Dissonant heritage? The architecture of the Third Reich in Poland - ebook

Our atti­tude to the past is no longer rooted in pietism towards mon­u­ments; today it is shaped by a cul­ture of mem­ory as a sys­tem of the col­lec­tive mem­ory of a soci­ety. This is far more than the the­o­ries of Max Dvořák and Julius von Schlosser on _Kun­st­geschichte als Geis­tes­geschichte._¹

The cult of the past, so deeply rooted in Euro­pean tra­di­tion, is today evolv­ing into our ‘duty of mem­ory’, mem­ory both indi­vid­ual and col­lec­tive. The tragic expe­ri­ence of the nations of Cen­tral Europe in the twen­ti­eth cen­tury was such that this ‘duty of mem­ory’ presents a par­tic­u­lar chal­lenge. The Holo­caust, changes to so many polit­i­cal bor­ders, eth­nic cleans­ing, and total­i­tar­ian ide­olo­gies were all fac­tors in caus­ing the processes of restor­ing, con­struct­ing, and entrench­ing col­lec­tive mem­ory ini­ti­ated after 1989 to trans­form Cen­tral Europe into a vast bat­tle­field of mem­ory—with Poland at its epi­cen­tre. One major fac­tor in this bat­tle is cul­tural her­itage, and within it tan­gi­ble her­itage.

Cul­tural her­itage is not only the process of con­stant rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of the past and its instru­men­tal­iza­tion for con­tem­po­rary aims; it is also the sub­ject of con­flicts (as the exam­ple of bat­tle­fields demon­strates) and con­tro­ver­sies—between states, nations, reli­gions, social groups, regions, and many other cat­e­gories of stake­hold­ers. John E. Tun­bridge and Gre­gory J. Ash­worth even go so far as to claim that all her­itage is by def­i­n­i­tion a forum for debate and con­tro­versy.²

Dis­so­nant her­itage is a par­tic­u­lar prob­lem in Cen­tral Europe, where in the twen­ti­eth cen­tury polit­i­cal bor­ders shifted faster than cul­tural ones. Con­flicts of mem­ory, non-mem­ory, and the issue of dis­so­nant and unwanted her­itage are all part of the Pol­ish expe­ri­ence of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury. Inde­pen­dence meant not only cre­at­ing new state sym­bols, but also top­pling tes­ti­monies to for­eign dom­i­na­tion and erad­i­cat­ing them from the col­lec­tive mem­ory. Par­tic­u­larly dras­tic forms of destruc­tion of ‘alien’ sym­bols were seen after 1918 in the ter­ri­to­ries of the for­mer Prussian and Russian par­ti­tions. In Poz­nań, for instance, all Prussian mon­u­ments were demol­ished in 1919, includ­ing the statue of Otto von Bis­marck on what is now Mick­iewicz Square.³ While at that point such ‘turnover’ of mon­u­ments was some­thing of a sign of the times across Cen­tral Europe,⁴ the ‘_Bis­marck-Türme_’ in the lands of the Prussian par­ti­tion con­sti­tute a chap­ter of their own in the his­tory of dis­so­nant her­itage. In the lands of the Ger­man Empire (and beyond its bor­ders—even on other con­ti­nents), around 240 such ‘Bis­marck tow­ers’ were erected at the turn of the nine­teenth and twen­ti­eth cen­turies, many of them in the ter­ri­tory of the Sec­ond Pol­ish Repub­lic (i.e. Poland after its resti­tu­tion in Novem­ber 1918).⁵ The best known of these is the Bis­marck tower in Mysłow­ice, Sile­sia, erected in the imme­di­ate vicin­ity of ‘Three Emper­ors’ Cor­ner’, the point at which the Russian, Prussian, and Aus­tro-Hun­gar­ian Empires in their 1871–1918 bor­ders met. The stone bea­con, over 20 metres high, was sited on a rise at the con­flu­ence of the Black and White Przem­sza rivers. Fol­low­ing its cer­e­mo­nial open­ing in 1907, the tower rapidly became a tourist attrac­tion and a sig­nif­i­cant land­mark in the topog­ra­phy of the three empires’ bor­der­land region. When in 1922 it found itself in Pol­ish ter­ri­tory, it was renamed the Free­dom Tower and adorned with a bas relief por­tray­ing the insur­rec­tion­ist Tadeusz Koś­ciuszko. In the 1930s, how­ever, it was demol­ished at the behest of the Sile­sian gov­er­nor Michał Grażyński, and the stone used in the con­struc­tion of Katow­ice cathe­dral.⁶

Sym­bols of Russian impe­r­ial dom­i­na­tion in the lands of the for­mer Russian par­ti­tion elicited far stronger emo­tions. Many Russian Ortho­dox churches erected by the tsarist author­i­ties as a sym­bol of Russian rule and an instru­ment of Rus­si­fi­ca­tion fell vic­tim to the Poles’ rush to throw off the yoke of the par­ti­tions and to ‘de-Mus­cov­i­tize’ Poland’s towns and cities after World War I. After 1918, Ortho­dox church archi­tec­ture van­ished from the sky­lines of cities includ­ing Kalisz, Lublin, Płock, and Włocławek.⁷ The most dras­tic exam­ple of a con­flict of mem­ory was the demo­li­tion of the mon­u­men­tal Ortho­dox Cathe­dral of St Alexan­der Nevsky on Saski Square, in the heart of War­saw. It had been built in the years 1894–1912 on the ini­tia­tive of gen­eral gov­er­nor Yosif Hurka to plans by Leon­tii Benois, who was cho­sen as its archi­tect by Tsar Alexan­der III him­self.⁸ Even though the Ortho­dox cathe­dral had been intended as a ‘sym­bol of Russian rule for all time’,⁹ its demo­li­tion in the years 1924–1926 pro­voked tur­bu­lent debate and protests from intel­lec­tual cir­cles. Among those who voiced their dis­agree­ment was Ste­fan Żerom­ski, who pro­posed that the ‘unwanted build­ing’ be con­verted into a museum of the mar­tyr­dom of the Pol­ish nation.¹⁰

