be drawn around identifiable self-conscious
cultural groups so that each such nation formed a viable state and each state
consisted of only one such nation.
The resulting successor states were therefore either federations of nations
needing to create a new Yugoslavian or Czechoslovakian identity, or states
where a numerically dominant core people had been supplemented by the
addition of usually unwilling major minorities (such as Poland, Romania,
the Baltic States and briefly the Ukraine, as well as the two conglomerate Slav
federations). Ironically it was only the two successor losers, Austria and
Hungary, who had been effectively pruned of non-German and non-Magyar
speakers respectively, that emerged without large national minorities. Heritage
now became a matter of replacing the old imperial monuments and markers by a
new heritage of national liberation. Monument after monument through
European cities labels this ‘liberation’ — without making clear who was liberated
from what, at the cost of whom. Policy towards minority heritage was double-
edged. Enclaves were seen as a threat to the national integrity and thus to be
discouraged with a varying degree of ruthlessness. A spectrum of deliberate
disinheritance, involving for example the removal of minority language
CENTRAL EUROPE: MANAGING HERITAGE IN THE MAELSTROM 137
education and publishing rights, changes in place and personal names, and even
‘re-conversion’ to the appropriate national language, alphabet or religion could
be described, although not without objection from the countries involved,
running from the relatively mild to the Draconian; including the treatment of
Sudeten Germans, Hungarians, Ruthenes and Poles in Czechoslovakia, Ruthenes
and Lithuanians in Poland, Poles in Lithuania, and Hungarians and Germans in
Romania. National minorities, ie. those capable of creating a separate state, or
uniting with neighbours in such a state, were generally treated more harshly
than non-national minorities who posed no comparable political threat, such as
Jews or Germans in Slovakia and Romania. Exclaves, that is members of ‘your’
cultural group existing on the ‘wrong’ side of the newly drawn border, were,
however, to be encouraged and if possible protected as an object of ultimate
irredentist reunion.
A central point in a nationalist legitimation is primacy of occupation of the
area claimed. Such ‘we were there first’ arguments are especially sharp when
disputed and can fuel prodigious historical and archaeological scholarship.
Much interwar German archaeology in Central Europe was a search for ‘Aryan’
occupation to justify ‘Lebensraum’ (Lemaire, 1993). The ‘Szeklers’ of eastern
Transylvania, for example, have been demonstrated (by Hungarian scholars) to
be the descendents of the Magyar tribes left to guard the Transylvanian passes
in the tenth century. Their settlement predated the arrival of Romanian-speaking
herdsmen from the Danube Delta and therefore supports a Hungarian national
claim to the area. Romanian scholars, however, have shown that they are
Romanians who were forcibly ‘Magyarised’ in the course of the Middle Ages
and their presence legitimates a Romanian claim to sovereignty. What might be
viewed as an obtuse academic discussion takes on a contemporary political
significance which reduces history to ‘a treasure hunt’ (Paul, 1993: 154) with
very real prizes and penalties for winners and losers.
The extent to which the ‘nationalisation of heritage’ has proceeded almost
unchallenged is reflected in numerous current publications which are so
commonplace as to pass unremarked. Publications intended for foreign tourists
often present the simplest and most direct cases. For example, ‘Cracow the most
Polish of Polish cities, said to be the synthesis of all that is Polish, summarizing
Polish history. . . Poland looks more beautiful when reflected in the mirror of
Cracow, the city indeed reflects the beauty and reality of Poland’ (Cracow
(Krak6é6w) tourist information centre, 1994 p. 13). One thousand years of urban
history has thereby been annexed by a state which only came into existence in
its present nationalist form 70 years ago.

The suppression of nationalism

Europe served as the principal battlefield of the Second World War and for the
50 years since its conclusion was the potential battlefield for the threatened
conflict between the two dominantly extra-European superpowers and their
respective ideologies, with Central Europe playing the role of border zone for
the Communist bloc. Thus heritage on both sides became a vehicle of expression
for competing ideologies and, more subtly, for ways of life.
138 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Communist policy towards heritage was ideologically somewhat ambiguous.

On the one hand, the new states were intended to reflect a new society which
had decisively broken with a past that was now rejected. Not only were the
existing monuments and place nomenclature dissonant but so also were
preserved buildings, streetscapes and whole towns which were reminders of
previous national or class identities that were to be superseded. On the other
hand, as argued earlier the dominant ideology thesis had long been incorporated
into Marxist thinking and preserved relics of the past were endowed with new
and important educational roles. Even capitalist and bourgeois structures could
be used at least to demonstrate such themes as the triumph of man over
adversity and at best to remind people of the stupidities or iniquities of previous
regimes.
Newby (1994) claims that, in Plovdiv, the long struggle of the Bulgars against
the Turks has been quite explicitly chosen as the central theme for the
interpretation of this expensively conserved and reconstructed city, for two
reasons. First, the ‘reconstruction was a statement that the communist rulers saw
themselves as the legitimate heirs of the Second Bulgarian state and of the
struggle against the Turkish yoke’ (Newby, 1994: 222); and secondly, there was
an implicit parallel being drawn between the overthrow of Turkish rule and the
overthrow of capitalism 500 years later.
However, such generalisations about communist policy need modifying by the
particular setting of time and place. Post-1945 policies were far more sym-
pathetic towards conservation than was the case in the earlier years of the
Russian revolution when there was a strong sentiment for sweeping away the
past and beginning again at year zero (Bater, 1980). The Soviets themselves used
the Russian nationalist card during the Second World War and the countries of
Eastern Europe made some quite remarkable achievements in the field of the
conservation of the built environment after 1945.
Poland, for example, was for a generation used as a textbook example of
architectural heritage reconstruction, often on the basis of almost total
destruction. The centralisation of planning powers and the expropriation of
much private property of the church and large estate owners provided the
opportunity; the need of the Communist government for acceptance as the
natural heirs of Polish history provided much of the motive. The argument that
political legitimation was more important than aesthetic considerations would be
supported by comparing the care and resources lavished on the old walled city
of Warsaw, with its obvious symbolic importance to Poles following the Nazi
destruction and Soviet engulfment, compared with the simultaneous relative
neglect of the fabric of the German towns of East Prussia acquired after 1945.
Even there, however, oblique political legitimation could have motivated the
painstaking reconstruction of Malbork/Marienburg castle, a potent symbol of
past oppression by the Teutonic Knights (despite Polish successors) (Figure 6.1).
Policy towards heritage was much less clear when national identity was more
likely to be an unqualified focus of opposition to, rather than a support for, the
communist regime. The Baltic, Caucasian and Central Asian Republics in
particular presented this difficulty. The three main policy options were destroy,
ignore or reinterpret. The first was only practical for individual buildings or
CENTRAL EUROPE: MANAGING HERITAGE IN THE MAELSTROM 139

ei:
44

Figure 6.1. Malbork Castle, Poland: formerly Marienburg, German East Prussia (JET, 1994)

memorials and not for whole townscapes such as Riga, Vilnius or Bokhara or
for natural features such as Lithuania’s sacred mountain. The second policy
involved a neglect of the built environment, especially of the inner cities, much
of which was left in the ownership of individuals, in favour of the development
of socialist new towns elsewhere (see the many examples in French and
Hamilton, 1979); in Estonia the suppressed Lutheran churches and buildings
from the interwar independence period are the current focus of restoration
(National Trust, 1991). The third approach was to accept the existence of the
physical heritage and even to maintain it, but to treat it as having aesthetic
rather than contemporary political value, focusing on the intrinsic qualities of
the object rather than its relation to the people who created it or the messages it
was intended to convey. This can be seen in the ‘museumification’ of many
historic churches and monasteries and the mosques of Central Asia (Giese,
1979):
The case of the former East Germany (DDR) has been referred to already and
has been discussed at length elsewhere (Tunbridge, 1994). However, it requires
further consideration here because of the extraordinary artificiality of its
geographical base for heritage interpretation, the exceptional significance of this
in the front line of the Cold War, and now the strategic centrality of its former
territory to a Europe in the throes of post-Cold War heritage reappraisal. The
DDR shared Poland’s problem of fitting a national heritage to an arbitrary
territory, but more severely since its space consisted of the centre of defeated
Germany (with its heart in Berlin being partially excised) with its economic trade
flows realigned. Its population was as ethnically homogeneous as Poland’s, but
with the radical difference of ideological separation from compatriots to the
west. Its built environment projected comparable devastation but with a much
140 DISSONANT HERITAGE

more intricate interpretation problem with respect to who had originally built it,
who destroyed it and who subsequently restored it.
The DDR’s response in heritage and tourism marketing was to project itself as
the true custodian of German culture: a stance facilitated by its possession of
central Berlin, Potsdam, Dresden and especially Weimar (Tunbridge, 1994). In
addition, it made a claim to be the spiritual home of German communism in
particular (especially in towns such as Leipzig and Erfurt) and of popular revolt
in general, stressing the importance of the 1848 revolution and the ‘lost
revolution’ of 1918. It thus cast itself in the role of victim of Nazis, West German
capitalists and the western allies of the Second World War. In contrast, it was a
beneficiary of Soviet goodwill in preserving and reconstructing cultural
treasures, the ransacking of its economic infrastructure for war reparations being
left unmentioned. Victimisation extended to the interpretation of concentration
camps (Chapter 5) in which communist prisoners were cast in the role of leaders
of the liberation struggle and thereby the inheritors of a humanist mantle in
which, in a rewritten history, such cultural giants as Luther, Miintzer (a medieval
peasant leader) and Goethe were central figures, leading to such more recent
manifestations as Luxembourg, Liebknecht and other Communist leaders.
However, other associations with a German past were muted and traditional
regional identities were suppressed. International solidarity was stressed with
the victims of Nazism and with the fraternal socialist successor states while
official reference to former German identities in these states avoided. All refer-
ence to environmental damage precipitated by the DDR and, as subsequently
reported, the massive Soviet military machine it housed, was also suppressed.
Since the demise of the DDR the internal dissent behind the facade of official
heritage has been widely reported; and its interpretations steadily dismantled.
The traditional identities of regions (often as Lander) and, where relevant, of
towns (including reference to some now in Poland) have been reasserted, most
publicly by renaming of towns, streets and buildings. However, adjustment to
the new phase discussed below remains in flux and in the case of concentration
camps has been retarded by its sensitivity and complexity (Morsch, 1994).

The re-emergence of nationalism

The sudden collapse of the Soviet system (and the consequent, if delayed,
withdrawal from Europe of United States political and military power) removed
the official contraints of international socialist fraternalism, however com-
promised and modified that idea had become in practice, and allowed
previously discouraged nationalist heritage interpretations to re-emerge.
As in the previous period the ideological shift has had results for heritage that
are ambiguously beneficial. The changes in street and even town names, the
removal of the ubiquitous statuary of the Marxist-Leninist pantheon, the ‘de-
marking’ of sites by the removal of dedications (as has occurred with many
Second World War ‘liberation’ war memorials) and, more rarely so far, the ‘re-
marking’ of sites with new interpretations, has all occurred with bewildering
speed. Many previously officially ignored and financially neglected religious and
secular sites and buildings have reasserted their symbolic importance. Much
CENTRAL EUROPE: MANAGING HERITAGE IN THE MAELSTROM 141

more serious in the longer term, however, are the double threats to the
preserved built environment posed by two consequences of the newly espoused
liberal democratic dominant ideology; and these may be paralleled by specific
problems of whose heritage, whose property and whose maintenance.
First, the treasure house of preserved but ‘unspoilt’ cities has been opened up
to a neighbouring West European culture tourism market that is not only
growing but is eager for new experiences. The dimensions of this sudden influx
can be appreciated from a single statistic: Prague, visited with some admin-
istrative difficulty by only a handful of western visitors until 1989, entertained
65 million foreign tourists in 1991 (Cooper, 1992). A remarkable transformation
has occurred in the quality of the inner city, particularly along the main axis of
tourist movement from Wenceslas Square, through Old Town Square, across the
Charles Bridge to the castle, as both public and private investments have been
stimulated by tourism revenues. Equally, however, congestion along this axis
has become severe, roads overloaded and accommodation scarce, while street
crime is increasing (Hammersley and Westlake, 1994). In view of Prague’s
superlatives (its architectural masterpieces, proximity to major markets, cultural
relevance to Western tourists and in the shorter term its novelty value) there is
an imperative to expand the tourist city, including better marking of such
resources as the Jewish museum (Chapter 5). The impact of this still-increasing
number of visitors, first on Prague, Budapest and Krakow, and after a few years
spreading out to ‘discover’ the smaller towns and more peripheral regions, can
only be imagined by reference to Bath, Florence or Heidelberg. In contrast to the
Western European cases however, tourism is seen almost exclusively in terms of
the opportunities it presents for an economic development led by small and
medium-sized private firms. The need for local management of the resulting
pressures for development is not only not appreciated, but the experience and
organisational structures to perform such management either do not exist or are
confused as to their role and largely popularly discredited. While the use of
heritage resources by tourism is increasing, the organisational, legislative and
financial structures that have preserved these resources have been severely
weakened or even abolished (see the arguments about the Polish case advanced
in Zuziak, 1993).
The second threat is that heritage conservation is rejected ideologically and
practically as being not only associated with an often unsubtle propaganda of a
now discredited state but also as a part of a centralised, public sector planning
apparatus that present governments are committed to dismantling. The task has
been described as the need ‘to re-establish the legitimacy of conservation’
(Hammersley and Westlake, 1994: 178) that is in danger of being discarded as
itself a relic of the previous regime. Hammersley and Westlake point to Czech
privatisation as an implicit threat to heritage. The return of national cultural
heritage to the private sector not only risks the subordination of long-term
conservation to immediate profit but serves partisan interests that may disinherit
others and in the long run the nation as a whole, particularly if these interests
lack the resources for maintenance. The dissonance and instability of heritage
conservation in such environments is illustrated beyond Central Europe in the
case of Russia itself: here the restoration of church property and power has
142 DISSONANT HERITAGE

ironically raised tensions recently over the partisan reappropriation of national

artistic heritage, such as historic icons, which is to be housed in buildings ill-
equipped to secure and preserve it, with the aim of profit maximisation
(Smirnova, personal communication 1994).
A single small case illustrates some aspects of the emerging problem and the
failure, as yet, to devise solutions. The small Czech town of Cesky Krumlov,
bypassed by modern pressures for re-development, preserved by a mixture of
state investment in the larger buildings and a benign neglect of the rest, is an
archetypical tourist-historic gem city (Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990) with a
World Heritage status awaiting imminent mass tourist ‘discovery’ (Hammersley
and Westlake, 1994). However a high proportion of the building stock, especially
in the central areas, was previously owned by either Germans or Jews. The
former were mostly dispossessed and expelled by the Benes decrees of 1945 and
the latter were largely holocaust victims. The property has passed into the care
of the national government together with the responsibility for its maintenance.
The return of property is theoretically possible to Jewish original owners, but
practically unlikely given their fate, while return to expelled German owners is
potentially easier because their descendants are largely known but is, as yet, not
generally legally permissible. Meanwhile the responsibility for unclaimed
property was passed from the central to the local government in 1992, although
without additional financial resources. Since then the local authority has
attempted to dispose of their burden in various ways, none of which have
proved either legally or politically acceptable (Brasier, 1993), leaving unsolved
the problem of the maintenance of the resources the tourists are coming to use.
Tourism is of course by no means the only new function of heritage: the
support or re-establishment of a national or ethnic identity, the original motive
for the creation of most heritage agencies in these countries, remains paramount.
However, political and economic factors can become intertwined.
Limits on the stridency of the rediscovered nationalist heritage are imposed by
the economic aspirations of almost all the new states of Central Europe for
relationships with the West. Investment, technology and markets are sought in
the European Union and especially in Germany. Even foreign tourism is likely to
be dependent principally upon German markets. Politically the Soviet successor
regimes require legitimation and supportive acceptance from their Western role
models. This dependence in turn requires at least the absence of public tensions
that might disturb a stable investment climate and at best some positive
demonstration of an acceptance of political pluralism and tolerance of cultural
diversity.
The two states least encumbered with embarrassing and distracting internal
minorities and external claims are Hungary, where the harshness of the Trianon
settlement can now be viewed as beneficial and the historic claims to the ‘lands
of St Stephen’ are expressed at present in humanitarian concern rather than
territorial demands; and Czechia, which expelled its German minority, and more
recently shed its minorities in Slovakia. Post-1945 Poland is similarly much more
culturally homogeneous than the post-1919 state, having lost its Ukrainian,
Lithuanian, German and Jewish minorities. Its claims to the East, especially on
Lwow (Martyn, 1990) and Vilnius, and the claims made upon it in Silesia and
CENTRAL EUROPE: MANAGING HERITAGE IN THE MAELSTROM 143
the Baltic by a resurgent German nationalism are, however, dormant rather than
defunct. These three countries receive the bulk of investment and governmental
support from the West and are nearest the front of the queue for acceptance into
the Western clubs such as NATO and the EU. While other factors are involved
there is none the less a clear lesson for others that the avoidance of heritage
dissonance, or more cynically the avoidance of the publicity of such difficulties
in the Western media, is rewarded economically and politically.
Whether the present phase of re-emergent but constrained nationalism will
evolve towards a fifth stage in our sequence, ie. a stage of greater European
unity of heritage identity fundamental to a developing European Union, is a
question we return to at the end of this chapter.

TOWARDS AN EXPLANATION

The result of the superimposition of these differing major distinctions through

time and space has been a paradox in spatial scales that typifies Central Europe
and explains much of both the intensity and the complexity of the cases
discussed below. On the one hand, there exist clear broad-brush continental-
scale cultural and political fault lines that encourage the idea of a definite
frontier (whether to Christendom, orthodoxy or the ‘free world’, etc.) to be
resolutely defended or boldly extended; while on the other hand, local variations
in one or more of the distinguishing characteristics create a series of dis-
continuities, enclaves and exclaves, that confound in detail the broad pattern.
There are Cyrillic-using ‘Uniate’ Catholics in sub-Carpatho-Ukraine, Slavonic
Moslem converts in Central Bosnia, Orthodox but Latin-alphabet-using
Romanians, Magyar-speaking Protestant communities in Northern Transylvania
and many more.
The result is a map such as Figure 6.2 (Fischer, 1956) which, although itself a
crude generalisation, is nevertheless a patchwork of local detail. The two critical
and obvious characteristics of such a political geography are first that the
‘disputed areas’ are more spatially extensive than the undisputed, and secondly
that no political boundary is more than 80 years old. Consequently the national
idea (with its national heritages) and national political reality (the nation state)
only rarely coincide and are only shallowly rooted in time. The creation and
nurturing of a supportive heritage is therefore critical but equally the continuous
realigning of boundaries results in a proliferation of recent dissonant heritage
experiences. A living inhabitant of sub-Carpatho-Ukraine, for example, could
have been successively an Austrian, Czechoslovakian, Hungarian, Soviet and
Ukrainian citizen without leaving his birthplace and thus subject to a
bewildering succession of official heritage interpretations. Equally a similarly
rooted inhabitant of Leipzig would have experienced the same number of
changes in the ideological content of heritage while remaining a German citizen.
The Spis (Spits/Zips) region of north-eastern Slovakia (Figure 6.3) illustrates
the case of multiple heritage, where not only has there been no clear dominant
cultural group but individuals have traditionally proved capable of shifting their
identification with changes of government, even making multiple identifications
144 DISSONANT HERITAGE

1995 Boundaries
ssammesss «=80+ years old
wees = 75 years old
— 50 years old
cece <5 year old

Areas that have changed

sovereignity within past 80 years

Figure 6.2. The maelstrom of Central Europe

as the simple equations of religion, language and cultural customs break down.
The 24 small cities around the regional capital Levoca (Leitschau) were late
medieval mining and trading settlements largely peopled by German migrants
who set much of the economic and cultural tone of the region. However, a
dominantly Slovak rural population, under a Polish government until the mid-
eighteenth century, a Hungarian government until 1919, and a Czechoslovakian
government subsequently, added not only Hungarians, and some Poles, Czechs
and Ukrainians, but also a major urban Jewish population to the mix. The
combination of an economically prosperous merchant class, a reasonable
measure of civic self-government and security together with such a variety of
cultural traditions has resulted in a quite remarkably rich heritage of visual arts,
buildings and walled towns (notably Levoca and Kezmarok) set in the landscape
of the northern Carpathians. Its potential value to culture tourism is obvious but
its contribution, or indeed relevance, to Slovak national identity is less clear. The
incorporation of such a heritage into a national Slovak story, which has largely
yet to be written, is potentially dissonant in two main ways. In general it recalls
the multi-ethnicity of previous imperial epochs, which is the antithesis of the
idea of the nation-state being shaped in Slovakia. Secondly, the detailing of the
heritage is disturbing. Being largely German, Jewish or Hungarian, it is either a
reminder of the long periods within which the currently dominant Slovaks feel
themselves to have been politically and culturally suppressed or it recalls the
particularly unhappy history of relations with Germany over the past 50 years.
The wartime mixture of official nationalist collaboration, the largely communist
CENTRAL EUROPE: MANAGING HERITAGE IN THE MAELSTROM 145

POLAND

high Tatra
pe ie‘\ :
Mountains

low Tatra Mountains

1000 m Wi = major towns

—-- international K Kezmarok
boundary P Poprad
L Levoca
0 30 S Spisska Nova Ves
[i al i af i al
km @ other towns

Figure 6.3. The Spis area, Slovakia

Slovak uprising of 1944 and guilt at the disappearance of the Jewish population
all raise confused and unpleasant memories associated with what is in essence a
German architectural and cultural heritage. The fact that ‘the initiators of this
movement had been dead and buried for centuries before the sour influences of
nationalism had begun to work’ (Wanklyn, 1954: 199) may prove irrelevant to its
acceptability.
As a consequence of the developments through time and space described
above, a single region, even of restricted extent, is quite likely to contain
elements relating to the enclave heritage of potentially subversive ‘national
minorities’, the exclave heritage of potentially reunitable ‘exiles’, as well as the
heritage of ‘incomplete nationalities’ seeking recognition and legitimacy. The
above broad-brush treatment of the many uses of the heritage of two millennia
of the many ethnic cultural and ideological groups in Central Europe must now
be illustrated in more detail in a series of case studies. It would be convenient if
each of the major categories of heritage dissonance could be illustrated by a
single exclusive example. However, that situation would be so untypical of
Central Europe and a contradiction of the discussion so far. Therefore the six
urban cases selected as substantial illustrations of particular issues raised in fact
overlap considerably.
146 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Sarajevo: heritage destruction by cultural cleansing

The former Yugoslavia appears to provide the clearest illustration in modern

time of heritage as a military target: its destruction used as a deliberate
instrument of disinheritance and dissociation of cultural/ethnic groups from
their established space, sometimes in association with ethnic despoilation by
other means, including slaughter and the generation of illegitimate offspring
through systematic rape. At the time of writing it is necessary to rely primarily
on media reports, but their evidence of deliberate cultural disinheritance in this
region has been consistent during the early 1990s and has been further
substantiated in the aftermath of the attack upon Dubrovnik. It is clear that the
phenomenon reflects ancient regional feuds already noted, and is not confined to
a single city (Almond, 1994; Poulsen, 1995). Sarajevo, as the capital of the
currently most ravaged state of Bosnia~-Herzegovina, can be discussed as the
central focus of ‘cultural cleansing’, before our consideration is broadened to
other urban centres.
Sarajevo was a fifteenth-century Turkish foundation in what was until 1878 a
province of the Ottoman Empire. As the focus of a region which through
historical vicissitudes was culturally diverse, its urban morphology was shaped
by three major and several minor cultural/ethnic groups. The city core retained
a strongly Turkish character into recent time, including mosques and a bazaar,
but with Roman Catholic and Serbian Orthodox cathedrals and related
structures reflecting the Croat and Serb communities respectively; and with a
legacy of distinct quarters historically created by trading minorities including the
Jews, still present (Gruber, 1992). The cession of Bosnia-Herzegovina to Austria—
Hungary in 1878 ended the historic Muslim dominance and largely modernised
the capital city, by adding new districts rather than destroying the old; during
this period the city became the focus of the Serbian irredentist movement. The
murder of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, by a
Serbian nationalist with some connivance by Serbia, provoked the Austrian
attack on Serbia which led by chain reaction to the First World War, the
supreme consequence of cultural/ethnic antagonism in this region. The murder
constitutes in itself a supremely dissonant heritage, from the points of view of
Serb irredentists, Muslims disadvantaged by them and world spectators
appalled by the consequent cost of global war; it has lent itself to changing
interpretations with changes in the subsequent local political order. The war
directly resulted in the province’s federation with Serbia as part of the new
Yugoslavia after 1918. During the Second World War the city suffered the
cultural schism of Yugoslavia and allied bombing, as a nominal part of the Nazi
client state of Croatia (Chapter 5). The experience of the Second World War,
with its multiplicity of internal and external participants, allowed the existing
ethnic tensions to be overlain with elements of national resistance or collabor-
ation; the existing heritage of cultural, linguistic and religious antagonisms
acquired the sharp edge of treason and heroism, involving resentments and
revenge of atrocities committed and suffered. Communist-controlled reunifi-
cation of Yugoslavia under Marshall Tito subsequently gave the appearance of
cultural reconciliation, with multicultural Bosnia being seen as a microcosm of
CENTRAL EUROPE: MANAGING HERITAGE IN THE MAELSTROM 147
the new Yugoslavia, until Tito’s death in 1980 reanimated dormant centrifugal
forces.
In 1984 the Winter Olympics gave Sarajevo the opportunity to capitalise upon
the diversity of its cultural heritage: this hallmark event was the high point of its
tourism exploitation of the heritage resource, which was actively marketed and
augmented by federal revitalisation grants. The enhancement of tourism was
assisted by the possibility of day trips from the established coastal resort of
Dubrovnik. But subsequent developments suggest that Sarajevo has missed the
potential presented by the Olympics to consolidate both its long-term tourism
industry and more particularly its position as a culturally diverse leader in the
greater quest for a new integrated European heritage. Amid progressive
disintegration of the Yugoslav federation in the early 1990s, Bosnia’s attempt to
establish an independent multicultural state provoked aggressive annexation by
adjacent Serbia and Croatia of those parts of Bosnia which they could ‘ethnically
cleanse’ in their favour, leaving a rump Muslim-dominated state centred upon a
violently contested Sarajevo.
In the protracted siege of the city by Bosnian Serbs there is clear evidence of
the targetting of cultural heritage. In particular, the nineteenth-century Moorish
Town Hall, associated with the 1914 assassination and latterly containing the
National Library, highly significant to Muslim culture, has been burnt out by
systematic shelling (Bollag, 1995). Other losses have included Ottoman-era
houses and structures such as public baths, which as we note in Budapest have a
particular significance in Muslim societies. Likewise, the Ottoman archives were
lost in the destruction of the Institute for Oriental Studies, and military observers
concluded that the devastation was similarly deliberate (Marlowe, 1994). The
characteristic attitudes of the perpetrators reflect fear of Muslim funda-
mentalism, perception of historically justified counter-atrocity, denial, or claimed
equal victimisation, echoing our observations on atrocity rationalisation in
Chapter 5 (Morrow, 1992). Such destruction of dissonant heritage naturally
jeopardises the tourism economy of a future reconciled city, but much more
fundamentally questions whether political reconciliation of the conflicting
cultures can in fact forseeably be achieved.
Such heritage destruction is manifested much more widely in Bosnia and
elsewhere in former Yugoslavia. It is reported that the Serb-held areas of Bosnia
have been subjected to the destruction of all mosques, the renaming of streets
and towns and the replacement of the Latin alphabet by the Cyrillic; with the
reverse occurring in the Krajina and Slavonia Serb-inhabited areas held by
Croatia. Perpetration is multilateral: the three factions reported in 1994 (albeit
with self-serving bias) that some 250 Orthodox and 500 Catholic churches and
monasteries have been damaged or destroyed in Serb-Croat fighting in Croatia,
with nearly 1500 mosques demolished in Bosnia; in addition to many museums,
graveyards, monuments and other sites (Marlowe, 1994). Attacks on cultural
heritage have been so widespread that the Council of Europe has coined the
expression ‘cultural cleansing’ (as against ‘ethnic’ in reference to people) to
denote its deliberate and wholesale destruction, and sees in this a European
cultural catastrophe. The ‘cleansing’ has included plunder, as of museum
contents, either to sell or to ransom as part of a political settlement.
148 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Aside from Sarajevo, prominent sites of ‘cultural cleansing’ have included

Mostar, Bosnia’s second city, where Croats destroyed Muslim heritage in-
cluding the Stari Most bridge, a symbol not only of the city but more widely of
the Muslim presence in the Balkans. Serbs have levelled Vukovar in Croatia;
and attacked the walled city core of Dubrovnik, a World Heritage Site and
‘gem’ in tourist-historic terms (Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990); this was the
most sensitive assault in terms of heritage tourism destinations, and dominated
world media attention until its damage was found to be limited. Dubrovnik
was a prime coastal resort and cruise destination upon which Yugoslav
revitalisation resources had been lavished; it had also provided access inland to
Sarajevo, and its loss to the tourism economy even in the short term is
incalculable. Since its original heritage identity is partly Italian, there are
grounds for surmising that its damage represented economic as much as
cultural ‘cleansing’, and this may apply to other damaged tourist sites such as
a Roman palace in Split. Perpetration is also open to question, since the attack
occurred in the early stages of Yugoslavia’s disintegration, at the hands of Serb-
led federal forces. However, the reality of motive, victim and perpetrator are
less significant than perceptions thereof (Chapter 5), especially in a conflict
where outside opinion is likely to be critical in the supply or denial of military
and economic assistance.
A highly significant aspect of the Yugoslav tragedy, which bodes ill for other
cases of culturally based heritage dissonance, is the wanton disregard for the
1954 international Hague Convention, which defines crimes against cultural
property as crimes against humanity, and which Yugoslavia was one of the first
countries to ratify (Marlowe, 1994). The Convention emblems which former
Yugoslav soldiers had been taught to observe were not respected, though
defenders sometimes provoked the destruction of protected sites by using them
as military positions. In the case of Dubrovnik, UN flags hoisted by local
authorities and UNESCO on the city walls were used as targets (Bumbaru, 1992).
Compounding such disregard has been the slowness, more generally, of such
world organisations to react to threatened destructions, and the difficulty they
encounter in subsequently repairing the damage, when resources may be in
hostile territory and, worse, hostilities may be continuing (Marlowe, 1994); there
may also be ethical problems over prioritising tourist sites and problems of the
innate subjectivity of cultural value (Bumbaru, 1992). The lack of common
international vision, and the difficulties of enforcing international standards with
respect to cultural heritage, are part of the global dissonance resolution issue we
return to in Chapter 9. However, in line with the Convention, the UN war
crimes tribunal in The Hague is preparing to prosecute the former-Yugoslav
perpetrators of ‘cultural cleansing’, using evidence gathered by UN and
European Union officials; the results of this effort may be expected to create a
global precedent. (See also Fleming, 1995, on concurrent UNESCO initiatives.)
The ‘cultural cleansing’ phenomenon of former Yugoslavia which is typified
by Sarajevo represents a benchmark extremity of dissonance with respect to
heritage structures and artefacts, with overtones of atrocity in itself and direct
association with a larger scenario of human atrocity, the heritage implications of
which we have already discussed.
CENTRAL EUROPE: MANAGING HERITAGE IN THE MAELSTROM 149

Budapest: the contradictions of dynastic imperialism and ethnic legacies

Budapest illustrates the consequences of the oscillation between national and

imperial roles and thus between the exclusive heritage of a distinct ethnic group
and the more all-inclusive heritage of a multi-ethnic imperium: the first being
used to define and separate from neighbouring peoples and areas and the
second to place Hungary within much wider ideological and cultural European
contexts. So intertwined are these two contradictory trends that they cannot be
assigned a clear chronological dominance. The heritage of the Hungary of
Arpad, the archetypical tribal Magyar warrior, and of Stephen, the equally
stereotypical European Hungarian Christian saint and scholar, have generally
coexisted through the vicissitudes of governments and ideologies.
The role of Hungary in general as the eastern bastion of Christendom against
the Turk created a single consistent race enemy which could be used in two
different ways. The Turkish conquest after the battle of Mohacs (1526), the
occupation and the subsequent liberation (1683) provides an interpretive theme
of Hungarian heroism uncomplicated by any surviving Turkish or convert
Islamic cultural group (as in Bulgaria or Bosnia) and at least until recently by
any notable surviving physical structures. The emerging Hungarian state of
Matyas Corvinus, portrayed as a leading light of the European renaissance, is
brutally extinguished by the Turks and the ensuing dark age, interpreted as a
cultural void, lasts until liberation by a combination of internal resistance and
external western help.
Although all the Eastern European and Balkan states make some use of the
‘eastern barbarian hordes’, it has been of particular value in Hungarian state
building (Turks can be replaced on occasion by Tartars (thirteenth century), and
later by Russians (1849), Romanians (1919) and Soviets and Romanians (1945)).
This straightforward narrative with its obvious heroes and villains was of
inestimable value to the creation of both a self-conscious Magyar and European
identity. Both were particularly difficult for a relatively recently arrived group of
migrant Asiatic tribes. A Maygar nation with a set of ascribed distinctive
characteristics (such as steadfastness and reliability) could be forged from loosely
organised independent groups. Also, and not necessarily contradictorily, a
relatively small number of parvenus with a language and culture bearing no
relation to that of their neighbours was able to stake a claim to the lands of the
Danube Basin and its surrounding Carpathian rim, a large and fertile area in the
heart of Europe, and more broadly to claim participation in a European culture
during much of whose formative period before the late ninth century they were
in fact absent.
In the light of the central political importance of this narrative, it would have
seemed until recently to be unlikely that its clarity would have been clouded by
any revisionist dissonance, let alone any wholesale rehabilitation of the Turkish
occupation of Budapest (1541-1686). However, there are indications that this is
what has been occurring. The major physical relics of the Turkish period did not
survive the reconquest, therefore the city lacks the central mosque, now church,
of Pécs or the distinctive minarets that have become the urban symbols of Pécs
and Eger. It does, however, have four hamams (baths) which are not only
150 DISSONANT HERITAGE

carefully preserved but the Kiraly Fiirdo in particular is prominently positioned

in tourist literature and in urban symbolic promotion. To these have been added
more recently the tomb and gardens of Giil Baba, the mystic and rose breeder,
and, most remarkably, a monument to the last Turkish commander of Budapest
has been erected on the citadel he, ‘a heroic enemy’, unsuccessfully defended.
To these contradictions from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be
added those deriving from the subsequent Hapsburg liberators/conquerors. As
an Imperial capital, Budapest participated in the nineteenth century urban-
industrial development of the empire. In Buda the prominent Hapsburg
presence in the palace on the Var was supplemented not only by new
government buildings, statues and place names but by one of the strangest and
most incongruous examples of late-nineteenth-century gothic romanticism, the
‘Fisherman’s Bastion’, built in 1890-1905 and probably the part of ‘old Budapest’
most photgraphed by tourists. In Pest the Vienna ‘ring’ was paralleled by the
inner and outer rings (‘kis/nagy korut’) lined by the distinctive fin de siécle/art
nouveau apartments, hotels and offices of the burgeoning commercial heart of
the Danube Basin. In addition, especially after the ‘Ausgleich’ of 1867, the capital
of the Magyar state also became the capital of a polyglot imperium mirroring in
its own population the ethnic mix of the Dual Monarchy. Among _ these
minorities the Jews were numerous and prominent and although little of the
Jewish quarters of settlement remain, the principal synagogue on the Tanacs
Korut is both large and distinctive, and the fame of Raoul Wallenberg’s rescue
attempts (1944-45) has led to a marking, mainly for foreign pilgrims, of the
‘Wallenberg ghetto’.
The heritage of Hungarian ethnic nationalism stands in stark contradiction to
the imperial heritage. The numerically small, culturally distinct Magyar identity
is seen as threatened from strangers within and enemies without. A pantheon of
‘resistance’ heroes, resisting at various times Turks, Germanic Hapsburgs, Slavs
and Rumanians, is remembered at the grandiose monument at Hdésok Ter
(‘Heroes Square’), erected in 1896 to commemorate the millennium of Magyar
settlement. The theme of heroic resistance is insistently replayed through the 31
sieges of the city and numerous revolts. Such a theme was exploited equally
through the Horthy interwar regency, the period of Communist government and
the post-Communist democracy. All in various ways and with differing stress
used not only resistance to the Turks but also to the Hapsburgs to support the
legitimacy of an ethnically distinct Magyar nation state. The same historical
events have featured prominently in the interpretations of governments of
widely different ostensible ideology. The numerous peasant revolts (‘koruc’) of
the eighteenth century, the 1848-49 ‘war of national liberation’; the First World
War, viewed as the gallant Hungarian ‘Honved’ holding the Carpathian bastion
of Europe against the Slav hordes; the post-war Rumanian incursions (seen as
either a consequence of the ‘red terror’ of 1919 or as the ‘white terror’ of 1920);
and even the legacy of ‘the events of 1956’ (the pock-marked buildings, the
Corvina cinema complex and the Killian barracks) were all the raw material of
an assertively national heritage regardless of the social ideology of successive
governments.
A number of dilemmas result from this contradiction between national and
CENTRAL EUROPE: MANAGING HERITAGE IN THE MAELSTROM Jul

‘European’ heritage. A national heritage can have no place for a ‘Roman

Budapest’ (notably the ‘Aquincum’ excavations) that predates the first Magyar
settler by a thousand years. A ‘European’ capital needs to commemorate its
German, Jewish and Slavonic legacies. Foreign tourists in particular search
largely in vain for the German character of Fiinfkirchen (Pécs), the Serb heritage
of Szentendre, or the Jewish contribution to Budapest. The economic and
political advantages of twinning Budapest with Vienna in joint commercial and
cultural promotion of the Danube cities requires not only a reconstitution of the
Hapsburg link but a revaluation and restoration of its manifestation in the late-
nineteenth-century buildings of the Pest rings.

Krakow-Kazimierz: exclave or national heritage? (Figures 6.4—6.6)

The Jewish ghetto in the European city presents a peculiarly complex heritage
issue. In one sense it is a unique phenomenon because of the unique dimensions
of the crime of the ‘Holocaust’: in another it is archetypical of the cultural and
ethnic mosaic reflected in a separate and distinctive built environment that could
have housed any of the many possible communities (Chapter 4). The Jewish
ghetto was discussed in Chapter 5 as an extreme and graphic example of the

Suan e/ KRAKOW-KAZIMIERZ

——— om Kazimierz

T Major Christian monument PN PI. Nowy

ma Major Jewish monument SZ Szeroka

@® Other major monument JC Jewish Cemetary

Figure 6.4. Krak6w—Kazimierz, Poland

152 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Pmt ae, i ts iseSani i a Nass : ES

Figure 6.5. Krakow, Poland: Cloth Hall in the main square of the city centre (JET, 1992)

Figure 6.6. Krakow: Kazimierz. Former-synagogue museum in empty central square (JET,
1992
CENTRAL EUROPE: MANAGING HERITAGE IN THE MAELSTROM 153
heritage of atrocity. However, it has wider implications. If the atrocity element
was the only consideration then it would be relatively easy to accord a
paramountcy to the national and international memorial function. However, it
was such a widespread phenomenon throughout European cities, even con-
taining a majority of the population in some Polish cases (Gruber, 1992), that it
merges into more mundane issues of the local revitalisation and renovation
problems of inner city districts. It is the clash of the sublime and the mundane,
the sacred and the secular, the international and the local that provides much of
the complexity now facing the city planners as they embark upon renewal in
such districts.
Krakéw-Kazimierz was one of the largest and oldest continuous districts of
legalised Jewish settlement (declared an ‘Oppidum Iudaeorum’ in the fifteenth
century and surviving many vicissitudes to be abruptly terminated with the
Polish defeat in 1939). Its symbolic importance is increased by its location in a
Poland that accommodated the largest community of the Jewish Ashkenazi
diaspora and subsequently provided the largest number of victims of the ‘final
solution’. More recently the popularity of Keneally’s book, and more so
Spielberg’s 1993 film, Schindler’s Ark (subsequently Schindler’s List), has resulted
in worldwide notoriety for the district and the rise of what is now locally called
‘Schindler tourism’.
The district directly abuts the eastern medieval walls of Krakéw and is many
times larger than most European ghettoes. Prague’s Jakobov (Josefstad) in
contrast is older, possessing a mid-thirteenth-century synagogue, but is much
smaller and more exclusively Jewish for most of its existence. Kazimierz was
rarely exclusively Jewish; for much of its existence a majority of its population
was Christian, which has resulted in its most spectacular heritage buildings
being Christian churches.
The issues facing the planners can be summarised as aspects of the ‘whose
heritage?’ question for which there are answers at three spatial scales, each of
which has implications for the rest.

e The heritage of the European Jewish community, and especially its

extermination, is an aspect of world heritage of significance to existing Jewish
communities abroad (especially in Israel and the United States) and more widely
to humanity as a whole. The physical and architectural issues are technically
simple although economically more complex. The remaining synagogues and
Jewish cemetery can be protected and restored as a financial priority (with
considerable financial help from overseas). The fundamental difficulty is how to
restore a Jewish settlement without Jews. A Jewish presence can, to an extent, be
reinserted through appropriate reuse (as libraries, museums and interpretation
centres) of some of the buildings and some public signage.
Typical of the problems in detail is that of the box containing extracts from the
Torah that was traditionally fixed on the external door-posts of Jewish houses.
This important physical ‘marking’ of the ghetto was removed in 1939 (leaving
identifiable fixing points). Replacing these has been considered by the city
planners, as both an act of reconciliation as well as a useful means of marking
the ‘tourism trail’ which is in the process of creation through the district.
154 DISSONANT HERITAGE

However, marking in this way houses now inhabited by Christians creates

opposition among current inhabitants and also among Jewish theologians. The
absence of a local Jewish population and the worldwide interest in the topic has
inevitably resulted in much external financing of Jewish heritage buildings. The
Jewish Cultural Center, for example, stands out as not only foreign financed but
at a foreign standard of quality and largely using a foreign language for
interpretation to foreigners.
The result is a clear case of ‘exclave heritage’ where what is perceived as
someone else’s heritage is inserted, largely for exogenous use, into a district. At
best it is ignored by locals as irrelevant; at worst it is an irritating reminder of
the lower priorities afforded to their material needs, let alone their heritage.
e At the scale of the city and the Polish state the question is seen largely as a
reflection of the long relationship between the Polish national idea on the one
side, and Judaism on the other. The sensitivity of the issue results from the ‘loss’
of the largest European Jewish community. This in turn can be seen as evidence
of long-standing Polish tolerance in a multi-religious city or of collaboration,
whether active or passive, in its demise. The policy of the city of Krakow is to
use its Jewish heritage characteristics as a demonstration of either its long-
standing liberal heritage credentials or, alternatively, as some recompense for its
acknowledged complicity in the guilt of the past atrocity. Either policy accords
well with broader foreign and economic aspirations in relations with the United
States and the European Union. The complication is that such interpretations
ignore or minimise the interpretation of the period as one of heroic Polish
national resistance. (There is a dual symbolism perhaps in the two separate
Warsaw uprisings against the German occupation: that of the Jewish ghetto in
1943 and the ‘Home Army’ in 1944.) Are the Poles (or more specifically the
Catholic Poles) to be viewed as fellow victims or as associate perpetrators? The
collapse of communism as the dominant ideology has given a recent twist to this
long-standing saga of ambiguous relations. If a specifically “Catholic Poland’
(supported by a Polish Pope) is regarded as the core of successful national
resistance to an atheistic international communism, then anti-communism can
easily become anti-semitism: if some leading communists were Jews and some
Jewish intellectuals supported communism then a still officially unacceptable
anti-semitism can be cloaked by a patriotic, catholic anti-communism.
e At the local level there is little ambiguity in the negative reactions of the
present inhabitants of Kazimierz. This is more complicated, however, than
merely a revival of a visceral anti-semitism among economically deprived
Christians, provoked by the re-insertion of a Jewish character from outside in
pursuit of external objectives. The present inhabitants are largely drawn from
among the poorest groups in the city and many are rehoused migrants displaced
from the Eastern territories lost in 1945. The tenement housing stock (dominantly
still in public ownership) is in poor condition and public utilities and spaces are
in obvious need of renovation. Resentment at the concentration of resources
upon the heritage of a group that no longer exists in the area is compounded by
the fear of displacement.
The return of expropriated property to the previous heirs is a topic whose
serious implications are only now becoming apparent throughout much of
CENTRAL EUROPE: MANAGING HERITAGE IN THE MAELSTROM 155
Central Europe. The seemingly simple justice of returning property ownership
creates insecurity for present occupiers, many of whom were themselves
displaced and in no sense beneficiaries of the original seizure. The increasingly
visual presence of a resuscitated Jewish heritage raises the spectre of a possible
transfer of ownership to an heir, living now in all probability in Israel or the
United States. The philosophical ‘whose heritage’ question becomes part of a
very practical ‘whose property’ question as we have already discussed in other
cases.
The negative reactions are not just a consequence of this competition for
recognition, resources and property with the existing poorer population groups.
The revitalisation of such an inner city district has commonly been financed by a
process of gentrification in Western cities. The role of private investment has
usually been critical and here, as in much of Central Europe, the privatisation of
public assets, including housing, is an important policy. Historic and centrally
located Kazimierz would seem in many ways to be one of the more favoured
districts for renovation by private owners and a number of such initiatives do
exist. However, the ‘gentrifying’ Polish middle class have little interest in the
Jewish heritage and the tourism it generates, apart from using some of the
subsidiary catering services it generates, and have shown some reluctance to
invest in and populate a ‘ghetto’ whose heritage is memorialised atrocity and
conflict. This will, of course, moderate the pressures for the displacement of
existing poorer populations but at the cost of retarding a revitalisation that can
only in current economic circumstances be financed by the private sector.

