Tourism Conflicts and Conflict Tourism: Curating “Holoscapes” in Europe’s Age of Crisis

The notion of a European heritage has become one of the main pillars of the EU’s cultural policy. However, instead of the political wish for a European shared patrimony, Europe faces a highly conflicted past, which has become for many Europeans a contested heritage with strong repercussions for the backward-looking notion of European culture. For, there is no heritage without culture and no culture without conflict. One’s heritage also defines one’s identity, and the willingness of Europeans, and “Western” tourists more in general, to identify with deplorable and painful pasts makes Holocaust heritage tourism into a kind of healing experience. More than being a matter of shared values, the conservation of such painful pasts deals with their present uses. In other words, the meaning of heritage is produced by politics of memory and identity as much as by the performative experience of heritage tourists and other stakeholders with often conflicted interests and competing memories. This has resulted in many parts of Europe (and beyond) in what I would call urban “Holoscapes”, where visitors now walk in the footsteps of victims in a virtually re-enacted site without Jews.