The dis­putes and con­flicts of mem­ory of the Sec­ond Pol­ish Repub­lic period were almost entirely eclipsed, how­ever, by the scale of the tragedy of World War II in the Pol­ish lands. The Yalta order and its polit­i­cal con­se­quences, which included another shift in the coun­try’s bor­ders and sev­eral large-scale eth­nic cleans­ing drives, fur­ther com­pli­cated the prob­lem of its dis­so­nant her­itage. The new def­i­n­i­tion of this issue in the post­war Pol­ish real­ity essen­tially equated unwanted her­itage (_unge­wolltes Erbe_) with the ‘strug­gle against all things Ger­man’. One good illus­tra­tion of the scale of anti-Ger­man emo­tions was the expec­ta­tions of the Pol­ish del­e­gates from Masuria to the first Lublin con­ven­tion of the Asso­ci­a­tion of Archi­tects of the Repub­lic of Poland (SARP), who in Novem­ber 1944 called for the ‘abo­li­tion, demo­li­tion, erad­i­ca­tion from the face of the earth of all for­mer Teu­tonic cas­tles, so that no trace of them be left, and their mem­ory be lost’.¹¹ The list of sites that fell vic­tim to this mode of think­ing is long, and still awaits ver­i­fi­ca­tion. It includes both medieval mon­u­ments and nine­teenth- and twen­ti­eth-cen­tury her­itage. One espe­cially dras­tic man­i­fes­ta­tion of this ‘strug­gle against all things Ger­man’ was the mass destruc­tion of Ger­man ceme­ter­ies in the west­ern and north­ern regions of the Peo­ple’s Repub­lic of Poland. This con­tin­ued into the 1970s, even in such large cities as Gdańsk and Wrocław.

Mod­ern her­itage man­age­ment the­o­ries draw atten­tion to issues includ­ing the dis­in­her­ited, since any action in the field of her­itage can engen­der prob­lems for groups sub­jected to aggres­sion or exclu­sion, or ignored.¹² Her­itage of the dis­in­her­ited and unin­her­ited her­itage are both ‘prod­ucts’ of the tragedy of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury: the Holo­caust and eth­nic cleans­ing. One prime exam­ple of this phe­nom­enon is Wrocław, the largest city not only in Europe, but any­where in the world, in which World War II caused a total pop­u­la­tion exchange.¹³ After 1945, Wrocław became a poly­gon of major con­ser­va­tion projects in a bid to recon­struct the ruined city; a true lab­o­ra­tory of her­itage as mem­ory and iden­tity. This is some­thing far more com­plex and del­i­cate than mon­u­ment con­ser­va­tion. For the first Pol­ish set­tlers who arrived there, the ruins of Ger­man Bres­lau were enemy her­itage. Over the ensu­ing decades the think­ing of suc­ces­sive gen­er­a­tions of Vratisla­vians around their new small home­land under­went a major evo­lu­tion: from treat­ing it as enemy her­itage, and an alien city, to accept­ing it as their own and recog­niz­ing its uni­ver­sal val­ues. The exam­ple of Wrocław can help us bet­ter to under­stand the power and impor­tance of intan­gi­ble her­itage, our mem­ory and iden­tity, and also the dynam­ics of the process that is her­itage.¹⁴

It is thus vital that we draw a clear dis­tinc­tion between two terms that are often—wrongly—used inter­change­ably: ‘mon­u­ment’ and ‘her­itage’, and also between two par­a­digms: the phi­los­o­phy of pro­tec­tion and the phi­los­o­phy of her­itage. Her­itage, in con­trast to the tra­di­tion­ally defined mon­u­ment, need not be beau­ti­ful. This is why Auschwitz is today the most leg­i­ble sym­bol of the her­itage of atroc­ity in the world (and is inscribed on the UNESCO World Her­itage List), and the Stal­in­ist Palace of Cul­ture and Sci­ence in War­saw is a prime exam­ple of dis­so­nant her­itage.¹⁵

The con­tem­po­rary bench­mark in state her­itage pro­tec­tion pol­icy in Europe may ulti­mately be expressed in the form of a few fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples. Salient among these is the equa­tion of the terms ‘cul­tural assets’ and ‘cul­tural her­itage’, and the cre­ation of the expres­sion ‘our com­mon her­itage’. This may pre­vent the threat of selec­tive pro­tec­tion of his­tor­i­cal sub­stance along ide­o­log­i­cal or polit­i­cal lines.¹⁶ But what is the real­ity like?

The most intrigu­ing exam­ple of dis­so­nant Third Reich her­itage in Kraków is Wawel.¹⁷ Build­ing no. 5 in par­tic­u­lar, such a dom­i­nant in the Wawel Hill land­scape, was the sub­ject of dis­cus­sions and design stud­ies, and the over­all plans for its devel­op­ment were approved by Hans Frank him­self in March 1941.¹⁸ In spite of the stigma of dis­so­nant her­itage and its polit­i­cally incor­rect pedi­gree, build­ing no. 5 in its form as the _Verwaltungsgebäude der Kan­zlei Burg_ sur­vived unal­tered as Wawel’s Third Reich her­itage through­out the Peo­ple’s Repub­lic of Poland and for well over a decade into the coun­try’s Third Repub­lic period. It was only in the years 2006–2009 that Hans Frank’s chan­cellery under­went spec­tac­u­lar alterations. The declared aim of this most recent chap­ter in the ‘strug­gle against all things Ger­man’ was ‘to remove, at least par­tially, the stigma of Ger­man activ­ity on the hill and improve the archi­tec­ture of such an impor­tant, rep­re­sen­ta­tive site’.¹⁹ More than sixty years on from the fall of the Third Reich, there is no longer space for the _Verwaltungsgebäude der Kan­zlei Burg_ at Wawel in view of its spe­cial sta­tus as a site of Pol­ish col­lec­tive mem­ory. It was the opin­ion of the Pol­ish con­ser­va­tors of the royal res­i­dence that archi­tec­tural her­itage from the Third Reich did not fit with the con­struct of national mem­ory that was the ‘sacred hill of the Poles’. It was con­tro­ver­sial, the more so that a site of such impor­tance to the nation as Wawel is a con­stituent ele­ment of the national iden­tity. In this way, Wawel as lab­o­ra­tory of Pol­ish col­lec­tive mem­ory has also become a touch­stone of our atti­tude towards the her­itage of the Third Reich. Are its mate­r­ial remains in Poland des­tined to remain dis­so­nant her­itage, and should they really be erased from mem­ory?

This is one of the ques­tions that we are ask­ing today. Have we matured to the answer? What is impor­tant is that we at the Inter­na­tional Cul­tural Cen­tre have matured to ask­ing it. It was first artic­u­lated dur­ing a con­fer­ence enti­tled ‘The Dis­so­nant Her­itage of the Third Reich in Poland’, which we orga­nized in part­ner­ship with the Munich Zen­tralin­sti­tut für Kun­st­geschichte in Decem­ber 2018. We asked it at the ICC not because our seat on Kraków’s Main Mar­ket Square was altered in 1940 to serve Hans Frank as the NSDAP head­quar­ters for the whole Gen­eral-gou­verne­ment (Gen­eral Gov­ern­ment).²⁰ We asked it because the ICC itself grew out of Poland’s 1989 trans­for­ma­tion pre­cisely in order to tackle dif­fi­cult issues in dia­logue with its neigh­bours. And our book enti­tled _Dis­so­nant her­itage? The archi­tec­ture of the Third Reich in Poland_ was born out of the same phi­los­o­phy_._ It con­tains both the fruits of that 2018 Kraków con­fer­ence and spe­cially com­mis­sioned texts.