Gdansk or Danzig? Projecting a composite heritage (Figures 6.7—6.10)

It has been asserted that Gdansk reflects the 1000-year Polish resistance to the
German ‘Drang nach Osten’ more than any other city of Eastern Europe
(Encyclopedia Britannica, 1970). Originating near the mouth of the Vistula as a
natural outlet for Polish trade, it attracted German merchants in association with
Liibeck’s eastern commerce. It became a major link in the chain of ports which
formed the Hanseatic League from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries,
controlling east-west trade along the Baltic coast; it thereby acquired a strong
German imprint, in common with Riga and Tallinn (Reval) (Barraclough, 1984).
The Germanisation of Gdansk, as Danzig, had resulted also from its fourteenth-
century conquest by the Teutonic Order, responsible for a more general
encroachment upon Polish territory until its defeat a century later (now proudly
memorialised at Grunwald, ex-Tannenberg, reclaimed by Poland in 1945). In the
fifteenth century the city reverted to Polish rule and economic orientation,
securing a local autonomy and prosperity to become the most populous city in
Eastern Europe by 1750. With the subsequent extinction of the Polish state,
Prussian annexation for over a century until 1919 cut it off from most of its
Polish hinterland and resumed its Germanisation. Still as Danzig, it became a
Free City under the League of Nations to 1939; but its strongly German identity,
although under loose suzerainty of a reconstituted Poland, induced the Poles to
build the adjacent port of Gdynia in the infamous ‘Corridor’ separating Danzig
(and East Prussia) from most of Germany. It was Nazified in 1933 and its
156 DISSONANT HERITAGE

SHIPYARDS
S BALTIC A Westerplatte |
ene, SEA
Solidarity

Railway
Station

DO aes

=pt
Polish Monument
(replacing German)

=I Nae
Crs
St. Mary's
City Gate
Ly
+1)

Cit
z CAE] ria warehouses |\ ©
Central Market Ral ss ES
(pedestrian) i

GRADUAL—
RECONSTRUCTION

(oma
GRADUAL
0
rr
~ 400 RECONSTRUCTION ff |

Figure 6.7. Gdansk (Danzig), Poland (historic details after Baedeker, 1936)

incorporation into the German Third Reich was the ultimate casus belli and scene
of the first engagement of the Second World War.
German expulsion in 1945 followed a savage struggle in which the city was
substantially ruined by Soviet bombardment and the subsequent dismantling of
industrial plant. From this nadir it re-emerged as Gdansk and its historic core
was meticulously reconstituted; but it also acquired a new identity as Poland’s
first ocean-going shipbuilding centre, in which guise it catalysed social and
political changes throughout the nation and adjacent socialist states in the 1980s.
The obvious heritage questions therefore confront us: what and whose
CENTRAL EUROPE: MANAGING HERITAGE IN THE MAELSTROM 157
heritage have the Poles created and reconstructed in Gdansk since 1945? The
city’s mainstream heritage projection has become composite by virtue of its
distinctive geographical significance within the Polish state. It provided an
opportunity for Poland to develop an ocean-going role on a_hitherto
unprecedented scale, thus elevating the city’s maritime image from what had
become a comparative Baltic backwater. Unforeseen and categorically un-
intended was the socio-political heritage that was to attach to this: the Gdansk
shipyards became the focus of the Solidarity movement for a trade union free of
Communist control and as such became, with the Catholic church, the rallying
point of opposition which eventually overturned the Communist system. This
development was of extreme national heritage significance, representing the
overthrow with Communism of alien Soviet Russian domination. However,
instant relay by the Western media of these events rapidly gave Gdansk an
international heritage profile, both as a focus of opposition to Communism and
more generally with respect to union rights, a profile clearly enhanced by its
encouragement of unrest elsewhere in Central Europe which ultimately led to
the collapse of East Germany and the end of the Cold War. A monument of
strongly industrial symbolism in front of the shipyard is the most obvious
physical expression of this heritage (Figure 6.8); it was unveiled in 1980 in
memory of workers killed a decade before, expresses the resolution of Solidarity,
and is now a place of pilgrimage for visiting heads of state. In addition, St
Brigide’s church nearby has become associated with Solidarity. However, the
Western media’s encapsulation of the shipyard events characteristically failed to
link them with the existence of an adjacent historic city; in consequence the
limited heritage significance of Gdansk to global tourism is not only strongly
Polish and international, but is associated primarily with an industrial imagery.
The Central European heritage context of Gdansk is another matter. Centuries
of mercantile wealth left a streetscape of outstanding public and commercial/
residential buildings in the historic core, particularly along the now-pedestrian-
ised central artery (Figure 6.9); these reflect the influence of Flemish/Dutch
architects but have more pervasive associations especially with the Hansa period
for Germans and the Polish nobility for Poles. Symbolism with respect to the
Second World War is also sharper to Poles and Germans than it is globally (it
was noted internationally but with limited background at the fiftieth anniversary
in 1989). It derives from the history outlined above and culminates in the
opening bombardment of the war at Westerplatte, memorialised near the
entrance of Gdansk harbour, and the final expulsion of the German population
amid great loss of life and devastation of the city. The sinking of the Wilhelm
Gustloff in January 1945 with over 7000 refugees from the Danzig area, the
greatest maritime disaster in history (Keegan, 1989) is, unsurprisingly, not
memorialised in Gdansk but among the German losses at the U-Boat Memorial
outside Kiel.
The reconstruction of Gdansk accordingly raises particularly delicate issues of
heritage identity. However, sufficient continuity of architectural and mercantile
tradition persisted throughout the city’s political vicissitudes that the Poles had
no difficulty identifying with the results of their reconstruction (as in Wroclaw;
see Tunbridge, 1994). Medieval and Renaissance architectural styles in Gdansk
158 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Figure 6.8. Solidarity Monument, Gdansk yf Poland, with dockyard behind (JET, 1994)

FEigure 6 9 . Gdansk (Danzig): city centre. Neptune statue in Long Market and St Mary’s
Church (JET. , 1992)
CENTRAL EUROPE: MANAGING HERITAGE IN THE MAELSTROM 159

Figure 6.10. Gdansk: restored area in broader context, looking from wartime ruins (1990s
redevelopment) to reconstructed warehouses and beyond across the harbour (JET, 1994)

have wide currency in Europe and also have a local accent which, although
associated with the Hansa traditions emanating from northern Germany and
Flanders, has Baltic regional rather than nationalistic overtones. Furthermore,
Polish iconographic elements persisted into the twentieth century, although
subject to some Nazi removal (Dybowski, 1991). Naturally all specifically
German streetscape iconography has now disappeared, and pragmatic modifi-
cation occurred in the reconstruction (including density reduction by leaving
green space in block interiors; Dybowski, 1991), providing scope for some
selective reversion to the city’s Polish Renaissance period. Official tourist
literature unsurprisingly magnifies Polish associations at the expense of German.
Attitudes to the Germans are necessarily ambivalent, however, since the most
obvious tourism market for formerly German cities in Poland (especially Danzig,
Breslau/Wroclaw and Stettin/Szczecin) is those who have an understanding of
their history, personal associations with them, residential proximity and the
means to visit: in short, the Germans. Here we find the most striking case of
selling tourists their own heritage, since the most fertile tourism market consists
of those who were born or grew up there. Polish anxiety to join the European
Union portends an intensifying quest for and dependence on the tourist
Deutschmark. In practice, however, some market segmentation is occurring both
in the heritage sold and the medium of its sale. With respect to the historic core,
the Germans are the dominant market and official Polish tourism perspectives
are available to them in German brochures; but their specific cultural interest is
catered to by a private sector willing to accept Deutschmarks, sell maps and
mementoes of German — even Nazi — Danzig (for example in philately),
increasingly to speak German, and to provide tours to other places of interest to
160 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Germans (see Kaliningrad below). On the other hand, the marking of the
streetscape is ‘cleansed’ and the official literature slanted for the consumption of
Poles and non-German tourists, while the culturally neutral Baltic tourist trade
in amber products generally sidesteps nationalist sensitivities.
St Mary’s church encapsulates the bicultural heritage identity of historic
Gdansk. It dominates the townscape but projects no cultural affront. Its Flemish-
Germanic Gothic design implies Hanseatic identity but its medieval construction
actually straddled periods of both German and Polish control. It had served the
German Protestant majority but reverted to Catholic control after its post-war
Polish restoration. It continues to project German language and imagery in
gravestones and paintings, and in a multilingual memorial to one German figure
deemed to have culturally augmented Gdansk; but these are now overlain by
Polish imagery in the form of memorials to war service and the Katyn atrocity
(Chapter 5), and to figures associated with the anti-Communist liberation
struggle such as the murdered priest Jerzy Popieluszko. The contemporary
relaxation of cultural dissonance is evidenced by German contributions to the
church restoration (Dybowski, 1991); likewise St Catherine’s church provides a
multilingual account of the replacement of the carillon of bells removed during
the war, through the good offices of a former Danziger and other German
interests motivated to make a fiftieth-anniversary gesture of reconciliation.
Polish dedication to historic restoration and reconstruction has in effect
created a national heritage overlay, whatever question may exist as to the
intrinsic heritage projection of the structures involved. While, as noted earlier,
this is most apparent where national symbolism is greatest, it may also occur in
more equivocal cases. One such example is the cathedral in Wroclaw, which
reacquired in 1992 the spires which are recognisable from pre-war images of
German Breslau. The painstaking expenditure of the necessary resources by an
economy under considerable stress is, however, a distinctively Polish heritage
phenomenon.
Gdansk is peculiarly well equipped to project a recast European heritage
identity. It is a product of two main cultures, with minority contributions from
Jews and others. Its distinctive Hanseatic identity, while of Germanic origin, is
none the less a multinational European regional idiom that does not in itself
carry overtones of nationalistic oppression and is generally recognised in the
tourism industry. Its centuries of wealth drew European cultural luminaries to it
and enabled the city to make a continent-wide cultural imprint. Conversely it
marks the outbreak point of the worst European, indeed global, war. It is one of
few cities to have possessed an international ‘Free City’ identity, both in the
Napoleonic era and, however unsuccessfully, between the World Wars. Finally,
it performed a catalytic role in the disintegration of the Cold War European
order. Its effective projection in this European identity may well follow Poland’s
integration into the European Union.

Kaliningrad: resurrecting the heritage of Konigsberg (Figures 6.11—6.15)

Kaliningrad /K6nigsberg is the only major German city to have fallen to direct
Soviet/Russian annexation in 1945; as such, and as a Baltic port 150 km from
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Figure 6.12. Kaliningrad (Kénigsberg), Russia: cathedral and central island. The spire is
under reconstruction; former Stock Exchange on the right, with the socialist city in
background (JET, 1994)

Gdansk, its heritage context is superficially comparable to that of Gdansk.

However, the radical changes in the political and economic circumstances of the
city and its surrounding territory (the northern half of the former East Prussia),
from the German time through the Cold War to the subsequent Soviet dis-
integration, provide a uniquely interesting case with respect to our theme.
Kaliningrad was closed to foreigners for 45 years, and the following represents a
preliminary assessment of the changes in its heritage dissonance.
Konigsberg was founded in the thirteenth century by the Teutonic Knights,
subsequently becoming their chief centre, and is thus of unambiguous Germanic
origin; it also became a member of the Hanseatic League. Unlike Danzig/
Gdansk, however, it remained in essentially continuous German occupance until
1945, when this 700-year identity was terminated with the expulsion or
execution of the Germans by the Soviet army, after a siege which destroyed
most of the city that had not already succumbed to British air raids. It had
become a German naval base, vital to the defence of the eastern frontier, and this
role was recreated in reverse by the Soviets, to whom it was a coveted ice-free
port projecting power westwards. Unlike Gdansk, Kaliningrad essentially
disappeared in secrecy, being surrounded by an unparalleled concentration of
military as well as naval installations reflecting its Cold War front-line position
within Soviet territory. It was renamed after the titular president of the Soviet
Union during the Stalin era, as a clear symbol of its new identity.
No city has been more immediately destabilised by the end of the Cold War.
Not only has its military significance become both apparently redundant and
unaffordable, it has also become strategically untenable since the Kaliningrad
CENTRAL EUROPE: MANAGING HERITAGE IN THE MAELSTROM 163

Figure 6.13. Kaliningrad (K6nigsberg): fort on inner defences (Dohnaturm) containing

Amber Museum and incorporating a gate (Rossgarter Tor) (JET, 1994)

Oblast (region) is now severed from Russia by the independence of Lithuania

and Belarus, through which transit fees are high. In short, it finds itself in a
broadly analogous position to its pre-war status within the German exclave of
East Prussia. With the military economy in decline, its presence has none the less
been boosted without adequate means of support by the return of troops from
Germany. Accordingly, Kaliningrad has been seeking both a new economy and
a further new identity. It aspires to profit from free-port status which could
serve as a multinational ice-free outlet, benefitting from proximity to, and
improving rail and road links with, Western Europe (Hall, 1992). However, a
less uncertain and more immediate economic rescue may lie in tourism: its
distance from Berlin is half that from Moscow; a new highway to the west is
being built by a German-Russian firm; its accessibility to the tourist Deutsch-
mark is accordingly good; and its interest to the Germans obvious, if traumatic.
It was opened to tourism, specifically German-oriented, in 1990; and it has
subsequently become accessible by overnight train from Berlin and a destination
for both hydrofoil excursions organised from Gdansk and visiting ships in the
post-Cold War Baltic cruise trade. Being primarily day visits, the latter minimise
problems of limited accommodation, food and currency in the stressed con-
ditions of post-Communist Russia.
The questions arise as to not only whose heritage, but what heritage recog-
nisable in tourist terms, may be sold. The German city has largely vanished;
however the Soviet, chiefly Russian, civilian and military inhabitants imported
in 1945 have created an environment which could in theory constitute a saleable
heritage. But in this respect a fundamental problem has arisen: the collective
heritage identity useful to tourism and essential to socio-political stability is
164 DISSONANT HERITAGE

disintegrating, as a result of the failure of the Soviet state, the discrediting of the
city’s Stalinist name, and the severance from a post-Soviet Russia which in any
case appears unable to meet the practical or spiritual needs of its citizens. In
addition, the physical reconstruction of the city is an improbable basis for a
generally satisfactory sense of place, for reasons discussed below, and there is a
widespread desire to connect with a residual urban and regional environment
which is clearly not Russian. In consequence, a significant heritage resurrection
and appropriation has been occurring, of the only credible option: that of the
departed Germans. This creates a very unusual heritage dissonance problem:
local interests are becoming consonant with the formerly very dissonant heritage
of the Germans and are to this extent aligned with the principal tourism market,
but by seeking to assume themselves the identity they are selling back to visitors,
they are generating a dissonance with their own past and the Soviet iconography
still (in 1995) around them, and potentially so with their future identity within
the Russian state. The desire of most citizens to restore the name K6nigsberg is
the ultimate expression of this problem; the reversion has been stalled by military
conservatism (Meyer, 1991) and specifically the opposition of veterans, an
intergenerational expression of dissonance which must necessarily fade.
In considering the emergence of both local and tourist interest in the German
heritage of Konigsberg, it is realistic to ask on what material basis this heritage
might be rebuilt. While we stressed in Chapter 1 that heritage is a fluid and
expanding concept which may exist in the absence of material artefacts, in
practice this is unlikely when a former material heritage has been traumatically
erased by an alien replacement which still exists.
The central focus of the reclaimed heritage identity is Immanuel Kant, who
taught at the former German university and, as an internationally renowned
philosopher, has a human significance devoid of hostility and transcending
purely German heritage; his emphasis on the importance of free will has a
particular appeal in the present political climate. Kant is also intrinsic to the
regional sense of place, having spent his entire life in the vicinity of Konigsberg.
While his reclamation does not therefore depend upon German identity (least of
all that in local living memory) it has been conducive — along with the hope for
German investment — to a more general “Teutomania’ (Benjamin, 1994). Kant’s
material heritage is primarily his tomb adjacent to the ruined cathedral, and this
has become a shrine upon which flowers and wreaths are regularly laid. From
this his presence has diffused, such as to a wall plaque in German and Russian
(repeated for at least one other German cultural figure) and a statue in front of
the contemporary university (a German-funded replacement of a statue lost in
1945). An international Kant society is based in Kaliningrad and a Kant Museum
in the cathedral is proposed.
However, the historic core of Kénigsberg, on and around the island in the
Pregel (Pregolya), was destroyed by air raids, the final battle for the city, and
Soviet clearance of the ruins in the post-war years; the only building to survive
was the shell of the cathedral, which now shares the central island with formally
designed parkland containing Soviet/Russian statuary. This amounted to a near-
annihilation, Vernichtung, of the image-forming city core, notably eradicating the
castle and university which had overlooked the northern bank of the Pregel.
CENTRAL EUROPE: MANAGING HERITAGE IN THE MAELSTROM 165
Nevertheless various disconnected elements of Kénigsberg’s material heritage
survive outside the immediate city core, in a variety of conditions between
restoration and ruin, and different degrees of reuse from governmental to
makeshift. They include one survivor of the many churches, and various
eighteenth to twentieth-century institutional, commercial and _ industrial
buildings, mostly isolated but forming one semi-continuous streetscape east of
the city centre, in which one ruined building retained in 1994 its German
business name and an appearance falsely suggestive of recent devastation.
Fragments of working-class tenement housing continue in use, and a substantial
area of originally residential and other structures, now providing the civic and
regional administrative focus, survives in suburbs north-west of the centre. The
street plan generally remains, outside of the central island, as does a system of
ponds and waterways manipulated for economic and defensive purposes.
However, the most substantial remains are fortifications surrounding the inner
city, largely of late nineteenth-century date and used as the final line of defence
in 1945; consistent with our comments in Chapter 5, despite damage they remain
durable, and they include city gates with obviously Germanic motifs and
vestigial statuary (Figure 6.14). In nearly all cases the German structures are
sharply distinguishable from their successors by their dominant use of red brick
and usually substantial Gothic or Baroque ornamentation, in contrast to uniform
factory-produced apartments which predominantly succeeded them; however,
they generally lack the continuity desirable for the development of local identity
and viable tourism alike, particularly since their chief tourism market is former
K6nigsbergers for whom such islands in an alien sea (unlike Gdansk) have
obvious negative overtones.
However, the connecting sea of Stalinist architecture is itself an improbable
basis of heritage identity since it is mostly in poor repair, repetitive of socialist
modernist design across the former Soviet Union, and has specifically failed to
replace the image-forming city centre. Kaliningrad provided close to a ‘tabula
rasa’ for the application of socialist planning principles in which a commercially
focused or otherwise high-intensity city centre had no place (Rugg, 1979; Bater et
al., 1994), and in any case the military imperative no doubt took precedence over
concern with urban design. Furthermore, for reasons already discussed neither
the overall Soviet-era morphology nor its monuments, such as those to Lenin
and Kalinin, now provide a generally acceptable basis for local heritage identity.
In this unusual heritage vacuum, any alternative might be preferable and that of
Kénigsberg is the only one available, as well as the only possibility for heritage-
based tourism.
The process of resurrecting the heritage of Kénigsberg, beyond Kant, is
already under way. A society appropriately named Eintracht is dedicated to
restoring the area’s German heritage, and entrepreneurs are renovating old
buildings for Western consular offices and companies (Montaigne, 1993). The
Kaliningrad Museum occupies a finely restored nineteenth-century civic building
and records both the city’s earlier identity and the 1945-48 transition time, the
latter in a special exhibition with a German summary cast in conciliatory terms
of inevitability and shared German/Russian suffering. The Museum of Capitula-
tion in the former German city-centre bunker portrays through dioramas and
166 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Figure 6.14. Kaliningrad (Kénigsberg): eastern gate of the old city (Kénigs Tor). Note
current vegetation growth (JET, 1994)

Figure 6.15. Kaliningrad: statue of Kalinin, outside the south station; characteristic
socialist streetscape behind (JET, 1994)
CENTRAL EUROPE: MANAGING HERITAGE IN THE MAELSTROM 167

photographs the character and destruction of Kénigsberg, particularly the castle

complex formerly in its vicinity (a dissonant Teutonic symbol). The Amber
Museum, which depicts the most distinctive economic resource of the region,
adaptively reuses one of the peripheral defensive bastions, albeit with limited
reference to the building’s origin; it provides a German brochure, and summary
of a display on the priceless Amber Room stolen by Nazi Germany from Russia,
but fails to identify that this was centrally associated with Kénigsberg and last
seen there in 1945. Cafes and bars are also appearing as (somewhat) tourist-
friendly amenities in the old fortifications; while others in more mundane
locations recall the townscape of Konigsberg in their decor. Furthermore, the
surviving church has been refurbished and charges tourist admission.
A key element in the strengthening of the German heritage is German-
supported reconstruction. Above all, the German government is contributing
substantially to the reconstruction of the cathedral, in progress in 1994, with the
Russian Ministry of Culture, and local government and private donors; apart
from its greater symbolism this has a disproportionate townscape significance,
for its new spire recreates historic vistas along the city’s several water axes.
Additionally, the German Museum Stadt Konigsberg (in Duisburg) has donated
a model of the old inner city to the Kaliningrad Museum, and private German
interests with Konigsberg roots (compare Danzig) facilitated the erection of the
statue of Kant noted earlier.
Thus a tentative Konigsberg heritage is re-emerging. The inevitable decay of
the Soviet iconography, as elsewhere in Russia, will remove an obvious
dissonance; although perhaps qualified by the survival of that with such
patriotic symbolism as the naval war memorial, close to the cathedral. The city’s
overall attractiveness to tourism may remain limited, and confused by such
survivals, but it shares the post-Cold War accessibility of the rest of Central
Europe and could do so more fully if visa constraints were further eased.
Whether and how it might attempt (with external support) to reconstruct other
components of Kénigsberg’s inner city, as in Dresden (Soane, 1994), and thereby
reduce the central vacuum which presently exists, is an interesting question of
central importance to any large-scale tourism generation.
The enigmatic disappearance of the fabled Amber Room from the ruins of
Konigsberg is an obvious focus of heritage creation for tourism. It was originally
made in Konigsberg, before being gifted to imperial Russia, and was stolen back
as a precursor of the planned relocation in the city of cultural treasures to be
looted from Moscow (Harris, 1992). There are various scenarios regarding its fate
in 1945, apart from loss by fire, and these have generated a treasure hunt from
Weimar to Kaliningrad, where the Russian Ministry of Culture has engaged a
US company to search for it (Walsh, 1993). This is a classic case of misplaced
heritage, which could potentially offset the relinquishment of the Schliemann
treasure (Chapter 3). In Kaliningrad its story is presently an under-exploited
tourism resource, despite its link with the local amber industry, and this reflects
a more general absence of effective tourism marketing in 1994, which could be
remedied in the short term. However, it must be borne in mind that Kaliningrad
was a forbidden city which has achieved a rudimentary identity reversion and
associated tourism industry within four years of its reopening to the world.
168 DISSONANT HERITAGE

The apparent similarity with Gdansk is therefore quite misleading, most

fundamentally in the relationship between the two cultural heritages involved
(and also in the presence of religion as a central factor in the reconstruction of
Gdansk). Kaliningrad was a case of attempted total displacement of an entirely
German heritage, now paradoxically showing aspirations towards a_ total
reversion. In practice, however, a complete denial of the heritage of Kaliningrad,
inseparable as it is from hard-won victory in a brutal war, seems neither
plausible nor attainable; the city’s identity may become inexorably hybrid and to
this extent akin to Gdansk. (Discussion is extended in Tunbridge, 1995.)

Berlin: heritage fulcrum for Central Europe (Figure 6.16)

Berlin, even more than other great European capitals, projects a microcosm of
the European problem in that its heritage dissonance is too complex to be
comprehensively reviewed in a brief case study but too critical to ignore.
Ultimately, any discussion of the theme in Central Europe requires a broad
overview of its dominant instigation from and reflection in Berlin. This is
examined in four phases, essentially corresponding with the chronological
swings in Europe as a whole which we have discussed above.
Contemporary Berlin derives its oldest substantial imagery from its centuries
as the capital of Prussia. The eighteenth-century Brandenburg Gate and
Tiergarten and the Siegessdule (Victory Column, 1873) are reflections of similar
grand design in other nascent imperial capitals of Europe; in this case they
reflect primarily the power of Frederick the Great, which was associated with
Prussian expansionism at the expense of Poland. The most complete heritage
representation of this period is the royal retreat at nearby Potsdam, inspired by
that at Versailles and manifested by palaces such as Sans Souci and by the set-
piece ‘Residenz’ town. This imagery of dynastic Hohenzollern power intensified
after the unification of Germany in 1871, whence it was exercised from Berlin on
a global scale as well as in continuing designs on ‘Mitteleuropa’, leading to the
imperial rivalries culminating in the First World War; this period is associated
with some of the most powerful visual imagery of Berlin, such as the Reichstag
and the various state institutions on or near Unter den Linden.
Imperial Germany’s defeat, however, was followed by a democracy which is
symbolised by its initial safe retreat of the National Theatre in Weimar
(Tunbridge, 1994) rather than by its visual impression on Berlin, the subsequent
burning of the Berlin Reichstag by Hitler representing a vivid image of the
Weimar Republic’s collapse. The rise of Nazism was not initially a Berlin
phenomenon but rapidly impressed itself upon the city as the nerve centre of a
newly expansionist Germany. In the renewed and virulent ‘Drang nach Osten’
under Hitler, Berlin accordingly came to symbolise the ultimately atrocious
projection of dictatorial power. Its monumental redesign as the Nazi capital of
all Europe, under Speer, was intended to project this heritage on a scale never
before accomplished (Harris, 1992; Morris, 1994). In the event it was never built
and the ‘constructive’ physical heritage of this period is limited and most notable
in the fragmentary ruins of the control centres of totalitarian government, in
particular the Topography of Terror museum on the site of the Gestapo, SS and
169

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state security headquarters, and the graves of a few key figures such as
Heydrich. (Grandiose major structures survive in Nuremberg, Berchtesgaden
and more remote locations, however.) The Nazi physical heritage is essentially
that of destruction, both that sown by the regime (Reichstag, synagogues) and
much more that which it reaped. Hitler’s decision to spend his final days in a
climactic battle for Berlin, rather than retreat to his original base in southern
Germany, ultimately impressed the Nazi heritage upon the city through
devastation almost as indelibly as it might have been impressed through
monumental redesign, leaving the remains of the underground bunker where he
died as a supremely dissonant parting legacy.
The Cold War period complicated the already contentious heritage of Berlin in
an unprecedented manner. The division of the city between the Western Allies
and the Soviet Union dichotomised its physical recovery between the symbolism
of liberal Western democracy and that of state socialism. West Berlin was
essentially reconstructed as a democratic capitalist environment but, having lost
the greater part of the city centre, was obliged to substitute by expanding the
commercial focus around the Kurftirstendamm, and to do so in an exclave
environment of intermittent siege from surrounding East Berlin and East
Germany; the heritage of this period includes many associations with the
Western Allies and is symbolised by the Luftbrticke (air bridge) Memorial.
Conversely, East Berlin retained the dominant surviving pre-war imagery
focused on Unter den Linden, but in a largely decayed and bullet-scarred
condition that preserved the visual heritage of the Second World War into the
1990s more pervasively than West Berlin’s symbolic memorial in the partly
ruined Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church; to this was added a limited and
completely discordant redevelopment expressing Stalinist architectural rigidity
(Morris, 1994) focused upon the Alexanderplatz (Figure 6.17), and latterly some
set-piece and visibly kindred ‘historic’ reconstruction as in the Nikolaiviertel. A
major Stalinist landscape feature is the Soviet cemeteries and war memorials,
one of which penetrates the morphology of West Berlin to effect a particularly
dissonant juxtaposition.
The Berlin Wall was built between the two Berlins in the 1960s, creating
perhaps the most globally dissonant of all built heritage in that in addition to the
associated atrocity (Chapter 5) it was rapidly projected by the Western media as
the ultimate symbol of the Cold War (Figures 6.18 and 6.19). In this symbolism
Berlin’s status was visibly reversed from the former centre of European power to
the extreme power periphery; it thereby expressed the temporary disappearance
of Central Europe in favour of West and East as effectively client states of
Washington and Moscow (Poulsen, 1995). The Wall’s less famous corollary,
however, was the cordon sanitaire behind it which cut an empty ‘no man’s land’
some 200 m wide across the city centre, effectively freezing within it the
underground remains of Hitler’s bunker.
The Berlin Wall not only epitomised the Cold War but also its end, most
visibly symbolised by the opening of the Wall in November 1989. This set in
train the reunification of the Germanies and of Berlin, which has again reversed
the geographical role and heritage status of the city. From an ideological
borderland it has reassumed its focal position, specifically as the redesignated
 ”

CENTRAL EUROPE: MANAGING HERITAGE IN THE MAELSTROM aya

Figure 6.17. Berlin: Palast der Republic and Cathedral from Alexanderplatz (JET, 1994)

capital of the most powerful and strategically central country of Europe, within
a European Union which other countries of a reconstituted Central Europe are
anxious to join, now that power-bloc constraints have gone. Berlin is both the
renewed gateway to the East and the most rapidly growing focus of power in a
Europe edging towards some degree of political union. Because of the
opportunity perceived in Germany, its Central European neighbours are anxious
to reinforce an economic and political interdependency with it which, in
conjunction with Western Europe already so oriented, is creating a continental
order ironically resembling that which Hitler had planned under German control
(Harris, 1992); as in that design, Berlin, if not the sole continental focus, is the
principal magnet from a Central European perspective. Its attraction to migrants
(having attracted in the Cold War period a Turkish minority in the West and
various groups from the then-socialist world in the East) has increased
dramatically and is particularly strong for Central Europeans. Given its growing
stature and magnetism for visitors, the heritage which Berlin projects already,
and which will be projected by its rapid redevelopment and by minority
settlement, is of unparalleled significance in Central Europe.
In the early 1990s the streetscape scenes of Berlin epitomised the city’s role in
the end of the Cold War and the renewed intercourse with Central Europe and
points farther east. Pieces of the Berlin Wall became the heritage souvenirs of
choice, and the goods of Central Europe and beyond became the common
currency of impromptu street markets, particularly at sites associated with the
Cold War such as the former Checkpoint Charlie and the Brandenburg Gate.
However, the built environment imparts a series of mutually dissonant messages,
172 DISSONANT HERITAGE

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Figure 6.18. Berlin: heritage of the Wall. Memorial section across Spree from Reichstag
(JET, 1994)

Figure 6.19. Berlin: redevelopment zone behind the former Wall. From Brandenburg Gate
to Potsdamer Platz, towards former East; Hitler’s bunker underground in the mid-
distance (JET, 1992)
CENTRAL EUROPE: MANAGING HERITAGE IN THE MAELSTROM 173

many of which are hostile to the city’s new role. The Nazi heritage is impossible
to mark, let alone market, without dissonance among long-standing residents
and recent migrants from former victim nations; and particularly without
enshrinement for neo-Nazi groups, a problem which reaches its extreme in the
case of Hitler’s bunker (Chapter 5). The Communist heritage of the East presents
similar problems; however the killings at the former Wall produced unofficial
shrines near the Reichstag, later formalised along with a memorial section of the
Wall itself (see also Chapter 5); the 1953 revolt and the former Stasi secret police
victims are now memorialised; and as elsewhere substantial renaming, of streets
particularly, has rendered the Communist pantheon much less visible.
Debate can be particularly contentious over associations with the Holocaust or
other atrocity, including lesser-known sites such as suburban Grunewald Station
which are intermittently drawn to public attention by development schemes or
even by neo-Nazi attacks. Dissonance is not necessarily extinguished by
demolition, as of the Spandau prison of the Nazi Rudolf Hess. Less still is it
resolved by established heritage interpretations in monuments, museums and
exhibitions, for whether of DDR or Federal Republic provenance they commonly
relate to war or atrocity and are likely to foster substantial inter-group dis-
sonance, implying shorter or longer-term questions as to their future immut-
ability. Important examples are the Museum of Unconditional Capitulation in
Karlshorst (being redesigned following the withdrawal of the Soviet garrison);
the Topography of Terror museum; memorials to German anti-Nazi resistance,
including this museum, the ‘Questions on German History’ exhibition initially
in the Reichstag; and conceivably even the new National Memorial (see Figure
6.20 below). Among the most insidious dissonant heritage problems, with a
potential still largely untapped, are cemeteries sharply divided between
extremist ideologies, with Communists at Friedrichsfelde and the Prussian/
Imperial military at the Invalidenfriedhof, both in the erstwhile East; the former
experienced Nazi destruction in 1935 and the latter was neglected and
vandalised by the DDR. The grave of Heydrich in the latter now constitutes a
specific problem of potential neo-Nazi enshrinement to which a proposed
solution is the replacement of the gravestone by one recording only the number
of deaths for which he was responsible (McQuillan, personal communication
1994). With this potential we must associate the larger problem in Central
Europe (and elsewhere) of neo-Nazi vandalisation of Jewish cemeteries.
Debate over heritage identity, interpretation and dissonance resolution is in
ferment over a multiplicity of issues beyond the more atrocious legacies of
ideological extremism. Karl Marx Allee will be preserved as an example of
‘socialist realism’ (Painton, 1994), but there is only minority sentiment in favour
of retaining the Palast der Republik (East German parliament; Figure 6.17). The
equestrian statue of Frederick the Great has been re-erected after 40 years of
storage in East Berlin (Poulsen, 1995), but the symbolic as well as economic
implications of reconstructing the fifteenth-century Royal Palace, destroyed by
the Communist order, represent one of the more contentious issues.
Throughout the former East, such as Alexanderplatz which will become one
pole of a restructured city centre (Morris, 1994), there is active debate over urban
redesign. The focal problem concerns the redevelopment of the former cordon
174 DISSONANT HERITAGE

sanitaire, particularly the recreation of the lost Potsdamer Platz, as a

morphological reunification and recapitalisation of newly revalued land which
will hopefully minimise, indeed redress, dissonance with respect to the city’s
increasingly international and cross-cultural role; even perhaps forging a new
heritage for a new Europe (Morris, 1994). However, the wider design debate has
focused political controversy over what the city stands for: it has been resolved
in favour of predominantly height-harmonious conservative morphology (Neue
Einfachheit, or New Simplicity) consistent with the city’s main nineteenth/early
twentieth-century character, and this conformity with the past has provoked
accusations of empathy with undesirable heritages dissonant to the present and
future identity of Berlin (Painton, 1994). Soane (1994), however, has set this
decision within the broader context of the revival of cultural vernacularism
within Germany as a whole, most strongly manifested in the proposals to
rebuild Dresden, which he suggests is a reassertion of indigenous tradition after
decades of its political undesirability; it is arguably accordant with the historicist
thread of postmodernism in the Western world in general, but this rarely carries
such cultural and ideological baggage.
The Neue Wache shrine on Unter den Linden is a globally outstanding
example of successive changes of heritage interpretation, in response to
contradictory dissonances resulting from the sharp ideological turns to which
East Berlin/Germany have been particularly subject. It was created in the
nineteenth century for royal commemoration, and became the national war
memorial of the Weimar Republic, a shrine of Nazi aggrandisement, and a
memorial to the ‘victims of Fascism and Militarism’ under the DDR. In 1990 the
victims of Communism were added to this label, before the shrine’s closure, to
emerge in 1993 redesigned as the National Memorial of the united Federal
Republic (Figure 6.20). In this role it bears inscriptions memorialising, with the
utmost circumspection with respect to inclusion, all in and beyond Germany
who suffered and died innocently at the hands of every manifestation of
aggression and abuse of power which has emanated from the nation’s past; it
embodies powerful symbolism in a bullet-scarred exterior, and a new statue of
‘Mother with Dead Son’ within an interior otherwise returned to that of the lost
forebear, the Weimar Republic.
Potential minority heritage dissonance is most conspicuously manifested by
the restoration of the New Synagogue in Oranienburgerstrasse, to become
primarily a Jewish cultural centre, which is particularly relevant to the memory
of this area as a past focus of Jewish life, and in view of the renewed growth of
the Jewish community with immigration from the East. It was attacked on the
Nazi Reichskristallnacht in 1938 and subsequently bombed, its politically
motivated restoration being commenced under the DDR 50 years later
(Simmons, 1989). The heritage identity being created by more recent minorities
compounds dissonance in Berlin still further. The mainly Turkish inner-city
district of Kreuzberg is illuminating: solidly Germanic apartment blocks contain
at street level a townscape of exotic bars and restaurants, in a sea of posters and
graffiti expressing counter-culture solidarity with other marginalised groups and
opposition to oppression in Turkey, disenfranchisement in Germany, and the
rise of neo-Nazism. The vulnerability of old and new minorities and of their
CENTRAL EUROPE: MANAGING HERITAGE IN THE MAELSTROM 175

floor inscription “To the victims of war and the rule of force (Gewaltherrschaft)’ (JET, 1994)

heritage contribution to dissonance culminating in such threats is appropriately

illustrated in Berlin, as an example of a much wider Central (and general)
European problem.
In the overall equation of Berlin’s heritage adjustment, Potsdam, which is a
mirror of Berlin’s historical function and image, has a distinctive role. Partly as a
result of DDR interpretation, its marketed heritage is sharply bipolar: the palaces
and townsite of eighteenth-century Prussian kings (saved by Soviet “‘benevo-
lence’) as against the Cecilienhof Palace. This is a product of imperial Germany
which remained in Hohenzollern hands until 1945, but is marketed more for its
international significance as the site of the Allied conference which ended the
war in Europe. It was a hallowed site to the DDR, which claimed that the terms
of the Potsdam Agreement had been fulfilled only on its territory (Simmons,
1989). The DDR’s suppression of German nationalism fostered an interpretation
of the Agreement which marginalised its catastrophic heritage significance for
Germany, in its dismemberment and Cold War division. This self-effacement has
survived into reunification and would be difficult to adjust retrospectively, since
it not only mirrors to Western and Eastern visitors alike their own heritage of
hard-won victory, but also accords with the heritage internationalism which for
different reasons is as desirable to the new status of Berlin as it was to the
defunct DDR. Furthermore, catastrophe notwithstanding, the Potsdam Con-
ference remains fundamentally Germany’s heritage in the foundation of its
present realities, among which is now the full recovery of liberal democracy.
One factor which is affecting heritage evolution in Potsdam is that, as an
eighteenth-century period piece neglected for two generations, it is currently
capitalising upon an exceptional gentrification potential, despite the political
176 DISSONANT HERITAGE

sensitivity in the former DDR of social displacement through West German

property reclamation and acquisition.
Overall the resolution, or more likely control, of heritage dissonances in Berlin
is the most significant expression of the issue in Central Europe and probably in
the evolving new Europe as a whole. If, as argued earlier, Central Europe is to a
large extent a German concept, developed to explain and sometimes justify
German economic, cultural and political incursion eastwards, then Berlin played a
major role as fulcrum for such efforts. Conversely, if Berlin was instrumental in
Germany’s extension of influence eastwards, now it is itself the recipient of people
and ideas originating from points east within, and beyond, Central Europe.

CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A EUROPEAN CONSONANCE?

It is important to keep in mind that the heritage dissonance of the Central

European ‘maelstrom’ is substantially reflected elsewhere in Europe. As perhaps
the most obvious illustration, post-Communist ideological adjustment is more
problematical still in the former Soviet Union where successor states are
stumbling between alien Western models and past ideologies of their own, in
this case seldom experienced within living memory. We have noted some
Russian parallels to our ‘maelstrom’ cases, and it is not difficult to discern
specific heritage tensions which await resolution when pressing material needs
are met: in Moscow, the problems of Lenin’s Tomb and Soviet heroes in the
Kremlin Wall, with less obvious issues concerning Central Asian minorities
(Smirnova, personal communication 1994); in St Petersburg, the Tsarist capital as
against the birthplace of the Red Revolution, and the heritage ownership of the
1941-44 Siege, now in the novel context of Western-inspired waterfront
revitalisation (Nefedov, 1993); and more generally the interpretation of the sites
of the Gulag (Chapter 5) and the Second World War, which include extremely
dissonant German cemeteries (Smirnova, personal communication 1994). In
Western Europe, the growth of the European Union and generations of highly
interactive tourism have greatly reduced interpretive dissonances between
national heritages but have not eliminated them, and certainly not eliminated
dissonant regional perspectives, as the chronic conflicts in the Basque country
and Northern Ireland have borne witness.
Neither can we restrict our vision to the long-established population of
Central Europe. Inner-city alien minorities, always a feature of European cities,
are growing rapidly as post-imperial Third World migration increases (Chapter
4). This primarily involves Africans (including radical Muslims) to Western and
Southern Europe; but West Germany, a traditional part of Central Europe
integral to the Cold War West, has become one of the biggest recipients, from
diverse sources. Ironically, the Jewish minority so nearly destroyed has been
demographically, if not socio-economically, replaced by a Muslim minority in
the form of Turkish ‘Gastarbeiter’ who, although seldom religious radicals, have
thus far mostly failed to achieve assimilation into German society, as demon-
strated in Kreuzberg; as with minorities from the Asiatic Communist countries
in the former DDR. Since reunification there has been a flood of immigrants into
CENTRAL EUROPE: MANAGING HERITAGE IN THE MAELSTROM We

Germany, particularly from the post-Cold War east, benefitting from permissive
refugee provisions long directed at ethnic Germans. This has produced the most
serious social resistance in Europe, especially in depressed eastern Germany
where it has been centrally associated with the neo-Nazism referred to above.
Plainly it is premature to expect an aggregate social identification with inclusive
multiculturally-sensitive heritage in Germany, and the alternative heritage
dissonance there is likely to manifest itself elsewhere in Central Europe as
economic uplift may transform Poland, the Czech Republic or Hungary into
immigrant rather than emigrant countries. Recent immigrants therefore
compound the dissonance of the ‘maelstrom’, albeit unevenly, as they do of
Europe more widely; until their contribution finds acceptance they will represent
a problematical ‘enclave’ heritage potential (Dawson, 1987).
We should not lose sight of the variety of human bases for heritage dissonance
that exist beyond culture/ethnicity and ideology, as discussed at length in
Chapter 4. Some, such as class, are deeply ingrained in Central Europe’s social
fabric and inseparable from its heritage in detail. The contemporary ‘disadvan-
taged’ group identifications reviewed in Chapter 4, however, are so over-
whelmed in significance by the cultural/ethnic and ideological fundamentals
that they do not yet offer a fruitful avenue of investigation in the present
regional context.
The question of European economic and perhaps political integration in the
European Union, which either actually or aspirantly involves the countries of
Central Europe, is inextricably linked to the heritage of the continent and its
dissonance, compounded as they now are by the immigration factor (Ashworth
and Larkham, 1994). Such integration might be regarded as a further stage in the
oscillation we discussed above, away from nationalism towards a new form and
level of internationalism; institutions such as the Council of Europe and Europa
Nostra are testimony to the evolution of such internationalism in heritage
perspectives, aspiring to offset the aggressively nationalistic uses of heritage so
distressingly illustrated above in Sarajevo. Resolution or at least containment of
heritage dissonance is clearly a sine qua non of the effective attainment of
internationalism, however. A greater harmonisation of the historical education
which underlies collective heritage perceptions would evidently be necessary to
further the common identity required for political integration to function, along
with the downplaying of heritage which divides in favour of that which could
unite at least most Europeans, whether or not the legacy of ancient Greece and
Rome surely the common suffering (as against perpetration/victimisation) of the
World Wars; in this context shrines such as Buchenwald (Chapter 5) could
become central icons of identity. However, even if Europe can contain its
heritage dissonance sufficiently to achieve political union, it has already
squandered the chance to develop a truly inclusive European heritage: however
accommodating future generations may be to the heritage of minorities it is too
late to undo the near-annihilation of the Jews, which has given the non-
European successor state of Israel an indelible ‘exclave’ claim on much European
heritage including that most clearly identified with atrocity.
We must leave open the question of whether any substantially integrated
European identity could be sufficiently differentiated from the German-centred
178 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Nazi vision of the 1940s to find continent-wide acceptance; the heritage base
upon which it is promoted will clearly be germane to this issue however. This is
why the redevelopment of Berlin is so sensitive: to what extent and in what
image it might become a new quasi-capital of the new Europe is central to the
acceptability of a new European identity. While the European status of Berlin
remains open to speculation its key role with respect to the Central European
‘maelstrom’ is already clear, and the sensitivity of its heritage imagery to our
immediate area of reference is accordingly unequivocal.
Central European heritage dissonance not only relates to the larger European
case but, through it, to kindred dissonance issues on other continents. The case
of Ireland on the Atlantic fringe of Europe illustrates this clearly: Johnson (1994)
has documented the tension between British colonial and nationalist heritage
monumentalisation there a century ago (Chapter 4), and this case links the
nationalisms of Europe to their later emergence in overseas empires. This issue is
closely involved in heritage dissonance in Canada (Chapter 7) and southern
Africa (Chapter 8). Rarely, however, have the nationalistic passions elsewhere
been associated with an intensity of heritage dissonance comparable to that
experienced, and possibly yet to be experienced, in the Central European
‘maelstrom’.
7 Canada: Heritage Dissonance
in a “New World’ Settler
Society

THE HERITAGE CONTEXT OF SETTLER SOCIETIES

The preceding chapter considered the profound fragmentation in heritage

identities that exists within the continent where ancient nationalisms are most
intricately juxtaposed. We turn now to those continents which have become
dominated by settlers from Europe, in which factional discord has been inherited
from the old continent, but in which tensions with both aboriginal societies and
alien newcomers stir two further ingredients into a potential vortex of heritage
dissonance. This discussion will lead us logically to the post-colonial case,
described in Chapter 8, in which aboriginal societies have ultimately come to
dominate settler minorities. It should be stressed that a continuity of
circumstance exists between the case studies in Chapters 6, 7 and 8, but differing
proportions of characteristic heritage ingredients require distinct consideration of
three typical scenarios.
Societies in which settler progeny is overwhelmingly dominant occur in parts
of Latin America (notably Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Costa Rica and Cuba); this
chapter has some significance for them, but their comparatively high degree of
racial and cultural blending has diluted their potential heritage polarisation. Our
prime concern is the English-speaking societies of North America and
Australasia, generally characterised by less blending of an often larger variety of
components. Heritage diversity reaches its extreme in the United States,
including (as in Brazil) the especially dissonant legacy of slavery, but in the US
case dissonance is tempered by a powerful national mythology, sustained with
exceptional dedication and material resources and moderating radical heritage
reinterpretation.
However, the focus of our discussion in this chapter is on Canada, a country
in which daily life is in constant tension with the dissonant realities of its
cultural (as well as physical) geography, a tension managed with strictly limited
resources. Broadly, Canada is seen as an archetype reflecting many of the
potential dissonances of settler societies. The cliché that Canada demonstrates
the triumph of history over geography at least encapsulates the idea that a land
of enormous size and variety has acquired a distinctive political and social
identity largely through the operation of historical events; and that this shaping
180 DISSONANT HERITAGE

of identity at various spatial scales is an incomplete and continuing process, in

which heritage plays a major instrumental role.
Canada has from its origins as a political entity relied heavily upon
interpretations of heritage both to differentiate itself from the United States and
subsequently to reconcile the two cultural and political traditions of its English-
and French-speaking sections within a single confederation. This attempt to
shape a national identity has not only been a preoccupation of Canadian
consciousness but also an active goal of government policy. Federal agencies
such as Parks Canada, responsible for historical monuments and sites, and the
National Capital Commission, responsible for shaping a symbolic capital in
Ottawa-Hull, have quite deliberately, through selection and interpretation,
endeavoured to legitimate the federal entity through the public presentation of
heritage. Despite these official efforts, neither the differentiation from the US nor
the integration of the two major cultural groups can be regarded as wholly
successful: both are under constant challenge from other internal and external
pressures which also use heritage interpretation as a justification for their
arguments.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Canada was a major stimulus to our initial
statements on heritage dissonance (Tunbridge, 1984). These were framed around
the question of ‘whose heritage?’ and answered in terms of a broad range of
socio-political and cultural variables, including those such as social class which
have universal significance extending beyond settler societies (Chapter 4). In the
ensuing decade the situation has become more complex with the emergence of
additional and often overlapping interest groups who have entered the arena
with their own political agendas and their own versions of the interpreted past.
Three of these now play important roles. There are the ‘native peoples’, whose
occupation of Canada predates the social and political structures of the now-
dominant settler societies, and there are also the immigrant groups from cultures
other than the hegemonic British and French. Both of these groups have in the
last few years emerged in most settler societies, with a new consciousness of
their identity and sets of demands for inclusion within a national heritage. The
third category includes those who feel they have in the past been excluded from
mainstream heritage as a result of their gender, or some social attribute (as
discussed in Chapter 4). The rise of special interest pressure groups purporting
to represent women, homosexuals, the physically disabled and others is, of
course, not unique to settler societies but common to many developed Western
countries. However, it can be argued that such developments can more easily
take root and receive a sympathetic response in the relatively fluid social
climates of ‘new world’ societies. In any event, heritage in Canada is expected to
play a multiplicity of roles, at a variety of spatial scales, by a large number of
interest groups. It is this variety that provides the potential for dissonance and
the opportunity for devising dissonance-resolving policies.
From this benchmark of the Canadian experience, comparative reference can
be made to other settler societies, most notably to Australia, given their common
experience as British Dominions; and, given the similar continental historical
experience as well as an increasing social and economic congruence, to the
United States.
CANADA: HERITAGE DISSONANCE IN A ‘NEW WORLD’ SETTLER SOCIETY 181
THE PRINCIPAL PARTICIPANTS

The ‘founding society’

It would be helpful to the heritage identity of settler societies if their European

‘founding fathers’ had shared a common background. Despite their predomi-
nantly British imperial origin, however, none were internally homogeneous,
except relatively so in the small society of New Zealand. They were odd
assortments of those escaping or driven from the mother society, those
representing its establishment, those aliens convenient for the purpose of
consolidating settlement, and those aliens forcibly transferred as slaves (as in the
early American Colonies); thus they carried with them seeds of potential
heritage dissonance. In the US, the heritage fusion was highly successful for the
majority and later absorbed most of its enormous subsequent immigrant
population, but the North-South division lingers and its association with slavery
perpetuates a heritage dissonance in US society; since the heritage of black/
African Americans only recently became visible it is considered below in relation
to recent immigration.
In Australia, the convict/free division predisposed a class polarisation,
expressed in ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and seemingly colouring attitudes to the British
heritage underlying the contemporary constitutional debate (Chapter 4).
In the case of Canada there is a particularly fundamental division within its
established national identity. Notwithstanding this, the founding heritage
appears to the English-speaking world to be consonant, uncomplicated and
encapsulated in the heritage of the Loyalists. The arrival of around 100 000 8E
refugees, discharged soldiers and relocated Indians between 1770 and 1814 is
credited with creating a new society based upon the rejection of the United tion
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States and the republican individualism that it represented. It is the principal
root of the Canadian national identity and iconography, dominating public orma
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national history, conserved historical sites, flags, heraldic symbols, monuments
and the like (Bell, 1970). The loyalist counter-revolution is credited (Gwyn, 1985)
with shaping many modern aspects of the self-image of Canadians, such as Institute,
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The historical reality that the Loyalists were an extremely diverse group
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slaves and native Indians), who did not express any coherent political vision
other than antipathy to the new US, and who were relocated among an existing
settler population, need be no absolute handicap to their role as the founding
heritage (Moore, 1984). Few national founding myths bear close historical
scrutiny. Far more serious has been that this simple, and at least for Canada’s
first century, successful concept of a national founding heritage has two
problems. First, the idea of loyalism has been interpreted in a number of quite
different ways and used in support of different political visions. Secondly, it
failed to incorporate or to satisfy an increasing proportion of the Canadian
population who felt alienated from it and therefore effectively undermined it
over time.
182 DISSONANT HERITAGE

At various times Loyalist heritage has been used to justify a wide variety of
political ideas (discussed at length in Ashworth, 1993b). In the decades around
the turn of the eighteenth century loyalism appears to have been little more than
a defensive justification of separateness from the US, although by the mid-
nineteenth century it was used to underpin the political ascendancy of a local
governing elite. However, it reached its flamboyant apogee in the political
philosophy of ‘Canadian imperialism’ at the end of the nineteenth century,
which also saw the institutionalisation of loyalism in the United Empire Loyalist
Association and the many hallmark events and publications that marked the
centenary of the original migrations. Loyalism then conceived as loyalty to the
imperial idea was used as a means of asserting the unity of the newly forged
Dominion, its distinctiveness from the expansionist US, and its place upon a
world stage (see Holdsworth (1986) for a discussion of British imperial archi-
tectural expression). The influence of the Loyalist interpretations of history
ebbed from this high tide mark but occasionally re-emerged in unexpected forms
(Smith, 1991). These include ‘continentalism’, which stresses the American
attributes of the Loyalist migrants and their development of a perceived
alternative American political vision rather than a British colonial bridgehead.
Most recently a number of minority groups, including native Indians (especially
the Mohawks of Ontario and Québec) and the descendants of freed and escaped
black slaves (especially in Nova Scotia), have been stressing their historic
Loyalist credentials as arguments for fairer treatment within contemporary
society (Skeir, 1983). The case of Africville, Halifax (see below) must be seen
against this background (Pachai, 1992).
Thus Canada’s dominant founding heritage has proved remarkably robust
and flexibly capable of reinterpretation to support changing political require-
ments. However, it has been faced by a number of challenges, first from the
French-speaking minority (25%) which claimed an alternative founding heritage,
on the powerful grounds of historical antecedence and recognition as a co-
founding society at the time of national confederation (1867). The foundation of
Canada was in large measure a marriage of convenience between the dominant
British establishment and the French society, which continues to be motivated by
a sense of its defeat in 1763 and the imperative of ‘survivance’ and ultimate
resurgence. The renaming of Dominion Day (1 July) to Canada Day in 1982,
which like the earlier replacement of the Canadian Red Ensign as the national
flag remains an issue of intermittent debate, was first and foremost a response to
the challenge from the co-founding society.

The Canadian co-founders — the heritage of the junior partner

The ceding of New France to Britain in 1763 created a majority, later minority,
population with a language, religion and way of life different from that of the
dominant society. This basic geographical condition did not, however, pose a
serious challenge to the dominant founding heritage until relatively recently. A
traditional and largely agrarian society whose distinctive language, devout
Catholicism, landholding and legal systems were tolerated (under the Québec
Act of 1774) had little reason to alter the status quo and _ historically
CANADA: HERITAGE DISSONANCE IN A ‘NEW WORLD’ SETTLER SOCIETY 183

demonstrated some support for it during the American Revolution and

nineteenth-century political crises. But changes within Québec society since 1945,
summarised as the ‘quiet revolution’, transformed a rural, traditional and
deferential people into an urban, commercial society whose newly emerging
educated elite resented the anglophone domination of both government and
commerce. Simultaneous federal attempts to create a Canadian nationalism, with
its iconic trappings, largely failed to stem the increasing conviction in Québec
that the province, not the confederation, was the logical national entity.
The heritage legitimating Québec nationalism relied upon the ‘conquest’: the
reinterpretation of the events of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a
colonial domination typified by economic exploitation, political exclusion and
cultural marginalisation imposed by the anglophone Canada of the founding
heritage idea. A new heritage reflecting this challenge arose in monuments,
urban conservation (especially the showcase use of Québec City described
below) and ultimately even the streetscape of linguistic signage, explicitly altered
in favour of French in the Draconian provincial law 101 (Chapter 4).
The federal restructuring of the founding heritage to accommodate this
challenge involved a more explicit biculturalism. This was more than the now
official bilingualism; it was the incorporation of the French imperial experience
into the founding mythology as an equal partner, and it received morphological
expression in Ottawa—Hull (see below) as an expanded de facto capital
(Holdsworth, 1986). The success of this duopoly, at least as measured in terms of
its practical objective of maintaining the existing confederation, cannot yet be
assessed, but its effects upon heritage selection and interpretation at the federal
level have been profound: among many National Historic Sites, Parks and
related landmarks nationwide, the 1970s reconstruction of the French fortress of
Louisbourg, Nova Scotia, is remarkable testimony to this cultural (as well as
local economic) imperative (Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990). Bicultural heritage
was later compromised by a much wider multiculturalism which is discussed
below.
It is worth noting that the arguments above relate most particularly to the
largest concentration of francophones, which is in Québec (about 80% of its
population); French linguistic minorities elsewhere have interpreted heritage
somewhat differently in pursuit of a different political objective. In particular,
francophones in the Maritime Provinces, known as Acadians, have survived as a
minority (some 30% in New Brunswick but only 3% in Nova Scotia) and
therefore have pursued policies of increased participation and representation in
existing structures rather than separate political and economic development.
There has been little support for separate political representation, or for the
establishment of an Acadian province spanning parts of the existing three
provinces (Daigle, 1982). The crowning success of these policies has been the
designation of New Brunswick as the only officially bilingual province in
Canada. Meanwhile the hosting of a World Acadian Congress attended by the
UN Secretary-General in 1994 has inoffensively raised the Acadian cultural and
political profile. Of course, federal bicultural policy designed primarily to
appease Québec has had some beneficial impact upon francophones elsewhere,
in so far as it has not unduly irritated neighbouring anglophone majorities.
184 DISSONANT HERITAGE

It is appropriate at this point to add that not all dissonant minority heritages
are based on ethnic/linguistic divergence from the dominant culture, or indeed
on the other kinds of interest group considered below. The case of the Nova
Scotia ‘planters’ is interesting in this respect. These were largely New Englanders
who were officially encouraged to settle in the 1760s. Despite pre-dating the
Loyalists, and leaving substantial domestic architectural remains (Candow, 1986;
Canadian Parks Service, 1989), their contribution to heritage has until recently
been largely ignored. The marginalisation of this unfashionable minority stems
in part from the dissonance of their occupation of the lands of the Acadians
dispossessed in 1755 and also their doubtful loyalty during the American War of
Independence. Therefore they did not fit into the Loyalist heritage of the
Maritime Provinces and more recently have been an uncomfortable reminder of
the Acadian expulsion, reflected in the euphemism ‘pre-Loyalists’ on interpretive
notices of ‘planter’ heritage (Wynn and McNabb, 1987). The dissonance is
increased by the echo of the Ulster plantations, a not dissimilar historical
experience resulting in a similarly dissonant minority. The Grand Pre National
Historic Site, for example, commemorates the pre-1755 Acadian society and has
deliberately excluded the ‘planter’ heritage which now dominates the area in
which it is set (Dunn, 1985). The heritage of one minority is dissonant to another
(Ashworth, 1993b; McKay, 1994).
Our discussion of heritage tensions deriving from within the Canadian
founding societies reflects a unique case; but an extreme among various dis-
sonances that exist within the mainstream of settler societies. This discussion
dominates the case studies below, and makes comparative reference to examples
in other settler societies where appropriate. Initial attention to the founding
societies does not imply their immutable primacy, but the reality that they are
the origin of the national identity and iconography, the source of coats-of-arms,
dominant monuments and the like. The late twentieth century has, however,
brought new contestants to the heritage field in the form of both antecedent and
subsequent cultures, and interests otherwise defined who would rewrite history
and redirect its future.

Aboriginal societies — belated heritage recognition

A fundamental part of the post-colonial catharsis has been long-delayed pangs
of conscience in settler societies over crimes, whether real or imagined, against
their ‘native peoples’, and a growing desire to both restore their rights and
recognise their distinct heritage. In part this has been propelled by growing
militancy among the native peoples, from Maori to Siberian Chukchi, over these
issues and over their deprived condition in general; heightened by global mutual
awareness through such international organisations as the World Council of
Aboriginal Peoples and the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation
(Hornblower, 1993). The aboriginal resurgence reached a new peak during the
1992 commemoration of the Columbus Quincentennial, which sharpened
controversy as to the proper proportions of guilt and restitution, given the
shortcomings of pre-Columbian societies such as the Aztecs (Plumb, 1993).
Against this background all settler societies are experiencing tension between
CANADA: HERITAGE DISSONANCE IN A ‘NEW WORLD’ SETTLER SOCIETY 185
the majority and the native population. This may have destructive consequences,
as over land, resources and power in Amazonia, Brazil; or it may ultimately lead
to creative solutions in which the majority accepts native title to land or
participation in resource management. In the associated confrontations, the
environmental lobby characteristically aligns itself with the natives, at least
initially; this is particularly so where the issues involve national parks or other
forms of natural and cultural resource conservation (see Dearden and Berg
(1993) on Canada, and Head (1993) on Australia). Since native control means the
curtailment of resource exploitation by society at large, which may also bear
direct financial costs, and since native legal claims are often clouded by the
nature of treaties with former colonial powers, resolution may be as protracted
as it is contentious (extensively discussed for Canada by Dearden and Berg,
1993). None the less, Australia exemplifies a gradual change in the balance of
native power over resources, hastened by the abandonment of the legal concept
of terra nullius; despite differences in levels of government responsible, Canada is
broadly comparable and in important respects ahead (Mercer, 1993; see also
Howitt, 1992; Head, 1993). Related to this are native flag controversies, and the
reassertion of native place names in areas of both countries, furthered in the case
of Queensland by questioning of the colonial place-name heritage where it is
deemed offensive to aborigines (and other minorities).
Heritage issues are characteristically central to the debate, since native concepts
of heritage are typically inseparable from land and resources, and thereby also
provide a useful pragmatic lever to prise as much of these as possible from
majority control. In some cases a heritage site is highly specific, such as a burial
site, and its recognition costs the majority little pain; however, it may well occur
in a now-urbanised area in which effective recognition means expensive
acquisition, as in the $2.6 million purchase of a Seneca village and burial site in
Scarborough, Toronto (now Bead Hill National Historic Site), shared between
Ontario and Canadian federal governments, both of which are in serious financial
straits (Heritage Canada, 1994). In other cases, however, the native heritage may
be locationally imprecise, particularly convenient for justifying expansive land
claims; different groups of those concerned may also disagree on the details of
stories and legends inherited by oral tradition. A classic case of these problems in
a context of dissonance is documented by Jones (1992) with respect to the
Aborigines of Western Australia: they have succeeded in challenging the heritage
status of Perth’s first brewery on the Swan River by pointing out that the site
is where their legendary water-serpent, the Waugal, descended to create the
river, and — vagueness and disagreement notwithstanding — it has a signifi-
cance to which settler industrial heritage is dissonant (see also Head, 1993; and
compare Victoria Island in the Ottawa case below). Given the highlighting of
Australia’s guilt towards the Aborigines by its 1988 Bicentennial, and given an
opportunistic alliance with some mainstream advocates of demolition, the
Aborigines have successfully opposed the heritage exploitation of the brewery to
date. However, the issue remains an unresolved textbook illustration of the
multiple dissonance which can surround issues of whose victory, whose reality
and whose heritage; as with parallel conflicts in Canada, it has distinct
expressions at federal, state and local levels, and has become heritage in its own
186 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Cornwall
a
Akwesasne

NEW Y (OURIK

Figure 7.1. The Mohawk question: Oka and Akwesasne. Ottawa area in context

right (Jones, 1992; personal communication 1995). On a constructive note, a

Canadian source has recently discussed the application of GIS technology to help
clarify heritage land-use/landscape imprecisions germane to the resolution of
native land claims in the Northwest Territories (Duerden and Keller, 1992).
Canada’s involvement with native heritage issues runs the gamut of the above
and other scenarios, from hostile confrontation through contentious negotiation
to fulsome recognition. The protracted Oka Crisis in 1990 shook the country’s
benign self-image and confronted it with the harsh reality of native disaffection.
The attempt by a small Québec community to build a golf course on land sacred
to the Mohawks provoked native resistance, loss of life and intervention by the
Canadian army; furthermore it triggered native resistance across the country
over a litany of grievances over and beyond heritage, and fuelled criminal
activities by embittered Mohawks, including armed cigarette smuggling via the
Akwesasne reserve (straddling the Canada-US border on the St Lawrence;
Figure 7.1), which became a national crisis in 1993. The Oka struggle over
heritage land not only flared again in 1994 but by then had, like the Perth case,
itself become heritage (‘remember Oka!’). Somewhat less harrowing have been
native/environmentalist confrontations with the logging industry on the coastal
islands of British Columbia, associated with the creation of national parks — in
the case of the Queen Charlotte Islands, the South Moresby National Park
Reserve (Figure 7.2). Here, after initial joint success, the Haida agenda parted
from the environmentalists and forced Parks Canada into a co-management
regime in which Haida protection of their cultural heritage, including the World
Heritage Site village of Ninstints, is interwoven with control of natural resources.
Despite initially poor tourism returns (Matas, 1993), this has influenced other
native successes, such as Haisla/environmentalist protection of the Kitlope
CANADA: HERITAGE DISSONANCE IN A ‘NEW WORLD’ SETTLER SOCIETY 187

y Rainforest

ee (ue eee

aw xe i
VANCOUVER %, oe ancouver
ISLAND‘

Chemainus- “\ ple seattle

Cowichan Valleys.) ?
Heritage Region

Figure 7.2. British Columbia: South Moresby, Kitlope, Vancouver and Victoria

Rainforest (Figure 7.2) (Linden, 1994); and it is seen as a model for similar
national park negotiations elsewhere in Canada, aboriginal peoples having
progressively supplanted entrepreneurs and environmentalists as the dominant
party in an ‘administrative penetration model’ (Dearden and Berg, 1993).
Meanwhile the lengthy process of resolving other native land claims, especially
in the Canadian North, has been under way since the 1970s. Its most spectacular
achievement to date has been the recent negotiation of Nunavut, the mainly
Inuit half of the Northwest Territories which will become a separate Territory by
the year 2000 and will have predominant control of its resource and heritage
issues (Cross, 1993; Mercer, 1993).
In any event Parks Canada, as the federal agency within the Department of
Canadian Heritage responsible for national parks and historic sites, and the
voluntary Heritage Canada Foundation have been committed since the 1970s to
a comprehensive and equitable representation of heritage including the native
component, their constraints being those of funding, balance of priorities, and
co-operation of other concerned jurisdictions (Dearden and Berg, 1993). More
generally, Canada is reinterpreting its history with respect to the natives, a
noteworthy case being the 1992 official pronouncement rehabilitating Louis Riel,
a Metis (mixed blood) rebel leader hung for murder in the nineteenth century.
However, a disturbing footnote is the problem of Québec’s northern
territories, in which the Cree, Inuit and others have heritage/land claims which
run counter to those of the Québecois: a further case of the heritage of one
minority being dissonant to another. But in the event of Québec separation the
natives would confront a francophone majority hostile to minority recognition,
and some native leaders have threatened their own separation, if not by legal
argument through the UN then by violence.
188 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Recent immigration — heritage melting pot or salad bowl?

Prior to the late 1960s, voluntary immigration to most societies created by

European settlers had been essentially of European origin; minorities from
elsewhere (such as Asians in British Columbia) had been marginalised if not
legislated out of effective social and political participation. Mainstream European
immigrants were decreasingly from the founding societies, or generally favoured
north-west European sources, but were expected to adapt to patterns and
heritage derived in essence from them; the US ‘melting pot’ concept is the classic
expression of this expectation. During the past quarter-century, however,
prosperity and low birth rates in Europe have tipped the balance of immigration
strongly in favour of ‘Third World’ source countries, in which contrasting
conditions have typically prevailed. In fact this migration of hitherto alien races
and cultures has also flowed to the traditionally emigrant countries of Europe.
With growing economic and political stress, exacerbated by the upheavals
following the end of the Cold War, the flow has become a flood towards
traditionally settler and emigrant Western countries alike. The impact of “Third
World’ migrants on the long-established societies of Europe has generated
considerable resistance to the needed adaptation of social values and identity
(Chapter 6).
In settler societies, however, where the concept of immigration is more
fundamental to the collective mindset, adjustment to the changing settler reality
is perhaps farther advanced (although not free of tension either with the host
society or among the newcomers themselves — particularly where religious
differences are involved). Past racist attitudes subsided, and officially died, in the
post-colonial international climate, especially within the Commonwealth:
Canada, Australia and New Zealand are valued members of this which must
live up to their 1961 actions effectively to expel racist South Africa, and to their
subsequent rhetoric on this issue. The most notable change of attitude is
Australia’s abandonment of the ‘White Australia’ policy in the 1960s, and its
subsequent reorientation to closely connected economic and migrant dependence
on East Asia (H. Jones, 1992); this has fuelled its contemporary republican
movement, which raises important questions about future heritage dissonance.
The issue of heritage dissonance and adaptation in the face of large and growing
‘Third World’ populations demands a similarly high profile in all settler
societies, particularly in the light of perceived and now officially recognised
injustices to their compatriots who arrived in past decades. The fact that many
share language and values with the host society derived from a common British
imperial heritage both moderates and complicates the issue, since this
inheritance may or may not have been similarly experienced.
Canada provides numerous illustrations of such dissonance and adaptation, as
well as of the problems involved in multilateral heritage reconciliation.
Paradoxically, the flexible Loyalist founding mythology (see above) fosters the
interpretation of Canada as a nation of refugees; this refugee mentality, an
interesting parallel to the Australian convict mentality rooted in the same
historical circumstance (namely American independence), is an important
influence upon Canada’s widely shared sense of moral obligation — albeit now
CANADA: HERITAGE DISSONANCE IN A ‘NEW WORLD’ SETTLER SOCIETY 189
under stress — to admit contemporary refugees. More generally, it may
contribute to the ‘society of victims’ mentality (see Chapter 5) which could be
argued to exist in Canada, and thereby to affect heritage issues including but
exceeding new immigrant identities (as discussed below).
Canadian federal government policy has had to respond to a threefold
challenge, as outlined above; namely the failure to sustain the central core of
Loyalist philosophy, the new consciousness about and among native peoples,
and the recognition that the cultural diversity of immigrants cannot, or should
not, be subsumed away in an existing core culture. The 1960s official policy of
bilingualism/biculturalism was a pragmatic attempt to appease the newly
assertive Québec and thus maintain confederation, as we have noted (Royal
Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, 1963). This, like the Austrian—
Hungarian ‘Ausgleich’ of 1867, promoted the idea of Anglo-French dual
parentage and, like its predecessor, not only ignored the other groups but was
an invitation to their assimilation. By the early 1970s, however, an official policy
of ‘multiculturalism’ was devised as a means of meeting the demands of the
non-founding ethnic groups (including many of early provenance), native
peoples and more recently other social groups. Funds were allocated to support
‘ethnic’ festivals, publications, etc., in an economic climate which permitted such
largesse concurrently with massive expenditure in support of the French
language. This policy has promoted extensive affirmative action, and was closely
associated with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms which
accompanied the 1982 Constitution.
It would be inaccurate, however, to imply that it is universally accepted,
particularly in the tough economic times of the 1990s. Indeed public unease over
multicultural immigration levels has prompted a move to memorialise Canada’s
heritage of immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax, poorly accessible and little used as
well as potentially dissonant in 1994, but none the less the site of a com-
memorative ceremony led by the federal immigration minister on Canada Day.
In provincial politics, Québec’s insistence on Canada as a compact between two
founding nations, against which multiculturalism trivialises its cultural aspir-
ations, is fundamental to its inability to reach constitutional agreement with the
rest of Canada and consequently to the threat of its separation (Salée, 1994). At
the local level, the Toronto Board of Education marked the city’s bicentennial
with a festival honouring 200 years of multicultural/ethnic heritage, a selective
capture of the political socialisation use of heritage (see Chapter 3) to address the
current cultural/ethnic tensions in a city long perceived as archetypically
‘British’.
Multiculturalism has invited minorities to express their heritage as ingredients
in a diverse national ‘salad bowl’ or, in long-standing conventional wisdom, the
Canadian ‘mosaic’ to be contrasted with the American ‘melting pot’ (elaborated
by Goldberg and Mercer, 1986); thus has the innate and growing centrifugality
of Canadian identity been repackaged as a virtuous expression of an unusually
tolerant society. The official encouragement of heritage life-style expressions, and
the widespread recognition that these have made Canadian cities both more
interesting and more marketable to tourists, raises important questions as to
what durable heritage the minorities are creating, and what recognition should
190 DISSONANT HERITAGE

be granted them in formal monuments. The commitment of both voluntary and

government conservation agencies to the principle of multiculturalism now
favours both forms of enduring expression.
This deserves brief scrutiny here because it has had a profound effect upon the
shaping and promotion of public history in Canada, not least in the selection
and presentation of heritage sites, buildings and museum artefacts (notably in
Ottawa-Hull, discussed later). It is of much wider relevance here however.
Many countries face similar problems of reconciling the heritages of diverse
ethnic groups and incorporating those of recent migrants into an existing
national heritage identity. The response of many such countries, which are at
least aware of the potential of such dissonances, has been to explore the
possibilities of an ostensibly multicultural approach. Canada has more
experience in this field than most and its experience is thus of wider interest.
The attraction of a multicultural heritage policy is so apparently self-evident as
to be rarely made explicit. Dissonance within the previously ignored groups is
reduced by their representation, but equally society as a whole can be enriched
by the wider range of cultural insights to which it is exposed, and indeed
tolerance and mutual respect for a wide range of heritages can be seen as a
commendable social goal in itself (compare the discussion of Canadian heritage
policy in Nelson, 1991).
However, multiculturalism may not be the simple universal panacea for these
problems of heritage dissonance. There are three major unresolved difficulties
that practice is beginning to reveal. First, the criteria for the addition of ‘new
heritages’ have not been established. If it is argued that no such criteria are
required or desirable then an almost infinite quantity of diverse heritages, of
groups of decreasing size or historical significance, can be added to the pot-
pourri. If such criteria of significance or intrinsic value are devised then the
problem reverts to that of the founding heritages which, however enlarged, will
exclude some groups. The Canadian case of national historic sites, for example,
has a policy of adding to the existing stock of interpreted sites, which reflect
dominantly British or French heritages, sites of importance to native peoples or
to other immigrant groups, such as a Ukrainian agricultural building in
Manitoba which is seen as covering three different types of gap in the collection,
namely ethnic, functional and regional. But of course any attempt at a ‘complete’
balanced collection raises the simple question of how one knows what balance to
strive for and when it has been attained.
Secondly, it is not clear if multicultural heritage implies any particular balance
of elements within such a mix even if it were all-embracing. If all are of equal
merit, and have made a contribution of equal value to national identity, then this
in turn creates problems. It will create dissonance among the large or even
majority groups who see their heritage contribution being proportionately
reduced and who therefore themselves experience dissonance, which in any
democracy can have electoral consequences, as we note below in Canada and
particularly Québec. Furthermore, it fails to allow for regional imperatives: the
result of pursuing heterogeneity in heritage can curiously result in the opposite,
a homogeneity that fails to reflect and support regional and local identities,
which in Canada are frequently strongly related to a specific ethnic heritage. Of
CANADA: HERITAGE DISSONANCE IN A ‘NEW WORLD’ SETTLER SOCIETY 191
course, a national policy of heritage mixture can be combined with a regional
policy of specific heritages — the ‘patchwork quilt’ rather than a finer-grained
‘salad bowl’ mosaic, and the converse of a ‘goulash’ melting-pot. In practice this
may well result in a concentration of multicultural heritage in the federal
showcases, themselves concentrated in the core and capital region, and more or
less unicultural heritage in the peripheral regions, which may have considerable
power to stress their dominant ethnic flavour(s). We note below such dominance
in Québec and St John’s; but also the opposing economic incentive to highlight
heterogeneity in currently developing ‘heritage regions’.
There is also the simple point of what physical resources are actually available
for conversion into heritage. Absurd situations could easily arise should
multiculturalism policy require the presentation of the heritage of a specific
under-represented culture in a specific region in which that group was either not
notably present or has for whatever reason left few physical remains or
associated sites. Canadian historic sites include a large number of British military
constructions, not only because these have been seen to have significance as
national heritage but also because these tend to be large, spectacular and above
all physically enduring artefacts. The physical remains of the culture of some
other groups, such as the native peoples and European agriculturalists such as
the Acadians (Ennals, 1988), are just less prominent and robust.
Conversely, if not all the elements are to be regarded as of equal value then
the establishment of such values raises all the potential dissonance situations
that multiculturalism was designed to reduce.
Finally and most seriously, the question remains as to whether multi-
culturalism requires the existence of what can be termed a ‘core heritage’ to
which distinctive ethnic or social variants are added. Is there a definable
Canadian core heritage, promoted through official actions, which encompasses
the identification of all Canadians over and above a specifically Chinese, Inuit or
homosexual heritage? If there is, or should be, such a core, then the problem
reverts to a definition of what that is, with all the concomitant dangers of
disinheritance. If there is not, or should not be, such a core then the question
arises as to whether a national identity can be based on the idea of a tolerant
multiculturalism as a heritage in itself rather than on the detail of its content. If
this seems a somewhat esoteric point, it is worth noting the long and sharp
discussion over the content of the so-called ‘Canada clause’, i.e. the initial
statement in the much-discussed Constitution that defines the essence of
Canada.
Despite the doubts expressed above as to whether multiculturalism as an
official policy has been thought out at any depth, there is no doubt that in
various forms it now underlies the practice of many Canadian government and
private agencies at all levels, and is a recurrent topic of local public controversy.
The concept of ‘adaptive heritage’ has been applied by Heritage Canada to the
culturally expressive property modifications that often accompany inner-city
sequent occupance, for example those made by Portuguese and Italians, and
potentially many more recent migrants, in Toronto and Montreal. The
Foundation has argued cogently for the legitimacy of such modifications, despite
the fact that they may imbue Victorian structures with a heritage significance
192 DISSONANT HERITAGE

dissonant to mainstream gentrification (Tunbridge, 1984). In contrast, the new

identity may be destructively assertive: recent construction of ‘monster homes’ in
established suburbs of Vancouver by rich Hong Kong migrants involves the
eradication or overwhelming of British cultural symbolism, such as well-wooded
mock Tudor in house and garden design, by Chinese idioms at a dispro-
portionate scale governed by alien principles of harmonious design, ‘feng shut’
(Marcus, 1987); there is strong local opposition on grounds of scale and heritage
dissonance, which could lend itself to racist interpretations and is in any case
inimical to the Asian investment on which, like Australian cities, the local
economy depends (Ley, 1994; Majury, 1994). Thus the protagonists of multi-
culturalism must build a sensitivity among, as well as towards, the new
minorities if dissonance over heritage creativity is to be contained.
Public monuments in Canadian cities are, as in most societies, strongly
expressive of dominant groups and cultural values; what society regards as
worthy of memorialisation is changing, however, if less dramatically than in
southern Africa (Chapter 8). Toronto is now targetting new monuments for
hitherto unrepresented groups such as the Chinese and, with such a prominent
example, we may ultimately expect multiculturalism to be more clearly ex-
pressed in stone and bronze, or at least marked by plaques. As we have noted,
nationwide heritage representation is primarily in the hands of Parks Canada;
since a 1981 policy directive from the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of
Canada, this agency has been committed to a ‘systems plan’ for national historic
sites aiming at a more balanced representation of aboriginals and other
minorities. This should lead in time to a stronger multicultural commemoration
through monuments or plaques, in the absence of tangible historical remains
(Heritage Canada, 1993). (The ‘systems’ approach, however, has been described
in detail and criticised as unworkable in Ashworth, 1993b). Provincial ministries
with cultural responsibilities and a variety of private interests are also gradually
extending the marking of minority heritage sites. Exceptionally these may be in
rural settings such as the Nikkei (Japanese Canadian) Internment Memorial
Centre at New Denver, British Columbia, which commemorates a perceived
injustice in a remote location reflecting Second World War priorities and conse-
quent heritage dissonances (Chapter 5). The single institution with the nation’s
most explicit multicultural mandate, however, is the Canadian Museum of
Civilization in Hull, Québec, which performs a balancing act between the
competing claims of different groups for representation in permanent or at least
transient exhibitions; the policy problems of this institution are referred to under
Ottawa—Hull below, and reflect our general discussion of evolving museum
philosophy in Chapter 3.
Black/African American heritage constitutes an issue of great contemporary
significance which is not, of course, a matter of recent or voluntary immigration
but which provides important comparative insight with respect to recent visible
minorities and to the historically related Canadian black minority of Nova
Scotia. Earlier reference to black American heritage in the atrocity context
(Chapter 5) attests to its dissonance among traditional mainstream American
values. Since the 1960s it has become visible, thus initially more dissonant but
less so as mainstream attitudes have changed. Museums and artefacts of black
CANADA: HERITAGE DISSONANCE IN A ‘NEW WORLD’ SETTLER SOCIETY 193

heritage are now widely encountered in US cities, prominent examples being

Charleston and Savannah (Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990). Tourism marketing
agencies are well aware of the need to attract black tourists to increase their
competitive edge: Charleston, while stressing heritage diversity equally to
individual tourists, employs a specialist to attract black conventions and group
meetings within a well-defined national market (Lawson, personal communi-
cation 1994) and Savannah does likewise. The designation of black ‘heritage
trails’ within these cities is a geographical manifestation of this, linking heritage
of cultural significance, of segregation and struggle, and of contribution to the
nation. The US National Park Service has become especially minority-sensitive
in the designation, archaeological investigation and presentation of national
historic sites, such as the Charles Pinckney plantation site under development
near Charleston. Nationally prominent organisations such as the Colonial
Williamsburg Foundation have become less reticent in acknowledging the
heritage of slavery (Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990), although attempts to
interpret it have themselves proven dissonant to some blacks. The American
example is therefore encouraging to other multicultural societies, but not
uniformly so: dissonance persists at the level of individual acceptance and
among less progressive jurisdictions; and demolition of black heritage dwellings
in Savannah (1994) illustrates the stark reality that structures significant to a
historically oppressed group were usually poor and may now be condemned as
unsalvageable slums in unsafe, abandoned inner-city areas, despite the anguish
of local heritage and tourism agencies (Armstrong, 1994). Ironically, successful
inland expansion of tourist-historic Charleston confronts black heritage with the
alternative threat of displacement through upgrading (Ashworth and Tunbridge,
1990; Antoine, personal communication 1994).

