Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Contested Histories: Heritage and/as the Construction of the Past: An Introduction
- 1 ‘Caught in the Ferris-wheel of History’: Trianon Memorials in Hungary
- 2 Public Sculpture in Cluj/Kolozsvár: Identity, Space and Politics
- 3 Interrupted Histories: Collective Memory and Architectural Heritage in Germany 1933–1945–1989
- 4 History Revised: National Style and National Heritage in Polish Architecture and Monument Protection – Before and After World War II
- 5 Polish and German Heritage in Danzig/Gdańsk: 1918, 1945 and 1989
- 6 Heritage and the Image of Forgetting: The Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov in Sofia
- 7 Athens: The Image of Modern Hellenism
- 8 Cosmopolitan versus Nationalist Visions: Rem Koolhaas’ Exhibition The Image of Europe
- List of Contributors
- Index
Contested Histories: Heritage and/as the Construction of the Past: An Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Contested Histories: Heritage and/as the Construction of the Past: An Introduction
- 1 ‘Caught in the Ferris-wheel of History’: Trianon Memorials in Hungary
- 2 Public Sculpture in Cluj/Kolozsvár: Identity, Space and Politics
- 3 Interrupted Histories: Collective Memory and Architectural Heritage in Germany 1933–1945–1989
- 4 History Revised: National Style and National Heritage in Polish Architecture and Monument Protection – Before and After World War II
- 5 Polish and German Heritage in Danzig/Gdańsk: 1918, 1945 and 1989
- 6 Heritage and the Image of Forgetting: The Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov in Sofia
- 7 Athens: The Image of Modern Hellenism
- 8 Cosmopolitan versus Nationalist Visions: Rem Koolhaas’ Exhibition The Image of Europe
- List of Contributors
- Index
Summary
This book originated in a symposium on cultural heritage that took place in the National Gallery of Slovenia in Ljubljana in 2006. Its aim was to address the construction of heritage across a variety of contexts, with particular reference to its role in the formation of national identities. In itself this is a fairly familiar topic, but the majority of the contributions examined issues of heritage and heritage politics within Central and Eastern European contexts, an area which has enjoyed little critical analysis. Not only do the papers in this volume highlight cases which are thus fairly unfamiliar to wider audiences – the post-communist legacy of the mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov in Sofia, monuments in Hungary to the Treaty of Trianon or conflicts over the cultural identity of Gdańsk, to name a few examples – they also reveal the limitations of much critical heritage discourse as it has emerged over the past 20 or so years. In this introductory chapter, therefore, I shall sketch some of the ways in which consideration of the specificities of heritage in Central and Eastern Europe throws up important challenges for mainstream critical heritage discourse, in order to provide some kind of a framework for approaching the various examples presented by the authors here.
The Idea of a Critical Heritage Discourse
The notion of heritage or of its counterparts elsewhere (patrimoine in France, patrimonio in Italy and Spain or Kulturerbe in Germany and Austria) was born in the 19th century (Harvey 2008). It is widely accepted that as a product of modernity it emerged in response to the destabilising effects of modernisation, offering a temporal compass that could provide a framework of meaning within an increasing condition of spatio-temporal disorientation. Of course, it can be argued that classical antiquity performed a similar function, offering a cultural anchor that provided a secure point of reference, and indeed had done so since the Renaissance and, perhaps, even earlier. Yet classical culture was held to provide a universal set of norms, whereas the crucial aspect of heritage was its particularism; heritage consisted of our past, our tradition, our memories. Indeed, as Benedict Anderson indicates, the idea of nation is inextricably linked with notions of heritage, memory and tradition (Anderson 1991, 22).
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- Information
- Heritage, Ideology, and Identity in Central and Eastern EuropeContested Pasts, Contested Presents, pp. 1 - 20Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012
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