In the Peo­ple’s Repub­lic of Poland period, the Third Reich was a sub­ject ignored by schol­ars and banned by the cen­sors. In the Pol­ish con­text, then, Piotr Krakowski’s book _Sztuka Trze­ciej Rzeszy_ (The art of the Third Reich), pub­lished by the ICC in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Irsa, was a pio­neer­ing move to break this taboo.²¹ In it, how­ever, Pro­fes­sor Krakowski did not touch on the issue of Nazi archi­tec­ture in Poland. Today, over a quar­ter-cen­tury later, we there­fore want to go fur­ther—the more so that this archi­tec­ture was addressed in major Ger­man stud­ies as long ago as in the 1990s. One impor­tant and infor­ma­tive out­come of this research is the ground­break­ing study by Niels Gutschow enti­tled _Ord­nungswahn. Architek­ten pla­nen im „eingedeutschten Osten” 1939–1945_, pub­lished in 2001.²²

A boun­ti­ful spe­cial­ist lit­er­a­ture has grown up around Third Reich urban plan­ning and archi­tec­ture, above all—under­stand­ably—in Ger­man and Eng­lish. Recently, this is also a field that has started to inter­est a grow­ing group of Pol­ish schol­ars at sev­eral uni­ver­si­ties. Their stud­ies have addressed not only Wrocław and Szczecin after 1933, but also other Pol­ish cities, includ­ing ones that in 1939 were incor­po­rated into Reich ter­ri­tory, such as Poz­nań, Łódź, Toruń, and Oświęcim, as well as Kraków and War­saw.²³ In 1945, then, post-war Poland com­prised regions that had been part of the Sec­ond Pol­ish Repub­lic, but also ter­ri­to­ries that had pre­vi­ously been an inte­gral part of the Ger­man Reich. This fact itself cre­ates a research per­spec­tive that is unique in Europe. In the future it would also be worth­while to work together with Poland’s east­ern neigh­bours—Belarus and Ukraine, for instance—to analyse those parts of the Sec­ond Pol­ish Repub­lic that as a result of the Ribben­trop-Molo­tov Pact came under Soviet occu­pa­tion in 1939. It was ‘only’ in 1941, after the Ger­man aggres­sion on the Soviet Union, that these regions became the sub­ject of fur­ther Nazi visions and plans. This applies above all to the Białys­tok dis­trict, which was sub­sumed into East Prus­sia, and ‘Dis­trikt Gal­izien’, with its cap­i­tal in Lviv, which in 1941 became part of the Gen­eral Gov­ern­ment.

Ger­man sub­ju­ga­tion plans and Nazi geno­cide pol­icy, which patic­u­larly in Poland were directly linked to the occu­piers’ urban plan­ning visions, caused the entire out­put of the Third Reich’s archi­tects to be qual­i­fied unequiv­o­cally as ‘her­itage of atroc­ity’. Nonethe­less, this must not lead to the entire issue being passed over and ignored in the study of twen­ti­eth-cen­tury art in Poland—which also cov­ers Ger­man urban plan­ning visions for Pol­ish cities. The major­ity of these never went fur­ther than the design stage, and the struc­tures actu­ally built by the Ger­mans between 1940 and 1944 have become part of the land­scape. It is thus worth tak­ing a closer look at these projects.

The need to under­take and pur­sue sys­tem­atic research extends both to the few pieces of mon­u­men­tal archi­tec­ture left behind by the Third Reich in Poland and to sites imma­nently con­nected with the his­tory of the Holo­caust. Sites of mem­ory have an par­tic­u­larly impor­tant role to play in the ‘her­itage game’. As cat­a­lysts of col­lec­tive mem­ory and iden­tity that have endured for gen­er­a­tions, com­pris­ing both mate­r­ial and intan­gi­ble ele­ments, these have become part of our social, cul­tural, and polit­i­cal mores.

Third Reich archi­tec­ture is one facet of the wider issue of dis­so­nant her­itage, but a par­tic­u­larly dis­so­nant one, and this is the rea­son for the espe­cial dif­fi­culty inher­ent in its study. It is impor­tant to recog­nize and artic­u­late the excep­tional sta­tus of Poland in respect of Third Reich archi­tec­ture. In the lands that were within the bor­ders of the Ger­man state prior to 1939, the Third Reich had already devel­oped an impres­sive build­ing stock in the 1930s. This included not only the char­ac­ter­is­tic archi­tec­ture of major cen­tres such as Wrocław, Szczecin, Opole, Gli­wice, Bytom, and the Free City of Gdańsk. The her­itage of the Third Reich as one ele­ment of its iden­tity in the Ger­man lands prior to 1939 com­prises town halls, the seats of author­i­ties and admin­is­tra­tive bod­ies of var­i­ous lev­els, court build­ings, mil­i­tary com­pounds, rail­way sta­tions, schools, etc., scat­tered through­out local­i­ties of all sizes in Sile­sia, Pomera­nia, and Warmia and Masuria. Among them were also sites of sym­bolic impor­tance to the ide­ol­ogy and pro­pa­ganda of the Third Reich, such as Annaberg (Góra Świętej Anny) and Tan­nen­berg (Olsz­tynek), as well as model Nazi train­ing cen­tres like Ordens­burg Krössinsee (Zło­cie­niec), and ambi­tious, large-scale infrastruc­ture invest­ments includ­ing motor­ways, canals, and sport­ing facil­i­ties, among them the Olympic sta­dium in Wrocław. This is undoubt­edly a reflec­tion, and even a sig­nif­i­cant ele­ment of the her­itage of the Third Reich that pre­dates the aggres­sion against Poland, and an intrigu­ing chap­ter in the his­tory of the rela­tion­ship between archi­tec­ture and ide­ol­ogy, and the total­i­tar­ian polit­i­cal sys­tem. Poland is also dot­ted with numer­ous ‘mon­u­ments’ to the bloody Ger­man occu­pa­tion, how­ever, many of which are mate­r­ial illus­tra­tion of the cat­e­gory ‘archi­tec­ture and crime’. In the Pol­ish ter­ri­to­ries taken by the Wehrma­cht in 1939 we have evi­dence of the colo­nial aspect of the Nazis’ plans for the for­mer Sec­ond Repub­lic of Poland. This includes not only built projects but also plans and designs that offer con­fir­ma­tion of Hitler’s crim­i­nal inten­tions, both in ter­ri­to­ries within the Sec­ond Repub­lic that were sub­sumed into the Reich in 1939, includ­ing cities such as Poz­nań, Katow­ice, Łódź, Toruń, Ciechanów, and Oświęcim, and in the Gen­eral Gov­ern­ment, where one key issue was that of Krakow’s unde­sired cap­i­tal sta­tus. The con­texts in which par­tic­u­lar struc­tures were erected also var­ied, as did the com­mit­ment and atti­tudes of Ger­man (and Pol­ish) archi­tects and urban plan­ners in their exe­cu­tion. The dis­cov­ery of this stock and its diver­sity is bur­dened with the stigma of the crime sym­bol­ized by the Holo­caust and mas­ter­minded by Hitler from his mil­i­tary com­mand cen­tre at the Wolf­ss­chanze near Kętrzyn.