Other heritage claimants — reconciliation or dissonance?

We have suggested that the fluidity of settler societies has been particularly
conducive to challenges to the established heritage order from groups who
perceive themselves to be marginalised. Popular heritage recognition in settler
societies has in fact been contemporaneous with the development of several of
these groups, aside from those considered above; such recognition is only one
generation old in Canada, Heritage Canada having been founded in 1973 in
reaction to heritage attrition after the 1967 national Centennial (Tunbridge, 1981).
It would therefore be unsurprising if such groups should attempt to appropriate
the agenda of a nascent popular heritage movement, which in their view
otherwise simply revises ‘white male corporate’ values and becomes co-opted by
them. Like the heritage movement, the rise to prominence of marginalised
groups has been interpreted as an outgrowth of humanist values associated with
postmodernism (see Chapters 1 and 4; and Folch-Serra, 1993).
It is inappropriate here to extend our earlier comments on the broad
relationship of the postmodern social critique and a heritage movement whose
roots in fact predate it by a century (Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990). It is
apposite, however, to reiterate two simple points. First there is a consensus that
a postmodern society, however defined, reasserts the importance of historicity
194 DISSONANT HERITAGE

(marginalised in most modernist functional theories) through its revaluation of

the contribution of form to unique place identities (Soja, 1989). But it goes
further in transforming that historicity into a desirable commodity consumed in
many different ways by individuals through the products of the heritage
industry, or collectively in for example quality environments. Secondly, the
individualisation associated with postmodern societies makes extensive use of
heritage, eclectically defined, as an essential differentiating component in very
varied life styles.
This is manifested, especially in North American society, by a fragmentation
of what were previously seen as core values. The implications of this within a
country such as Canada, whose national identity is uncertainly established and
whose composition is in flux, are likely to be particularly extreme. The
cultivation of ethnic cultural variety discussed in this chapter can be seen as
archetypically postmodern in two senses: it reflects a broad toleration by a
majority society of the alternative life styles of others, and it provides many
consumable items in the form of ethnic folklore, handicrafts and gastronomy.
However, it can be argued that Canada’s associated self-image as a tolerant
haven for migrants and refugees predisposes it to become a society composed of
marginalised groups more variously defined, or even self-designated victims.
The ‘backlash’ political consequences of multifaceted social fragmentation have
now been dramatically demonstrated in the federal election of 1993, key aspects
of which were the disproportionate gravitation of white male anglophones to the
new right-wing Reform Party and the domination of Québec by the new
separatist Bloc Québecois, the postmodern ideal of unity in diversity remaining
effectively only in the hands of the very unevenly elected Liberal government.
Pressure groups dedicated to the attainment of particular ends are nothing
new. However, only in the past generation has the contention of some for
distinctive heritage recognition become a relevant issue. The most prominent of
these, aside from cultural minorities, are the women’s, homosexual and disabled
interest groups (see Chapter 4). Before discussing their roles in heritage, it
should be noted that they have at times combined forces with one another and
with cultural minorities to press for affirmative action in the redress of actual or
perceived social grievances.
The homosexual group is clearly problematical. Past social attitudes in
Canada, as elsewhere, have dictated that nobody has been memorialised for an
identity they were obliged to hide, let alone for doing anything to advance the
group cause. Present national attitudes remain equivocal — the majority (in this
respect) are routinely and sometimes correctly accused of ‘homophobia’. Even
today, therefore, any overt connotation of people or places as homosexual
heritage would generally risk incurring massive dissonance and probably
vandalism, notwithstanding (Chapter 4) some European and American
precedents. None the less, unless ‘progressive’ social trends are reversed by a
neo-Victorian reactionary backlash, we may fairly ask how long it will be before
the struggle for ‘gay rights’ is superseded by an organised movement for ‘gay
heritage’ to commemorate the people and places associated with that struggle,
and with the related battle against AIDS. Such a movement is much more likely
to originate among the large US population than in Canada, and could mirror
CANADA: HERITAGE DISSONANCE IN A ‘NEW WORLD’ SETTLER SOCIETY 195

the experience of the Black Civil Rights movement in ultimately overcoming the
hostility of the majority to the point of heritage recognition. This pattern has
been equivocally portended by memorialisation and a peaceful 25th anniversary
parade in New York, commemorating the 1969 Stonewall riot over police action
against a homosexual bar (Henry, 1994). However, if one may judge from the
trend of academic life and literature, Canada prominently included, homosexual
heritage will find its initial (and perhaps only) stronghold on university
campuses (Valentine, 1993).
The women’s movement is the most significant force seeking socially ‘pro-
gressive’ modification of heritage, and within it radical feminism is the most
significant source of historical revisionism and potential heritage dissonance.
Radical positions might be judged too extreme to secure majority support from
those for whom they presume to speak. Despite opposition even from leading
feminists, however, the ‘victimist’ position that human society is a vast machine
built by men to oppress women, and that all men are collectively guilty for male
crimes against women, has become powerful in official and academic pro-
nouncements in Canada, notwithstanding its proximity to illegal hate literature
(Conlogue, 1993). “Victimism’ would essentially invalidate all heritage in female
eyes except as the heritage of oppression. The fact that women, in Canada as
elsewhere, have been disproportionately prominent defenders of established
society’s heritage has seemingly passed unnoticed by the radicals, notwith-
standing a plausible case that such women have thereby opposed a dominantly
male modernism.
The receptiveness of some Canadian feminists to ‘victimism’ is closely
associated with one of the worst crimes specifically against women to have
occurred in any advanced society, the murder of 14 women at the Ecole
Polytechnique in Montreal in December 1989. Canadians were united over the
tragedy and apparently over the legitimacy of its subsequent enshrinement as a
national day of mourning, and a pivotal heritage of anti-female outrage which is
being memorialised in a variety of locations across the country. Many women as
well as men, however, question whether the act of one gunman (deranged by
jealousy of young women engineers) justifies its designation as a symbol of
collective male guilt (Conlogue, 1993). A national tragedy has thereby become a
focus of heritage dissonance. It also constitutes a heritage of female career
aspiration, however, and in this role has radically advanced general social
acceptance of women in non-traditional professions such as engineering.
The heritage of woman-as-victim is overshadowed by the more general issue
of female recognition in the mainstream of what society has regarded as
heritage. A ‘gender dissonance’ has recently been identified in the monuments of
Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal (Dafoe et al., 1993) whereby men — and
traditionally ‘male’ activities, not least war — are remembered far more
prominently than even the most uncontentiously deserving women candidates.
This apparently reflects a female invisibility more generally characteristic of
conventional social heritage, the inevitable result of which has been the failure
adequately to perpetuate the role models of those women who have attained
past prominence. Ironically the most frequent monuments to any single person
appear to be those of Queen Victoria, who is the more outstanding in her gender
196 DISSONANT HERITAGE

isolation and her multiple inappropriateness as a contemporary Canadian female

role model. (A similar examination of London or other European cities might
also question role-model ‘correctness’, rather than absence, of female
monumentalisation; compare Chapter 4.) Since the priority emphasis is now
moving towards formerly unrepresented groups rather than individuals (such as
the Chinese railway workers, albeit males, belatedly recognised in Toronto; Lai,
personal communication 1994) it is questionable whether women will ever be
equitably represented in individual statues, even in a society of such progressive
aspiration as Canada. It has been noted, however, that statues are subject to
abuse, or may otherwise stand unnoticed. Be this as it may, group recognition is
coming, in a form that none would have wished, woman-as-victim: monuments
to the Montreal tragedy are planned, for example, in Vancouver. Jones (personal
communication 1995) notes the more positive parallel group memorialisation to
pioneer women in Perth, Australia, mentioned above.
Redress of female invisibility is making more headway in other heritage
expressions, such as in street names, and museum displays such as those of the
Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull, Québec. Furthermore, the 1981
‘systems plan’ for national historic sites already mentioned required Parks
Canada to consider the history of women, as well as aboriginal peoples and
other cultural minorities, in achieving a more comprehensive representation;
public consultations to this end are in progress at the time of writing, although
intentions may not be fulfilled and are financially dependent on ‘partnerships’
rather than federal acquisition (Heritage Canada, 1993). By virtue of her double
qualification, Harriet Tubman, a black conductor on the nineteenth-century
Underground Railroad for escaped US slaves, has achieved an Ontario Heritage
Foundation memorial plaque in St Catherines (Duncan, 1993), associated with
the creation of a black ‘Freedom Trail’ in the Niagara region.
Recognition of the disabled as a group is potentially less contentious than the
preceding cases, in so far as an educated society comes to realise that disability
has equal relevance to all, although whether affected individuals wish their
identity or personal achievement to be so characterised is altogether another
matter (see Chapter 4). The concept that disabled people, as a group or as
individuals, might be candidates for heritage recognition was quite slow to
penetrate Canadian society; reminders have been necessary that famous
individuals such as US President Roosevelt did in fact overcome disability to
become so. But by 1980 Canadian responsiveness had grown sufficiently to
honour a perfectly timed feat by a young athlete who had lost a leg to cancer:
Terry Fox ran half-way across Canada in a ‘Marathon of Hope’ to raise money
for cancer research, and thereby captivated the nation before his disease and
subsequent death ended his run. He became a generally recognised role model
for the disabled and his commemoration in names and memorials across
Canada, including statues in Ottawa and Vancouver, perpetuates this. Popular
response to his accomplishment was coloured by disillusionment with the
concurrent Olympic Games, which at that time were an arena for Cold War-
related politics. ‘Media hype’ undoubtedly played a role: Steve Fonyo, similarly
afflicted but dissonant to the media, and still living, actually succeeded in
running across the country in 1981 but is little remembered. Whatever the
 CANADA: HERITAGE DISSONANCE IN A ‘NEW WORLD’ SETTLER SOCIETY 197

mechanism of heritage creation, however, intuitive everyday evidence suggests

that it has transformed attitudes to disability, particularly among the young.
An important background to recognition of the heritage of women and the
disabled, and reduction of any dissonance associated therewith, is the
designation by the United Nations of years in which these groups have been
comprehensively recognised. Canada’s strong adhesion to the UN and its values
has unquestionably motivated its generally positive attitude with respect to their
heritage. Whether the homosexual community will ever benefit from this path of
recognition is an open question. There is, however, a disturbing corollary to such
‘progressive’ group recognition in so far as it sharpens the ‘society of victims’
mentality to general disadvantage. Sarah Michaels (1993) has observed that
earthquake preparedness in British Columbia, of all unrelated imperatives, is
compromised by the correctness of representing all interest groups in the
relevant political mechanisms.
It should be stressed that this discussion of ‘other heritage claimants’ has
‘largely assumed the validity of group identities invoking heritage dissonance
questions with respect to mainstream society. However, we know of no
referenda undertaken, in Canada or elsewhere, to establish whether most of the
alleged members of such groups in fact have any sense of affiliation, or indeed
feel anything other than mainstream participants in society and its heritage. We
may fairly assume that Roosevelt wished to be remembered solely in the context
of the entire nation he led, despite pressure to memorialise him as disabled
(1995). The implication that such interest groups may consist only of unrep-
resentative activists is not only wildly ‘incorrect’ to the supposed orthodoxy of
the 1990s but raises a serious issue for us: the greatest heritage dissonance
applicable to these groups may be internal to their own supposed memberships.

CASE ILLUSTRATIONS OF INTRA-CANADIAN DIVERSITY

The case studies to which we now turn each illustrate primarily one of the
participants in Canadian heritage dissonance that we have considered: Québec
City the French co-founders; St John’s a special case relatable to the Loyalist
founders; Halifax—Africville an old ethnic minority; Vancouver-Victoria a more
recent immigrant minority; and Ottawa—Hull the principal locus of heritage
collision and potential confrontation. All, however, reflect to some extent the
wider interaction of Canada’s heritage competitors: among these the aboriginal
societies, while primarily still rural, are widely represented in cities; and the
‘other heritage claimants’ aspire to assert their comprehensive legitimacy. The
reality of most larger Canadian communities, like those in other settler societies
(in particular), is one of complex and changing competition between heritage
claimants in which patterns of local dominance vary widely but are not
necessarily immutable.

Québec City: World Heritage tension (Figures 7.3-7.6)

Québec City is the outstanding case of a tourist-historic ‘gem’ in Canada, one of
a handful of cities in North America in which the tourist-historic identity and
198 DISSONANT HERITAGE

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Figure 7.3. Québec City and region: key federal and other heritage sites. (Not shown:
minor federal properties, Catholic institutions. Note: street names predominantly French
or gallicised English)

economy are more than a generation old, and the only Canadian city recognised
as a World Heritage Site; since it is also a globally classic manifestation of
heritage dissonance, both actual and potential, its consideration as our first case
study is practically obligatory. Its very pre-eminence occasioned its discussion at
some length by Ashworth and Tunbridge (1990), in which the recognition of its
heritage discordance became one of the principal inspirations for the present
CANADA: HERITAGE DISSONANCE IN A ‘NEW WORLD’ SETTLER SOCIETY 199
work. It is unnecessary to repeat the earlier discussion in detail, but its salient
points are summarised below.
It should be remembered that heritage tensions in Québec City are the
concentrated reflection of a larger provincial reality. A notorious preservation
defeat, which reinforced the foundation of Heritage Canada, was the 1970s
demolition of the Van Horne mansion in Montreal, where the prevailing
perception of the builder of the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway was
of ‘an American-born, English-speaking, union-busting tycoon’ whose memory
was thus variously dissonant to most francophones (Berton, 1993). Dissonant to
Québec separatists is the Montreal statue of Canada’s first prime minister,
Macdonald: repaired after vandalism in 1994, it was noted by the media as a
potent political symbol vulnerable to further damage (as are Montreal’s British
imperial monuments).
Québec is the principal hearth of French civilisation in North America but was
conquered by British forces under Wolfe in 1759, in an encounter known to
world history as the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. This conquest, notwith-
standing the subsequent accommodations with the British (see above), is the
seminal fact of the perceived subjugation and quest for ‘survivance’ that
obsesses much of French Canada today. It was followed by the political and
commercial takeover of the city by a dominant British community, who made
substantial additions to the seventeenth-century French heritage, including
nineteenth-century completion of its present city walls, the Citadel commanding
the city centre and port on the St Lawrence, the Dufferin Terrace promenade
overlooking the river, and various churches, monuments, port installations and
warehouses. From the 1960s, however, political power in the province passed
increasingly into the hands of Québec nationalists, to whom the British heritage
presence is to varying degrees dissonant in their provincial capital, and an
anathema to many who seek separation from Canada. The imposition of a
unilingual French policy in most street signs and general usage both detracts
from British heritage identity in the streetscape and poses a problem of
communication with, and sometimes safety of, the city’s chiefly anglophone
tourism market, notably Americans (partially remedied by tourism media/
literature, as in Gdansk; Chapter 6). Extremists at one point blew up Wolfe’s
statue on the Plains of Abraham (later restored), and that of Queen Victoria is
now in the Québec Museum of Civilization. This new museum lacked English
signage until prompted by market realities in 1994. The virtual disappearance of
the anglophone population has left their churches and institutions marginalised,
although like the Anglican Cathedral, sometimes adapting by sharing with
francophone congregations and users.
The federal government’s heritage role is essentially as the successor to British
imperial, military and commercial interests, and it is from this ‘founding society’
mould that it must seek to maintain the diverse and bilingual national heritage
perspective in Québec City. The fact that it speaks with several voices could
compromise its defence of this, but in practice Parks Canada exerts a moral
authority with respect to other concerned departments such as National Defence
(the Citadel), Public Works (Vieux Port) and the National Battlefields Com-
mission (Plains of Abraham) (Richer, personal communication 1994). Parks
200 DISSONANT HERITAGE

see . :
Figure 7.4. Québec City: historic city from Vieux Port. Interpretation Centre left; city wall
divides the upper from the lower city, behind (JET, 1994)

Figure 7.5. Québec City: city wall. Historic city on the right; artillery park in the mid-
distance, and the railway station behind and to the right (JET, 1994)
CANADA: HERITAGE DISSONANCE IN A ‘NEW WORLD’ SETTLER SOCIETY 201
Canada itself controls several National Historic Sites, partly peripheral and
complementary to old Québec, but including the city walls and associated
features such as Dufferin Terrace which are both pivotal to the inner city’s
World Heritage designation and a strategic constraint upon its development.
Parks Canada also controls the Vieux Port interpretation centre, which focuses
upon the city’s nineteenth-century role as a key port within the British imperial
system and prime gateway for non-francophone immigrants to Canada. Many of
these were Irish, and the interpretation relates to the nearby National Historic
Site of Grosse-Ile, the immigrant quarantine centre in the St Lawrence where
many Irish arrived dead or dying after the potato famine, a matter of great
concern to the Irish government with respect to its developing on-site
interpretation (Chapter 5). Clearly there is multilateral dissonance potential in
this heritage situation; however, while the port/immigration interpretation
requires federal intervention, the Irish presence does not: many Catholic Irish
became assimilated into the Québecois working class, and archaeological
investigation in the old city has recently been searching for its Irish roots. The
overall Vieux Port project was instigated by the federal government, through a
Crown Corporation, in an implicit rivalry with nearby provincial revitalisation
which is directly relatable to our theme; but the haste and profit motivation of
its design triggered more universal conflicts of waterfront revitalisation, notably
the insensitive juxtaposition to the historic area of Basse Ville in general
(Tunbridge, 1988; Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990; Larochelle, 1992).
Even within the political status quo of a united Canada, the tourist-historic
management of Québec City is divided among agents with sometimes dissonant
interpretations of its heritage, in which the ‘civil territory’ within the walls is
dominated by provincial and municipal interests chiefly interested in its earlier
French identity, and concerned to keep cultural affairs to themselves. However,
there is a common interest in a complementary tourism product, largely
marketed dispassionately and bilingually by a metropolitan organisation. Both
the city and province have also shown some sensitivity to anglophone heritage,
for example in the protection and reuse of a redundant church, and sub-
sidisation of historic sites, such as the Anglican Cathedral and Morrin College.
At the professional level, Parks Canada, provincial and municipal heritage
officials meet and co-operate to an extent broadly comparable with other
provinces; however, at the political level there has been long-standing resistance,
by the province of Québec specifically, to further federal acquisition of land, for
example Artillery Park, which constituted a gap in the federal control of the city
walls (Richer, personal communication 1994).
Current heritage issues in Québec City relate primarily to a discordance
between the aggregate heritage identity and insensitive redevelopment. Concern
has been expressed about such pressure on a World Heritage Site (Dalibard,
1988/9). It includes further proposed developments in Vieux Port, such as an
IMAX theatre, which have been widely and in this case successfully opposed as
inconsistent with the world designation, and particularly discordant and
disruptive with respect to the adjacent revitalisation of Basse Ville; in requiring
public input Parks Canada effectively assisted a local coalition of opponents
(Vachon, 1992; Larochelle, 1992; Richer, personal communication 1994).
202 DISSONANT HERITAGE

_THis TAREY i
OFTRE CANADY

Figure 7.6. Québec City: British imperial iconography. Outside the railway station seen in
Figure 7.5 (JET, 1994)

The heritage dissonance of Québec City is subtle and complex; in part it is the
inevitable consequence of major cultural change, but its hostile overtones remain
largely quiescent. Its subtlety is underlined by the fact that the British-period
architecture, which projects linguistic dissonances to the present majority,
otherwise empathises with the French streetscape which preceded it, in ironic
contrast to current intrusive proposals. Of central research interest would be the
various resident and visitor responses to the city’s intricate iconography, which
is often mutually contradictory in cultural and ideological terms. It is clear that a
potential exists for the current confusion of heritage messages to be transformed
into a dissonance with a much sharper edge, particularly if the critical moderat-
ing influence of federal agencies should ever be withdrawn. The status of
Québec City as a World Heritage Site, prominently memorialised outside the
Chateau Frontenac in terms of its French, British and Canadian historical
significance, does not give confidence that these dimensions would all survive a
change in the political order; in view of the disregard of this status already
manifested in the development of Vieux Port, and in view of the political
cynicism which has often coloured such designation globally (Chapter 9).
Further significant change in the interpretation of Québec City’s heritage
would seem to depend on the province’s future with respect to Canada. The
issue of separation has hovered for many years as the political fortunes of
the separatist Parti Québecois have fluctuated; however, the outcome of the
federal and provincial elections in 1993-94, which produced a separatist Official
Opposition in Ottawa and government in Québec, has activated a further
provincial referendum. Any outcome which effectively removed Parks Canada’s
role in Québec City could marginalise or reinterpret non-French contributions
CANADA: HERITAGE DISSONANCE IN A ‘NEW WORLD’ SETTLER SOCIETY 203
and compromise its world heritage identity, for the nation-state aspiration in
Québec ‘implies the eventual negation of all other cultural expressions in the
public place’ (Salée, 1994: 94). In the province as a whole, this involves not only
the heritage of the erstwhile conqueror but also that of both native peoples and
subsequent minorities, for both of whom the francophone cultural preoccupation
has left scant understanding; this has been implicit with respect to northern
Quebec, the 1990 Oka crisis and persistent pressure to linguistically assimilate
recent minorities in the face of the low francophone birth-rate.

Halifax: Africville (Figures 7.7—7.8)

Africville was in essence a black squatter settlement on the northern margins of
Halifax, the demolition of which has become a national symbol of all that was
wrong with traditional urban renewal, and with the racial discrimination
historically endemic in those Canadian cities containing sizeable visible
minorities (Christopher, 1992; Kimber, 1992). Its destruction is the more damning
because it bears a strong superficial resemblance to the contemporaneous
demolition of District Six in Cape Town, South Africa (Chapter 8), although in
the case of Africville the professed planning intent was racial integration rather
than the segregation which had created it. The subsequent national catharsis has
included a travelling exhibition of Africville’s heritage, in 1992 among the
rotating displays in the Canadian Museum of Civilization (see Ottawa—Hull,
below).
Africville originated in the mid-nineteenth century as an unacknowledged
appendage of Halifax, a community of marginalised blacks whose condition,
notwithstanding their primarily Loyalist origins, was characteristic of Nova
Scotian towns (Clairmont and Magill, 1970; Winks, 1971; Pachai, 1992). It
developed as an informal settlement, lacking clear title to land, located on the
shores of Bedford Basin which provided a resource, particularly for fishing and
bootlegging. However, its inhabitants were politically powerless and _ its
environment was progressively degraded by Halifax’s other unwanted ‘fringe’
land uses, such as the city dump, industrial activities and a main railway line
built through the middle of the community. Halifax also resisted the provision of
utility connections and road maintenance. The inevitable result was Africville’s
social decline and ultimate designation as a slum, in the mentality of 1960s
urban renewal; its clearance was long-sought by the city to free land, eliminate
an eyesore and ostensibly provide better living conditions and social integration
for its inhabitants (Clairmont, 1992). It was cleared between 1964 and 1970, with
even less community consultation than was characteristic of the period. Seaview
Baptist church, the symbolic focus of the community, was bulldozed early and
with little warning. The inhabitants were largely transferred to public housing in
North Halifax, in which segregation persists, albeit economic rather than racially
exclusive; over time their dependence on social assistance grew, and with it the
desire of many to increase their trivial compensation and/or to reclaim their lost
heritage.
Changes in planning philosophy during the 1970s, emphasising structural
rehabilitation and community consultation, drew national attention to the
204 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Figure 7.7. Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada: Africville. Memorial in Seaview Park, by the
harbour (JET, 1994)

aad

&
os

Figure 7.8. Halifax: mainstream waterfront heritage. Historic Properties and a matching
hotel, with Citadel Hill behind (JET, 1994)
CANADA: HERITAGE DISSONANCE IN A ‘NEW WORLD’ SETTLER SOCIETY 205

injustice of the Africville clearance, including the failure to recognise its

community heritage values. The simultaneous implementation of multi-
culturalism as national policy reinforced these changes. The site was converted
into Seaview Park, and its former inhabitants have reappropriated its sense of
place by holding summer picnics and other family gatherings there. Their
association has sought the site’s formal heritage recognition and expects the
reconstruction of at least the church, with the achievement to date of a
monument to former residents (Figure 7.7), and the documentation of Africville’s
heritage: in effect this is largely created from the struggle over its destruction,
climaxing generations of struggle for existence (Saunders, 1989; Africville
Genealogical Society, 1992). Reappropriation by squatting appeared by 1995.
It is pertinent to record that Preston, a squatter settlement on the eastern
periphery of metropolitan Halifax, was not only the foremost early settlement of
Nova Scotia blacks but has been the beneficiary of the Africville experience in
receiving community development instead of demolition (Pachai, 1992;
Clairmont, 1992). It is a continuing reflection of Africville and also contains
the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia, which documents local black history
and contributions to Canada and the British Empire (Abucar, 1988).
It could be argued that selective indignation over Africville, as against many
areas of poor white redevelopment, represents its successful exploitation by
black consciousness proponents to focus their grievances. But however it is
viewed, the symbolic significance of Africville extends to more general re-
evaluation of minority heritage hitherto implicitly disregarded by majorities. In
particular, it demands greater sensitivity to the values of the larger black
population which has immigrated in recent years to central Canada and which,
notwithstanding historical and cultural differences, has helped to create the
multicultural perceptions from which Nova Scotia blacks are gradually
benefitting. However, black populations and values of whatever origin have yet
to achieve unqualified acceptance across Canadian cities, as witnessed by recent
tensions in Toronto and Montreal which have been partly related to the
extremely sensitive issue of perceived criminal activity .
It should be noted that black heritage sites and trails are now becoming
prominent in the Nova Scotia tourism literature, even though the black
population retains a generally low profile: the imperative in a depressed
economy to exploit all tourism resources is clearly apparent, reflecting similar
economic motivation elsewhere. This may elevate minorities (McKay, 1994).

St John’s: the imperial legacy (Figures 7.9-7.10)

St John’s, Newfoundland, is one of the earliest European settlements in the
Americas, having been a base for the Grand Banks cod fishery for over four
centuries (Mannion, 1987). However, few of its physical structures are old for
two main reasons: year-round settlement was officially disallowed before the
eighteenth century, and the community’s largely wooden buildings have
periodically been devastated by fire (Nader, 1976). Its irregular street pattern
and idiosyncratic streetscapes, the result of steep harbourside topography and
distinctive historical circumstance, have endowed the city with an indelible sense
206 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Figure 7.9. St John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. Harbourside Park at centre (JET, 1994)

Figure 7.10. St John’s: Harbourside Park. The original Gilbert plaque is at the foot of the
war memorial behind (JET, 1994)
CANADA: HERITAGE DISSONANCE IN A ‘NEW WORLD’ SETTLER SOCIETY 207

of place; nevertheless it has few tangible anchors for the development of a

tourist-historic city. However, following the deferral of its hopes for an off-shore
oil industry in the early 1980s, and the serious decline of the cod fishery, St
John’s has sought to develop heritage tourism and has undertaken a main-street
revitalization programme in association with Heritage Canada (Heritage
Canada, 1991). This followed an earlier study which had identified potential for
a heritage conservation area, with particular reference to the historic linkage
points between harbour and city (Heritage Canada/Newfoundland Historic
Trust, 1976; Sharpe, 1995).
In this historic linkage St John’s holds, for some, a ‘trump card’: upon landing
here in 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert claimed Newfoundland and thus founded
what was to become the British Empire. In response to this, King’s Beach, one of
the harbour connections and his reputed landing place, was refurbished as a
small Harbourside Park for the 400th anniversary in 1983 (Figure 7.10). This was
a collaborative project involving federal, provincial, local and private-foundation
funding, and closely reflecting recommendations of the earlier conservation area
study that the site be used for this historic recreational purpose (Heritage
Canada, 1976). It is framed by memorial markers pertaining to the pivotal event
and the subsequent maritime history involving this official and ceremonial
landing place, which looks out on the open ocean through the harbour entrance.
It also provides a setting for an earlier plaque (inscribed by Kipling) to Gilbert’s
proclamation, above which stands the highly ornate Newfoundland war
memorial, in itself an imperial monument. The assemblage is defined by the
federal government’s adjacent modern Sir Humphrey Gilbert Building. Lest the
imperial symbolism of this precinct be missed, the Harbourside Park marker
explains it clearly: ‘You now stand on the most historic place in all of Canada.
Landing on this site in 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert claimed Newfoundland for
Elizabeth I, Queen of England. Gilbert thereby founded the British Empire, the
greatest the world has ever seen.’
The imperial and royal symbolism is powerfully reinforced elsewhere in St
John’s, such as in the Anglican Cathedral, the Garrison Church, Government
House, the Colonial Building and Commissariat House (both Provincial Historic
Sites); and in the Cabot Tower, an 1897 structure commemorating both the 400th
anniversary of Cabot’s ‘discovery’ of Newfoundland and Queen Victoria’s
Diamond Jubilee, on Signal Hill at the harbour entrance. With this sense of
place, therefore, the Gilbert memorialisation is compatible. Even Parks Canada’s
overall interpretation of Signal Hill National Historic Site, which includes
seasonal military tattoos, reinforces the imperial symbolism; though tempered,
as in Québec City and elsewhere, by a larger heritage, notably of Marconi and
communications. In most other Canadian provinces, however, neither the extent
of this symbolism nor the claim of historic primacy would have withstood
challenge as late as 1983. They are also clearly dissonant with respect to the
heritage projections of federal institutions in Ottawa—Hull (see below). In
Newfoundland there is no aboriginal population, the Beothuks having been
marginalised into extinction (Newfoundland Museum, St Johns; Saturley, 1993);
French communities are few and remote; there has been no attraction for recent
immigrants of cultures other than the prevailing British Isles stock (except in
208 DISSONANT HERITAGE

transit); and diffusion of fashionable social values has been tardy. Only in such
comparative backwaters can imperial values remain so prominent, aided here
not only by distinctive historical primacy but also by the survival of effective
colonial status until well within living memory (1949). (It is interesting, none the
less, that Harbourside Park is also used to display a small plaque to the start of
the Terry Fox run, noted in the context of disability, even though it began and is
also marked 1 km away.)
O’Dea (personal communication 1994) affirms that the Gilbert anniversary
project encountered virtually no controversy locally, or indeed federally, and
that the imperial theme is an unquestioned part of the accepted Newfoundland
mindset. Like Sharpe (personal communication 1994), however, he points out
that imperial symbolism is more a matter of ‘amnesia’ or invisibility, bred of
familiarity, than of active discussion. These sources note that King’s Beach does
not receive much attention, the Cabot Tower and Signal Hill are of interest
chiefly for their contribution to tourism, and the war memorial is seen more in
terms of the 1 July anniversary of the Battle of Beaumont Hamel in 1916. There
is public debate over the affront to this heritage of sacrifice occasioned by
skateboarders, but there neither is nor has been debate over the imperial military
mismanagement which underlies it. In St John’s, as elsewhere, heritage values
received by the visitor may be latent (and sometimes unthinkingly inconsistent)
to residents, until some conspicuously dissonant development requires their
renewed consideration.
This proviso notwithstanding, the Loyalist legacy ensures that substantial
imperial symbolism also survives in the smaller centres of the three long-Canadian
Maritime Provinces. This is evident in Fredericton, the capital of New Brunswick,
which has all the trappings of an erstwhile colonial capital, such as Christchurch
Cathedral and the Military Compound which are quintessentially British colonial
in historical association and design symbolism. Loyalist heritage remains para-
mount here despite a pre-Loyalist presence and recent growth of antecedent Indian
and Acadian heritage awareness, stirring intermittent tension in the media; the
1828 Government House is a current focus of reuse/interpretation debate since its
site has preceding Indian and Acadian significance and both federal and provincial
governments are multiculturally committed (Nason, personal communication
1994). Imperial symbolism is also perpetuated in small towns across Canada,
notably in the war memorials that distinguish them from their US counterparts,
and nowhere is a British identity more explicitly tourism-commercialised than in
Victoria on the Pacific coast. It must be remembered, however, that the relationship
between Loyalism, Britishness and imperial sentiment is complex, has evolved
through time as well as varying over space between St John’s and Victoria, and is
frequently a matter of perception to suit a particular purpose.

Vancouver-Victoria: the Chinese heritage (Figures 7.11-7.12)

Reference has been made to a series of dissonance issues in British Columbia,
especially pertaining to the Haida in the Queen Charlotte Islands, and tensions
over both contemporary Chinese ‘monster homes’ and gender representativeness
in Vancouver. The heritage of the Chinese community in Vancouver and Victoria
CANADA: HERITAGE DISSONANCE IN A ‘NEW WORLD’ SETTLER SOCIETY 209

Figure 7.11. Victoria, British Columbia, Canada: Chinese arch. Back street location near
the traditionally industrial end of the harbour (JET, 1983)

Figure 7.12. Victoria: British waterfront heritage. Empress Hotel, Victoria statue, war
memorial; with the harbour in the background to the left JET, 1983)
210 DISSONANT HERITAGE

requires closer attention, however, for they have evolved from an outcast group
to the economic leading edge of West Coast society, largely by virtue of recent
immigration. Even though recent migrants do not automatically relate to historic
issues, the question of heritage adjustment to redress past injustices to the early
Chinese community is now of obvious political consequence. As we have
implied above, echoes of this scenario occur in Australian cities also.
Oriental immigrants in the late nineteenth century were either denied
permanent settlement or subjected to a form of apartheid by local legislation; a
situation reminiscent of South Africa at that time (Christopher, 1992) and
similarly justified in part on health grounds. Like Africville, the West Coast
‘Chinatowns’ were segregated and marginalised, and excluded from recognition
in early urban identity (Anderson, 1988; 1991). Yet their presence was tolerated,
primarily because they supplied expendable ‘coolie’ labour for mining
operations and for the construction of the principal European heritage artefact
in British Columbia: the Canadian Pacific Railway, which was the fundamental
requirement for the colony to join the Canadian Confederation (Galois and
Harris, 1994). This contribution has only recently begun to find recognition; for
example, in plaques in Vancouver and Yale, BC, as well as the Toronto
monument already noted (Lai, personal communication 1994).
More generally, the tourism value of a sanitised Chinatown ultimately became
apparent from the regional example of San Francisco; and parallel realisation of
the social damage being caused by urban renewal of the Chinese district of
Vancouver (credited with the national reversal of urban renewal policy in 1969)
led to nationally-assisted housing development sensitive to Chinese Canadian
identity. Broader awareness of the Chinese contribution to urban heritage has
been fostered recently by the work of Lai (1988), and has found expression in
heritage designation and tourist-oriented Chinatown development in both
Vancouver and Victoria, a reconstructed nineteenth-century Chinatown in the
BC provincial museum in Victoria, and tours by local Chinese associations.
Whether sufficient recognition and recompense has now been made to dispel
this aspect of West Coast urban heritage dissonance is an open question.
The tourism reclamation of Chinatowns in British Columbia and elsewhere
(notably Toronto) has a larger conceptual significance. They occupied back
streets such as Victoria’s Fan Tan Alley and represented a concealed and
discordant heritage potential prior to their recent recognition. In Victoria this
was in flagrant contrast to the waterfront and main street heritage (Figure 7.12)
which has long projected its Britishness to the adjacent US tourism market, and
has recently been the focus of major revitalisation efforts (Hamilton and Simard,
1993) highlighted by the Commonwealth Games. Chinatown’s exotic goods,
gastronomy and townscape, focused in Victoria characteristically upon a new
Chinese arch (Figure 7.11), provided a classic resource for the expansion and
diversification which is characteristic of the tourist-historic city (Ashworth and
Tunbridge, 1990). This relationship between the decline of dissonance and the
growth of the tourist-historic city is a fundamental issue which we identified
earlier and to which we return in Chapter 9.
Whether the ‘monster home’ controversy, between a minority of recent mainly
Hong Kong immigrants and the anglophone mainstream, will impede
CANADA: HERITAGE DISSONANCE IN A ‘NEW WORLD’ SETTLER SOCIETY 211

elimination of the larger Chinese heritage dissonance remains to be seen. It is

disturbing to note that the discord documented in the Shaughnessy and
Kerrisdale districts by Ley (1994) and Majury (1994) has since been reported
elsewhere, notably in British Properties, West Vancouver, a district which had
been synonymous with ‘tranquillity and tradition’ and which had excluded both
discordant structures and non-European residents by covenant until the 1960s,
but which is now experiencing a steady incursion of both ‘monster homes’ and
residents from Hong Kong, Iran and elsewhere (Matas, 1994).