Thus the area of the urban plan­ning solu­tions and archi­tec­ture left by the Third Reich in the ter­ri­tory of post-war Poland can­not be con­fined to research founded solely on tra­di­tional art his­tor­i­cal tech­niques. I firmly believe that the key to plumb­ing the essence of this issue is an approach based on cul­tural her­itage the­ory. Not inven­tor­iza­tion of arte­facts alone, but an inter­pre­ta­tion of them that tack­les their taboo, will help us to for­mu­late con­clu­sions and develop a cohe­sive stance on the her­itage left by the Third Reich in Poland.

How, then, can we for­mu­late our research pos­tu­lates today? What are the objec­tives and direc­tions of the stud­ies cur­rently being con­ducted in many cen­tres in Poland? In the first place we see a need for dia­logue, coop­er­a­tion, and geo­graph­i­cal sys­tem­ati­za­tion of research. The diver­sity of func­tions and archi­tec­tural gen­res that fall within the scope of our sci­en­tific inter­est invites the obvi­ous ques­tion: to what extent and in what areas should the dis­so­nant her­itage of the Third Reich be pro­tected? This book is an attempt to find answers to this and many other ques­tions. I hope that it con­sti­tutes a wor­thy record of the newest fruits of the work of Pol­ish and Ger­man aca­d­emics on the archi­tec­ture and urban design of the Third Reich inher­ited by post-war Poland, and inspires broader reflec­tion on the phe­nom­enon of dis­so­nant her­itage.

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1.

Jacek Purchla, ‘Naród–Dziedz­ictwo–Pamięć’, _Zagad­nienia Sądown­ictwa Kon­sty­tucyjnego_ nr 2 (4) (2012): p. 62.

2.

John E. Tun­bridge and Gre­gory John Ash­worth, _Dis­so­nant Her­itage. The Man­age­ment of the Past as a Resource in Con­flict_ (Chich­ester: Wiley, 1996), pas­sim.

3.

Witold Molik, ‘Straż nad Wartą. Pom­nik Bis­mar­cka w Poz­na­niu (1903–1919)’, _Kro­nika Miasta Poz­na­nia_ nr 2 (2001): pp. 91–108.

4.

See e.g. Zdeněk Hojda and Jiří Poko­rny, _Pom­niky a zapom­niky_ (Praha: Paseka, 1996); Zdeněk Hojda, ‘Pomník—svatyně národa’, in _Sacrum et pro­fanum. Sborník příspěvků ze stejnojmenného sym­pozia k prob­lem­at­ice 19. století_, edited by Marta Ottlová and Milan Pospíšil (Praha: KLP, 1998), pp. 54–64; Csaba Kiss, _Lekcja Europy Środ­kowej. Eseje i szkice_ (Kraków: Między­nar­o­dowe Cen­trum Kul­tury, 2009), pp. 151–157.

5.

Günter Kloss and Sieglinde Seele, _Bis­marck-Türme und Bis­marck-Säulen. Eine Bestand­sauf­nahme_ (Peters­berg: Imhof, 1997), pas­sim.

6.

Sieglinde Seele, _Lexikon der Bis­marck-Denkmäler: Türme, Stand­bilder, Büsten, Gedenk­tafeln_ (Peters­berg: Imhof, 2005), p. 282; Rafał Makała, _Nowoczesna praar­chitek­tura. Architek­ton­iczne pom­niki nar­o­dowe w wil­helmińs­kich Niem­czech (1888–1918)_ (Szczecin: Muzeum Nar­o­dowe w Szczecinie, 2015).

7.

Piotr Paszkiewicz, ‘Spór o cerk­wie pra­wosławne w II Rzeczy­pospo­litej. „Odmoskwianie” czy „pol­o­niza­cja”?’, in _Nacjon­al­izm w sztuce i his­torii sztuki 1789–1950_, edited by Dar­iusz Kon­stan­tynów, Robert Pasieczny, and Piotr Paszkiewicz (Warszawa: IS PAN, 1998), p. 228.

8.

Piotr Paszkiewicz, _Pod berłem Romanowów. Sztuka rosyjska w Warsza­wie. 1815–1915_ (Warszawa: IS PAN, 1991), pp. 115–120.

9.

Ibi­dem, p. 115.

10.

Ibi­dem, pp. 196–201.

11.

Marta Leś­ni­akowska, ‘Pol­ska his­to­ria sztuki i nacjon­al­izm’, in _Nacjon­al­izm w sztuce…_, op. cit., p. 44.

12.

Peter Howard, _Her­itage. Man­age­ment, Inter­pre­ta­tion, Iden­tity_ (Lon­don–New York: Con­tin­uum Inter­na­tional Pub­lish­ing, 2003), pp. 211–212.

13.

Gre­gor Thum, _Obce miasto Wrocław 1945 i potem_ (Wrocław: Via Nova, 2005), pas­sim.

14.

J. Purchla, ‘Naród–Dziedz­ictwo–Pamięć’, op. cit.: pp. 63–64.

15.

Jeremi T. Kró­likowski, ‘Meta­mor­fozy architek­tury impe­ri­al­nej—od soboru na placu Saskim do Pałacu Kul­tury i Nauki’, in _Kul­tura i poli­tyka. Wpływ poli­tyki rusy­fika­cyjnej na kul­turę zachod­nich rubieży Imperium Rosyjskiego (1772–1915)_, edited by Dar­iusz Kon­stan­tynów and Piotr Paszkiewicz (Warszawa: IS PAN, 1994), pp. 273–279.

16.

J. Purchla, ‘Naród–Dziedz­ictwo–Pamięć’, op. cit.: p. 64.

17.

This sub­ject is addressed more broadly in the arti­cle: Jacek Purchla, ‘Wawel – dziedz­ictwo kłopotliwe?’, in _Velis quod pos­sis. Stu­dia z his­torii sztuki ofi­arowane Pro­fe­sorowi Janowi Ostrowskiemu_, edited by Andrzej Betlej et al. (Kraków: Towarzystwo Naukowe Soci­etas Vis­tu­lana, 2016), pp. 491–498.

18.

Jacek Purchla, _Miasto i poli­tyka. Przy­padki Krakowa_ (Kraków: Uni­ver­si­tas, 2018), p. 122.

19.

Jad­wiga Gwiz­dałówna, ‘Wawel pod­czas oku­pacji niemieck­iej 1939–1945. Prze-miany architek­tury. Echa architek­tury nazis­towskiej’, _Rocznik Krakowski_ t. 77 (2011): p. 144; eadem, _Architek­tura Wawelu w cza­sie oku­pacji niemieck­iej 1939–1945_ (Kraków: Zamek Królewski na Wawelu, 2019).

20.

Żanna Komar, ‘Meta­mor­fozy’, in: _Rynek Główny 25. Dzieje jed­nego adresu_, edited by Jacek Purchla (Kraków: Między­nar­o­dowe Cen­trum Kul­tury, 2019), pp. 112–126.

21.

Piotr Krakowski, _Sztuka Trze­ciej Rzeszy_ (Kraków: Między­nar­o­dowe Cen­trum Kul­tury, 1994).

22.

Niels Gutschow, _Ord­nungswahn. Architek­ten pla­nen im „eingedeutschten Osten” 1939–1945_ (Gütersloh–Berlin–Basel–Boston: Birkhäuser, 2001). In the 1990s, Janusz Dobesz under­took a study of the her­itage of the Third Reich in ter­ri­to­ries that became part of the Pol­ish state in 1945, in the form of a mono­graph of Wrocław archi­tec­ture dat­ing from the period 1933–1945. Cf. Janusz L. Dobesz, _Wrocławska architek­tura spod znaku swastyki na tle budown­ictwa III Rzeszy_ (Wrocław: Ofi­cyna Wydawnicza Politech­niki Wrocławskiej, 1999).

23.

One impor­tant deliv­er­able of these stud­ies is the col­lec­tive work com­piled and edited by Karolina Jara and Alek­san­dra Parad­owska and pub­lished in Poz­nań in 2019, which offers an overview of the cur­rent state of research in Pol­ish art his­tor­i­cal and archi­tec­ture cir­cles into the legacy of the Third Reich in Poland. Cf. Karolina Jara, Alek­san­dra Parad­owska, eds., _Urban­istyka i architek­tura okresu III Rzeszy w Polsce_ (Poz­nań: Wydawnictwo Nauka i Innowacje, 2019). Eng­lish ver­sion avail­able online: www.kun­st­texte.de, Ost­blick, Archive, Aus­gabe 2019.3 .NAZI ARCHI­TEC­TURE AND THE CON­CEPT OF DIS­SO­NANT HER­ITAGE (_DIS­SO­NANTES ERBE_)

Nazi archi­tec­ture and the con­cept of
dis­so­nant her­itage (_dis­so­nantes Erbe_)

Chris­tian Fuhrmeis­ter

CHRIS­TIAN FUHRMEIS­TER, assis­tant pro­fes­sor, ini­ti­ates and coor­di­nates research projects at the Zen­tralin­sti­tut für Kun­st­geschichte in Munich. His work mainly focuses on the art, archi­tec­ture, and art his­tory of the 20th cen­tury (from Max Beck­mann to war ceme­ter­ies, National Social­ist art, and prove­nance and translo­ca­tion research). In 2013 he defended his post-doc­toral dis­ser­ta­tion on the Ger­man mil­i­tary office for the pro­tec­tion of art in Italy in the years 1943–1945. He lec­tures at the Lud­wig-Max­i­m­il­ians-Universität in Munich.This short paper sets out to offer a gen­eral reflec­tion upon the impli­ca­tions of the con­cept of ‘dis­so­nant her­itage’ for deal­ing with (traces, frag­ments, rem­nants, and ruins of) Nazi archi­tec­ture. Per­haps these con­sid­er­a­tions can con­tribute to the devel­op­ment of an aca­d­emic per­spec­tive as well as the for­ma­tion of a cer­tain moral atti­tude con­cern­ing those build­ings that are present and vis­i­ble on the ter­ri­tory of today’s _Rzecz­pospolita Pol­ska_.

In a cer­tain sense, one can argue, all cul­tural her­itage is pro­foundly dis­so­nant, as it is the prod­uct of gen­uinely asym­met­ri­cal power rela­tions. At no point in human his­tory can we speak of a per­fectly bal­anced, mul­ti­lat­er­ally acclaimed prod­uction of cul­ture for the ben­e­fit of all. Cul­ture is, by def­i­n­i­tion, the prod­uct or by-prod­uct of a soci­ety with a dis­tinct social, eco­nomic, and mil­i­tary order. As such, cul­ture has almost always been par­tial and par­ti­san, biased, unfair, unjust, one-sided. It is dis­cor­dance that has always shaped cul­tural her­itage most rad­i­cally, not accor­dance. It has always been mil­i­tary or aris­to­cratic rulers, polit­i­cal or admin­is­tra­tive gov­er­nors, reli­gious lead­ers, wealthy mer­chants and bankers, and other pow­er­ful indi­vid­u­als or groups with actual or assumed author­ity and supe­ri­or­ity who have decided upon the prod­uction, dis­tri­b­u­tion, and recep­tion of cul­ture, cul­tural arte­facts, and cul­tural her­itage, and they have always done so alone, with­out con­sul­ta­tion or coun­sel, and of course with­out ask­ing for approval.

Con­se­quently, all her­itage is, in a sense, fun­da­men­tally dis­so­nant, rep­re­sent­ing some voices while sup­press­ing oth­ers.¹ So why is the con­cept of dis­so­nant her­itage such a rel­a­tively new phe­nom­enon, dis­cussed only since the 1990s in broader aca­d­emic cir­cles? Why is it mean­ing­ful, help­ful, and needed?