The quest for national credibility in a vortex of heritage dissonance: the case
of Ottawa-Hull
A capital city should represent the imagery, aspirations and perhaps pretensions
of a nation, most visibly in the symbolism of its built environment (Taylor et al.,
1993). This is precisely the mould in which successive generations have sought
to recast Ottawa, after an unprepossessing origin as an early nineteenth-century
lumbering community at the junction of the Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal
(Holdsworth, 1986; Taylor, 1986; Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990) (Figure 7.13).
While Ottawa is in Ontario, Hull is across the Ottawa River in Québec; it is of
similar origin but has only recently, lightly and equivocally shared in the capital
status. The central fact of heritage dissonance in Ottawa—Hull concerns the
conjunction of English and French cultures compounded by the uncertain
political future of predominantly francophone Québec (Boal, 1993). This central
fact is framed, however, by the larger reality that the national images and
aspirations which Ottawa must represent are very far from harmonious, as this
chapter has indicated and the federal election of 1993 sharply confirmed.
Ottawa became the capital of united Ontario and Québec in 1858 and of the
Canadian Confederation in 1867. By the early twentieth century its capital status
dominated its functional identity and a concerted effort was made through
successive federal agencies to bring its physical imagery into line with this
reality (Taylor, 1986). The political imperative of developing appropriate
imagery in the arbitrarily selected capital of what might be considered an
artificially confederated state readily explains this effort. Its appearance was
gradually cleansed of industrial eyesores, which were largely replaced by green
space, and the mid-century governments of Mackenzie King redesigned
Wellington and Elgin Streets in the inner city with symbolic capital imagery to
blend with Parliament in the distinctively Canadian ‘Chateauesque’ style, a
hybrid of Québec influences and ‘Westminster in the Wilderness’ (Figure 7.14).
This recognised the duality of the ‘founding’ societies adequately, until the onset
of Québec militancy in the 1960s seriously questioned the legitimacy of its
government from Ottawa. Political heritage dissonance, in terms of the
memorialisation of individuals reflecting the party in power, was already in
evidence however, as noted in Chapter 4 (Kalman, 1982; Tunbridge, 1984).
By the 1950s planning attention turned to the larger framework of a National
Capital Region, designated within Ontario and Québec as far as provincial
power in the Canadian constitution would allow, within which Hull began to be
considered as something more than a working-class appendage. The European
212

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CANADA: HERITAGE DISSONANCE IN A ‘NEW WORLD’ SETTLER SOCIETY 213

Figure 7.14. Ottawa, Canada: Parliament from the Canadian Museum of Civilization,
Hull. On the left is the Chateau Laurier Hotel (JET, 1994)

planner Greber, already responsible for much of the inner-city redesign, was
commissioned to plan this larger entity; the legacy of his work includes greatly
extended scenic parkways, a green belt around Ottawa and a green wedge
extending into the Canadian Shield escarpment behind Hull, creating the
Gatineau Park (Taylor, 1986). The federal government was constitutionally
obliged to purchase these lands, although the Mackenzie King Estate in the
Gatineau Park was willed to the nation by the former Prime Minister. With the
subsequent growth of Québec nationalism these federal properties have become
highly visible and symbolic bones of contention, the Gatineau Park being viewed
as a neocolonial ‘English’ playground by Québec extremists (Boal, 1993). This is
not merely a question of quasi-wilderness green space, but involves in the
Mackenzie King Estate some of the most dissonant cultural heritage in Canada:
Kingsmere is preserved as King’s wartime retreat and is redolent with
mementoes of a Second World War, and conscription, in which most Québeckers
wanted no part. The memories are sharpened by bilingual film documentaries
on Canada’s role in the war, in which King’s devious bicultural balancing act is
spiced with characters as dissonant — in many French Canadian eyes — as King
George VI and Winston Churchill. While the displays strive for a balanced
Canadian interpretation which should no longer affront Québec federalists, the
ability of such heritage — or even the Gatineau Park as a whole — to survive a
political separation of Québec is an intriguing question indeed. (See Figure 7.1.)
The federal agency created to manage the National Capital Region is the
National Capital Commission, and its regional role has progressively developed
since the 1950s (Taylor, 1986). Initially, however, its most significant contribution
was to extend the capital imagery of central Ottawa by initiating the
214 DISSONANT HERITAGE

revitalisation of its original core, Lower Town, in time for the national
Centennial in 1967 (Bond, 1961). In this it acted as one of the pioneer agents of
the heritage conservation movement which was stirring in some North
American inner cities at that time. Lower Town, formerly known as Bytown
after its British military founder, had been a roistering lumbering community
strategically sited at the junction of Colonel By’s Rideau Canal and the Ottawa
River; it was marginalised by the subsequent growth of the national capital
precinct, at a discreet remove across the canal (Taylor, 1986). It was primarily a
Franco-Irish working class community focused on the Byward Market, and it
gradually subsided into a classic ‘zone of discard’ (Nader, 1976; Tunbridge,
1986a, 1986b, 1987). The NCC expropriated Sussex Drive and revitalised it as the
‘Mile of History’ which connected Parliament with the Prime Minister’s and
Governor General’s residences; in so doing they catalysed a diffusion of
revitalisation eastwards across the Byward Market area, at the hands of civic
and private enterprise. The result was the creation by the 1980s of: the
commercial heart of tourist-historic Ottawa, documented by Ashworth and
Tunbridge (1990). This revolutionised the tourist/leisure geography of Ottawa
within a generation, but it has left two conspicuous dissonant legacies. The first
is common to most recent inner-city revitalisations, as we have already
considered: dispossession and disinheritance of the most marginal social classes,
including the homeless (and the prostitutes), who had long found refuge in such
‘zones of discard’, and who partly remain tenuously sheltered by incongruously
juxtaposed but tenacious institutions such as the Salvation Army. The second is
culturally specific: the erosion of the ‘French’ identity of Lower Town, in which
some institutions representing past francophone-rights struggles, notably the
Ecole Guigues, have belatedly found compatible reuse (Beaulieu, 1993), while
others are dispossessed; the most evident case is the de facto eviction by the
NCC, during its ongoing upmarket development of Sussex Drive, of the Institut
Jeanne d’Arc, a Catholic shelter for young women migrants to Ottawa. In the
process of creating a tourist-oriented ‘heritage pastiche’, other cultural elements
in Lower Town’s heritage have also been obliterated, notably the Jewish second-
hand stores on Clarence Street, albeit not necessarily to the financial
disadvantage of the individuals concerned (Tunbridge, 1986a).
Simultaneously with the resurgence of Lower Town there has been an
increasing absorption of Hull into the capital identity (Holdsworth, 1986).
Federal alarm at Québec separatist activities in 1970 accelerated the move of
some government departments (including Parks Canada with Environment) to
Hull, resulting in a totally schizophrenic urban morphology in which the residue
of the provincial Québec lumber town has been rendered dissonant to the
juxtaposed office high-rises, even though a fragment of it has been recycled for
the office lunch market. Furthermore, the National Capital Commission has been
actively promoting Hull’s identification with the capital in a variety of respects,
notably the development of a national ceremonial route which links both city
centres — and provides striking views of Ottawa from Hull (Figure 7.14) — by
virtue of the 1970s Portage Bridge. The late-1980s construction of the National
Gallery of Canada and the Canadian Museum of Civilization, respectively in
Ottawa and Hull and linked on the ceremonial route by the Alexandra Bridge,
CANADA: HERITAGE DISSONANCE IN A ‘NEW WORLD’ SETTLER SOCIETY 215
was a politically counterpoised commitment of a very large public investment; it
has provided a basis for some tourist-historic development in Hull and drawn
both tourist-historic cities towards each other and towards the Ottawa River
waterfront (Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990). Unfortunately this integration of
Hull into the national capital has been interpreted by Québec nationalists as
NCC ‘buldozage’ of local cultural identity, and an intensified threat to the
French language; and they have protested the loss of the original primary-
industry symbolism on the site of CMC (Boal, 1993).
Contemporary international preoccupation with waterfront revitalisation,
particularly for leisure exploitation of a heritage resource, points strongly to the
further exploitation of the Ottawa River waterfront as an additional strategy for
binding Hull to Ottawa, and with it Québec to Canada (Tunbridge, 1988, 1993).
The NCC is well aware of this, having hosted an international conference on
riverfront revitalisation (National Capital Commission, 1987). The Ottawa
riverfront does not lend itself here to conventional commercial initiatives such as
festival marketplaces; the topography is too constricting, sections remain in
industrial use, and most of the waterfront is government-owned and providing in
the first instance a scenic backdrop to Parliament, with low-intensity recreational
uses such as bicycle paths. None the less, the NCC is seeking more recreational
use, focusing on heritage and with the above political imperative never far from
view. Following its conference it promoted an integrated vision for the waterfront
from the Brewery Creek area of Hull across the Ottawa River islands to the
Lebreton Flats area of Ottawa. The integrating theme is industrial heritage
centred upon the Chaudiere Falls, the waterpower site which first attracted white
settlement to the area (circa 1800) and subsequently focused industrial devel-
opment on the islands and both shores. Paradoxically, a practical problem
inhibits the interpretation of the industrial heritage in that some of the industry
continues to exist, and furthermore continues to block effective visibility of the
Falls and thus deny exploitation of their cultural and remaining natural amenity.
None the less, several early industrial structures and sites are available for
interpretation, using various means including insurance plan atlases (Tunbridge,
1986b); and periodic recreational use is made of the industrial sites, especially
Victoria Island during festivals on and around Canada Day, 1 July. However,
industrial interpretation of Victoria Island constitutes dissonant heritage to one
group which has typically been overlooked in urban heritage issues: the
aboriginal people. In a situation distinctly reminiscent of the Perth, Australia
brewery controversy (Jones, 1992), the Assembly of First Nations has pointed out
that the island has an antecedent symbolism to the local Algonquin Indians, to
whom it represented a neutral staging area in intertribal trade before portaging
the falls, which have subsequently been impaired by industrial damming and
toxic waste. The Assembly has furthermore proposed it as the appropriate site of
a new centre for all aboriginal peoples, argued to be incompatible with retention
of the industrial structures (Montour, personal communication 1993); this has
been accepted by the NCC, subject to funding, but both the industrial buildings,
designated federal heritage, and the festival use will remain and integrate
(Boulet, personal communication 1994), or perhaps maintain an uneasy co-
existence. To Québec nationalists, an industrial-heritage interpretation of an
216 DISSONANT HERITAGE

integrated waterfront is also dissonant: apart from a further unwelcome reminder

that western Québec is bonded to eastern Ontario through the life-giving Ottawa
River, there is a deep-seated grievance against ‘English’ capitalist exploitation of
a ‘French’ industrial proletariat throughout the province. These constraints have
been compounded by longstanding debate about the redevelopment of Lebreton
Flats on the Ottawa shore (a 1960s ‘urban renewal’ clearance area), as to how it
should portray the NCC’s national symbolism or meet local needs. The 1990s
financial constraints upon any waterfront heritage development may, therefore,
be a blessing in disguise. However, a proposal for an ‘Expo 2005’ across this
waterfront zone, further boosting the national capital imagery, might have added
a new provocation to its heritage dissonance had it succeeded.
Ottawa does not have a well-developed heritage profile with respect to
immigrant minorities, in comparison with much larger Toronto, Montreal or
Vancouver. There are numerous locally significant ethnic clusters, and their
contribution to the urban fabric is generally perceived as positive, especially in
so far as they contribute cultural diversity to the resources for gentrification and
tourism in the form of many ethnic restaurants. Some streetscapes, such as
Preston for Italians and Somerset for Chinese, have acquired elements of
adaptive heritage, usually with this trade in mind; and a monument rep-
resenting a Vietnamese woman and child seeking freedom has appeared on
Somerset (dissonant to 1990s relations with Vietnam). There are no extensive
areas of cultural adaptation, however, comparable to those which have attracted
heritage controversy in the larger cities. Neither are there mutual hostilities
between immigrant groups on a scale which could yet incite the development of
heritage dissonance between them. However, mutual dissonance between
groups traditionally remote from Canadian life is present in Ottawa, in the form
of minority demonstrations outside Parliament and occasional acts of violence
against embassies (for example, an Armenian attack on the Turkish Embassy in
the 1980s). Such events, combined with knowledge of growing tensions with
respect to and between recent immigrants in larger cities, are creating a climate
of awareness of potential heritage dissonance.
As a relatively small metropolis, Ottawa—Hull is not a major battleground in
matters of gender heritage. Again, because of its political function, however, it
experiences intermittent reminders of this issue. These have included dissonant
interventions at the national war memorial during the annual Remembrance Day
observations, in memory of women raped in war, and kindred outrages for which
more awareness is sought. Predictably one of three figures on the Peacekeeping
Monument (see below) is female, and another aboriginal, in keeping with the
NCC's current policy (Boulet, personal communication 1994); ironically in light of
this, however, a monument to Simon Bolivar (male, war-associated and widely
deemed irrelevant) has been erected, although in a ‘non-capital’ location.
The task of balancing Canada’s multitudinous heritage claimants has been
‘progressively’ engaged (Canadian Museums Association, 1994) and falls in part
to major provincial institutions such as Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, but
disproportionately to the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull. Its very
name, the subject of protracted debate, is indicative of the perceived heritage
dissonance of its predecessor in Ottawa, the Museum of Man. Its high-profile
CANADA: HERITAGE DISSONANCE IN A ‘NEW WORLD’ SETTLER SOCIETY 217
waterfront design (Figure 7.14), by the native Indian architect Douglas Cardinal,
is a very unorthodox flowing structure which has been interpreted as reflecting
native themes and femininity, as a counterweight to the supposed masculinity
of the intervisible National Gallery and most contemporary buildings (reflecting
‘patriarchal Anglo-French authority’ and ‘foundational western myths’;
Douglas, 1992: 382). It contains permanent and transient exhibits. The former
are dominated by a hall of native culture, an apparent heritage redress until one
questions whether it is disproportionately concerned with the spectacular totem-
pole settings of the West Coast rather than an even-handed presentation of
native heritage. It is followed by a series of streetscape and life-style
reconstructions in the History Hall, a purportedly balanced portrayal of the
evolution of mainstream Canadian society, planned with the country’s leading
conservation agencies; which none the less projects early British Canadians as a
military presence, the ethnic diversity rather than Britishness of Loyalist
refugees being emphasised; and arguably fails to project a clear developmental
thread. Presentation as a series of tableaux without an evolutionary progression
of cause and effect, although not unique to this museum, may allow dissonance
to be sidestepped. The transient exhibits have the delicate responsibility of
projecting the many strands of contemporary Canadian multiculturalism on a
rotating basis: among these have been a native cultural programme reflecting
the reinterpretation and ethical concerns at issue following the Columbus
quincentennial (which extend to sacred artefacts and human remains, Phillips,
personal communication 1992); and a portrayal of Africville, Halifax (see
above). A smaller-scale reflection of contemporary heritage balancing is Parks
Canada’s class/ethnicity-sensitive presentation of the history of the Rideau
Canal at the Bytown Museum, which coexists incongruously with the Victorian
imperial eclecticism of the Ottawa Historical Society’s older collection in the
same early canalside building.
Queries about the Canadian Museum of Civilization’s presentation suggest
that it is difficult, in terms of political correctness not least, to resolve heritage
dissonance by attempting balanced inclusivity. An alternative approach could be
described as ‘minimalist’: the identification of common factors as unifying focal
points of heritage in a diverse society. Certain recent monuments on ‘capital’
sites (Boulet, personal communication 1994) in Ottawa point to this approach.
One is the Terry Fox statue, which as we have noted promotes the potentially
unifying theme of achievement overcoming disability. A second, the Peace-
keeping Monument, is the focal landmark of a new square facing the National
Gallery and Sussex Drive (Figure 7.15). Following the 1988 award of the Nobel
Peace Prize to United Nations Peacekeepers, this federal initiative was designed
both to honour Canada’s pre-eminent participation and to advance the capital’s
development, by creating a strategic symbol reflecting central values of Canada
on the national ceremonial route (NCC/National Defence, 1991). It demonstrates
Canada’s formative role in UN peacekeeping, without dissonant specification of
the primary targets of the formative exercise, which included the ‘founding
societies’, Britain and France (at Suez, 1956). Whether it was partly conceived to
pacify internal dissent within armed forces starved of resources is also left
unspecified. Its 1993 unveiling was appropriate yet ironic, in that it found
218 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Figure 7.15. Ottawa: Peacekeeping Monument on Sussex Drive, with Catholic Basilica,
Lower Town, behind (JET, 1995)

Canada’s military committed to UN peacekeeping to the limit of its resources, at

a time when recent evidence (especially Oka in 1990, above) and future
uncertainties caused some to question whether that role might not be needed at
home. However, it potently reflects Canada’s benevolent image of itself and its
role in the world (Todd, 1992), central to its national mythology, and intended to
provide a counterpoint to the national war memorial and War Museum which
are redolant of an imperial heritage (though not overtly dissonant as late as the
1994 fiftieth anniversary of D-Day) (Figure 7.16). From our perspective it
articulates one of the few heritage threads that all Canadians perceive that they
share, or might share, without prejudice to creed or group identity: an ethic of
peaceful and impartial democratic dispute resolution. In the fractious 1990s even
this thread is tenuous; its monumentalisation in the national capital may be
timely to reinforce the stability on the home front that derives from a common
national heritage identity. To overseas tourists the monument might appear
dissonant, however, since Canada’s global contribution to peacekeeping is
seldom acknowledged in the world media.
The interpretation and marketing of heritage in Ottawa—Hull reflects the
larger national and global problem that it is not in the hands of a single agency.
The problem is magnified, however, by the need to project national images as
well as local/provincial identities, which may be irrelevant to national
perspectives in the region’s Ontario jurisdictions, and actually conflicting with
them in the case of Québec (Boal, 1993). High-profile promotion by the National
Capital Commission, including numerous festivals and special events (Getz,
1991), is usually advantageous to local interests but its non-dissonance cannot be
assumed.
CANADA: HERITAGE DISSONANCE IN A ‘NEW WORLD’ SETTLER SOCIETY 219

Figure 7.16. Ottawa: national war memorial. Fiftieth anniversary commemoration of D-

Day (JET, 1994)

CONCLUSION: DISSONANCE MANAGEMENT APPROACHES

This chapter has explored the multifaceted character of heritage dissonance, both
actual and potential, in Canada. This exploration does not pretend to be
comprehensive but it is ample to indicate the existence of a problem, of cardinal
significance for national unity, and to touch upon various approaches directed
(at least implicitly) towards its resolution.
The first such approach might be termed ‘inclusivist’ — the incorporation of
all perspectives into a patchwork quilt called Canadian heritage. There is a basic
flaw to this approach in that everyone’s heritage is ultimately personal and the
attempt to be comprehensive could in the extreme become anarchic. None the
less, Canada’s recent self-image is that of a human mosaic; since the 1970s this
has found political expression in the policy of multiculturalism, which we have
criticised above and which is manifested so questionably in the Canadian
Museum of Civilization and in the mandate for Parks Canada to promote
maximal inclusiveness of both natural and human heritage. We have noted its
specific directive to expand its representation of cultural minorities and
disadvantaged social groups, and illustrated some outcomes. Further to this
political imperative, an economic imperative has emerged in the perceived need
to exploit the broadest possible resource base to attract tourism; with serious
problems in most of the resource industries upon which the peripheral regions’
economies depend, this has become a prominent issue nationwide and a matter
of desperation in cases such as Newfoundland and Labrador. Economic
rationality may not prevail over political hostility but there is plainly a case for
220 DISSONANT HERITAGE

leaving no heritage stone unturned. Some of Parks Canada’s most prominent

initiatives have been specifically motivated by make-work imperatives: the
former French fortress town of Louisbourg, Nova Scotia, was reconstructed
largely to employ an out-of-work anglophone mining community, any local
cultural squeamishness being readily cast aside, and reaping dividends with
francophone Canadians elsewhere (Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990). Heritage
Canada (like various provincial conservation bodies) is also deeply committed to
the ‘inclusivist’ philosophy, for its economic as much as political imperative, and
in particular is promoting an ‘ecomuseum’ approach (see Chapter 3), borrowed
from Europe: this is expressly concerned with packaging the entire heritage
diversity of a region’s physical and human geography for consumption by the
tourism industry, and commonly receives make-work funding assistance. A
series of ‘heritage regions’ embodying this approach have been identified with
local collaboration across Canada, including Cowichan and Chemainus Valleys
of Vancouver Island, BC (Untereiner, 1994); Manitoulin Island, Ontario,
involving close native Indian/mainstream collaboration (Brown, 1994); Labrador
Straits, including archaeology of Spanish-Basque whaling, in which residents
have participated despite negative associations of present-day fishing competi-
tion (Robbins, 1992); and the Baccalieu Trail Heritage Region in Newfoundland,
including commemoration of a French invasion (Leblanc, 1992; Bowering, 1994).
The economic argument for an ‘inclusivist’ approach is quite compelling and
would seem to encourage a more pragmatic and flexible multiculturalism, free of
‘systems’ artificiality, in which all groups would be potentially represented,
when their heritage contribution had acquired a wider significance, rather than
guaranteed distinct recognition by a rigid group right; this would raise further
questions, however, to which we return in Chapter 9.
Alternatively a ‘minimalist’ approach may seek to avoid dissonance by
developing only those heritage themes which are common to all inhabitants,
thereby evading the possible objection of one or another group to particular
patches in the ‘inclusivist’ quilt. This would logically emphasise natural heritage,
which would not be difficult in Canada, where it is the prime responsibility of
Parks Canada; and also cultural/social heritage of which the threat is neutralised
by time or circumstance, which by definition excludes that specific to contem-
porary dominant majorities. One prominent consequence of ‘minimalism’ is the
characteristic elimination of majority religious (ie. Christian) heritage from
educational and other official contexts, except for festivals effectively paganised
by commercialism. Such consequences imply, of course, the risk of backlash
from officially disinherited majorities, thereby revealing the weakness of an
ostensibly conflict-avoiding approach. The challenge for ‘minimalism’ is to
identify a credible common denominator which can both appease majorities and
embrace minorities; while natural heritage and its conservation ethic are vital to
this end, natural environments can seldom be interpreted completely separately
from the human elements which have interacted with them, and furthermore
some unifying human heritage must exist for a society to have meaning. It is in
this context that the Peacekeeping Monument in Ottawa is so important, and
likewise more general references to Canada’s contribution to the United Nations,
the safest heritage ground for a polyglot society because it embraces all cultures
CANADA: HERITAGE DISSONANCE IN A ‘NEW WORLD’ SETTLER SOCIETY 221
and has supported most disadvantaged social groups. On another plane, the
value of sport and athletic achievement as a unifying ‘minimalist’ social heritage
(manifested in ‘halls of fame’ museums) should not be underestimated, in
Canada as in many other societies; particularly since, as we have noted, this may
now visibly embrace the disabled population.
A third approach to dissonance management might be termed ‘localisation’,
the promotion or tacit acceptance of different heritage messages emanating from
different locations, and different scales in the spatial hierarchy as discussed in
Chapter 2 (Dalibard, 1992), with reliance upon geographical separation to mute
their dissonance. This can work only where particular localities are internally
agreed on what constitutes their heritage; this may apply to much of rural
Canada and to particular relatively homogeneous ‘backwaters’ little disturbed
by recent human cross-currents, such as the (francophone) Saguenay region
north of Québec City, Prince Edward Island or Newfoundland, and it is implicit
in St John’s (see above). This none the less raises the very serious question of
whether any nation can survive as a collection of mutually alien solitudes, even
if its cosmopolitan larger cities have perforce made their own heritage accom-
modations. The threat to Canadian national stability/survival of a failure to
embrace a broad commitment to some kind of multilateral holistic identity (if
not the present version) has been clearly identified (Bayer, 1991; Nelson, 1991;
McLellan and Richmond, 1994). ‘Localisation’ may therefore prove an interim
line of least resistance to dissonance, but as a long-term solution it runs the risk
that consequent overall centrifugality will outweigh the value of local self-
expression. Of course, in any federal nation a degree of regional distinction is
expected and is consistent with long-term stability.
In practice we may well be faced with the question of market differences
discussed in Chapter 3. Political priorities in heritage development are concerned
primarily with social harmony among residents, whereas economic priorities
have most to do with a tourism market which is either neutral to local heritage
tensions or biased differently from residents. The challenge becomes how to
project different messages to different markets, using different media, sometimes
(as in Québec City) predominantly in different languages, without confusing or
trivialising the messages, or antagonising any recipients. The sensitivity of this
task, including orchestration of the numerous bodies from which heritage
messages emanate, underscores the importance of the heritage marketing
mechanisms we have referred to earlier in this book.
In conclusion, it must be stressed that heritage dissonance in Canada is closely
reflective of other settler-dominated societies, of which it might be regarded as
an archetype with the notable complication that the national foundation
involved a marriage of convenience between two mutually alien cultures. The
substantive points and management approaches discussed are widely relevant
among settler societies and more generally relatable to European contexts. With
respect to heritage, conservation and broad urban/economic contexts, and to
black and native Indian minorities, there are fundamental parallels with the US
experience, notwithstanding important historical and geographical differences
that preclude simplistic assumptions of equivalence. With respect to national
evolution, aboriginal resurgence and contemporary position on the margins of
222 DISSONANT HERITAGE

a world which heavily constrains socio-economic and immigration policies,

Canada presents particularly compelling similarities to Australia. It is unsur-
prising, therefore, that the evolution of heritage attitudes shows especially strong
similarities between Canada and these other ‘new world’ jurisdictions, or that
presently fashionable heritage values should diffuse so readily between them —
perhaps more readily than through European societies with significantly
different heritage contexts and greater historical inertia against their own
continental unity, let alone adaptation to new faces and values. The internal
variation in heritage contexts and perspectives within Canada, brought out by
our examples, must not be minimised however; and as physically very large
nations, both the US and Australia significantly mirror this internal variation,
and likewise a substantial capacity to perpetuate it by virtue of their federal
decentralisation of some of the power to determine heritage presentation.
We turn now to the case of ‘Third World’ societies with settler minorities, in
which many of the above issues reappear, but with distinctly sharper overtones
of political tension or conflict associated with heritage in the protracted process
of decolonisation.
8 Southern Africa: Dissonant
Heritage as the ‘Black Man’s
Burden’?

HERITAGE DISSONANCE IN THE POST-COLONIAL ‘THIRD WORLD’

In those former colonies in which alien settlers never constituted a majority of

the local population, foundations for heritage dissonance were typically laid
which are arguably of even greater magnitude than those of settler-majority
countries such as Canada. The primary reason is self-evident: minority heritage
almost inevitably conflicts, to a greater or lesser degree, with the values of post-
colonial majority rule. The mass of what is loosely termed the ‘Third World’, or
the ‘South’, is susceptible to this problem. Even in long-independent Latin
America, acceptance of the Hispanic heritage varies between countries and was
the focus of intense international debate during the Columbian quincentennial of
1992; in Cuzco (Qosqo), Peru, the church/temple conflict noted in Chapter 4
involves UNESCO and is the focus of a much broader attempt to restore the Inca
heritage, with both nationalist and tourism motivations (Honoré, 1994). In Asia,
cases of both marginalisation (such as Western (1985) on Tientsin, China) and at
least qualified acceptance (Jones and Shaw (1992) on Penang, Malaysia; Logan
(1995) on Hanoi, Vietnam) of the European colonial heritage have been
discussed, and in hill stations (epitomised by Kipling’s Simla/Shimla, India) it
often remains indelible. In the case of Singapore, developmentally motivated
clearance of too much of the colonial streetscape has been followed by selective
‘pastiche’ reconstruction (Jones and Shaw, 1992); while the potentially conflicting
diversity of its colonially derived religious heritage has been subordinated to
state creation, except in so far as it serves a tourism purpose sometimes alien to
the inheriting religious groups themselves (Kong, 1993). It is in Africa, however,
that the recency and frequently turbulence of decolonisation has left the most
conspicuous dissonance; and above all in southern Africa, where the relative
prominence of white settlers has occasioned the most recent and most bitterly
contested decolonisation, a process barely complete in the supremely contentious
case of South Africa.
The cultural gulf between natives and settlers, whether from the colonising
power or elsewhere, is the most obvious root of colonial heritage dissonance.
While white populations are typically involved, this is not always the case: the
media have commented on Korean antagonism to the Japanese colonial heritage,
224 DISSONANT HERITAGE

widespread marginalisation of aboriginal cultures within Asian countries, and

the cultural/ideological displacement of mainland Chinese Nationalist heritage
in Taiwan. In addition to the deepseated value differences associated with widely
divergent ethnicities, the colonial experience reinforced a cultural polarisation
between colonisers’ values of conquest and exploitation, and native values of
subjugation and resistance (Barraclough, 1984). The former were well manifested
in the colonial built environment, surviving to varying extents, while the latter
are gradually finding a physical heritage expression. Caught between the two, if
acknowledged by neither, there may be a subordinate minority heritage of
settlers from additional cultures, notably Chinese or, in the African case, Indians;
their advent was usually intrinsic to the processes of colonialism and their
heritage is thereby inseparable from it (Christopher, 1992; Cartier, 1993).
The decolonisation process commonly added an ideological dimension to
coloniser-native polarisation, fuelled by the manifest differences in material
well-being between colonial masters and native underclasses. Liberation was
often identified (at least ostensibly) with more universal socialist principles,
while the protagonists of this perspective have commonly identified former
colonial oppression with exploitative capitalism. Some of the most prominent
heritage expressions of the colonial order, such as the Gold Reef City theme park
in Johannesburg and the heritage of diamond mining in Kimberley (see below),
reinforce this identification since they not only emphasise the capitalist legacy
but have been conserved or reconstructed by capitalist interests. The socialism/
capitalism dichotomy largely reflects, of course, the Cold War polarisation in
which decolonisation has occurred; but while this has hastened the process and
often sharpened the tensions involved, such global values have not necessarily
matched the historical reality of specific colonialist /native-nationalist tensions. In
fact the ideological dimension has sometimes cut across and complicated the
underlying cultural polarisation. In particular this prompted the illegal colonial-
settler independence of Rhodesia and thus the shaping of Zimbabwe, since local
colonialist perspectives sought primacy over those of manufacturing capitalism
which had favoured unwelcome growth of native urban employment (Drakakis-
Smith, 1992).
Ironically, decolonisation has sometimes added an unintended colonial
heritage, where new and ostensibly nationalist capitals have been built by the
departing colonial power essentially in its own image. This has been
documented in Belmopan, Belize, which also reflects dissonances of local origin
(Davis, 1991); and is visible in southern Africa in Gaberone, Botswana.
Decolonisation added a further complication to heritage dissonance by stirring
latent interethnic rivalries among the previously common subject peoples: in
short, stirring a resurgence of ‘tribalism’. Rival bids for power from within the
supposed majority population have been compounded by the quest to settle
historical scores, some of which had been exacerbated by colonial ‘divide and
rule’ compartmentalisation or, worse, selective favouring of groups, by colonial
authorities throughout the former empires (Christopher, 1992). Such compart-
mentalisation reached its extreme in the ‘homeland’/bantustan-based tribal
designations of South Africa, internally colonial until 1994; this exacerbated in
particular the historic Zulu—Xhosa conflict and thereby severely impeded the
SOUTHERN AFRICA: THE ‘BLACK MAN’S BURDEN’? 7403)
country’s progress in the early 1990s towards ‘majority’ independence. Such
interethnic rivalries pose an acute risk of the creation of a dissonant built
heritage, which would aggravate the dissonance of tradition which already
exists, this was particularly relevant to the artificially created ‘homeland’ capitals
of South Africa, such as Ulundi in Kwazulu, although apparently checked by
formal homeland dissolution in 1994. The root of interethnic rivalry in post-
colonial states lies very largely in the demarcation of colonial boundaries
without regard for local human geography, and Africa as a whole was the most
flagrant illustration of this, in the ‘scramble for Africa’ which was so
Eurocentrically resolved at the Berlin Conference in 1884 (Barraclough, 1984); so
serious is the resultant ethnic conflict within many African states that there have
been signs (Ethiopia, Somalia notably) that the issue might extend beyond
internal cultural tension to state disintegration.

DECOLONISATION AND HERITAGE IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

The ‘winds of change’, of which British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan

warned South Africa in 1960, carried away most colonialism from northern and
central Africa within months of his words. The past 30 years have endured a
much more painful southward spread of decolonisation, in which white
minorities originally from the colonial powers have fought one futile rearguard
action after another against black majority rule (Barraclough, 1984). Only
Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland, former British Protectorates with little white
settlement, became independent with minor pain. The independence of Zambia
and Malawi, in the mid-1960s, ended the white dream of the Central African
Federation of which Southern Rhodesia had been the centre of power. Angola
and Mozambique broke away from Portugal in 1975 through traumatic civil
war, and the ultimate collapse of Portuguese will; and by denial of their strategic
transit routes to (ex-Southern) Rhodesia contributed to the collapse of that
territory’s illegal white-ruled independence (1965-79), itself the focus of civil
war. Namibia, a formerly German territory mandated by the League of Nations
to South Africa in 1919 and later held in defiance of the United Nations, became
independent in 1990. Only South Africa, which because of white minority
independence had maintained its colonialism internally since 1910, remained
minority-ruled until the effective end of subcontinental colonialism in the wake
of its 1994 election.
This final end leaves a ‘black man’s burden’ of heritage dissonance across the
entire southern African subcontinent, with outliers to the north, of which Kenya
is the most significant. The weight of and response to the burden has varied
with the differing circumstances of colonial history, the varying significance of
black interethnic rivalries, and the political perspectives of successor govern-
ments. The passage of time naturally affects all of these variables. Not least,
political perspectives following the end of the Cold War hastened the collapse of
first-generation governments and ideologies in favour of democratic and
capitalist values often more friendly to former colonial powers and to western
tourism. At the time of writing, the decolonisation process in the most important
226 DISSONANT HERITAGE

and sensitive case, South Africa, was sufficiently recent and tentative that the
issue of heritage adjustment had only begun to be addressed.
The dissonance burden primarily concerns the heritage of colonialism, which
will be the essential focus of this chapter; but it relates significantly to native
heritage also. Indigenous southern African built environments were seldom
substantial or durable enough to constitute a ready focus of heritage conservation,
though a few such as Lobengula’s Kraal in Bulawayo were retained as historically
significant by colonial authorities, and a few colonial African township houses
have been preserved as the former homes of independence leaders, such as
Kaunda’s in Lusaka. The major exception is Great Zimbabwe, the enduring ruins
of which suffered interpretive dissonance: during much of the colonial period
their African origins were denied in favour of exotic interpretations such as Arab,
notwithstanding early Portuguese records. The decolonisation of heritage
interpretation has not only restored their African identity but has developed this
as a central national symbol of Zimbabwe, the ethnically diverse successor state of
Rhodesia; the Zimbabwe Bird is prominent in its flag and iconography.
Unfortunately, decolonisation has brought this heritage from the ‘devil’ of
colonialism to the brink of the ‘deep blue sea’, potential internal and external
African dissonance. Internally, ‘zimbabwes’ were specifically Shona tribal meeting
places, and a pre-independence interpretation of Great Zimbabwe’s demise
postulated rival Ndebele destruction in the early nineteenth century (Encyclopedia
Britannica, 1970), although tourism literature currently attributes it to overpopu-
lation stresses. Furthermore, even if contemporary symbolism transcends tribal
divisions to contrive a needed national identity, this should be muted externally
as it could otherwise run counter to pressing pan-African development needs.

The colonial heritage — typical southern African responses

North of South Africa the established post-colonial states have manifested a range
of responses to the colonial heritage, from active maintenance through benign
neglect and gradual elimination to ‘sudden death’, itself the subject of varying
shades of confrontation. In some (e.g. Swaziland), conservative and/or pro-
Western governments have kept the heritage intact even to the retention of street
names; retentionist leanings may have been encouraged in cases such as Malawi
by at least subconscious recognition of positive results of colonialism, notably the
suppression of slavery. In others, particularly Angola and Mozambique whose
liberations were bloody and ideologically radical, the monuments of colonialism
were quickly consigned, at best, to museums (e.g. Lubango, Angola; van Niekerk,
1992) and their imagery at first replaced by Marxist-Leninist murals, with the
urban stress induced by extreme poverty and civil war aggravating structural
decay of the capital cities, Luanda and Maputo, in particular (Gordon-MacLeod,
personal communication 1993; Sidaway and Power, 1995). But powerful realities
have narrowed the effective range of responses: the most conservative have been
obliged to establish a modicum of new identity, at least to assert a nationalism in
place of colonialism as a counter to ethnic centrifugality, and sometimes to
promote a personality cult to sustain the national leader (as Banda in Malawi); the
most radical have been unable to eradicate colonial streetplans and have not
SOUTHERN AFRICA: THE ‘BLACK MAN’S BURDEN’? 227

usually been so improvident as to destroy serviceable buildings (except in

conflict), and may even have hesitated to obliterate all monumental symbolism
and nomenclature in consideration of their tourism potential (as at Victoria Falls
in nominally radical Zimbabwe).
Within this narrowed range, the modal response has involved removal of the
more obvious monuments to colonial dominance, erection of a converse monu-
ment to ‘freedom’ from ‘colonial bondage’ (as in Lusaka, Zambia), piecemeal
change in placenames and streetnames, and gradual evolution of the building
stock involving limited demolition. The colonial streetscape is no longer clearly
marked but is not difficult for the trained eye to read. Whatever the prevailing
attitude towards it, however, its change cannot be understood without reference
to concurrent evolution of larger environmental influences both within and
beyond the city core, and in this the southern African city is not fundamentally
different from any other: time does not stand still and conservation forces,
whether dissonant or not, must contend with demands for the accommodation
of new land uses and changing modes and scales of operation. Thus expanded
government functions and multinational investment have generated new
construction which has modified urban images, whether deliberately or not, and
inevitably caused some demolition. But such change did not necessarily begin
with independence, neither has it usually been extensive since. It must be
remembered that this is, by global standards in the 1990s, a region of economic
failure: there have been no Singaporean transformations in southern Africa, and
the most considerable capitalist urban redevelopment has been in Johannesburg,
Durban and Cape Town, which not only reached the mid-1990s still under
minority rule but endured economic sanctions as a result of this.
In fact the preoccupation of post-independence governments, especially that of
South Africa, is not the management of inner-city growth but the control of urban
implosion by a rapidly growing rural proletariat looking vainly for a better life
(Tomlinson, 1990; Lemon, 1991; Drakakis-Smith, 1992). Thus, as Western (1985)
has suggested, the threat to urban heritage identity may be far less from physical
displacement than from neglect, as the city centre becomes an increasingly
irrelevant island in a sea of informal squatter settlement; it may experience
substantial withdrawal by the elite population whose heritage it projects (already
apparent in Nairobi, Harare and Johannesburg; Dewar, 1991; Parnell and Pirie,
1991) as it becomes increasingly delapidated and unsafe. Perhaps the clearest
example of such marginalisation is Maputo in Mozambique, where the heritage
of the colonial port capital (Lourenco Marques) is indelible in the site, central plan
and buildings of Portuguese style and materials, but where white flight and
continuing civil war have worsened ideologically induced neglect and exacer-
bated surrounding inundation by squatters; it remains to be seen whether the
reviving tourism will arrest this marginalisation (Forjaz, 1992). (Conversely,
however, the former capital, Mozambique, on an offshore island in the remote
north, has survived better and, following a UNESCO study, has seen government
restoration efforts, including ceremonious reinstallation of a Portuguese cultural
monument; Gordon-MacLeod, personal communication 1993.)
How far, and how generally, the dissonance of Southern African urban
heritage will be resolved by such marginalisation also remains to be seen. To the
228 DISSONANT HERITAGE

extent that the region’s cities escape this prognosis, the contemporary issue of
heritage dissonance and adjustment will remain the more relevant, particularly
as the need to capitalise on urban heritage tourism in a continent with a
dwindling natural heritage base becomes more apparent. We turn now to a
series of case studies to illustrate something of the range of dissonant heritage
issues which exists at present between and within southern African cities, with
respect to post-independence adjustments already made but primarily to those
in South African cities which are only now being addressed.

SOUTH AFRICA AT THE POST-COLONIAL THRESHOLD

In substantial contrast to other African urban centres, the white colonial heritage
in South African cities remained essentially intact at the time of writing and the
question of adjusting urban heritage projection was still in an early stage of
resolution. Cape Town (see below) and Pretoria, respectively the legislative and
executive capitals, continued to be marketed as the principal -repositories of
white heritage in the tourism literature in 1993. Pretoria’s many statues to white
leaders such as President Kruger, who is buried there with the founder Pretorius
and others in Heroes’ Acre, are complemented by monuments of white
hegemony such as those to the South African and World Wars and the police,
and by white-symbolic structures culminating in the Union Buildings. Pretoria is
overlooked by the massive Voortrekker Monument, described as memorialising
the fortitude of the Great Trek but in fact the icon of Boer cultural supremacy
which remains the focus of right-wing rallies, especially on the Day of the
Covenant (the anniversary of the Boer victory at Blood River, 16 December).
Black African heritage was promoted mainly in terms of tribal dancing and
artefacts, a colonial perspective remaining more generally characteristic of
tourism marketing.
During the 1980s the white minority government had gradually acknowl-
edged non-white heritage contributions, however, by designating a significant
number of National Monuments of (usually) Indian origin (Haswell, 1984). The
value of non-white heritage to the cities of a state which had long sold itself as ‘a
world in one country’ was becoming too obvious for even the architects of
apartheid to ignore. By the early 1990s, political developments were compelling
more substantial consideration to be given to the heritage values of the majority:
the general issue had received consideration, though scarcely priority, in the
counsels of the African National Congress by 1992 (Sirayi, 1993) and in the more
liberal cities the issue was under active discussion. In Soweto the uprising of
1976 had been memorialised and was the focus of ANC peaceful protest in 1992;
it is commemorated on Soweto Day (16 June), an example of new calendar
symbolism rivalling and diametrically opposed to the Day of the Covenant. The
question of what heritage of apartheid should be preserved, as an extreme
injustice that led to atrocity, had yet to be resolved.
Christopher (personal communication 1993) notes that the white sense of
heritage in colonial structures may be shared by non-whites for contrasting
reasons (as in Robben Island, Pietermaritzburg and Harare, below); he cites the
SOUTHERN AFRICA: THE ‘BLACK MAN’S BURDEN’? 229
old Victorian police station in Port Elizabeth as heritage shared for dissonant
reasons by whites (for whom there is an Anglo-Afrikaner internal dissonance
relating to the early imprisonment there of subsequently-President Vorster) and
by Africans, whose trade union leaders were held there. Butler-Adam (personal
communication 1994) reports similarly with respect to the colonial Department
of Native Administration building in Durban. The South African heritage issue
will require resolution, therefore, not merely of the balance between colonial and
post-colonial, and of the extent to which the former should survive, but also of
the interpretation to be placed upon both.