One key rea­son is that most efforts to con­cep­tu­al­ize the rel­e­vance of cul­tural her­itage adopt a fun­da­men­tally affir­ma­tive approach, hold­ing that a given set­tle­ment is char­ac­ter­is­tic for the colo­nial impe­tus of the early inhab­i­tants of its region, or that a build­ing embod­ies the key traits of the local peo­ple, or that the col­lec­tive iden­tity is easy to see in the way a cer­tain motif in art or crafts has remained vir­tu­ally unchanged over the cen­turies, and so forth. Here, her­itage—and by that, the past in gen­eral—is seen as pos­i­tive in the sense that it is a man­i­fes­ta­tion of a cer­tain (some­times fic­ti­tious) col­lec­tive or national iden­tity. Essen­tially,

his­tory has been gath­ered up and pre­sented as her­itage—as mean­ing­ful pasts that should be remem­bered; and more and more build­ings and other sites have been called on to act as wit­nesses of the past. Many kinds of groups have sought to ensure that they are pub­licly recog­nized through iden­ti­fy­ing and dis­play­ing ‘their’ her­itage.²

The his­tory of mon­u­ment pro­tec­tion proves that this atti­tude has been for­ma­tive and deci­sive;³ the belief that her­itage thus serves a unique and dis­tinct social pur­pose—fos­ter­ing pride and self-esteem, built on an autochtho­nous tra­di­tion—was ubiq­ui­tous for cen­turies and is still very wide­spread.

Dis­so­nant her­itage, by con­trast, acknowl­edges that the past is, more often than not, a his­tory of con­flicts, pain, prob­lems, losses. This ren­ders iden­tity build­ing—in the sense of Hob­s­bawm’s _Inven­tion of Tra­di­tion_ (1983)—while not com­pletely impos­si­ble, much more prob­lem­atic and con­stantly demand­ing. The con­cept of dis­so­nant her­itage pro­duces a spe­cific under­stand­ing of the past, and its accep­tance requires a spe­cific mind­set. As such, it is a crit­i­cal con­cept—partly because ‘pol­i­tics of the past’ (_Ver­gan­gen­heit­spoli­tik_, i.e the way a par­tic­u­lar image of the past is devel­oped, trans­mit­ted, and com­mu­ni­cated⁴), ‘pol­i­tics of mem­ory’, and ‘iden­tity pol­i­tics’ need to be reflected upon, analysed, inter­preted, and under­stood. As a mat­ter of fact, seen in this per­spec­tive, all cul­tural her­itage is noth­ing but a mate­ri­al­iza­tion of much larger world views, indeed con­cepts and man­i­fes­ta­tions of (chang­ing) def­i­n­i­tions of mankind. Con­se­quently, remem­ber­ing as such has been called dis­so­nant: Whose mem­o­ries and whose her­itage are addressed, and whose mem­o­ries and her­itage are not rep­re­sented at all?⁵

That said, the prob­lems asso­ci­ated with dis­so­nant her­itage are intri­cately linked to ‘uses of the past’, as they mir­ror his­tor­i­cal and cur­rent con­flicts of own­er­ship, pat­ri­mony, and cul­tural her­itage. Again, this is a mat­ter of nar­ra­tives, and these are usu­ally shaped by the dynam­ics of present-day atti­tudes, beliefs, and con­vic­tions. ‘Putting the past to use’ can take var­i­ous forms: affirm­ing or reaffirm­ing col­lec­tive iden­ti­ties, evok­ing or enforc­ing national iden­ti­ties; attribut­ing mean­ing, dig­nity, nobil­ity, and also com­mer­cial or mar­ket value; strength­en­ing regional or eth­nic affil­i­a­tions and tra­di­tions in a com­pet­i­tive, non-inclu­sive way; con­trol­ling, shap­ing, and defin­ing present and future con­cepts of col­lec­tive iden­tity.

It is within this larger field of—ulti­mately polit­i­cal—def­i­n­i­tions, eval­u­a­tions, and assess­ments that both con­cepts: cul­tural her­itage and dis­so­nant her­itage, are sit­u­ated. For good rea­sons, dis­so­nant her­itage has out­paced other denom­i­na­tions like dif­fi­cult, dark, or uncom­fort­able her­itage: it is more pre­cise in acknowl­edg­ing the diver­sity of per­spec­tives, and it accepts these dif­fer­ences as a given. In their sem­i­nal study _Dis­so­nant Her­itage. The Man­age­ment of the Past as a Resource in Con­flict_—pub­lished in 1996 and writ­ten dur­ing the Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001) and the col­lapse of the Apartheid regime in South Africa in 1994—John E. Tun­bridge and Gre­gory J. Ash­worth have also high­lighted the spe­cific prob­lems asso­ci­ated with what they call ‘her­itage of atroc­ity’, linked to human trauma and suf­fer­ing. The Nazi archi­tec­ture in Poland is cer­tainly asso­ci­ated with this type of ‘delib­er­ately inflicted extreme human suf­fer­ing that can be called atroc­ity’. They state that ‘the dis­so­nance cre­ated by the inter­pre­ta­tion of atroc­ity is not only pecu­liarly intense and last­ing but also par­tic­u­larly com­plex for vic­tims, per­pe­tra­tors and observers’.⁶

This assess­ment is entirely cor­rect, and it poses a num­ber of prob­lems—for pol­i­tics and admin­is­tra­tions at large, at the national level, on the level of fed­eral states and munic­i­pal­i­ties, for insti­tu­tions of cul­tural her­itage like offices for the preser­va­tion and pro­tec­tion of mon­u­ments and his­toric build­ings, and for the human­i­ties in gen­eral and art and archi­tec­tural his­tory in par­tic­u­lar: What ele­ments of the past deserve preser­va­tion, inves­ti­ga­tion, and analy­sis? What is included and what is excluded from both the canon and mem­ory? Why pre­serve the archi­tec­ture of a con­cen­tra­tion camp, why that of an exter­mi­na­tion camp? If the col­lec­tive iden­tity is built on suc­cess­ful trans­for­ma­tion (after all), then why bother with what has been over­come?

Hence, look­ing at Nazi archi­tec­ture from the per­spec­tive of dis­so­nant her­itage inevitably boils down to ques­tions of def­i­n­i­tion and con­trol, of shap­ing an image of the past, of inter­pre­ta­tion and the con­struc­tion of nar­ra­tives—in short, to ‘power strug­gles involved in nego­ti­a­tions over col­lec­tive mem­ory’.⁷ In turn, analysing these processes of attribut­ing mean­ing to Nazi archi­tec­ture in the past 75 years ulti­mately pro­vides ‘a deeper under­stand­ing of how post­war Ger­man soci­ety has dealt with the Nazi legacy’. ⁸ In doing so, cur­rent con­cerns, present fears and assump­tions, recent expe­ri­ences, and lat­est devel­op­ments invari­ably influ­ence our per­cep­tions of processes that ended long ago, and of those of their prod­ucts that remain vis­i­ble and tan­gi­ble today.⁹ It is vital that our ana­lytic frame­work (our frame of ref­er­ence) take account of this dynamic com­plex­ity of feed­back (_Rückkopplung_) processes, of per­ma­nently over­lap­ping, mul­ti­lay­ered, inter­twined, and inter­de­pen­dent inter­ac­tions.¹⁰

A case in point is, not sur­pris­ingly, the reg­u­lar or con­tin­u­ous resur­fac­ing of cor­re­spond­ing debates in Ger­many. Look­ing only at 2019 and 2020, I want to briefly men­tion three debates or dis­courses. The first is the issue of ‘Rechte Räume. Bericht einer Euro­pareise’, pub­lished on 24 May 2019 in the jour­nal _Arch+ Zeitschrift für Architek­tur und Urban­is­mus_, and com­pris­ing reports on the ‘spa­tial pol­i­tics of right-wing pop­ulism’ (and, by con­se­quence, their rela­tion to his­tor­i­cal exam­ples of fas­cist and Nazi archi­tec­ture). This insti­gated a heated dis­cus­sion in the press, prompt­ing the pub­li­ca­tion of a sep­a­rate, 24-page sup­ple­ment, _Arch + fea­tures 96_, in Octo­ber 2019, assem­bling and doc­u­ment­ing the reac­tions to the orig­i­nal piece. The sec­ond was the minor media storm that blew up around plans to extend the small museum in the house and stu­dio of Johann Michael Bossard (1874–1950) in Jeste­burg, south of Ham­burg, due to the fact that, accord­ing to some crit­ics in the press, the artist’s affil­i­a­tion with ‘völkish’ ideas and ide­olo­gies had not been prop­erly addressed.¹¹ The third and final exam­ple is that of the debates con­cern­ing the sculp­tures in the Berlin Olympic Sta­dium, ignited by the arti­cle ‘Weg mit diesen Skulp­turen!’ (‘Away with these sculp­tures!’) by Peter Strieder in _Die Zeit_ (Nr. 21, 14. Mai 2020: p. 43). From 1996 to 2004 Strieder (b. 1952) was respon­si­ble for urban devel­op­ment in Berlin. His arti­cle cul­mi­nated in the sug­ges­tion that the entire area of the for­mer Reichss­port­feld be ‘denaz­i­fied’ (_ent­naz­i­fiziert_) by strip­ping it of all sculp­tures, fres­coes, murals, and by clear­ing away the ‘Maifeld samt Führertribüne’ and trans­form­ing it into a ‘lively park for sport and leisure’ (‘zu trans­formieren in einen lebendi­gen Sport- und Freizeit­park’). Strieder’s argu­ments pro­voked many let­ters to the edi­tor and fur­ther opin­ion­ated arti­cles,¹² includ­ing a report in _The Times_ (29 May 2020) by David Cross­land, enti­tled ‘Berlin split over calls to bull­doze Aryan stat­ues at Hitler’s sta­dium’.

In a nut­shell, these three recent—unre­lated—debates neatly indi­cate the cur­rent state of affairs (in Ger­many): Nazi ide­ol­ogy and archi­tec­ture—whether in its more or less orig­i­nal state, or in slightly mod­i­fied, heav­ily altered, or almost com­pletely changed form—remains the fun­da­men­tal touch­stone for estab­lish­ing a post-total­i­tar­ian posi­tion vis-à-vis the past. Today, easy, sim­ple, reduc­tive views meet with ardent responses, and are chal­lenged and refuted. But the out­come is open, and it remains a per­ma­nent task to develop a respon­si­ble atti­tude. The her­itage of atroc­ity is inex­tri­ca­bly linked to geospa­tial con­fig­u­ra­tions like build­ings and infrastruc­tures. The idea of dis­so­nant her­itage—which always includes stew­ard­ship of rem­nants and remains of the influ­ences of for­eign forces and pow­ers, and of the debris of occu­pa­tion regimes—seems to be a very use­ful con­cept, espe­cially since it poses vital ques­tions about estab­lish­ing and main­tain­ing (col­lec­tive and indi­vid­ual) iden­tity in a fun­da­men­tally dynamic, migra­tory, shift­ing, unsta­ble world with­out secu­rity or sta­bil­ity.¹³

------------------------------------------------------------------------

1.

Cf. Višnja Kisić, _Gov­ern­ing Her­itage Dis­so­nance. Promises and Real­i­ties of Selected Cul­tural Poli­cies_ (Ams­ter­dam: Euro­pean Cul­tural Foun­da­tion, 2016), pp. 54–57.

2.

Sharon Mac­don­ald, _Dif­fi­cult Her­itage. Nego­ti­at­ing the Nazi past in Nurem­berg and beyond_ (Lon­don: Rout­ledge, 2009), p. 1.

3.

Cf. Ingrid Scheur­mann, _Kon­turen und Kon­junk­turen der Denkmalpflege. Zum Umgang mit baulichen Relik­ten der Ver­gan­gen­heit_ (Köln–Weimar–Wien: Böhlau, 2018).

4.

The clas­sic exam­ple is Nor­bert Frei, _Ver­gan­gen­heit­spoli­tik. Die Anfänge der Bun­desre­pub­lik und die NS-Ver­gan­gen­heit_ (München: DTV, 1996).

5.

Cf. the call for papers: ‘Dis­so­nantes Erin­nern. Umkämpft, ver­han­delt, aus­ge­grenzt: Erin­nerun­gen an den Nation­al­sozial­is­mus, den Holo­caust, den Zweiten Weltkrieg und seine Fol­gewirkun­gen, 29.10.2020–30.10.2020 Duis­burg’, in _H-Soz-Kult_, 15.11.2019, www.hsozkult.de/event/id/ter­mine-41783 .

6.

John E. Tun­bridge und Gre­gory J. Ash­worth, _Dis­so­nant Her­itage. The Man­age­ment of the Past as a Resource in Con­flict_ (Chich­ester: John Wiley & Sons, 1996), pp. 94 and 95.

7.

Dan Stone, review of Sharon Mac­don­ald, _Dif­fi­cult Her­itage_, op. cit., _Museum and Soci­ety_ 8 (1), March 2010: pp. 61–62, here p. 61.

8.

Paul B. Jaskot and Gavriel D. Rosen­feld, ‘Urban Space and the Nazi Past in Post­war Ger­many’, in _Beyond Berlin. Twelve Ger­man Cities Con­front the Nazi Past_, edited by Gavriel D. Rosen­feld and Paul B. Jaskot (Ann Arbor: Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan Press, 2008), pp. 1–21, here p. 2.