Cape Town: urban symbolism and the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront
Cape Town (Figure 8.1) may be regarded as the ‘Mother City’ not only of South
Africa; where it is so known from the original Dutch settlement, but more
generally of colonial heritage among the anglophone southern African states: the
impetus for British colonial settlement came primarily from or via Cape Town,
notably through the enterprise of Cecil Rhodes as Prime Minister of the Cape
Colony.
Its historical relationship to its environs, most immediately the contemporary
Cape Province, is analogous to that of Boston with respect to New England: both
cities acted as colonial ports of entry and points from which urban settlement
diffused inland, during essentially the same time period from the mid-
seventeenth century onwards. Through the eighteenth century this process was
nominally controlled by the Dutch East India Company, supplanted by the
British in Cape Colony and Natal through the nineteenth century and overall by
the early twentieth century; until South African independence under white
minority control in 1910.
As urbanisation in southern Africa began in Cape Town, so did urban seg-
regation, a hedge of bitter almonds planted by van Riebeeck, the first governor,
being seen retrospectively as a symbolic beginning (Cook, 1991). Paradoxically,
however, segregation did not develop with the rigidity later seen in the mining
towns of Kimberley and Johannesburg, in the Indian immigration centre of
Durban, and elsewhere (Lemon, 1991). The population of Cape Town was
historically predominantly white and ‘coloured’ (resulting from miscegenation
between whites, native Hottentots/Khoikhoi and East Indian slaves), its black
African population remaining relatively small until rapid migration from the
nearest ‘homelands’ (Ciskei, Transkei) in the late twentieth century (Cook, 1991).
Whites and coloureds were broadly intermixed, in part reflecting the genetic
reality that coloureds were a spectrum in physical appearance, rather than a
cohesive social group. Although few coloureds could aspire to elite areas, they
were deeply rooted throughout much of the city that was in fact their essential
place of origin. The African minority which began to migrate to Cape Town in the
nineteenth century, however, were segregated from 1890 into ‘native locations’,
initially near places where they found work, notably the docks until bubonic
plague in 1902 provided an excuse for their peripheralisation (Western, 1981).
The advent of formal apartheid following the election of the Nationalist
government in 1948 forced a national standard of urban segregation upon an
230 DISSONANT HERITAGE

to Robben
= Island
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Sea Point se EN NS .
(2 km) Victoria & , Victoria Ye
a Alfred : Basin < =
Waterfront . 3g 7 Se ;

A ees
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1 harbour pee
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Botanical
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(33 (17th century) L>
.A. Museum ey
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OULEVARD
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to Simonstown
to Table Mountain (30 km)
Y (3 km) \

Figure 8.1. Cape Town: central area

initially reluctant Cape Town, following the uncompromising theoretical

premises of the ‘apartheid city’ (Lemon, 1991). Coloureds were rigidly classified
(causing tragic division within families) and then mostly peripheralised into
segregated new suburbs of relatively poor quality. The African locations, seen as
historically alien to Cape Town and barely tolerated, continued to be pushed
progressively farther out as the city grew (Western, 1981; Cook, 1991). The city
core was pre-empted by whites and its symbolism explicitly appropriated by
them as ‘sacred space’, considered below (Western, 1981). In the process, inner
residential areas were taken over by whites in what sometimes became legislated
SOUTHERN AFRICA: THE ‘BLACK MAN’S BURDEN’? 201

Figure 8.2. Cape Town, South Africa: District Six (JET, 1993)

gentrification. In the infamous case of District Six (renamed Zonnebloem after its
1707 Dutch farm identity; Guelke, 1987), the area was razed following the
removal of its predominantly coloured population, under the pretext of the
urban renewal in vogue elsewhere in the world (Western, 1981; Hart, 1988);
however, its symbolic status as coloured ‘sacred space’ subsequently inhibited its
redevelopment as a white area, and it remained largely vacant in 1993 pending
final determination of its non-racial future, a high-profile political issue coloured
by the urgent need for low-income inner-city housing (Figure 8.2). Virtually the
only inner-city district remaining in coloured occupance was the Cape Malay
quarter (Bokaap/Schotsche Kloof), to which the attachment of a distinctive
Islamic group was tolerated, becoming in time a tourism asset; it was revitalised
by the 1980s and, in a post-apartheid irony, is subsequently suffering a threat to
its identity in the form of mainly-white gentrification (Cook, 1991; Wills,
personal communication 1993).
Post-apartheid Cape Town faces a larger readjustment of its heritage
symbolism. Many whites are becoming sensitised to its present extreme
asymmetry. Different elements of the coloured population may reassert their
shared identification with the white heritage, or turn away from it in favour of
an apartheid-honed group identity, or of solidarity with the larger underclass.
However, since the imposition of apartheid the African population has grown
enormously, despite government opposition, largely in illegal shantytowns such
as Crossroads, albeit in the 1980s substantially diverted to the distant suburban
township of Khayelitsha (Cook, 1991). The subsequent abandonment of
apartheid controls spells massive further increase in the African population,
which is becoming more pervasive in the inner city and asserting its presence in
an alien heritage environment (most visibly in informal marketing, black taxi
232 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Figure 8.3. Cape Town: white ‘sacred space’. Company (Botanical) Gardens with Rhodes’
statue pointing ‘Your Hinterland is There’ (surviving in 1995) (JET, 1993)

stands and vagrancy). What this means for the white symbolism remains to be
seen: Western’s (1981) question, ‘whose Mother City?’, now becomes of critical
interest. The symbols of Cape Town, in particular, are an issue of academic
concern in South Africa, focusing upon the main public spaces in the central area
(the white ‘sacred space’ — gardens, parliamentary precinct, Parade; Figure 8.3)
but ranging more widely across the Cape Peninsula; they include the seven
South African Cultural History Museum components, all but one of which
essentially focus upon white South Africa, one of these being devoted to its
national emblems and anthem. Grant (personal communication 1993) employs
teaching materials on symbols which draw attention to the lionisation of Rhodes,
Smuts and others in many statues in and around Cape Town, and the
memorialisation of British wartime naval events in nearby Simon’s Town, but
the complete absence of statues to heroes of resistance against racism such as
Solomon, Kgosana or Zihlangu.
The revision of heritage symbolism may be expected to include the marking of
lost vernacular coloured/African heritage, as well as the memorialisation of
individuals. In this respect the African heritage of inner-city ‘native locations’ is
particularly interesting, for these were eradicated with urban growth long before
the era of formal apartheid. The prime focus of interest in regard to such heritage
is the recent Victoria and Alfred Waterfront revitalisation scheme, which involves
the former docks ‘location’ and also a former prison, and has associations with
the infamous Robben Island penitentiary offshore (see Chapter 5).
The Victoria and Alfred Waterfront project was begun with the formation in
1988 of a private company so named, after a state committee had decided upon
private revitalisation of then state land, in close liaison with city and (white)
SOUTHERN AFRICA: THE ‘BLACK MAN’S BURDEN’? 233
h to Robben
Island

Victoria (asia
} : Wharf ¢&: ~ \
Victoria & Alfred SO nee
Hotel Victoria Basin -

Former
-| Breakwater

Proposed
. Pierhead Precinct Canal
. Portswood Ridge
. S.A. Maritime Museum
+.
=x
NO
GO Granger Bay -
residential (1995+)
5. Yacht Marina (1994+)
6. New Basin (1994+)
7. Alfred Marina (1994+)
to CBD
8. Old Power Station and
Imperial Cold Storage sites —
rehab/reuse 0 500m

li

Figure 8.4. Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, Cape Town. (After Prinsloo, 1993)

community (Prinsloo, 1993). It is a restoration of the nineteenth-century dock

complex (Figure 8.4) which, as commonly elsewhere, had become obsolescent
and had been progressively supplanted by larger docks for most contemporary
maritime commerce, and perceptually isolated by landfill and road devel-
opments. By 1993, with the help of initial state capital investment and the benefit
of overseas experience, the ‘V and A’ had become simultaneously one of the
most successful waterfront revitalisations worldwide, receiving many awards,
and one of the most outstanding tourist attractions in southern Africa; over six
million visitors came in 1991 (Prinsloo, 1993). The Victoria Wharf festival
234 DISSONANT HERITAGE

mane AJ

Figure 8.5. Cape Town: Victoria and Alfred Waterfront. The Hotel is on the right in the
foreground (JET, 1993)

marketplace was added to the Pierhead focus in 1992, subsequently to

incorporate a Cape Trade Centre. The various stages of the project were
proceeding broadly on schedule to create, within a decade, a continuous-use
recreational, residential and office waterfront linking established seafront resort
areas such as Sea Point to the inner city, reaching the latter via a canal
connection. At a time of global recession, dampening waterfront initiatives
elsewhere and hitting the South African economy particularly severely, the
visible buoyancy of the development in 1993 was remarkable.
Reasons for this success include marked geographical advantages: it is
between central Cape Town and affluent mainly white coastal communities; it is
a ‘drive-in’ amenity at the terminus of the Nl freeway/highway from
Johannesburg; it provides an unparalleled spectacle of the city with Table
Mountain behind; and it enjoys a climate suitable for outdoor activity almost
year round. Furthermore it remains a working harbour in which tugs and
fishing vessels provide an active focus of interest for pedestrians and for the
many harbour tour boats, along with a sea rescue vessel and museum ships of a
new waterfront museum. It is also efficiently run with well-placed information
points, close security, and frequent cheap shuttle buses to the city centre and Sea
Point. It is aesthetically inspired (Figure 8.5): Victoria Wharf, in part rehabilitated
warehouses, is sufficiently distinct from the sameness of many festival
marketplaces (although the basic formula of speciality shops, vendors’ barrows
and food court is followed) and relates well to a distinctively rehabilitated group
of Victorian port structures, including much of the Portswood office complex
which provides an elevated backdrop to the central tourist-leisure core. The ‘V
and A’ also provides a non-racial venue for relaxed socialising which is highly
SOUTHERN AFRICA: THE ‘BLACK MAN’S BURDEN’? 235

publicised in contemporary South Africa and is profoundly important to the

success of its current democratic transition. While the standard criticism of all
such capitalist ventures applies, namely that its shops, restaurants and the V &
A Hotel (a converted warehouse) are generally expensive, its ambience and fast-
food amenities can be enjoyed by a large and potentially growing section of the
non-white population — by means of commercial sponsorship, free enter-
tainment, festival events and a variety of inexpensive children’s activities are
available. Overall, this is an impressive experience even to an observer familiar
with waterfront revitalisation elsewhere, and with its unsurpassed scenic
backdrop it is one of the most compellingly logical reclamations of a hitherto
alienated and declining waterfront to be found worldwide.
But whose heritage is represented? The ‘V and A’ emanates from a planning
mindset emphasising technological development and aesthetic appeal, in a
capitalist context (Worden and van Heyningen, 1996). It is broadly portrayed as
the heritage of the Victorian British Empire, which is unquestionably relevant
and also sells well to a large number of white South African and overseas
tourists (Prinsloo, 1993). It is more generally projected as ‘the tavern of the seas’,
reflecting Cape Town’s fundamental mercantile role. In general it relates weakly
to Africa; but in historic fact Cape Town was primarily a strategic maritime way
station and only subsequently a gateway to the African continent. Indeed the
presentation could be criticised for not sufficiently emphasising the pivotal
geographical role of Cape Town (like Jakarta, Singapore and Sydney) within the
global imperial networks of the Dutch and later British, as the ultimate raison
d’étre for its harbour development. However, instead, the “V and A’ stands
accused of ignoring the local underclasses, who built and peopled the docks and
whose homes were formerly nearby.
Villa-Vicencio (1992) pinpoints the ‘silent voices’ — African workers, convicts,
prostitutes and seamen in particular. She points out that the site of petrol storage
tanks soon to be converted into a yacht basin was formerly the location of an
African dock workers’ hostel, and that the nearby building recently refurbished
for the Graduate School of Business of the University of Cape Town was
formerly the Breakwater Prison, source of convict (and later migrant African)
labour (Figure 8.6). However, contrary to her assertions, it is possible to learn
something of these matters from the information office and considerably more
from its sponsored literature (Cape Town Heritage Trust, 1988); and the
presentation is not, as alleged, purely British imperialism but above all of an
historic and still-active harbour, and more generally of the heritage of the sea.
Furthermore, the contemporary underclasses are not, as claimed, entirely shut
out by the prices; and the tight security is in place for good reason.
Villa-Vicencio’s assessment is therefore contentious, and she inadequately
recognises that any limitations of the ‘V and A’ are shared by most revitalising
waterfronts worldwide, particularly to the extent that they represent profit-
motivated investments (Chapter 4; and Hoyle et al., 1988). Heritage, tenure or
access of the underclass give rise to varying expressions of conflict: The Rocks,
Sydney, Australia (entrepreneurially associated with the “V and A’; Worden,
1994) is one example, which also shared both the imperial mercantile role of
Cape Town’s waterfront and its symptoms of squalid poverty such as the
236 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Figure 8.6. Cape Town: former Breakwater Prison (JET, 1993)

bubonic plague outbreak circa 1900 (Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990). More
generally, the divergence here from her evaluation, allowing for its earlier date,
spotlights the perception differences that can arise between educated observers
informed by different values: there can be no value-free expert assessment of
heritage dissonance and the acid test must be the popular perception — if, in
fact, the question of which popular perception can be equitably resolved. Given
that her assessment is more widely shared, however, Villa-Vicencio’s conclusion
must be accorded some weight:

An opportunity has been missed to show a blending of people and cultures that
could have contributed to the quest for a common South African culture — an
important ingredient, I am told, in nation-building. The underside of history has
been excised from this tavern of the seas. It has, however, not gone away. One day
we shall need to face this reality.

Subsequent academic comment has in fact broadened and deepened this

criticism and set it in the context of global shortcomings of capitalist waterfront
development. Worden (1994) examines problems with three aspects of the
historical images of the ‘V and A’: the construction of an identity which is British
and male at the expense of both Dutch and underclass components of the
Capetonian identity; the role of nostalgia, addressed at middle-class white
Capetonians seeking to recapture a pre-apartheid era and requiring selective
heritage suppression in their need to escape current dilemmas; and the private
enterprise context whereby heritage is manipulated to commercial ends and
education subordinated to entertainment.
The day to face reality more explicitly had arrived by the democratic transition
SOUTHERN AFRICA: THE ‘BLACK MAN’S BURDEN’? 231,

of 1994. More prominent recognition of the ‘silent voices’ has now been effected
by on-site marking, as well as in further professional commentary, initially
sometimes reticent (Worden and van Heyningen, 1996; as against Prinsloo, 1993;
personal communication 1992). The relationship to Robben Island offshore,
already acknowledged in ‘V and A’s literature (Cape Town Heritage Trust, 1988)
and accessible by cruise trips from the Waterfront, has now been marked,
through an uneasy collaboration with academic historians at the University of
Cape Town, which has produced many other plaques extensively broadening the
social and general heritage context (Worden and van Heyningen, 1996).
Accordingly there is now, among much else, a visible record of the ferries that
took different generations and races of political prisoners to Robben Island, most
recently black nationalists of whom Nelson Mandela is the most famous. This is a
positive step towards the larger and more vexatious issue of reinterpreting the
heritage of the island itself, which has a sequence of possible natural and
historical heritage interpretations of which apartheid, and resistance to it, could
be an agreed centrepiece (Brynard, 1991; South African Museum exhibition,
1993). A proactive role with respect to Robben Island became more critical with
the opening of Victoria Wharf, which otherwise projects a sharply dissonant
outward perspective towards it, and with the intended residential/marina
redevelopment of the adjacent foreshore in 1995 (Prinsloo, 1993).
The broader heritage interpretation of the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront
should make a seminal contribution to the review of Cape Town’s, and thus
national, heritage at a critical time in nation-building; particularly since the
waterfront has refocused the external image of Cape Town (Worden and van
Heyningen, 1996). It could also set a new standard in correcting selective or
sanitised waterfront interpretations globally. Historical plaques are, however,
recognised to be limited by the willingness of the consumer — who may have a
biassed or no historical perception — to stop and read them. Also, although the “V
and A’ Company has generally accepted them (where they do not give unduly
negative impressions or, like one offending the adjacent fishing company, indicate
business malpractice!), it now predictably appears more interested in the rapid
momentum of commercial success than in the heritage resource that triggered it.
Public interest has been displayed, from tour operators to African township
schools, and the company values the kudos of pioneering the ‘new’ history; but
the extent of its wider support for this remains to be seen (Worden and van
Heyningen, 1996). ‘The issues related to control over history are by no means
resolved’ (van Heyningen, personal communication 1994). Furthermore, whether
heritage readjustment could be supported by broadening the affordability of the
future residential developments is a delicate question; it is sharpened by the
occurrence of small-scale squatting just outside the ‘V and A’ boundary.
There are further problematical characteristics of the ‘V and A’ which bear
tangentially upon its heritage interpretation. First, apartheid has left an
impediment to access for many non-whites, at least in its immediate aftermath:
enquiry among the catering staff confirmed that many employees face long
commutes at anti-social hours, and patronage is similarly impaired, the only
established non-white residential area within pedestrian access being the Malay
quarter. Secondly, there is evidence both visually and from business and
238 DISSONANT HERITAGE

academic comment that the ‘V and A’ is adversely affecting central Cape Town’s
retail and hotel trade, as well as appropriating its image (Worden, 1994). This
would be consistent with experience in other cases where waterfronts are beyond
convenient/safe walking distance from city centres (e.g. Savannah, Georgia;
Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990) but it has especially serious implications in the
social context of southern African cities, which are currently beset by rapid
immigration of poor rural populations among whom there is a major incentive to
criminal activity. Any weakening of the retailing and nightlife of central Cape
Town could lead to an unsafe environment of ‘white flight’ and accelerated
business exodus; security-oriented advertisements for enclosed shopping malls
and the emergence of a programme on Radio Good Hope dedicated to ‘raving in
safety’ are symptomatic of the threat already perceived (see also Christopher,
1994). Central Harare (see below) and Johannesburg are already considered
unsafe after dark and in both cases ‘upmarket’ business is conspicuously
decentralising to security-oriented suburban environments. The implications for
existing city-centre heritage are compelling: in the short run it may go unvisited
and in the long run any white claim upon hitherto white ‘sacred space’ could be
abandoned, and with it any hope of rebalancing heritage to promote an
integrated society. A more pessimistic scenario would be that in Africa, as
elsewhere in conditions of socio-economic stress, withdrawal of the law-abiding
population to secure ‘laager’ environments is becoming unavoidable, and city-
centre abandonment inevitable; in this scenario, the ‘V and A’s tight security is a
necessary guarantee not merely of its commercial success but also of the existence
of a safe space in which the working out of a balanced non-racial heritage identity
can take place. (The problem of private appropriation of a vital public amenity
would have to be addressed, as in the western world; see Hopkins, 1991). The
implications of these scenarios for tourism are profound: the role of Cape Town
as a tourist-historic/cultural metropolis is strongly reflected in its promotional
literature and in wider documentation (Marais, 1991). Aside from tourism, the “V
and A’ has become a favoured resort for ANC members of the government
(Soutter, personal communication 1994), despite earlier ANC criticism (Worden
and van Heyningen, 1996), and was the focus of the Queen’s visit in 1995.
In any event, the accusation that the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront’s security
artificially keeps out elements of Cape Town’s contemporary population is
unrealistic, apparently informed by a socialist idealism at odds with the reality
that all law-abiding residents and visitors of whatever colour, gender, or level of
affluence have to look to their security, in common with their peers farther north
and increasingly in western cities also. (Knox (1994) has alluded to a ‘dystopian’
world in US cities, in which design for security has become an issue of
architectural finesse and social status.) No resolution of the sensitive heritage
dissonance problems of Cape Town, or indeed those elsewhere, can be attained
without reference to this cardinal fact.

Kimberley: the diamond heritage

Kimberley, in the interior of Cape Province, owes its existence purely to the
discovery of diamonds in 1871. In common with many frontier mining towns in
SOUTHERN AFRICA: THE ‘BLACK MAN’S BURDEN’? 259
areas of European colonial settlement, it represents an intense flowering of
Victoriana in a remote and inhospitable location (Ashworth and Tunbridge,
1990). Its heritage significance for the process of European settlement in southern
Africa is immense, for its resource potential led rapidly to the inland penetration
of the railway from Cape Town and it subsequently became the source of the
wealth needed to finance the process of British colonisation farther north. This
occurred primarily through the agency of the De Beers mining company, in the
hands of Cecil Rhodes, who subsequently became Prime Minister of Cape
Colony, principal advocate of British takeover of the Boer Republics (and the
Rand goldfields) and organiser of the Pioneer Column which colonised Rhodesia
in 1890. The Pioneer Column was specifically recruited in Kimberley, the
marking of which event in the city’s Market Square (continuing, Barbour,
personal communication 1995) also constitutes a more explicit heritage of the
former Rhodesia than can readily be found in contemporary Zimbabwe (an
example of dissonance through misplacement, discussed in Chapters 2 and 3).
Apart from its subcontinental heritage significance, Kimberley represents a
major concentration of high-quality Victorian and Edwardian structures,
important museum collections, and recent monuments pertaining to the
diamond heritage. However, these are located around and physically dwarfed
by the massive environmental despoilation caused by the opencast mining
legacy, in the form of the ‘Big Hole’ and the De Beers mine, the awesome
dimensions of which have paradoxically guaranteed their magnetism to tourists.
The finest historic mansions in Belgravia are, unsurprisingly, out of sight of the
mines. The principal tourism attraction, however, is the Kimberley Mining
Museum, which is located on the edge of the Big Hole and encapsulates the
heritage of the mining itself and of the early townsite which directly serviced it.
The Mining Museum is an admission-charging theme park conceived by De
Beers which is a representation of the early frontier town of Kimberley (Figure
8.7). Such reassembled historic towns in non-central locations are a widely used
device in the tourism industry; this one is not only excellent as a collection of
frontier Victoriana and as a museum of diamonds and their mining, but is
believable in that the steady encroachment of the mining edge historically
required the progressive relocation of the makeshift frontier community. In fact
many of the buildings have been relocated from the present city centre (1 km
east, connected by heritage tram), in the process of its redevelopment; some are
mining structures original to the site, while some (such as the early De Beers
farmhouse) are entirely replica. The capitalist symbolism of the heritage, and in
particular the corporate identity of De Beers, are manifest both in the historical
presentations and in the present-day retailing function; this symbolism is most
eloquently communicated by the railway coach once used by De Beers
magnates, and by photographic displays of Rhodes’ and the company’s
involvement in the Siege of Kimberley during the South African War. The
McGregor Museum in Belgravia extends this theme, being housed in Rhodes’
hotel/sanatorium and base during the Siege.
The interlinked heritage themes of capitalism and Victorian imperialism are
strongly reinforced by Kimberley’s central position within the larger South
African heritage circuit, with most of which the city continues to be linked by
240 DISSONANT HERITAGE

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Figure 8.7. Kimberley: former Malay Camp and diamond mines

the railway system called into being by the mining of diamonds and gold. It
requires little imagination to relate the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront
historically to Kimberley, aided by the tourism literature and the luxury trains
(Blue Train, Rovos Rail) that connect them. En route is the historic gem
(Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990) of Matjesfontein, a National Monument which
is a railway-village oasis in the semiarid Karroo, now integrated with the Lord
Milner hotel at which tourist trains stop; it is redolent of both the military and
health-cure dimensions of Victorian imperialism (Bell, 1993). This Victorian
village-hotel phenomenon occurs elsewhere in South Africa, notably at the
mining ghost town of Pilgrims Rest in Transvaal. The Kimberley Mining
Museum (Figure 8.8) itself is mirrored in Gold Reef City, a theme park of early
Johannesburg created around a disused gold mine south of that city’s centre,
which like Kimberley and most South African industrial museums (and many
elsewhere) has so far displayed a dissonant disregard of its industrial proletariat
(Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990; Berning and Dominy, 1992). Much other
Victorian heritage exists, globally exceptional in Pietermaritzburg (see below),
and this dimension of the national tourist circuit is capped by the heritage of the
South African/Boer War: the Siege and Relief of Kimberley memorialised there
relate to similar heritage in Mafikeng (Mafeking) and numerous relics and
cemeteries along the railways and elsewhere, usually well preserved by semiarid
climatic conditions.
It is therefore easy for the tourist to slip into a Victorian imperialist /capitalist
mindset on a circuit in which Kimberley is historically and geographically
central. Redevelopment in Kimberley’s city centre has reinforced this mindset for
residents and tourists alike, by means of strategic monuments of which the
Oppenheimer Memorial and adjacent Diggers’ Fountain are especially prominent
(Figure 8.9).
Once again the relevance of this heritage presentation is not in question, but
SOUTHERN AFRICA: THE ‘BLACK MAN’S BURDEN’? 241

Figure 8.8. Kimberley, South Africa: Mining Museum (JET, 1993)

Figure 8.9. Kimberley: Diggers’ Fountain, by the Oppenheimer Memorial (site of former
Malay Camp) (JET, 1993)
242 DISSONANT HERITAGE

its selectivity creates a dissonance as great as that of Cape Town. The role of the
coloured, African and Asian population is scarcely visible, notwithstanding their
central presence as miners, other labourers and residents from the outset, and
the fact that Kimberley created the first segregated African mineworkers’
compounds. Thus ‘it was here that the first formal strategy of racial residential
segregation was devised and implemented’ (Pirie, 1991), once corporate
capitalism displaced the original independent stage of mining in the 1880s. The
Mining Museum makes no mention of this. Close scrutiny of its visual
presentations reveals a very few shadowy background figures of Africans which
would normally go unnoticed, but there are no black faces on the Diggers’
Fountain or other memorials. Much as in Cape Town, urban renewal has
eradicated all trace of the former inner-city coloured/African/Asian area, the
Malay Camp, following stipulations in the 1939 deed of land donation by De
Beers (Pirie, 1991). The land is currently occupied by a major supermarket chain,
civic offices and amenities including the above corporate memorial and fountain
— the ultimate dissonant affront; its former status is unmarked except in the
memories of older residents. Such displacement of the underclass has also been
routine in Western urban renewal, as we noted in Chapters 4 and 7, but in South
Africa it was primarily motivated by racist policies culminating in the hard edge
of apartheid until the 1990s.
One museum, the Duggan-Cronin, commemorates the African presence in the
region. This is, however, a broadly capitalist/imperialist creation, an Edwardian
mansion purchased by mining interests and later donated by them for the display
of an early twentieth-century photographic collection of South African native
peoples. The representation is of traditional dress and customs in the manner of
ethnographic curiosities. To the museum’s credit, the word ‘Bantu’ has been
deleted from its name, it has added a pictorial display on the progress of black
liberation, and its staff express awareness of the need for change. But no inkling
was conveyed in 1993 of the African population having anything to do with the
creation of Kimberley, let alone involvement in its generation of British imperial
wealth. However, rewriting a composite script of Kimberleys’ history has since
begun, with a new National Monument, and museum revision, perhaps including
a mine hostel pending finance (Barbour, personal communication 1995).

Pietermaritzburg: first redress of dissonance

The capital of Natal is one of the most historic cities in South Africa, having been
founded in 1838 at the time of the Battle of Blood River, which symbolically and
substantively established Boer and white ascendancy over the African popu-
lation. The Church of the Vow, built after Blood River and now a museum, is
the central Boer Voortrekker monument in the city, which continues to reflect
the open grid of a Voortrekker ‘dorp’, even though finely subdivided in the city
centre by a later network of ‘lanes’ which frames a classic British Victorian
colonial capital (Haswell, 1990; Wills, 1991) (Figure 8.10). As the present authors
have described elsewhere (Tunbridge, 1984; Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990),
Pietermaritzburg — still known by the locally-irritating sobriquet ‘Sleepy
Hollow’ — continues to radiate the reassuring air of an old white settler
SOUTHERN AFRICA: THE ‘BLACK MAN’S BURDEN’? 243
BOSHOFF STREET

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community. It does so notwithstanding the presence of an Indian heritage,

marginalised by apartheid (Wills, 1991), and the greater reality that it is ringed
by African townships mostly across the gerrymandered former ‘homeland’
boundary of Kwazulu, and has in fact been in the eye of the hurricane of ‘black-
on-black’ violence since the late 1980s. However, in the otherwise relatively
liberal social climate of Natal, consideration has been given to the post-apartheid
evolution of the city and its heritage during the past decade, notably by
geographers at the University of Natal (Wills, 1991; Wills et al., 1987). This has
envisaged the eventual black takeover of much of the inner city, and the retreat
244 DISSONANT HERITAGE

of a white elite into pockets of gentrification, in which the Victorian residential

character valued by whites would have the best chance of surviving.
With the end of apartheid in 1991 racial residential mixing, mainly of whites,
Indians and Africans, is actively underway (Wills, 1991), the black presence in
the streetscape is steadily increasing (notably informal trading, taxi ranks) and
the fraying of the Victorian imperial identity can be anticipated. Notwith-
standing, the colonial government buildings and commercial city-centre archi-
tecture, and highly dissonant monuments of that identity (Tunbridge, 1984;
Figure 8.11), remained intact in 1993; the Publicity Association continued strong
tourism promotion of the Victorian heritage, including Natal as the ‘Last
Outpost’ (Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990); and the enhancement of the street-
scape proceeded, necessary to compete with out-of-town retailing. As in nearby
Durban, there was in 1993 a vibrant paradox of implosion by a largely
impoverished African population yet continued investment in the refurbishment
of a structurally quasi-Western historic city core (Davies, 1991; Wills, personal
communication 1993).
One significant structural modification towards non-racialism and non-
dissonant heritage has appeared, however. It is anticipated to be the first of many
(Dominy, personal communication 1993; Haswell, personal communication 1993),
albeit not necessarily along the path envisaged in 1980s planning proposals
(Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990). In June 1993 a statue of Gandhi (Figure 8.12)
was unveiled as a centrepiece in the new Maritzburg Mall, a pedestrianisation of
the central retail core on Church Street: synchronised with a centennial sym-
posium nearby at the University of Natal, this commemorates the centenary of his
expulsion from a train in Pietermaritzburg on racist grounds, and is a monument
expressly to non-racialism and (more controversially in contemporary South
Africa) non-violent resistance to racial discrimination. It is located outside the
former administrative Colonial Building, from which Gandhi looks away as he
simultaneously walks away from the railway station at the far end of the street.
The monument was organised by a Gandhi Memorial Committee on which local
interests supportive of both conservation and the African National Congress were
active, among whom its locational symbolism was well understood (Haswell,
personal communication 1993). It represents a pivotal new departure in a country
hitherto virtually devoid of non-white memorials, and in which we have noted
that non-white (Indian) National Monuments became significant only in the 1980s
(Haswell, 1984). This is a portent of further redress of heritage dissonance in a
democratic South Africa, for which Cape Town and Kimberley are prime
candidates: it is significant that the Mayor of Pietermaritzburg has expressed his
Council’s pride in association with the Gandhi monument, and delight in being a
‘focus of world attention’ at its unveiling and in leading other South African cities
into ‘the new era’ — with the hope that this might be guided by Gandhi's
teaching of non-violence (Pietermaritzburg Publicity Association, 1993).
Simultaneously the Natal Museum in Pietermaritzburg opened an exhibition (on
Soweto Day, 16 June) entitled “Amandla: the struggle for human rights — peace or
violence?’, resulting from a US-funded project to collect the heritage of the anti-
apartheid struggle in Natal. This is particularly concerned with the long-standing
struggle in the Pietermaritzburg area, and represents a critical accumulation of
SOUTHERN AFRICA: THE ‘BLACK MAN’S BURDEN’? 245

Figure 8.11. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Queen Victoria statue and colonial legislature
JET, 1978)

Figure 8.12. Pietermaritzburg: Gandhi statue in colonial streetscape. Colonial Building off
to the right (JET, 1993)
246 DISSONANT HERITAGE

often fragile and ephemeral materials only perceived as heritage with the recent
demise of apartheid and its replacement by an order which both permits their
acquisition and values their presentation. This initiative to redress heritage
dissonance has been undertaken in liaison with a Robben Island exhibition in Cape
Town (South African Museum, in 1993), an associated Museum of Apartheid at the
University of the Western Cape, a parallel initiative by the South African History
Archive in Johannesburg, and the University of Fort Hare in Ciskei (former
homeland) which has been designated as the repository for the ANC archives
(Dominy, personal communication 1993, 1995).
The presently unanswered question is: will such redress of heritage dissonance
augment or displace the existing heritage symbolism? Given the size and
economic power of the white minority in South Africa it is not clear that other
African countries provide precedents. It is also unclear that attempts by future
governing interests in South Africa to similarly diminish the white heritage
would necessarily prevail, especially since foreseeable military control will
remain substantially in white hands with an undisclosed ‘bottom line’ for
tolerance of change (MacLeod, 1993). Irrespective of political considerations, the
rebalancing of the heritage equation should be a matter of extreme economic
delicacy, given that in the early 1990s South Africa’s tourism contribution to
GDP was only 1% against an outside-world average of 9.3% (Indaba, 1992); its
development is a priority of the 1994 democratic government; the need for
urban-based tourism employment is so great; and the Victorian heritage is so
prominent and marketable an asset, above all in Pietermaritzburg.
There are in fact extremely powerful forces in favour of the essential retention
of the ‘white’ heritage in Pietermaritzburg, as part of the multicultural
inclusionary heritage management now evolving. The publicity slogan ‘the
heritage city’, supported by heritage trails and familiar trappings of a developed
tourism industry, cannot be abandoned or drastically reoriented without severe
economic damage; and the removal of statues such as Queen Victoria’s would
not only eviscerate the core heritage product but would destroy the architectural
ambience of their setting, in this case the former colonial legislature. Haswell
(1990) has described the phases in the city’s morphological evolution and the
cultural strands thus absorbed (including distinctions within ‘race groups’, such
as Hindu as against Muslim Indians) in building a cogent argument for its post-
apartheid phase to dispel heritage dissonance in favour of comprehensive
inclusion. He suggests an African—Indian marketplace and counterfoils to white
statues, and new townscape elements such as fountains designed with inclusive
motifs in interactive locations. He further suggests that the colonial buildings be
more broadly interpreted, to reflect the debates, speeches and trials which took
place there, as part of a quest for deeper meaning in the townscape to reshape
the colonial mentality which has hitherto been fostered. Since Haswell, an
academic geographer, commented as both a high-profile local conservationist/
politician and a Member of Parliament who converted early to the ANC, his
views may well prevail; especially since they are supported in the museum
context by Dominy (personal communication 1993), who co-ordinated the
‘Amandla’ exhibition from a position of influence within the ANC. Furthermore
Grant (personal communication 1993), following Ley (1987), has indicated the
SOUTHERN AFRICA: THE ‘BLACK MAN’S BURDEN’? 247
value of cultural diversity to postmodern design trends in Pietermaritzburg, and
it is not difficult to envisage an accommodation between urban developers and
the new political order to foster a mutually profitable multicultural heritage
presentation. To what degree a harmonious inclusiveness in Pietermaritzburg
might extend nationwide, however, is presently rather more imponderable.
The multiculturally inclusive recasting of heritage is easiest to achieve in the
creation of entirely new resources in which a clean slate for interpretation exists,
and security is usually more enforceable, whether the resource is newly
constructed (as in Sun City, below) or a refurbishment of structures with newly
recognised potential. The Victoria and Alfred Waterfront has been discussed as a
missed opportunity, until recently, in this respect. The fortuitously delayed Point
waterfront scheme in Durban (Butler-Adam, personal communication 1994) offers
one of South Africa’s major potentials for the creation of a new heritage identity
consonant with the values of a democratic South Africa, and with the need for a
regional tourism industry more equitably balanced in terms of beneficiaries and
- development opportunity (Grant and Butler-Adam, 1992); as a capitalist concern
aiming to compete with the “V and A’, however, it may require external pressure,
or perhaps the desire to emulate change there, for this potential to be fulfilled.
The economic constraints of a democratic South Africa may be expected to
pressure available capital into the provision of basic human necessities, shelter in
particular, at the expense of heritage/tourism investments unless these directly
address the economic needs, and preferably the cultural values, of the majority.
Foreign investment in heritage/tourism might be less constrained, however.
Unfortunately the perspectives of the African majority are themselves divided,
for it is in Pietermaritzburg and Durban that the urban conflicts associated with
Zulu tribal nationalism reach their peak (Davies, 1991; Wills, 1991). Not only
does this constitute a basis for inter-African heritage dissonance: as we have
already discussed, security is necessary for the effective exploitation of whatever
heritage resources are seen as politically and/or economically desirable. Butler-
Adam (personal communication 1994) reports that the potential for recognition
and redress of heritage dissonance exists in Durban but has apparently been
retarded by preoccupation with violence so far.

Sun City: legacy of apartheid or heritage of Africa?

Sun City, built as a modern resort complex in the nominally independent South
African ‘homeland’ of Bophuthatswana (Figure 8.13), could provide a clean slate
for heritage interpretation, in spite of its origins. Seemingly it contradicts the
popular notion of heritage, but it must be so regarded on two counts: visually,
the imagery that its developers have sought to project, culminating in the notion
of a ‘lost city’ of an ancient African civilisation; but more profoundly the
unspoken legacy that it represents as the ultimate exploitation of black labour
for white gratification and therein the ultimate monument to apartheid.
As noted above, the question of how far a democratic South Africa will elect to
preserve some of the heritage of apartheid remains to be answered, in any detail.
In addition to innumerable urban scars and much else, this heritage includes a
number of lesser resort complexes in other formerly ‘independent’ homelands
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SOUTHERN AFRICA: THE ‘BLACK MAN’S BURDEN’? 249

(Venda, Transkei), the fate of which will likely be influenced by the resolution of
this preservation issue. In the case of Sun City, at least, the decision must
rationally be made by economics: it is too valuable an asset to be discarded. It had
in fact become a bone of contention underwriting Bophuthatswana’s unwilling-
ness to rejoin a democratic South Africa, before events in 1994 dictated this.
Sun City was conceived by Sun International, a major South African hotel/
leisure developer, to exploit the potential artificially created by the ‘inde-
pendence’ of Bophuthatswana in 1977. This established a fragmented tribally
based homeland on the semiarid north-western edge of South Africa, in
bushveld scrubland of limited economic potential, but with a captive cheap
labour supply and freedom from the puritanical constraints of South African law
at that time, with respect to gambling, (white) nudity in entertainment, and
interracial mixing (Drummond and Parnell, 1991). With corporate capital, and
development incentives ultimately underwritten by the South African taxpayer
(Wills, personal communication 1993), it was possible to build a resort complex
-in an apparently absurd location, purely as a result of African segregation into
homelands mandated by apartheid laws. In fact it was a shrewd investment
because the application of capital permitted the exploitation of innate
geographical strengths: location within 200 km of Johannesburg, in a cheap
‘greenfield’ valley site favouring an integrated development removed from
visual or other disturbance, and protective reinforcement by Bophuthatswana’s
symbiotic development of the Pilanesberg National Park. This reserve largely
surrounds Sun City and represents a highly rational use of diverse but marginal
volcanic hill country for the purpose of re-establishing wildlife, including the
now-rare black rhino, while also allowing controlled hunting. Given the artificial
impoverishment of African populations effectively dumped in such marginal
locations, a capitalist paradise of cheap and abundant labour further portended
an attractive corporate investment.
Sun City includes a variety of casinos, theatres, the Superbowl stadium,
convention facilities, hotels, and a profusion of indoor and outdoor recreation
facilities, all set in extensive and frequently exotic landscaping which depends
on intricate management of water flow. The labour required for its elaborate
construction and sumptuous decor, as well as for the operative, maintenance
and security personnel, is visible testimony to the exploitative legacy of
apartheid. For this reason, prior to the end of legal apartheid Sun City was
notorious as a pariah on the international entertainment circuit; the stigma
subsequently faded.
In an effort to keep ahead of growing permissiveness in South Africa proper,
which could potentially undermine the rationale for the complex (Wills, personal
communication 1993), Sun International opened the Lost City fantasy theme
resort in 1992. This is focused upon the Palace (Figure 8.14), a hotel of unsur-
passed opulence set in grounds which provide sophisticated recreational facilities,
including an artificial-wave beach. The imagery of a ‘lost city’ is achieved by
‘ruins’, complete with artificial vulcanicity, set against what is claimed to be the
world’s largest artificial jungle; the Palace is designed to provide an awe-inspiring
backdrop, particularly at sunset and by the light of open-flame torches at night.
The ‘Lost City’ occupies the valley head and dominates the imagery of Sun City.
250 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Figure 8.14. Sun City, South Africa: Palace of the Lost City, across the Bridge of Time
from the entertainment centre (JET, 1993)

The complex overall can now be compared with such world recreational leaders
as the Disney developments and Las Vegas.
The question therefore arises as to how a democratic South Africa, which has
reincorporated Sun City, can live with its legacy of apartheid exploitation. This
might involve some combination of memorialising this central fact of its
heritage, and democratising access at least to the norms expected in a liberal
capitalist state (the non-white population majority being still the minority of
patrons in 1993). Establishing a modus vivendi, however, also refocuses attention
on the heritage identity that the developers implicitly project, and how it might
be adapted to the democratic reality. The imagery is in fact very fortunate in that
it is entirely non-racial, unlike that of every South African city (except the
Gandhi memorial, mentioned above). It concentrates on African wildlife and
environment and can easily blend with the environmental conservation theme,
the most obvious future unifying force for all South Africans, and indeed all
Africans. The notion of a ‘lost city’ overgrown by the African environment is an
entirely compatible extension of the theme, architecturally reminiscent of native
African heritage (the golf clubhouse mirrors Great Zimbabwe; Figure 8.15) and
clearly suggestive of Rider Haggard themes from King Solomon's Mines or Allan
Quatermain. The fantasy is simultaneously non-racial yet containing heritage
suggestions likely to be interesting and acceptable to all South Africans and
foreign visitors. The barrier to democratisation is not heritage but cost, and this
could be overcome by devices such as cheap-access days, since Sun City is
within day-tripping distance of the largest population agglomeration in the
subcontinent; on the other hand, the freeing of formerly captive labour to
migrate to Johannesburg and elsewhere will ultimately require more affluent
SOUTHERN AFRICA: THE ‘BLACK MAN’S BURDEN’? 251

Figure 8.15. Sun City: golf clubhouse, north of the Palace (JET, 1993)

patrons to bear a higher labour cost, either as an increase in general admission

price or in selective cost increases for those facilities accessible only to the
affluent.
While the innate heritage identity of the Sun City—Pilanesberg resource raises
no black-white dissonance barriers, a secondary dissonance issue has arisen with
respect to Bophuthatswana identity. Throughout Sun City, President Mangope’s
portrait, Bophuthatswana travel offices and other tokens of identity formerly sat
incongruously in a capitalist monument, partly reflecting the mutually profitable
symbiosis which had existed between the developer and Mangope; and in
Pilanesberg there are identity markers such as commemorations of the homeland
army’s role in its development. The displacement of these heritage tokens
constitutes at least an ephemeral dissonance issue. At the time of writing, Sun
City’s identity and role are in a state of flux, but it is significant that the
developer has been actively courting the ANC since its unbanning in 1990 and is
fully expected to sustain the enterprise, if without previous tax advantages
(Beresford, 1994) and with adjustments to be determined.