9.

Inter­est­ingly, in their intro­duc­tion, ‘Europe, Her­itage and Mem­ory—Dis­so­nant Encoun­ters and Explo­rations’, Iris van Huis, Sigrid Kaasik-Krogerus, Tuuli Lähdesmäki, and Lil­iana Ellena jointly state that ‘con­tem­po­rary chal­lenges’ were what prompted them ‘to ana­lyze, inter­pret, and rethink’, in Tuuli Lähdesmäki, Luisa Passerini, Sigrid Kaasik-Krogerus, Iris van Huis, eds., _Dis­so­nant Her­itages and Mem­o­ries in Con­tem­po­rary Europe_ (Cham: Pal­grave Macmil­lan, 2019), pp. 1–20, here p. 9.

10.

An instruc­tive exam­ple of how chang­ing com­mem­o­ra­tive mas­ter nar­ra­tives of mem­ory and counter-mem­ory influ­ence the way dis­so­nant her­itage is per­ceived is pro­vided by the archae­ol­o­gist Gilly Carr in her arti­cle ‘Occu­pa­tion her­itage, com­mem­o­ra­tion and mem­ory in Guernsey and Jer­sey’, _His­tory and Mem­ory. Stud­ies in Rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the Past_ (Vol. 24, Issue 1, Spring-Sum­mer 2012): pp. 87–117.

11.

Of the national news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines, two that should be men­tioned are _Die Zeit_ and _Der Spiegel_; many rel­e­vant facts are men­tioned in the col­lec­tive review by Rolf Keller of Gudula Mayr, ed.: ‘“Über dem Abgrund des Nichts”. Die Bossards in der Zeit des Nation­al­sozial­is­mus’ (= _Schriften der Kunststätte Bossard_; 17), Jeste­burg 2018, and Gudula Mayr, ed.: ‘Johann Bossard. Texte aus dem Nach­lass. Pro­gram­ma­tis­che Schriften und Reise­berichte’ (= _Schriften der Kunststätte Bossard_; 16), Jeste­burg 2018, in _ArtHist.net_, 20.04.2020 (https://arthist.net/reviews/22957, accessed 14 Sept. 2020); cf. https://www.bossard.de/bossard-84/forschung.html.

12.

See e.g. Hans Koll­hoff, ‘Lasst die Skulp­turen ste­hen!’, _Die Zeit_, Nr. 22, 20. Mai 2020: p. 54; Volk­win Marg, ‘Aufklärung statt Skulp­turen­streit’, _Die Zeit_, Nr. 23, 28. Mai 2020: p. 46; and var­i­ous let­ters to the edi­tors in that issue: p. 16.

13.

In this regard, work in the her­itage field might profit from reflec­tions on memo­ri­als and doc­u­men­ta­tion cen­tres, see e.g. Volkhard Knigge, ‘Tatort – Lei­den­sort. Fried­hof – Gedenkstätte. Museum. Noti­zen für eine KZ-Gedenkstättenarbeit der Zukunft’, in _Schriften der Kurhes­sis­chen Gesellschaft für Kunst und Wis­senschaft_, Heft 3 (Kas­sel: Kurhes­sis­che Gesellschaft für Kunst und Wis­senschaft, 1999), p. 23: ‘Nicht Sinns­tiftung kann deshalb die Auf­gabe von Gedenkstätten sein, son­dern Arbeit an der Gewahrw­er­dung der Unselbstverständlichkeit des Guten, gefaßt etwa als Unselbstverständlichkeit von Frei­heit, Menschenwürde, Tol­er­anz und Demokratie. So gese­hen ver­weist Gedenkstättenarbeit nicht auf wie immer verfaßte his­torisch-poli­tis­che Gebor­gen­heit­skon­struk­tio­nen – die am Ende immer mehr oder weniger ide­ol­o­gisch und entmündigend sind – son­dern auf unteil­bare Werte und Men­schen­rechte, d.h. auf Zer­brech­liches und Ver­spiel­bares, insofern Werte und Men­schen­rechte nur wirk­lich sind, insofern sie gelebt und gesellschaftlich akzep­tiert und prak­tiziert wer­den.’ (‘There­fore, the task of memo­r­ial sites can­not be to cre­ate mean­ing, but rather to work on the aware­ness of the non-self-evi­dent nature of good, for exam­ple as the non-self-evi­dent nature of free­dom, human dig­nity, tol­er­ance, and democ­racy. Seen in this light, the work that is being done in the con­text of memo­r­ial sites does not refer to the usual his­tor­i­cal-polit­i­cal con­struc­tions of secu­rity—which in the end are always more or less ide­o­log­i­cal and inca­pac­i­tat­ing—but to indi­vis­i­ble val­ues and human rights, i.e. to the frag­ile and playable, in so far as val­ues and human rights are only real, in so far as they are lived and socially accepted and prac­tised.’)THE ASYM­ME­TRY OF CUL­TURAL MEM­ORY (_ERIN­NERUNGSKUL­TUR_). POL­ISH AND GER­MAN PROB­LEMS WITH DIS­SO­NANT HER­ITAGE

The asym­me­try of cul­tural mem­ory
(_Erin­nerungskul­tur_). Pol­ish and Ger­man
prob­lems with dis­so­nant her­itage

Robert Traba

ROBERT TRABA, pro­fes­sor of social sci­ences and his­to­rian work­ing at the Insti­tute of Polit­i­cal Stud­ies at the Pol­ish Acad­emy of Sci­ences (PAN). Founder (1990) and for many years the chair­man/edi­tor in chief of the Olsz­tyn-based peri­od­i­cal _Borus­sia_. Founder and direc­tor (2006–2018) of the PAN Cen­tre for His­tor­i­cal Research in Berlin, hon­orary pro­fes­sor at the Freie Universität in Berlin. In 2007–2020 co-chair of the Pol­ish-Ger­man Text­book Com­mit­tee. His main areas of research inter­est are cul­tural his­tory, social mem­ory, and the bor­der­lands of Cen­tral Europe. His most recent pub­li­ca­tions are _The Past in the Present. The Con­struc­tion of Pol­ish His­tory_ (2015), _Die deutsche Besatzung Polens. Essays zur Erin­nerungskul­tur_ (2020), and (ed.) _Niedokońc­zona wojna? „Pol­skość” jako zadanie pokole­niowe_ (The Unfin­ished War? “Pol­ish­ness” as a Gen­er­a­tional Task) (2020).