ESTABLISHED POST-COLONIAL AFRICAN CASES

In comparison to the post-colonial-threshold situation of South Africa we

consider the two cities which represented the greatest concentration of British
colonial settler heritage north of the Limpopo, Harare and Nairobi, both of
which now have a substantial post-colonial history but between which exists a
significant difference in the recency of the colonial experience.
252 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Harare

Harare, as the erstwhile Salisbury, represented much the largest urban colonial
settler presence in the former British Central Africa (Rhodesia and Nyasaland,
now Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi). Other centres of control, namely Living-
stone and Lusaka in Northern Rhodesia/Zambia; Blantyre, Zomba and
Lilongwe in Nyasaland/Malawi; and Bulawayo in Matabeleland, Southern
Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, were all either much smaller or more limited in white
presence and colonial symbolism. The present authors have commented
elsewhere on the marginalisation of the colonial heritage in Harare since the
independence of Zimbabwe in 1980 (Tunbridge, 1984; Ashworth and Tunbridge,
1990). Case-study reference here is chiefly concerned to update dissonance
issues, particularly in so far as they illustrate a possible course of evolution for
South African cities under democracy. The more general model significance of
Harare for South African cities has been considered by various authors, notably
Wills et al. (1987) and Dewar (1991).
At independence, colonial statues such as that of Rhodes (now in the National
Archives) were removed and the names of some streets were changed. There was
neither political nor economic impetus to embark upon a redesign of the streetscape,
however, notwithstanding the published intent to ‘restructure the colonial
landscape’ (Government of Zimbabwe, 1982); indeed certain colonial structures had
heritage significance to the newly empowered majority, albeit sometimes for
inverse reasons of commemorating colonial injustice (Tunbridge, 1984). Otherwise
the heritage of the new order began appearing in peripheral locations, notably
Heroes’ Acre (war cemetery and National Monument) and later the National
Stadium. By 1988, name changes had increased (most conspicuously the central
Cecil Square had become Africa Unity Square) but the streetscape remained intact,
apart from modest redevelopment; outlying colonial monuments, notably that
to the pioneers on the Kopje overlooking the city centre, had been allowed to
remain but were in poor repair and apparently marginalised, notwithstanding the
recasting of the Kopje’s identity by the addition of a small independence
monument. The city’s 1990 centennial passed without official marking, other than
by cognate university activities (Cumming, personal communication 1992).
By 1993 few colonial street names remained in the city core; the fact that their
erosion continued, rather than use of the north-south streets (numbered) for
newly fashionable names, could be interpreted by knowledgeable visitors as at
least unfriendly disinterest in the likes of the explorer Stanley. In fact opinion
expressed in the media is sharply divided, not necessarily on racial lines, as to
the legitimacy of continuing rounds of colonial name changes, proposed by a
group of city councillors without discrimination as to the local contribution of
the memorialised individuals (Cumming, personal communication 1994). Struc-
turally, the pace of redevelopment had quickened, but the resultant increase in
high-rise imagery arose more from overseas and local capitalism than from
official initiatives; and its future was in any case uncertain due to Zimbabwe's
political tension with the West, especially over the vexed question of
expropriating white-owned farmland, which received prominent Western media
attention. An irony of Harare’s colonial heritage is that its attrition had already
SOUTHERN AFRICA: THE ‘BLACK MAN’S BURDEN’? 253

begun in the late-colonial 1970s at the hands of capitalist interests, as in Western

cities, the most flagrant illustration being self-destruction by Meikles Hotel (an
icon of colonial Rhodesia on Cecil Square itself) in favour of a high-rise
redevelopment; this was in the process of further expansion in 1993, the
philosophy implicit in its promotional literature being that its traditional
excellence is best maintained and enhanced in a non-traditional building.
Notwithstanding significant redevelopment, in fact primarily from capitalist
sources, and the absence of truly effective protective mechanisms, the streetscape
of colonial Salisbury remained substantially intact 13 years after independence:
the institutional grouping of Parliament and St Mary’s Cathedral remained
prominent as the northern edge of the former Cecil Square; the cathedral
maintained a continuity between the colonial past and a non-racial, non-partisan
contemporary role; and government redevelopments were beginning to
incorporate pre-existing buildings (Cumming, personal communication 1994).
The question also arises, however, as to the survival of colonial heritage in
‘museum and archival contexts. The Victoria Museum has retained its name,
although it was relocated to an off-centre site before independence. Like its
Zambian equivalent in Livingstone, however, it is small and mostly traditional
(in places quaintly sexist) and primarily concerned with natural history and
native cultures: it does not present the colonial legacy, although it derives from a
traditional interpretation of the environment the colonial settlers encountered.
The National Archives are also a colonial foundation, in their original location in
the northern (traditionally white) suburbs: they are the principal repository of
colonial heritage, which has been retained with little disturbance, some critical
reappraisal of Rhodes being balanced by generous treatment of at least one of
his associates (Beit); the record then continues unbroken through the inde-
pendence period, albeit with unsurprising partisanship in favour of the ‘freedom
struggle’ and the contemporary leadership. The archival colonial heritage
therefore leads into the independence record with no jarring dissonance of
content or tone. The same is true of the smaller archival collection in the national
museum at Livingstone, Zambia, in which Livingstone retains a presence almost
as prominent as Kaunda (and with changes of government potentially more so).
Cumming (personal communication 1994) points out, however, that the critical
question is the manner in which archival contents are used.
The moderate attrition of the colonial heritage in Harare implies that its
dissonance is not perceived sufficiently strongly to risk affronting minorities,
foreign aid donors, tourists or general economic common sense by its wholesale
displacement or reinterpretation. In fact there are diverse voices raised in its
defence in the media; and their concern is with the relatively lax controls on
private developers (and the need for them to use a new provision for the
transfer of development rights from historic buildings) as much as with hostile
government intent (Jackson, 1993; Cumming, personal communication 1994). In
any case, the colonial heritage has largely been pushed onto the back burner of
government concerns, which are generally rural-biassed (Drakakis-Smith, 1992).
When one considers the problems of national development in the face of rapid
population growth, tribal dissidence, intermittent drought and an adverse world
economy, it is hardly surprising that the colonial heritage does not command
254 DISSONANT HERITAGE

much official attention, however it is viewed in theory. Its likely future is one of
progressive marginalisation through the weight of other concerns, particularly
the impact of rapid urbanisation over which official policy has but tenuous
control (Rakodi, 1992). While most of the residential growth is occurring in
peripheral townships there has been major African takeover of inner-city
housing (Drakakis-Smith, 1992). However, the streetscape impact of the
‘blackening’ of the inner city is most obvious in the steady growth of petty
informal trading, busking and begging in the CBD, giving a now well-developed
‘Third World’ flavour to a quasi-Western urban fabric.
The most insidious threat to the character of inner Harare, however, is that
over which, by definition, the civic authorities have the least control: street
crime. By 1993 it was no longer considered safe to walk about the city centre
after dark, always by around 7 pm in this latitude, and even during daylight
hours the theft of cars had reached epidemic proportions. Also, relatively
unfrequented outlying locations such as the Kopje had become potentially
unsafe through the presence of vagrants, although this is not yet a perceived
problem (Cumming, personal communication 1994). In such an environment,
heritage symbolism can be destroyed far more effectively than by official edict.
Symptomatic of the white/affluent response was the opening of a new shopping
centre at Borrowdale Village in the northern suburbs (still largely white) in 1992:
this is defended space, inward-looking and guarded, which was built specifically
to provide a safe and attractive alternative to the inner city, free of ‘street kids’
and greater threats (Levy, personal communication 1993). Heritage symbolism
has been built into Borrowdale Village centre, implicitly to take the place of the
city centre: ‘old England’ motifs are suggested in the architecture, and an ancient
clock has been installed in a clock tower which was not consciously designed as
a miniature of St Mary’s Cathedral in the city centre but which looks remarkably
like it to foreign eyes (Figures 8.16 and 8.17).
Harare in the 1990s therefore shows evidence of effective heritage dis-
placement developing more through lawlessness and a decentralising geography
of security than from any official action against its dissonance, or from
commercial redevelopment. As noted in Cape Town, there is a clear possibility
of South African cities following the same path, with white colonial heritage
being lost more de facto than de jure, unless it can be reinterpreted and/or
evolved as a non-dissonant heritage worthy of collective action to defend a
common ‘sacred space’ and valuable tourism resource.

Nairobi

The significance of Nairobi to a discussion of southern Africa is twofold. First, as

the principal centre of settler residence and repository of colonial heritage in the
former British East African colonies (now independent Kenya, Uganda and
Tanzania), it bears direct comparison with Salisbury /Harare. Secondly, by 1993
Kenya had been independent for 30 years and Nairobi may therefore suggest the
fate of colonial heritage over this longer time span.
All colonial street names have now been displaced, other than a few of neutral
character (University, Parliament, etc.), mostly in favour of Kenyan and other
SOUTHERN AFRICA: THE ‘BLACK MAN'S BURDEN’? 255

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Figure 8.16. Harare, Zimbabwe: Africa Unity Square and St Mary’s Cathedral, from
Meikle’s Hotel (JET, 1993)

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Figure 8.17. Harare: Borrowdale Village centre (JET, 1993)

256 DISSONANT HERITAGE

African independence leaders, as is now typical of Harare and most African

cities. The streetscape remains largely colonial, however, and its partial
displacement is again more capitalist than nationalist motivated. The central City
Square remains partly dominated by public buildings (Parliament, City Hall and
others) of mid-twentieth-century British design which instantly recall the
heritage of those visitors who were growing up in Britain circa 1950. In this case
the cathedral is absent from the assemblage, being 1 km distant but providing
the same colonial-contemporary continuity as Harare’s, within a form more
conservatively reflective of Gothic English church architecture. The Norfolk
Hotel, a colonial ‘icon’, likewise continues as (actively marketed) colonial
heritage, but is similarly distant.
In the absence of a cathedral and a hotel, the central square is now partly
bordered by two public structures of expressly nationalist symbolism: the
Kenyatta Centre, a government conference centre which contains the head-
quarters of the governing party and dominates the city’s skyline; and the tomb
of Kenyatta, the first president, adjacent to Parliament and counterbalancing its
colonial symbolism. Both suggest elements of post-colonial heritage which could
appear at a later stage in Harare’s evolution, but in Harare’s case the central-
square location of cathedral and hotel would apparently deny them such an
imageable site, other than by the possible appropriation of the originally colonial
square itself. It is, however, noteworthy that the significance of Nairobi’s
Kenyatta Centre has declined since the 1970s in that its top floor, which then
contained bar and restaurant facilities, is now derelict; access to the roof lookout
is now only through the visitor-unfriendly means of accompaniment by an
armed guard.
However, the attrition of the colonial heritage is less by official intervention
than by failures of environmental control, as in Harare but more advanced. In
Nairobi’s case there has been a marked increase in air pollution between 1978
and 1993, chiefly the result of inadequately controlled exhaust emissions, and
this not only makes the city centre much less pleasant but also alters the
environmental context of the ‘city in the sun’ to which the colonial heritage
related. Beyond this, the street crime problem is longer established than in
Harare, reflecting the fact that uncontrolled urban migration of a rapidly
growing population has been in progress for much longer; tourism literature
now contains explicit warnings against walking about by night. The psycho-
logical impact of both factors upon Western visitors in search of a reflection of
their own heritage should not be underestimated. The ameliorating factor in
Nairobi is the off-centre location of important heritage: the cathedral is near
major hotels and is an inoffensive destination by daylight; the Norfolk Hotel is
adjacent to the university and an office precinct and is both salubrious and
defensible space, so that (with guards patrolling street parking) its streetside
verandah pub/restaurant remains a vibrant social centre for expatriate and
settler society. (At Meikles in Harare this social pre-eminence continues, but in
internalised space following redevelopment.) However, out-of-town shopping
centres have developed in Nairobi as in Harare, reflecting a progressive
withdrawal of elite retailing as Africanisation of the city centre proceeds (Woods,
personal communication 1993).
SOUTHERN AFRICA: THE ‘BLACK MAN’S BURDEN’? 257,
The National Museum is a colonial inheritance, as in Harare and Livingstone,
but again is neither primarily concerned with colonial heritage nor generally
modern in the sense of tourist-friendly. In contrast, the colonial heritage is
poignantly focused in the Karen Blixen Museum, in the elite fringe community
of Karen. This was the home of the author and central character of Out of Africa,
filmed in 1985 partly using the house and garden. The background of the
Museum is a classic illustration of the principle of reflecting back the visitor’s
own heritage, with historic artefacts that could be highly dissonant to the mass
of the local population, notwithstanding the subject’s personal benevolence to
them. While the memory of Karen Blixen is perpetuated in the community
name, and the heritage of her coffee estate is recognisable in several buildings
and the elite Country Club, the impetus for the Museum came from overseas
and demonstrates in this the above principle. It was purchased by the Danish
government and given to Kenya as an independence gift in 1963; it was then
attached to a nearby college also funded by Denmark. Only after the
intervention of the Western film industry in 1985 was it obtained by the
National Museums, to exploit the tourist trade stimulated by Out of Africa,
displaying to this end some of the film’s artefacts as heritage in their own right
(McRae, 1989). Subsequently other buildings of the former estate have been
exploited for an ancillary tea garden and gift shop. However, the dormancy of
the resource for a generation after Kenya’s independence naturally raises the
question of what similar heritage resources may await exploitation through
similar mechanisms in later years of Zimbabwe's independence.
By such mechanisms it may remain possible to sell reflected European heritage
to overseas tourists, in peripheral locations which are neither unsafe nor
nationally symbolic to the local population, even if the colonial heritage of inner
cities should cease effectively to exist. In this vein it should be noted that
numerous hotels with colonial ambience continue to exist in outlying resort
areas. Notable examples near Nairobi are the Outspan at Nyeri (which maintains
a small museum to Lord Baden-Powell’s retirement there, a mecca for Scouts and
Guides with his nearby grave) and its satellite Treetops in the Aberdare National
Park (immortalised by the Queen’s Accession there in 1952). Zimbabwean
parallels include the Victoria Falls Hotel, with Livingstone memorabilia, and
hotels in the eastern mountains, one of which includes a former Rhodes home-
stead; and the contemporaneous Shangani Memorial near Bulawayo, which
commemorates a battle of the Matabele War, also remains. Thus far Zimbabwe
has left such colonial heritage details alone while changing many larger place-
names, even Rhodes’ grave remaining visible on maps of the Matobo (Matopos)
Hills.

CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A POST-COLONIAL HERITAGE

RESOLUTION?

This chapter has attempted to illuminate the problem of heritage dissonance in

post-colonial societies, from the perspective of Africa, but does not claim to have
produced a clear southern African model, let alone one of universal applicability.
258 DISSONANT HERITAGE

The turmoil of political and economic events since the end of the Cold War
suggests the unwisdom of attempting to create one, at least until some
semblance of stability returns to international relations in a yet-undeveloped
new world order. This is so because the issue of colonial heritage in an alien
society cannot be separated from international relations, whatever that society’s
view of selling such heritage to visitors from former colonial powers. Western’s
(1985) negative prognosis for the survival of colonial heritage in Tientsin and
Cape Town needs revision in light of the apparently assured ascendancy of de
facto capitalism in both China and South Africa, even though the inner-city
security problem may prove substantially supportive of his view.
Uncertainties notwithstanding, some recognisable threads can be drawn from
the above examples. Most of the colonial heritage (there being benign exceptions)
is highly dissonant to the majority of the population, still in South Africa in 1994,
and prior to independence in the countries to the north. It is apparent, however,
that successful capitalist quasi-Western heritage creation is continuing in South
Africa, notwithstanding that country’s economic plight. It is clear that this is also,
more or less, dissonant with respect to the majority population and that this
dissonance will have to be adjusted, and quickly. It has emerged that pioneer
adjustments to urban heritage dissonance do now exist in South Africa and that
they are being proclaimed as models for existing and developing heritage in
other South African cities. It is further apparent that the attainment of inde-
pendence/democracy in the absence of such adjustment has not (and could not
have) led to the wholesale obliteration of dissonant colonial heritage in Harare or
Nairobi; but it has led to the removal of most superficial colonial evidence, and
to limited if any motivation to protect colonial streetscapes in the face of more
pressing issues elsewhere and increasingly unmanageable problems in the inner
urban environments themselves. The former Portuguese colonial cities, with the
significant qualification of Mozambique, reveal a harsher fate for the colonial
heritage in view of the hostility, superimposed Marxist-Leninist iconography and
urban stress levels noted above. Conversely, more conservative post-colonial
systems such as in Malawi or Swaziland have treated it more gently, whether in
response to a less conflictual colonial experience or to political dependency upon
the West and South Africa.
Notwithstanding this variable and the exceptional size, age and influence of
South Africa’s hitherto dissonant minority, the lesson for white South Africans
should be plain: seek to reduce urban heritage dissonance more rapidly in order
to motivate the democratic leadership not merely to soften the process of post-
colonial heritage reorientation but also to defend heritage in general from the
environmental stresses, especially crime, which are developing. Only thus can
the ‘dystopian’ process (Knox, 1994) of minority withdrawal, into protected
areas cast in their own image, be minimised; and only thus can the fuil potential
of the heritage base for tourism be retained as a common resource for the
general benefit. Whatever becomes of urban heritage, however, some survival of
colonial heritage by geographical separation may be anticipated throughout
southern Africa, peripheral relics being tolerated, and even resources developed,
despite unrepentant dissonance, where their tourism value is sufficiently
important. (This could apply to Orania, an Afrikaner refuge in the Cape.)
SOUTHERN AFRICA: THE ‘BLACK MAN’S BURDEN’? 259

In light of these points it is of particular interest to review the cultural policy

of the ANC, the majority party in the first democratic South African
government, and to consider both its implications for heritage if fulfilled, and its
likelihood of effective fulfilment. It seeks to foster national unity, reconciliation,
democratic values and accessibility with respect to museums, monuments,
national archives, heraldry and national symbols; redressing the ‘legacy of
inequality and injustice created by colonialism and apartheid’ (Sirayi, 1993: 10).
It visualises new management structures, integration with education and
dedication to national reconstruction and development programmes; and atten-
tion to ‘neglected and suppressed history and culture of the majority of the
people (including women, workers, peasants, etc.)’ with funding to redress
imbalances in collections, staffing and management, and to reflect effectiveness
and relevance to development and education. Specifically, co-ordination between
museums and tourism is sought in order to foster socio-economic development;
and overall there will be a ‘holistic strategy regarding the management of
heritage resources’, and supervision by a proposed National Heritage Council
which will control state funds and thereby ensure that regional/local policies
operate within a broad national policy. Such a general statement implies the
essential continuity of existing heritage but appears to leave open the fate of
specific cases, the future of which might be determined more by the political and
economic constraints discussed in the context of Pietermaritzburg; however, the
use of funding control to effect compliance with national policy will unques-
tionably be applied against perceived threats, tribally based institutions such as
the Kwazulu Cultural Museum in Ulundi (Dominy, 1992) which might
perpetuate ethnic conflict (below) being most financially dependent and thus
most vulnerable. Dominy (personal communication 1995) asserts that there is no
general demand for the destruction of the symbols of the past; and he records a
convergent policy change by the Southern African Museums Association in 1987
towards a new breadth and inclusiveness of coverage, particularly in reaction
against the national constitution of 1983 which had attempted to institutionalise
racial heritage dissonance and deny the multicultural relevance of most South
African heritage (Berning and Dominy, 1992). He notes (like Barbour, personal
communication 1995) that various museums, including Pretoria and Durban,
now plan to present ‘hidden histories’ and expand their services, in addition to
the initiatives relating to Pietermaritzburg. Dominy (1992) further advocates the
creative reinterpretation rather than replacement (anyway costly) of narrowly
ethnocentric traditional museum displays, for example by participatory theatrical
events as at the Natal Museum in 1991. (These changes mirror developments in
the larger museum world, as earlier chapters have indicated). Further to the
ANC’s cultural policy, and apparently guaranteeing its broad acceptance of
existing heritage components, is the party’s basic commitment to both respect
diversity and reorientate the economy towards manufacturing and services,
including tourism (Mandela, 1994).
Such respect for diversity does not, however, extend to the more obvious icons
of apartheid. In particular, Hendrik Verwoerd, its chief architect, is disappearing
in name and in effigy, the latter even from Bloemfontein in the Boer heartland;
and the more offensive trappings have been removed from Parliament in Cape
260 DISSONANT HERITAGE

Town. The larger issue of how far to leave, destroy or transfer to a museum the
relics of apartheid remains to be resolved, in the light not only of the need to
minimise alienation of the right wing but also of the need to preserve for
everyone else, more fully than in existing initiatives, the memory of the struggle
to end apartheid. (Place-name change remained limited in 1995.)
Further to ANC policy, more pressing priorities in the face of limited
resources, the risk of political/military backlash, the economic imperative to
expand urban tourism employment and its dominance by initially white
capitalist corporations are likely to maintain the essence of the ‘white’ heritage
and its marketing — within a larger tourism product and with a more equitable
spread of its economic rewards (Grant and Butler-Adam, 1992). Realistically the
latter implies greater participation of the informal and otherwise small-scale
sectors, and in this respect it is interesting that African enterprise is already
offering tours, as of Soweto from Johannesburg. The curiosity of visitors as to
the legacy of apartheid, set against the security need for local African escorts,
provides a strong starting point for black tourism enterprise, but it must be able
to exploit the larger tourism potential once its clients’ interest in black living
conditions has been gratified, and to do so in terms which can sufficiently
empathise with the visitors’ frequent need to understand a heritage as a
reflection of their own (even if it is locally dissonant). However, the continuing
key role of the large-scale private sector implies continuing tensions between
public, corporate and academic concerns over heritage presentation, for the
resolution of which the Cape Town waterfront is seen as an important test case
(Worden and van Heyningen, 1996).
Dissonant heritage in southern Africa has indeed been the ‘black man’s
burden’, and so in large measure it presently remains, even though in the case of
South Africa there is a recognisable momentum towards a distinctive multi-
cultural reconciliation. We have focused upon the most visible dimension,
Africans versus white colonisers; we have also to note burdens which have come
as by-products of colonialism, such as Africans relative to Indians, and those
innate to African society but often exacerbated by colonialism, namely the
tensions of tribalism/ethnicity. The case of Bophuthatswana was only one of
many, and mild by comparison with Zulu nationalism. The potency of this,
clearly documented by Lemon (1993), has received extensive world media
comment: a warlike gathering in December 1993 at Isandlwana, the site of Zulu
annihilation of British forces in 1879 (held in collusion with a right-wing
Afrikaner gathering at their sacred Blood River battlefield) was soon followed by
the Zulu king’s demand for secession with all of Natal which the British had
subsequently conquered. This deliberate exploitation of a dissonant heritage of
sacred place and space, for belligerent ends both anti-colonial and _ tribally
nationalistic, amid a protracted low-level civil war between the conservative-
Zulu Inkatha party and ANC supporters, was regarded as a very ill omen for
South African unity on the eve of the 1994 election; while it did not disrupt this,
it threatens to exacerbate heritage tensions for the foreseeable future.
The lifting of the ‘black man’s burden’, both of colonialism and of colonially
exacerbated tribalism, will be no simple matter; but both the political and
economic imperatives of Africa dictate that heritage evolve into a common
SOUTHERN AFRICA: THE ‘BLACK MAN’S BURDEN’? 261
human resource at the earliest possible time. The least difficult way to approach
this end is to accentuate that heritage which is potentially shared irrespective of
race or culture. The most obvious dimension is the natural heritage of Africa, the
attrition of which is a two-edged sword from our perspective: there is a common
need to defend it, but the inevitability of wildlife decline in the face of human
competition for land and water means that other common heritage must be
fostered to supplement its value, both for internal cohesion and external tourism.
One heritage dimension of disproportionate significance for internal cohesion —
in African as in Western societies — is sport, the isolation of which was used by
the outside world for many years to pressure white South Africans to abandon
apartheid; racial integration in South African sport is now well established and
an ANC spokesman has noted that ‘sport has the potential to unite all South
Africans’ (Eddings, 1992); as with the Rugby World Cup, 1995. It should not
therefore be difficult to evolve sports-oriented museums and other heritage into
the non-racial heritage instruments they normally are worldwide, even though
in South Africa they have hitherto been divisive.
Other heritage, comprising most of the tourism resource aside from wildlife,
will require more sensitive management if it is to fulfil its urgent mandate to
promote internal political reconciliation and external economic marketability,
above all in South Africa. But the management sophistication foreshadowed in
Chapter 3 (including mitigating the consequences of dissonance by goal-directed
intervention) has yet to be implemented here, even though there is active
heritage debate amid the welter of Third World/post-apartheid development
problems with which the region, especially South Africa, is confronted. Market
segmentation might enable different messages to continue to reach different
consumers, but unless it is accompanied by geographic separation, marketing
dissonant colonial heritage to tourists is likely to encounter both credibility
and security problems in the increasingly alien environment of urban Africa.
Realistically, market segmentation between visitors and residents, and among
different groups of each, will only be generally attainable once an essentially
common recognition has been achieved as to what constitutes heritage and how
it might be interpreted. Such a common recognition could then permit a
respectful selectivity to meet the specific interests of particular groups; but in
practice most visitors and ultimately most residents would regard the expansion
of heritage identification/interpretation as the collectively profitable enlargement
of the heritage resource base available to promote socio-economic progress.
Indeed, promoting the common recognition of an expanded heritage could well
fulfil a proactive political role in muting the inter-African tribal tensions which
are commonly the biggest threat to social harmony in contemporary southern
Africa. This is an argument for the management by inclusivity which we have
seen powerfully advocated in the context of Pietermaritzburg, and more
generally in South Africa; of the various newly available heritage resources
which could adopt this management approach from the outset, perhaps the most
compelling is Robben Island off Cape Town, already used for its anti-apartheid
symbolism in ANC political campaigning in 1994 but with the potential for a
larger heritage inclusivity, presaged in the contemporary Cape Town museum
exhibition. As we discussed in Chapter 7, however, a socially more radical (and
262 DISSONANT HERITAGE

economically less profitable) alternative to inclusive heritage management,

possibly among other alternatives, is a ‘minimalist’ approach which would
define heritage symbolism only in terms of the common denominators to which
all can readily agree, and proceed to forge an otherwise new national identity
and heritage; reflecting the reality that hitherto ‘the story a symbol tells can be
one person’s dream and another’s nightmare’ (Grant, personal communication
1993).
An obvious limitation to the above discussion is the need to research the
perception of heritage dissonance by urban residents and its impact upon them.
In Africa and throughout the Third World this is beset by literacy, linguistic and
other cultural problems and by the fact that there are more immediate priorities
for researchers and subjects alike. Some such research is underway, however, in
Pietermaritzburg for example (Grant, personal communication 1993). It has been
noted, though, that impoverished populations with relatively short generational
cycles and life spans may have a high propensity for heritage amnesia; J. Morris
(1994) has observed with respect to Sri Lanka that the remnants of the British Raj
convey no message at all to the general populace and any possible dissonance of
colonial heritage has ceased to exist except, presumably, among an educated
elite. Irrespective of current popular feelings in recently post-colonial cases,
therefore, the problem of colonial heritage dissonance may be solved relatively
quickly by time, the alien significance of older structures being lost even before,
as Western (1985) has postulated, their implied threat might be expected to have
faded; in this case their tourism value will largely be lost as well, of course.
Where colonial or colonially introduced populations remain as conspicuous
minorities, albeit politically reconciled, this is naturally less likely to occur; and
no such amnesia can be expected to solve problems of inter-indigenous heritage
conflict where political rivalries remain unresolved.
The recency of decolonisation, however, along with the heritage plurality that
it embraces and the severity of its contemporary development problems, point to
southern Africa as a region of the Third World with both major heritage
dissonance in the immediate future and an exceptional need to resolve it. (This is
compounded by the diffusion of gender heritage issues, as noted in Chapter 4).
As such it sharpens the intensity and broadens the scope of our understanding
of global heritage dissonance, to the more comprehensive management of which
we now turn.
9 Retrospect and Prospect of the
Management of Dissonance

THE PAST - A CAUSE FOR DESPAIR?

‘Almost all of the previous chapters have related accounts of serious, deep-seated
and seemingly incurable dissonance. It would not be surprising if a reader
presented with such a dismal narrative of the actions and inactions of a flawed
humanity were to suffer some dissonance when confronted by the management
of what might appear by now to be intrinsically unmanageable. Our discussion
of the uses of heritage in the contemporary world may lead some to the
conclusion that all is so complex, so difficult to understand let alone intervene in,
that dissonance will inevitably occur, with probably disastrous consequences.
Therefore the only sensible policy is to reject the past by eradicating its relics
from our environments and its memories from our consciousness, so that a new
and better future can be constructed without such calamitous baggage: ‘let the
dead bury the dead’.
We would like to stress that this is not our logical conclusion. Much
dissonance is trivial, ignorable or bearable; much is avoidable, often quite simply,
and much that is not avoidable is certainly mitigable in various ways. To these
extents the management of dissonance is not necessarily an intractable problem,
and the confidence in this respect expressed in Chapter 3 is justified. We would
hope that these sorts of conclusions were evident in some of the cases we have
discussed, even though bearing, avoiding and mitigating may require more
careful thought and active management than they have hitherto customarily
received; and even though others of our cases reveal limited attempts or success
at goal-directed intervention to mitigate more problematical dissonance and its
consequences. Similarly, although we have demonstrated that the past can be
used to support almost any contemporary demand made upon it, this does not
imply that we believe it contributes nothing of value.
It should be added that simply because all heritage is dissonant to someone,
and all dissonance is someone’s heritage, it cannot be concluded that no
absolutes exist, whether aesthetic or ethical. We have discussed the trivial and
mundane in juxtaposition with the serious and the spectacular, but we would
not wish these to be accordingly equated in some relative universe. We can
accept that some heritages may be better than others, in the sense that one
building may be more beautiful, more rare or just more interesting to more
people than another; and, more contentiously, that some societies have left a
264 DISSONANT HERITAGE

legacy that has more of ethical or social value to contribute to the future than
others. Similarly we would not want to reduce the value of the serious lessons to
be learned by the present and the future from such specific events as the
genocides and other atrocities we have discussed, by the false conclusion that all
people at all times have behaved equally well or equally badly. Some heritages
can be considered intrinsically more important for transmission than others.
Because criteria for establishing such relative importance are difficult to
determine and to apply impartially does not mean that they do not exist or that
they should not play a role, however difficult to define, in the myriad of
selections and choices implicit in heritage management.
Finally we would not wish to be accused of a dogmatic anti-commercialism
nor be used as ammunition by those (described in Chapter 3) who believe that
education and enjoyment, collective values and commercial profits, preservation
and exploitation are clear and opposing exclusive choices. Dissonance is fre-
quently caused or exacerbated by short-term, insensitive, commercial devel-
opments (an issue which merits reinforcement below); but that does not put us
in automatic opposition to theme parks, Disneyworlds, Michelin tourists, ‘key-
fob souvenirs’ or indeed anything that attempts to make money from the past.
On the contrary, central to our message has been the idea that preservation
serves many purposes, that collective and individual heritages are closely
related, and that fun and enlightenment need not be contradictory experiences.
We would go further and claim that museums, archives, public history, public
monuments and preserved townscapes have been, if anything, guilty of causing
heritage dissonance more often and with more serious consequences than any
commercial developer, however short-sighted, greedy and banal. A sense of
proportion is therefore required with respect to those of our comments, as below
and to some extent above, which imply criticism of heritage commercialism.

THE WIDER DIMENSIONS OF HERITAGE DISSONANCE

In Chapter 1 we began by setting our central problem of dissonance within the

context of broader difficulties and tensions associated with the notion of
heritage. Following an introduction to the central problem in Chapter 2, and its
relation to the uses of heritage in Chapter 3, we outlined in Chapter 4 the critical
dimensions of heritage dissonance which derive from cultural, social and
political arenas of human discord. We have consistently argued that these are
central to the larger issue of heritage dissonance, which is universal, integral to
the very concept of heritage, and which can have profoundly negative conse-
quences for both social harmony and economic prosperity. This contention has
been sustained by detailed consideration of three very different geographical
contexts in Chapters 6, 7 and 8, following a wide range of case illustrations and
supporting references throughout the preceding text; and above all by con-
sideration of the heritage of atrocity, in and beyond Chapter 5. There are,
however, wider dimensions of heritage dissonance which reinforce, and render
still more complex, the universality of our theme; many have been touched upon
but their development has been beyond our present scope. These require brief
 RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT OF THE MANAGEMENT OF DISSONANCE 265
consideration before we attempt comprehensive conclusions on the nature,
management and operational scales of the dissonance problem.
The first might be termed dissonance of commercialisation, i.e. of the ‘heritage
industry’ critically discussed in Chapter 1, and referred to in Chapter 3, with
respect to accusations of triviality, elitism and other shortcomings. There is
recurrent evidence in both media and academic commentary indicating that the
commercialisation of heritage, particularly by large-scale corporate enterprises,
generates interpretive dissonance extending beyond the issues we have
specifically discussed thus far (compare Sellars (1990) and Kearns and Philo
(1993) on bourgeois capitalist commodification of culture; and Merrifield (1993)
on the placeless universalising quality of associated capitalism). There is wide-
ranging evidence that the general appropriation of heritage to serve tourism,
involving selectivity and sanitisation, can alienate or even disinherit local
communities, as Kong (1993) noted in Singapore; or distant parties, as in the case
_ of commercialisation of the Bridge on the River Kwai, Thailand (Chapter 5),
which has alienated World War Two veterans in both Japan and the West.
Furthermore there is often widespread feeling that theme parks, in particular,
‘trivialise’ heritage. We have argued elsewhere, and noted in Chapter 1, that
there is no ‘authentic’ heritage, only what is successfully portrayed as such
relative to market objectives (Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990); but if a section of
local or broader sentiment perceives such trivialisation, then heritage dissonance
is created. In both a mock slave auction at Williamsburg (Chapter 7) and the
(ultimately abandoned) proposal to build a Disney historical theme park close to
the Civil War battlefield at Manassas, Virginia, there was opposition to the
trivialisation of historical pain for tourist entertainment. Further again, it has
been argued that open-air museums in both the US and Europe, which far from
trivialising often exhibit an earnest seriousness, are guilty of the more sinister
crime of subverting heritage in favour of establishment/majority values (Mills,
1994). This may be so but equally, as argued in Chapter 3, is neither necessarily
so nor inherent in commercialisation. However, the commercialisation of
heritage can too easily cross a fine line, such that intended neutral or positive
results for local residents or other concerned parties, deriving from strategies of
market separation or of economically profitable participation, inadvertently
produce negative interpretive dissonance. It is easy to see that the well-known
mundane frictions between tourists and residents could further exacerbate
interpretive dissonance resulting from heritage commercialisation. Of course, the
intended tourist market may itself be alienated by the dissonances associated
with commercialisation.
There are, in addition, various economic dimensions of the dissonance
problem. On the one hand, the simple fact of heritage designation can cause
perceived economic harm to property owners and others with an economic
interest in the property concerned, quite irrespective of the cultural/social
identification of such capitalist interests with the values the heritage may project.
This is in fact one of the most fundamental problems of heritage identification,
being as old as the notion of heritage, especially in the property-rights
environment of the US, where it is being documented by Holdsworth (1995). We
need now to reassert it retrospectively as a basic element in our universal heritage
266 DISSONANT HERITAGE

dissonance. On the other hand, economic dissonance to culturally consonant

capitalists may be counterbalanced by economic consonance to culturally
dissonant workers: poverty will certainly encourage locals to sell tourists
whatever heritage they wish to see or hear, possibly even if it offends religious or
similar scruples, as in the world of radical Islam. This economic imperative is
nowhere more obvious than in South Africa where, as we saw in Chapter 8, the
post-apartheid government is simultaneously committed to tourism development
and to respect for existing heritage, thereby seemingly guaranteeing its blessing
for employment generated by heritage whether dissonant or not; in the presence
of a dominant tourism/recreation industry to which past injustice is inherently
an unwelcome issue (van Heyningen, personal communication 1994). Further to
the paradoxical scenarios above, there is an essentially unexplored question as to
what impact our central concern of cultural/social dissonance may have upon
tourist retail behaviour: we do not presently know to what extent retail
expenditure may be curtailed, redirected or unpredictably modified by tourists’
perception of a heritage dissonant to themselves. However, we do know (Chapter
7) that US tourism managers are now sensitised to capturing the ‘tourist dollar’ of
their own black minorities, and that tourism literature throughout the Western
world shows a growing awareness of the need to sell itself to ever new audiences
through ever more languages and cultures. There is therefore a very obvious
need to research the impact of dissonance upon tourist retail behaviour, and the
principal geographical framework for such study will be the tourist-historic city,
which we discuss further below.
In addition to economic issues there remain further dimensions of heritage
dissonance beyond our central concerns, some of which will no doubt come to
the present authors’ attention after this attempt at a comprehensive statement has
gone to press. One, which is as fundamental as economics to the basic act of
heritage identification, is the question of aesthetics, particularly pertinent in
postmodern urban environments of claimed ‘aestheticisation’ (Ley, 1993). Our
judgement as to whether a heritage structure is dissonant on the simple grounds
of ugliness or locational inappropriateness may of course be culturally
influenced, but not simply or necessarily so. Despair or jubilation at the 1993
destruction of central Ottawa’s Daly Building largely reflected an aesthetic
judgement as to whether its significance outweighed its ugliness, and did not
obviously reflect the conservationist credentials or socio-cultural outlook of the
protagonists. The problem of decaying military installations in the UK (National
Parks Today, 1994) and continental Europe dating from World War Two has
been brought into focus by fiftieth anniversaries such as of D-Day, and involves
much larger-scale significance-versus-aesthetics judgements, often in the context
of the durability we noted in Chapter 5. More fundamentally still, the question of
aesthetic dissonance goes to the heart of changing fashion with respect to
architecture: Birmingham in England is just one striking example of a city which
demolished much of what would later be regarded as its heritage in the 1960s,
when Victoriana was not yet fashionable and the idea of Victorian industrial
heritage practically beyond conception. Past aesthetic dissonance has commonly
contributed, with economic motives of the day, to a present dissonance of
remorse for heritage lost: to some, no doubt, the ultimate heritage dissonance.
 RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT OF THE MANAGEMENT OF DISSONANCE 267
Other dimensions of heritage dissonance can be related to aesthetics. One is
discordant juxtaposition, as Buchenwald to Weimar (Chapter 5), though as in
this case such discordance may be interpretively exploited. Another is that
created by the discordant intrusion of contemporary reality into pre-existing
tourist images, as discussed by O’Brien (1988) with respect to the UK. Yet
another is the possible dissonance of cultural artefacts to the natural environ-
ment, despite the broad-scale complementarity in contemporary natural-cultural
heritage management to which we return below; Rhodes’ construction of his
railway bridge in front of the Victoria Falls has been referred to as an act of
‘ecological terrorism’, even though it arguably blends with the scene a century
later (Igoe, 1992).
This review of wider dimensions of heritage dissonance may seem unusual in
the conclusion of a book which has already attempted a comprehensive
statement on the issue. The inescapable reality, however, is that proliferating
_ facets of dissonance continue to emerge with the apparently inexorable growth
of heritage itself, as both a phenomenon and an industry. Not only must our
statement remain open-ended in detail, but a measure of its success will be the
extent to which it draws forth an expanding grasp of the scope and implications
of dissonant heritage, from minds and experience beyond those of the present
authors.

MANAGING DISSONANCE FOR POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC

SUSTAINABILITY
The principles
Cultural resources interact in many ways with natural resources, mirroring the
intimate relationship between human and physical geography overall (see for
example Nelson, 1991) and, especially relevant to this argument, have many
close parallels in their management. This interaction was assumed in Chapter 1
and has been expressed in many topics discussed subsequently, for example the
‘ecomuseum’ idea. The intimacy of the natural—cultural relationship in fact
intensifies as we learn more of the extent to which apparently natural environ-
ments, such as the ‘New Worlds’ before European contact, represent both a
cultural creation and a focus of cultural tradition (Head, 1993). The study of
cultural heritage and its dissonance cannot therefore be undertaken without
reference to ostensibly natural heritage, a point implicit in many of the cases we
have discussed.
However, it is much easier to arrive at such a position than to proceed to
sketch its implications for management. The notion of ‘sustainable development’,
albeit fashion-prone and sometimes controversial, has been central to contem-
porary concerns about resource management; and the philosophical, organis-
ational and management parallels between natural and cultural resources lead
us logically to the idea that planning for ‘green’ and ‘grey’ environments can be
conducted not only with reference to each other as complementary, but more
fundamentally by using the same set of management concepts. If we can at least
approach a sustainable natural heritage, could we, and should we, not equally
268 DISSONANT HERITAGE

promote a sustainable cultural heritage? In a tourism context, might this not

provide the means to relieve pressure upon the natural heritage? If a sustainable
cultural heritage is the objective, then the management of dissonance will be a
central condition of this sustainability, given its importance both to socio-
political stability and economic success.
The management of resources for sustainable development requires the
implementation of the following concepts that are implicit in the idea.

1. Resources are valued for more than their immediate use in an economic
production system. It is abundantly clear, from the extensive discussion
above, that the historic resources utilised in the production of heritage are
valued in a wide variety of ways and freely used for many purposes, which
change drastically over time. The development of such resources for any one
purpose at any one time must be in the context of an awareness of the
possibility of other uses at other times. This does not mean that no historical
resource can ever be used for fear that it may deny some future generation
some future development option, as yet unknown: that we raise all the
philosophical and practical difficulties of monument preservation and
artefact collection for its own sake discussed in Chapter 3. But it does mean
that the principles of resource use derived from the management of natural
environmental resources such as parsimony, renewal, recuperation and
recycling have an equal relevance, although different application in detail, in
the management of cultural heritage resources.
2. Sustainable development implies the attainment of output equities. Balances
are to be struck between economic sectors, social groups, spatial political
entities and, above all, human generations. The whole idea of heritage as we
have developed it here, and indeed the definition of the word itself, implies
a very particular relationship between the past, the present and the future.
Heritage is a contemporary function, selecting from the past, for trans-
mission to the future. The difficulties we have discussed at length above
stem from the two intrinsic necessities for choice contained in that definition.
A conscious selection is made by the present from an almost infinite variety
of possible pasts and, equally important, a selection is made about which
inheritances are to be presented to a future whose needs have to be
predicted. This is the intergenerational equity contained in the many
‘option’, ‘existence’, and ‘bequest’ demands made upon heritage resources.
Its achievement is, however, compromised by the problem of predicting the
heritage needs of the future (Chapter 1).
Time may be the fundamental dimension but other equities have also been
considered, such as between ethnic, social, national and other contemporary
human groups. The multi-selling of the same historic resources in different
products renders it essential that these not be hijacked for the exclusive use
of any one consumer group at any one time, and intervention in pursuit of
equity in benefits is critical. The probability of equity, like justice, being
undefinable and unattainable, as our cases often indicated, does not
disqualify it as a principle of heritage management.
3. The determination and maintenance of carrying capacities is a well-known
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT OF THE MANAGEMENT OF DISSONANCE 269
management principle derived from the agricultural exploitation of natural
resources. The question, ‘how many cows can graze in a field without
irreversibly damaging the pasture?’ has much in common with such
questions as ‘how many tourists can visit a historic city, or visitors use a
museum, without damaging the resource or diminishing the aggregate
utility of the experience?’ Of course, as an optimising principle, it depends
on the prior determination of what is to be optimised, which in heritage
management would depend in turn upon the resolution of the question
about output equities raised above. Secondly, the difficulty of setting out to
discover an abstract carrying capacity to be used as a basis for the sub-
sequent management of a heritage site is that carrying capacity is in itself
very largely a product of management; the process thus becomes circular.
Nevertheless, with these provisos, which apply equally to natural as to
historic resources, and with the understanding that people are more complex
in their expectations and behaviours than cows, it can be operationalised in
detail. (See, for example, the management cases of historic towns discussed
in the 1991 British ‘Tourism and the Environment Task Force’ report; and on
the sustainable management of tourism generally, see Nelson et al., 1993;
and Manning, 1994).
4. The development of homeostatic processes linking the production to the
resource systems is required. In the sustainable management of the natural
environment the task has been expressed as a policy of ‘internalising the
externalities’ (most usually through pricing or taxation systems so that users
pay for the resources they use, deny to others or damage). Such self-
regulating systems of accountability would seem to have an equal relevance
to historic resources in so far as these are zero-priced public goods prone to
over-utilisation and potential irreversible damage. Public goods must receive
public payment and a major difficulty is that those who benefit are fre-
quently not the same as those who pay, as has been apparent in many of the
cases discussed when heritage resources are freely used by the commercial
tourism industry. However, many historic resources lend themselves to both
the control of, and monetary charge for, physical entry and effective use.

The practice
Although its management is fundamental to a sustainable cultural heritage, there
is an evident lack of awareness of the dissonance problem, or at best ad hoc
approaches to its resolution, in much heritage conservation and marketing
worldwide. This is so notwithstanding the appearance of various implicit and the
first explicit, though not comprehensive, literature on the subject (see Kearns and
Philo, 1993). It could be argued that non-management is acceptable since time
will eventually erase contention over heritage, as any implied threat disappears
(Western, 1985); a British Empire ‘at one with Ninevah and Tyre’, in Kipling’s
words, will leave a heritage as benign as theirs, or that of Rome. In the mean
time, however, the costs of non-management are likely to be unacceptable, in
terms of both reconciliation and revenue foregone, and a resource destroyed or
allowed to decay. The present authors would therefore argue for active
270 DISSONANT HERITAGE

dissonance management, involving the development of a coherent blueprint

which anticipates the problem on one or more of the various dimensions we
have discussed; where possible, defuses it before confrontations develop; and
simultaneously draws attention to the diversity of the potential heritage resource,
as a basis for determining the particular broader or narrower strategy for its
exploitation which might be deemed appropriate to particular circumstances.
Before returning to the issue of strategy, a series of specific management
problems have come to our attention in the course of this work, some of which
have been noted in case studies but which none the less require reiteration here.
First, our discussion of the wider dissonance context in this chapter points to the
need for closer dialogue between organisations which commercialise heritage
and people who have a specific non-commercial interest in it; even though not
all interests are likely to be satisfied this should reduce the dissonance of
commercial interpretation, which may involve central issues of social, cultural or
political content or may exist apart from them. Secondly, with respect to this
content, it has been observed that heritage marginality is relative: the marginal
may themselves marginalise others, as observed by S. Smith (1993) in the
Scottish Borders, and broadly as we have noted with respect to the Chinese in
British Columbia; thus management requires a relatively sophisticated dialogue,
not merely encouragement for the toleration of minority values. Thirdly, again
with respect to social/cultural minorities, the decline of dissonance may mean
the decline of heritage itself: much of the heritage of groups such as black
Americans is one of segregation and struggle, and as their integration increases
their minority institutions have diminishing relevance and become moribund
(Gates, 1994); again, management requires a balancing act to sustain interest in
such heritage, and even to prevent it from becoming dissonant to its own
inheritors, without reigniting past social tensions in the process.
A fourth problem is that of security, which demands particular consideration
here because it requires the management of dissonance as one component in a
much more comprehensive and difficult socio-economic management process.
Perceived personal insecurity is one of the most certain routes to the effective
elimination of heritage which, though it may continue to exist, will remain
unvisited; furthermore, the site/object may well be vandalised and left to decay,
reflecting a parallel physical insecurity of the heritage itself. The security
problem was indicated in Chapter 8 with respect to Africa, but also to other
parts of the world, notably the US where the defensive design of urban
buildings has become a distinctive architectural idiom (to this extent para-
doxically creating a heritage) (Knox, 1994). In US cities such as Boston, national
landmarks as sensitive as those on the Freedom Trail (Ashworth and Tunbridge,
1990) have led to selectively well-defended inner-city space; but in others such as
New Orleans, unsafe inner-city and ghettoised areas are compromising main-
stream heritage values (Woodbury, 1994). This phenomenon is now emerging in
Western Europe also, as in some UK cities and in Amsterdam (Vogel, 1994);
to say nothing of cities around the world (e.g. Miami, Algiers and Cairo) in
which the 1990s have witnessed the variously motivated but specific criminal
targetting of tourists/visitors. Insecurity not only diminishes access to and
quality of mainstream heritage, with all that implies for tourism revenues; it also
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT OF THE MANAGEMENT OF DISSONANCE Zhe
compromises the possibility of dissonance reconciliation by the proactive devel-
opment and interpretation of a broader heritage than hitherto. Not least (and not
only in the African case) this could impair the recognition of long-standing
heritage which recent ghettoised minorities would like to see more fully
acknowledged, such as that of slavery as the effective foundation stone for the
fine Georgian buildings in the inner city of Bristol, England, including the now
black ghetto district of St Pauls. In an increasingly multicultural urban world,
there is plainly a need for comprehensive management of security in which
heritage dissonance management will be one component, which both depends
upon the whole and contributes to it by the reduction of those spiritual affronts
which aggravate the material deprivations of many inner city areas (compare
Robson, 1994). Curiously, however, not all tourism revenue is dependent upon
the effective management of security: a ‘holidays in hell’ phenomenon has been
noted in the media whereby a minority of tourists either risk or deliberately seek
out fulfilment in dangerous places, often specifically into the teeth of dissonant
confrontations (Fedarko, 1993); however, such tourists may include those with
less either to lose or to spend, they may in fact be well protected from anything
worse than perceived risk, and in any case their behaviour does not significantly
reduce the imperative to manage inner-city security.
With respect to the strategy that dissonance management should follow in a
diverse society, we have suggested a fundamental distinction between ‘inclusiv-
ism’ and ‘minimalism’ (Chapters 7 and 8), which was anticipated as part of the
larger ‘more heritage/less heritage’ alternative discussed in Chapter 1. We
cannot prescribe which might be deemed wisest in different situations; but we
can point to the strengths and weaknesses of each in general terms. ‘Minimalism’
has the severe disadvantage that the suppression of all but limited ‘common
denominators’ would squander much of the resource base from which both
citizen enrichment and tourism revenue might be derived; against this socio-
economic negative, however, is the political positive that the intractable problems
of how inclusive and in what proportions (Chapter 7) might be circumvented.
‘Inclusivism’, on the other hand, maximises both the socio-economic resource
and the political bone of contention, given that the notion of simple inclusion is
naive. None the less, it appears to us that in an age which encourages maximum
freedom of expression, most societies (other than fundamentalist theocracies) will
find themselves in an ‘inclusivist’ mode whether they like it or not. As Ley
reminds us, ‘a respect for the diversity of urban subcultures’ (Ley, 1987: 43) is
central to the values of postmodernism. Some societies, such as Singapore and
other Far Eastern states, may have sufficient authoritarian control to maintain a
clear market separation, in which a recessive exploitation of heritage diversity
seeks tourism revenue while a dominant state ideology maintains firm social
control of the hearts and minds of a more or less polyglot population (Kong,
1993). The more liberal Western democracies, however, may be constitutionally
incapable of maintaining such a distinction, particularly where they are large
federal states such as Canada. In such a case, a multicultural policy may make a
virtue of necessity, whatever shreds and patches may compromise it in remote
and/or recalcitrant regions. Given the logical contradictions of multiculturalism
as it is officially professed in Canada, we return to the suggestion of Chapter 7
272 DISSONANT HERITAGE

that a more flexible pragmatic multiculturalism, based upon the ultimate

potential for rather than the unqualified right to status within the national
heritage, might prove a more workable basis for a future, goodwill-based give-
and-take approach to multicultural representation.
Goodwill, however, is frequently a scarce commodity and begs serious
questions. Where it is absent or uncertain, but where the economic imperative to
maximise heritage tourism resources precludes ‘minimalism’, the solution may lie
in the ‘localisation’ or separation we observed in Chapters 7 and 8. Dissonant
heritages with which tourists identify may be physically secure and safely
visitable in outlying locations, raising the possibility that those in urban locations,
insecure in general or heritage-specific terms, may be relocated or reproduced
elsewhere. Whether the highly inflammatory and place-specific ‘Hitler slept here’
phenomenon can be sidelined from urban centres is an interesting question,
however, such notorious figures tend to leave enough spatial associations for
selective heritage retention to be possible, in this case Berchtesgaden rather than
Berlin (Chapter 6). Sites of atrocity tend to present a lesser problem, however, by
ironic virtue of their propensity for spatially separated locations of concealment.
In cases where separation may be desirable but difficult to attain, on account
of disparity in scale between tourism and local heritage markets, and/or a lack
of space within which the resource base can be segregated, an alternative
strategy may be required. This is most likely to occur in formerly colonial
tropical microstates, in which tourism may be huge relative to population,
economy and territorial size, and the local identity may be overwhelmed by a
heritage tourism resource oriented to and essentially controlled by outsiders.
This resource typically emphasises the colonial heritage and may stifle the
development of a distinct national identity. Palmer (1994) identifies this problem
in Nassau, Bahamas; and the same past or present British colonial identity
overwhelms the tourism marketing of, in particular, Barbados and Bermuda. The
management solution may lie in greater indigenous input into the tourism
industry, and a gradual interspersion of more post-colonial iconography (see
Chapter 4 regarding Nassau); with the proviso that prominent anti-colonial
messages will be unacceptably dissonant, the local market for these in any case
remaining to be demonstrated (Palmer’s comments notwithstanding). It is
interesting to note that Nassau is analogous to Victoria, Canada, at the
diametrically opposite (north-west) corner of the US tourism market, as a
purveyor of British colonial imagery; but that Victoria, in contrast, suffers neither
scale nor space constraints to a tourist/local market separation which is not,
however, there an issue of concern.
The future evolution of multiculturalism and, more broadly, multilateralism
with respect to sustainable cultural heritage constitutes a prime research agenda.
So, of course, does grassroots investigation of detailed human responses to
heritage dissonance issues in general.

Practical planning and management links

Finally there are practical links of importance which are commonly encountered
in the specific quest for aggregate cultural—natural environmental sustainability.
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT OF THE MANAGEMENT OF DISSONANCE 273
The most obvious can be labelled the ‘heritage honeypot’ technique, in which
advantage is taken of the possibility of joint demand by diverting or soaking up
potential visitors to vulnerable natural areas through the encouragement of
higher-density visitor clusters at more manageable and less vulnerable built
environmental heritage sites, which may also serve as interpretation centres for
the natural environment. Such strategic spatial planning commonly requires co-
ordination between different agencies and is in itself a powerful motivation for
the integration of overall environmental management within public-sector
national parks systems or (as usually in the United Kingdom) voluntary-sector
conservation agencies with a comprehensive mandate. We have also argued
the relevance of the tourist-historic city to this diversion technique, thereby
relating it to the following discussion of the local focus of dissonant heritage
management.
We conclude by considering the local, national and global scales at which
heritage dissonance is a distinctive issue, and at which we believe its manage-
ment to be a matter of critical concern.

THE LOCAL FOCUS: DISSONANT HERITAGE AND THE TOURIST-

HISTORIC CITY

One immediate point of departure for this book was the realisation in the
conclusion of The Tourist-Historic City (Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990) that both
a fundamental problem and opportunity for the development of the tourist-
historic city derived from the existence of what we have since termed heritage
dissonance, and the need for its effective resolution. We identified the tourist-
historic city as the principal point of contact between tourism and cultural
heritage, and modelled its development with respect to the larger urban entity,
within which heritage and tourism are deeply embedded; the basic argument
was later extended to the case of waterfront cities (Tunbridge and Ashworth,
1992), of particular relevance here since revitalising urban waterfronts are
associated with a distinctive social heritage dissonance (Chapter 4). Intrinsic to
the model is the idea of growth, as new heritage resources are identified and, in
part, marketed to growing numbers and varieties of increasingly selective
tourists. The model has been applied in such comparatively unexpected
locations as Kansas (De Bres, 1994).
Quite clearly dissonance creates tensions and negative expressions which
impair the development of the tourist-historic city, while the resolution of
dissonance (at least by ‘inclusivist’ additions and reinterpretations) provides the
golden opportunity to expand and diversify the resource base and thereby the
tourism potential. A comparison of our comments on Pietermaritzburg, South
Africa, as a late-apartheid city (Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990) and as a post-
apartheid pioneer (Chapter 8) provides some insight into the constraints of
dissonance and the potential of its resolution for a classic colonial Victorian
tourist-historic city. It is at this scale that the costs and benefits of dissonance
and its resolution are most acutely visible; for it is at the urban level that the
impacts of global economic restructuring are ultimately being felt, that economic
274 DISSONANT HERITAGE

refocusing around tourist-historic pursuits is most apparent, and that intense

interurban competition demands sensitivity to the dissonance issue. This we
have noted particularly clearly in the cases of Charleston and Savannah in the
southern US.
While the tourist-historic cities of Western Europe remain the market leaders,
seeking out ever more specialised niche markets for the sophisticated selling of
their expanding heritage products, their neighbours in Central Europe are now
casting envious eyes upon the lucrative profits to be made. In the Central
European case, discussed in Chapter 6, the resolution of dissonance is
particularly important for contrasting reasons. If in Western European cities the
problem is increasingly perceived in terms of restraint upon tourism demands in
order to relieve a pressure upon heritage resources that is a major cause of
dissonance, further east the priority is upon the expansion of the tourist-historic
city quickly enough to take the strain of unprecedented tourism growth, above
all in Prague and Krakow. Its expansion there to include the former Jewish
districts is providing a diversification and more even utilisation of the cities’
historic resource bases (although not without management problems) and this
could be emulated in other cities in Central Europe and through much of the
former Soviet bloc. A sensitive tourist-historic appropriation of minority heritage
also generates a positive spinoff for international relations, with Israel and the
US in the case of the Jews.
We now contend that the cardinal factor in the growth of the tourist-historic
city, which is increasingly multicultural in most parts of the world, is the
willingness to overcome dissonance, the choice of a locally acceptable
‘inclusivist’ formula to do so, and the effective marketing of the heritage
resources thus realised to an increasingly discriminating global tourism
marketplace. In this fundamental respect the present volume may be seen as a
sequel to and qualification of The Tourist-Historic City.

THE NATIONAL FOCUS: DISSONANT HERITAGE AND POLITICAL

OTABILITY

Perhaps the most significant consequence of heritage dissonance is its capacity to

destabilise national, and major regional, political units. One need only recall the
heritage tensions of Canada, and within it those internal to Québec, to grasp a
point which is as universal as the occurrence of disaffected national/regional
minorities. Two qualifications are in order: first, heritage dissonance may be
interwoven in a complex cause-and-effect relationship with larger issues of
disaffection, and it may just as easily be created to suit existing political
opposition as be the reason for its existence. Secondly, we make no moral
judgement as to the long-term desirability of the disintegration of major political
units, in view of their common artificiality, for example as against city-focused
regions.
As discussed in Chapter 2, strategies designed to spread the benefits of tourism
are likely to create an increasingly heterogeneous tourism product, within which
ethnic and cultural variety, as well as regional and local differences accentuated
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT OF THE MANAGEMENT OF DISSONANCE bags
in developing tourist-historic cities, play a larger role and generate conflict with
the homogeneous national-identity heritage product. Tourism can accordingly be
dissonant to the latter in promoting regionalism if not separatism, the case of
Canada being notable among many others.
We note, however, that political disintegration resulting from disaffection is a
costly affair, and point to the need for protagonists of the political status quo to
devise national strategies of heritage dissonance management as a crucial
priority. These need to address the ability of the entire population to relate to
national expressions of public history, whether by ‘inclusivist’, ‘minimalist’ or
more refined approaches; they must contain and/or rationalise dissonance
emanating from different scales in the political hierarchy, which is no easy task in
a federal state; and they must seek similar management of dissonance emanating
from the private sector, particularly with respect to tourist-resident heritage
discordance, which is no easy task in a democracy. The proliferating ministries
of culture or heritage may be seen as ‘ministries of fun’ (compare Chapter 1) but
they are key players in a game with the highest stakes, and should never be
lightweight teams.

THE GLOBAL FOCUS: A ‘NEW WORLD ORDER’?

Human heritage affairs at the highest level are largely conducted through
agencies of the United Nations, in particular UNESCO, and other international
bodies such as ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites),
together with regional institutions such as the Council of Europe and belatedly
the European Union. It is through such agencies that any international heritage
reconciliation is likely to be negotiated, with all of its implications for global
economic prosperity and political conflict avoidance. We have noted (Chapter 6)
that their limitations may include lack of common international vision and
difficulty of enforcing international standards. None the less, the gravity of their
task is apparent from much of what we have said, not least the globalisation of
perspective needed to deal satisfactorily with internationally misplaced heritage.
In the wake of the Yugoslavian catastrophe UNESCO is formulating urgent
recommendations for increasing the effectiveness of the 1954 Hague Convention
for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (Fleming,
1995). One example of the many constructive projects involving UNESCO is a
study of the seventeenth-century quarter of Hanoi, of considerable potential
significance to tourist-based economic development in Vietnam (Logan, 1995).
It is important to note that these international instruments, despite the above
example, have not hitherto operated in a globally unbiassed fashion appropriate
to even-handed representation of the heritage of mankind. It might of course be
argued that only a superhuman agency could adjudicate fairly between the
relative significance of the heritage of this or that region to the total accumulation
of human culture. However, there is evidence of ingrained ‘Eurocentricity’ in the
valuations of international agencies, reflecting the antiquity of European
societies, the dominance, and it should be admitted quality, of their cultural
perspectives and the power of the leading European states with respect to
276 DISSONANT HERITAGE

cultural affairs. Canada has found itself in the challenging position of attempting
to guide ICOMOS to an acceptance both of historically younger and culturally
more diverse heritages as the qualitative equivalents of, for example, the artefacts
of Rome or Paris; resistance in ICOMOS (which screens potential cultural sites
for the UNESCO World Heritage list) to both the heritage values and agency
standing of Third World countries, in particular, has raised a serious question as
to whose heritage organisations effectively determine whose heritage will attain
global recognition (Hunter, 1995; J. Smith, 1993). Given the control of com-
munication and information systems so disproportionately by the Western world
and its media, the acceptance by international agencies of Third World heritages
on a par with those of the West appears unlikely to be quickly achieved. In any
case, there is a tendency for World Heritage Sites to be used as instruments of
national aggrandisement by the more and less developed countries alike,
potentially adding to international heritage tensions.
Apart from these background issues germane to the resolution of global
heritage dissonance, we find ourselves at a very specific fulcrum in time which
challenges us to ponder future global evolution relative to our subject. The 1990s
fin de siécle has emerged as a period of intense socio-political instability. The end
of the Cold War has broken the proverbial mould of global geopolitics, broadly
as at previous times of phase shift in political power (Taylor, 1993), and the form
of its subsequent realignment is as yet unclear (see especially Chapter 6).
Simultaneously the Western world, in the first instance, is experiencing a
possibly unprecedented series of challenges to established social values.
Universal awareness of an impending new millennium (not merely century)
naturally sensitises us further to the question of whether some ‘new world order’
might conceivably impend, or even be striven for in an attempt to break with
the bases of past human conflict.
It would be a pious hope indeed to expect that the complete and equitable
resolution of the many heritage dissonances that confound humanity might be
achieved and lead us all into such a new world order of harmony, prosperity,
and so forth. However, what is unequivocal is that the resolution of heritage
dissonances, on scales from local to global and of severities to the level of
atrocity, is absolutely fundamental to such degree of cultural and political
harmony as future human society might attain.
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General Index

aestheticisation 12, 17, 266 Benin treasures 52

anniversaries 99, 185, 208, 214, 217, 252, burials 53-4, 82, 117, 119-20, 150, 153,
266 170, 173, 176, 185, see also heritage
apartheid see race bodies
architecture 16, 75, 138, 145, 157-8, 165, buyer-benefit 23, 50 see also marketing
192, 250, 256, see also monuments
Armenians 92, 103, 110-11
art 12, 16, 42, 57, 144, see also culture Cadfael centre 67
cities 12, 60-1, 66-7 Canadian Museum of Civilisation 39, 51,
atrocity 83, 94-130, 153, 160, see also 196, 203, 214, 217, 219
cultural atrocity, disasters, epidemics, carnivals 31, see also culture festivals
famine carrying capacity 12, 18, 269
concentration camps 88, 103, 122-8, see cemeteries see burials
also Jews Holocaust Christianity 54, 55, 56, 74, 107, 125, 134,
143, 149, 154, see also religion
definitions 95-6
cities 88, see also Jews ghetto, tourist-
demonisation 105, 110
historic city, waterfronts
environmental 98-9, see also speciesism
design 16, 17, 242, see also
ethnicide 102, 111, 137, 146-8, 207
architecture, art cities,
genocide 102-3, 122-8, see also Jews
aestheticisation
Holocaust
destruction 56, 118, 138, 146-8, 164,
interpretation 94-5, 99, 105, OS mel
170
122, 124, 246 land-uses 61-2
management 103-22 leagues 59-60, see also DATAR
massacre 74, 101-2, 105, 110-11, 114 over-crowding 12
perpetrators 97, 101, 104-5, 108-11, management policies 12, 201, 214-19,
116-18, 148, 154 229-38, 243-6
persecution 100-1, 103 postmodern characteristics 17, 194,
politicide 102 246
prisons 114, 173, 236-7 reconstruction 56, 138, 155, 157-60,
reconciliation 111-12 164, 173, 203-5, 210, 223, 232-8
reparations 98 semiology 14-16, 159, 229-38
sites 113-14 spectacles 17, 31
tourism 94, 100, 112, 114, 130, 153 walls 115-16, 136, 150, 153, 170-1,
usability 104-5 200
variety 96-103 civic consciousness 61
victims 97, 98, 101, 104, 106-8, 126, 140, class 76-80, 91, 181 see also elitism
189, 195 cognitive
war 99-101, 116-22 dissonance 20
authentication 10, 11 geography 16, 26
authenticity 10-11, 18, 265 collective
of experience 10-11, 65 amnesia 109
of nature 18 guilt 110
of object 10, 45 memory (Foucault) 1, 74
pias GENERAL INDEX

colonialism 31, 67, 72, 75, 81, 90, 97, ethnic cleansing see atrocity ethnicide
180-2, 205-8, 223-8, 229-38, 238-47, ethnicity 3, 27, 71, 73, 77, 87-9, 133, 145,
252-62 194, 203-5, 205-11, 216, 225, see also
commercialisation 12, 265, see also atrocity ethnicide, Jews ghetto,
commodification multiculturalism
commodification 7, 9, 13, 17, 27, 194, see Europa Nostra 177, see also Council of
also commercialisation Europe
and dissonance 21-3 European Union 103, 118, 143, 148, 159,
objections 11-12 171, 176
Commonwealth 54, 84, 106, 119, 210
conservation 3, 185, 186, 249
built environment 9, 29, 135, 138, 141, famine 96-7, 201
iVAl Folk see museums folk
Council of Europe 58, 147, 177
culture 60, 72, 147, 259, see also art
biculturalism 183 guide books 10, 11 see also
cities see art cities interpretation
commodification 7, 11, 42
‘high’ 2, 43
festivals 61 hallmark events see anniversaries
products 2, 75, 76, 269 Heritage see also authenticity, conservation,
tourism 58, 141, 238, 273 see also historicity, monuments, national
tourism heritage
cultural abandoned 54
atrocity 101, 146-8 authenticity 10-11, 18, 65
capital (Bourdieu) 43, 48-9 bodies 53-4, see also burials
Canada 18, 191, 196, 199, 220
canals 1
DATAR 59-60 see also cities leagues choice 9-10
disabilities 83-4, 88, 196-7, 217 concealment 55-7, 259
disasters 96-7, 157 consumer 8-9, 43, 64, see also museum
disinheritance 21, 29-32, 72, 79, 146, visitors
203 content see interpretation
dominant definition 5-6, 11
groups 4, 40, 192 destruction 32, 55-7, 74, 129, 138,
ideology 13, 39, 47-50, 53, 88, 138, 140, 146-8, 201, 252-3, see also cities
150 destruction
dissonance 5, 263-76, see also atrocity,
war
ecological terrorism 267 and cultural conflict 32-3, 131,
ecomuseum 3, 37, 77 146-8
Elgin Marbles 52-3 57 and disinheritance 29-32, 79
elitism 12-13, see also class and human diversity 70-93, see also
empowerment see museums empowerment class, homosexuality, language,
embourgeoisement 42 race, religion
English Heritage 1, 2 and message content 27-9, 47-50, 72,
environment 18-19, 267-9 112
anthropogenic see environment, man- and misplaced 50-7, 86-7, 88, 167
made and multiuse 27, 68-9
man-made 9, 18, 29, 135 and products 21-7
management 18, 186, see also and scale 25-7, 57-9, 86
conservation and women 339, 72, 80-2, 83, 88,
natural 18, 261, see also national parks 195-6
sustainable management 18, 267-73 economic uses 59-68, 219-20
epidemics 97 commerce 61-2, see also heritage
escapism 42 industry
GENERAL INDEX 293
Heritage cont. tourists 33, 58, 62-8, 163, see also
location variable 59-61 heritage consumers, museum
tourism 62-8, 140, 142, 210, 228, visitors
247-51, 264, 265, 272, see also transformation 8
culture tourism trees 2
everyday life 1, 40, 50, 91 uses 34-69
fish 2 users see consumers
flora and fauna 2, 249 values 27-8, 32
identification 31, 79, 160, 164, 191 world 58, see also ICOMOS, UNESCO,
ideology 28, 47-50, 72, 84-5, 87 world heritage sites
industry 2, 17, 61-2, 265-6, see also heterotopia 17
commodification Hindu 56, 74
landscapes 2, see also conservation historicity 17, 60, 61, 193-4
living 3 History 5-6, 20, 27, see also past
management 30, 160-8, 263-76, see also as antiquarianism 6
heritage planning approaches 47
meanings 1-3, 15-17, 46-50 atrocity 95
misplaced 50-7 competing 51-2
misused 54-5 facts 6
model 6-9, see also commodification official 46-50
implications 11 popular 50
objections 11-14 promoted 61
motives 5 radical 50
aesthetic 9, 11 ultimate 6
antiquarian 11 homosexuality 82-3, 88, 97, 191,
collecting 35-6 194-5
intrinsic 9, 11
extrinsic 9, 11, 27
nationalisation 57, 136-7, 140-3, 253, Ice-Man 53
see also nationalism ICOMOS 275-6
organisations 14, 165, see also Heritage identity 31, 83, 180
Canada, National Trust creation 16, 46
ownership 31, 50-7, 153-5, 184-7, see place 15, 16, 22, 24, 244
also heritage theft regional 101
places 1, 7, 113-14, 117, see also art Image promotion 60-1, see also history
cities, tourist-historic city promoted, place images
planning 11, 15, 58, 62, 66-7, see also indigenous peoples 24, 40, 92, 103, 180,
heritage management 182, 184-7, see also Inuit
products” 2, 3, 8, 21 Industrial revolution 4, 77, see also
development 22-3 museums industrial
diversification 23 interpretation 8, 25, 38, 48, 57, 65, see
line 22 also atrocity interpretation, guide
railway stations 1 books
relocated 51-2 and authentication 10
repatriation 51-3 and ideology 28, 47-50
rescue 51, 57 battlefields 116-17, 137, 199, 265
resources 4, 7-8, 9, 267-8 city bombardment 118
custodians 12 competing 57
damage 4, 12, 13, see also carrying credibility 13
capacity labelling 10, 16, 237
mismanagement 11 resistance 49
regeneration 13 revisionist 78, 85, 117, 139, 252, 254-6
rivers 1 transmission 28-9, 49
theft 51-3, 147, 154, 167, see also Benin Inuit 2
treasures, Elgin Marbles, Schlieman Islam 33, 55, 56, 71, 74, 107, 134, 143, 147,
treasures 266
294 GENERAL INDEX

Jews 74, 75, 77, 92, 104, 122, 142, 145, see content 37-8
also concentration camps, Israel, crafts 2
Palestine education 38-41, 65
ghetto 89, 107, 113, 126, 127, 151-5 empowerment 40, 45
heritage 56, 83, 141, 174 folk 35, 40
Holocaust 103, 104, 107, 113, 122-8, functions 35, 38-41
151-5, 173 industrial 77-8, 91, 215, 239, 240,
pogrom 103 241
Zionism 107 repatriation 51-3
types 37
non-visitors 43, 50
Kurds 92 policy 36
visitors 41-5
frequency 44
language 74-6, 101, 107, 118, 132, 135, growth 41-2
144, 149, 202 motives 43-5
bilingualism 183, 189 myths 24, 181
legitimation 48, 54, 56, 138, 183, see also
political resources
leisure consumption 43 National
lifestyles 17 archaeology 46, 93
Capital Commission (Canada) 180,
211-19
marketing 10 heritage 1, 160, see also heritage
buyer-benefit 23, 50 nationalisation
core product 8 Historic Sites (US) 78
models 21 Historic Sites (Canada) 114, 183,
of cities 17 184
product development 22-3, see also history 46-7
heritage products image 2, 274-5
segmentation 23, 271 museums 39-41, 46
marking (MacCannell) see interpretation parks 18, 180, 193, 273
labelling Trust (UK) 18, 44, 80, 82
marxism 13, 47, 77, 226 nationalism 38, 46, 50, 57, 72, 75, 76, 133,
masculinisation see heritage dissonance and 135, 140-3, 145, 175, 183, 199, 256, see
women also heritage nationalisation
mental maps see cognitive geography nature reserves 44
Ministry of Heritage (Canada) 2, 18,
187
Ministry of Heritage (UK) 2, 18 output equity 18, 268, see also
monuments 11, 16, 29, 72, 81, 136, 150, sustainability
LOApLOO ML 2 LOO 20/ 21 pe 20,0209, intergenerational equity 30
240, 241, 257, see also ICOMOS
moslem see Islam
multiculturalism 2, 30-1, 71, 90, 93, 177, packaging 8, see also commodification
190-2, 205, 220-1, 246-7, 260, 272, see Past 20, 263-4, see also history
also ethnicity attitudes towards 44-5 64
museology see museums as heritage 5-6
museumification 48, 139 as history 5-6
Museums 3, 10, 29, 34, 51, 55, 153, 165, peace 120-2, 131, 216, 244-5
167,199, 207, 2327 239/2242.2445253, phenomenology 16
257, 259, 265, see also ecomuseum, pillar principle (verzuiling) 31
theme parks place
atrocity 98, 108, 113, 115, 120-2, 126, and heritage 23-5, 70
168, 173 images 17, 26, 59-61, 164, see also
British 10, 38 national image marketing 60-1
GENERAL INDEX 295
place cont. Taste 39
products 23-7 leaders 12, 79
dualism 25 theme parks 37, 45, 67, 247-51, 264, 265
hierarchies 25 Tourism 81, 91, 141, 148, 151, 266, 274-5,
multiselling 25, 268 see also heritage tourism, atrocity
scale 25-6, 57-9 tourism
sacralisation 24, 113, 230 behaviour 66
Planning 9-10, 203-5, see also heritage definition 64, 66
planning demand
political attitudes 64-5
correctness 79, 84, 85, 196 characteristics
resources 45-59, 267-73, see also development 23, 247-51
legitimation experiences 2 e
Postmodernism 16-17, 79, see also management 12, 66-8
heterotopia marketing 25, 66, 193, 228
progress thesis 48 markets 21, 26, 159, 165
trips 63
tourist-historic city 37, 91, 148, 197, 201,
race 3, 73, 188, 192, 203-5, 229-32, 242,
207, 210, 238, 273
243-7, 257-62
Townscapes 11, 86
racism see race
religion 73-4, 107, 143, 144, 147, see also
Christianity, Islam, Hindu, Jews
romanticism 52, 150
UN 84, 148, 183, 187, 197, 217, 220
UNESCO 51, 58, 136, 148, 223, 227, 275,
see also world heritage site
Schlieman treasures 52, 167
semiotics 14-16, 119
coding 15 visible minorities see race
connotative 16
denotative 16
and heritage 16 War 99-101, 131, 146-8, 218, see also
topological 15-16 atrocity war
townscapes 24, 157, 167 artefacts 116
sexism see heritage dissonance and women battlefields 113, 114, 116-18, 199, 242,
shadow effects 26 260, 265
speciesism 83, 98 First World War 119, 121, 135, 146
socialisation 16 Second World War 86, 89, 99, 103, 108,
statues 29, 99, 158, 166, 195, 196-7, 244, 109, 110, 116, 129, 140, 156, 176, 265,
255, see also monuments 266
structuration theory (Pred) 15, 24 waterfronts 91, 92, 204, 206, 209, 215,
Sustainable 23 232-8
management 18, 19 Women 39, 122, 195-6, 216
resources 13 world heritage site 142, 148, 186, 198, 201,
Symbols see semiotics 203, 276, see also UNESCO
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Place Index

Aarhus ey Bulawayo 257

Africa 98, 223-62 Bulgaria 138, 139
Agde 61
Alaska 98
Albania 54 Caen 121
Amritsar 74 Cairo 84, 270
Amsterdam 82, 270 Cambodia 102
Angola 224, 226 Cambridge 61
Atlantis: 6 Canada 2, 3, 18, 19, 39, 47, 78, 90, 106,
Auschwitz 1 22e25 114, 117, 179-222, 271, 275-6
Australia 24, 39, 79, 98, 101, 180, 185, 188, Cape Town 114, 203, 227, 229-38
222 Catalonia 39, 101
erie Ss Cesky Krumlov 142
Ch l Islands 109
Ayodhya 32, 56, 73, 74, 86, 93 oes, OEE
Chemnitz 85
; China 75, 208-11
ee ei Constantinople 51, 54-5, 74
Ba Eas 61 Croatia see Yugoslavia
eae ee oe Cuzco 73, 74, 223
Belsiten 39 117-18 Czechia 133, 141, 142, 177
Bie 124 Czecholovakia 104, 136
Belorus 133
Bergen 89 :
Berlin 41, 52, 53, 75, 115, 118, 119, 129, oe aes
140, 168-76
Ped eOl Dresden 99, 100, 140, 167
Biafra 103 Dubrovnik 146, 148
Birmingham 266 Durban 227, 229, 247
Bosnia 105, 133, 146-8
Boston 229, 270
Bradford 77, 90, 93 Edinburgh 61
Brazil 185 Egypt 33, 58
Brighton 61 England 1, 52, 77, 80, 82
Bristol 98 Estonia 48, 139
Europe 39, 43, 46, 49, eerie Mle Wen UH;
Britain 2, 18, 30, 41, 42, 52, 63, 72, 77, 92,
131 119, 131-78
British Columbia 2
Brittany 101
Bruges 12, 66, 67 Flanders 101, 113, 117, 119
Bucharest 132 Florence 12, 37, 61, 141
Buchenwald 122, 123, 124 France 1, 3, 39, 51, 63, 114, 116, 131
Budapest 40, 119, 132, 141, 147, 149-51 Freiburg 61
298 PLACE INDEX

Gabarone 124 Los Angeles 113

Gdansk 88, 155-60, 168 Lowell (Massachusetts) 40, 78
Germany 87, 89, 90, 99, 108, 109, 110, 122, Louisbourg (Nova Scotia) 37
125, 132-3, 142, 159, 160-8 Lourenco Marques 227
Ghana 52 Lwow 132
Glasgow 77
Greece 52-3, 57
Macedonia 57
Matjesfontein 240
Halifax (Canada) 182, 189, 203-5 Memphis (US) 98
Hanoi 223, 275 Mexico City 74
Harare 88, 238, 252-4 Minsk 132
Heidelberg 141 Montpellier 61
Hjerl Heide (Denmark) 40 Montreal 80, 195, 199, 205
Hong Kong 210-11 Morocco 90
Honolulu 120 Mostar 148
Hungary 136, 137, 142, 144, 149-51, 177 Mytiline 82

Iceland 53 Nairobi 254-7

India 56, 86, 90, 97 Namibia 224
Ireland 53, 72, 75, 96, 101, 105, 109 Nantes 98, 104
Isle of Man 44-5, 65 Nassau 81, 272
Israel 53, 107, 153 Netherlands 31, 36, 41-2, 60-1, 63, 101,
Istanbul see Constantinople 102, 126
aly 2a 07. New York 31, 51, 71, 82
New York State 2
Nottingham 77
Jamaica 83 North America 24, 81, 83, 84, 98
Japan 75, 99, 108, 118, 120, 129, 223 Northern Ireland 31, 58, 184
Jerusalem 31, 54 Norwich 61, 66
Johannesberg 224, 229, 238 Novgorod 89
Nuremberg 129

Kaliningrad 86, 116, 160-8

Kandy 24 Oakland 91
Kenya 225 Ottawa 85, 111, 120, 180, 207, 211-19
Kiel; 99) 129 Oxford 37
Kiev 113
Kimberley 224, 229, 238-42
Konigsberg see Kaliningrad Padua 61
Kossovo 54 Pakistan 86
Krakow =89,127, 1527 135,136, 137, 141, Palestine 54, 56, 73, 90, 107
151-5 ea Sil, 68), 7S), 82, 11
Pécs 149
Peenemunde 99, 108
Latvia 48 Pella 57
Le Creusot (France) 37 Penang 223
Leiden 61 Perth (Australia) 81
Leipzig 85 Pietermaritzburg 242-7, 273
Leningrad 118, 176 Plovdiv 138
Levoca (Slovakia) 144 Poland 307 1027116, 122, 1257112671129"
Lithuania 47, 137, 139 134, 137, 140, 142, 155-60, 177
Liverpool 63, 98 Port Elizabeth 229
Livingstone (Zambia) 253 Prague 63, 89/4126,/41327141, 153
London 31,.51779, é1, 91, 997112 Pretoria 81, 228
 PLACE INDEX 299
Québec 75, 76, 78, 87, 183, 187 Timor 105
Québec City 87, 88, 197-203 Tirol 53, 101
Toronto 31, 71, 185, 195, 205
Treblinka 122
Reading 40 Trieste 101
Rhodesia 105, 106 Troy 52
Riga 139 Turkey 33, 52, 110-11, 149-51, 171, 174
Romania 136, 137 Turin 37, 100, 118
Rome 51, 58
Rotterdam 118
Russia 48, 53, 86, 127, 133, 135, 160-8 Ukraine 74, 97, 109, 129, 133, 134, 135,
Rwanda 102, 105 136, 190
Ulster see Northern Ireland
United Kingdom 28, 107
St Fagans (Wales) 40 United States 1, 40, 41, 43, 72, 81, 117, 120,
St John’s 205-8 127, 129, 140, 153, 179, 181, 265
St Petersburg see Leningrad
WSSReA SO 7-el OD eal ent2D atSant
_Sachsenhausen 124, 125, 130
Salonika 57
Salisbury (Rhodesia) see Harare
Vancouver 195, 196, 208-11
Salzburg 61
Venice 12, 51, 61, 66, 89, 115
San Francisco 82, 114
Versailles 75
Sarajevo 146-8
Victoria (Canada) 84, 208-11, 272
Savannah 238, 274
Vienna 134, 135
Scotland 77, 103
Serbia 54 Vietnam 102, 118, 119
Sherbrooke (Nova Scotia) 37 Vilnius 139
Shrewsbury 67
Skansen (Sweden) 40
Singapore 223, 227, 265, 271 Washington (US) 113, 119
Slovakia 133, 142, 144 Wales 39, 77, 78, 101, 115
South Africa 81, 92, 106, 109, 129, 225-51 Warsaw 113, 154
Spis (Slovakia) 143-4 Weimar 75, 124, 126, 129
Stonehenge 59 Williamsburg (US) 265
Sun City (South Africa) 247-51
Swaziland 226
Sydney 235 York 104
Yugoslavia 74, 86, 103, 133, 136, 146-8

Taiwan 223
Thailand 115, 265 Zambia 227
Tientsin 258 Zimbabwe 87, 129, 224, 226
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 The Management of the Past
as a Resource in Conflict
J. E. Tunbridge
Carleton University, Canada
and
G. J. Ashworth
University of Groningen, The Netherlands

The past, its conserved artefacts and remembered personalities, symbols

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serve modern demands. The past is thereby being used as a resource ina
rare (elm anvele(s)eamlarelUlcicavar-tom (211 m=tomelave(clee)alal lave Rovevelt-lMmele]|(ele-1m-lalem efe)il((ercl
identities of individuals, groups, places and states. ‘
Dissonant Heritage is the first book to fully identify the actual and
potential conflicts that arise from this use of the past as a freely accessible
and apparently limitless resource, to examine the consequences of these
conflicts and to review the management options available.
' . The concept of heritage as the interpreted past leads immediately to the
question of ‘whose heritage is being interpreted by whom and for what
purpose?’ and therefore inevitably to ‘who is thereby disinherited?’. These
questions are posed first.in the context of the different cultural, political
and economic uses of dissonance related to ethnicity, gender, sexual
orientation, social class and physical disability. This approach climaxes in
the discussion of the powerful dissonances in the heritage of atrocity.
These general issues are then exemplified in detail by a consideration of
heritage dissonance and its management in Central Europe (an old world
of re-emerging. nationalisms), Canada (a new world of European
settlement) and the recent post-colonial and post-apartheid case of
Southern Africa.
The seriousness of the implications of heritage dissonance and the
importance of its management makes this book essential reading not only
for those engaged in the professional fields of managing the resources of
the past, whether in urban conservation, building preservation or
alUlsi=10]aatoom 00] ar-lioM (alekci=M (=1>) ole)alolle)(-mcolmn (alclimmlal(s1ge)ccitcli(elamiamere||(0le-lm-lare|
political studies and.tourism. —

ISBN 0-471-94887
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9 "780471

JOHN WILEY & SONS

Chichester -New York - Brisbane - Toronto - Singapore