Figure 4 - uploaded by Rob van der Laarse
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1 Bogdan Bogdanović's Stone Flower monument (1966).
Source publication
Van der Laarse examines competing narratives of the heritage and commemoration of the crimes of Nazism, Communism and the Holocaust as presented on different former WWII concentration camps in post-1989 Western and Eastern Europe. After the fall of Berlin Wall (1989) and Srebrenica Massacre (1995) the assumption of the Holocaust as a common Europea...
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Despite daunting circumstances, history is full of stories of men and women incarcerated by the Nazis, who risked their lives to save others. In some cases, the moral dilemma faced by these people presented an unquestionable challenge-particularly for those in the medical profession who had taken an oath to save life. This paper presents the dramat...
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Citations
... After all, scholars have long called for a decentralization of Holocaust remembrance, proposing that we "return to Oświęcim while at the same time moving beyond Auschwitz. " 15 As the primary location of Holocaust-themed art, Auschwitz and its visual currencies have also dominated the aesthetic canon of the contemporary comic book, a phenomenon which is also prominent in cases of contemporary non-testimonial work by non-Jewish artists. 16 My interest in Fantl also relates to his work's sequential format, which the other artists applied only loosely, and his penchant for satire, which is fairly rare in works from the camps and ghettos. ...
This article examines the art of Pavel Fantl (1903–1945), a Czech Jewish doctor whom the Nazis murdered shortly before the end of the Second World War. Fantl left behind approximately eighty drawings. Despite being created under difficult conditions in the Terezín Ghetto, his art stands out for its use of humor and satire. This article argues that Fantl’s work not only testified to the suffering and persecution of Jews, but also reflected the wider visual conventions of the time, in particular the satirical cartoon and comic strip of the 1920s and 1930s. In addition, by tracing the material practices surrounding Fantl’s art, this paper shows how the creation and survival of drawings from the ghettos hinged on strong interpersonal bonds with non-Jews beyond the ghetto walls.
... In order to delineate the scope of spatial appropriation offered by Israeli Artscaping artists as well as to learn more about its potential, an examination of Israel's tangled relationship with diasporic spatiality -a complex relationship that plays a significant role in Israeli Jewish identity -is required. It is imperative to look at the ways in which memories, and to some extent what Hirsch (2012) calls 'postmemory', associated with pre-1948 Jewish diasporic spatiality in Europe are 'hijacked' in the Israeli public sphere for nationalist purposes beyond Holocaust commemoration (van der Laarse, 2013). To illustrate this process, I draw on Rob van der Laarse's work on Europe's many terrorscapes; namely, landscapes that were the site of violence and terror, and which consequently trigger memories and narrative struggles that are used -and sometimes abused -by various appropriators for a variety of reasons; the framing of such landscapes according to specific 'spacetime' settings of terror leads to a situation in which traumatic memories compete with other memories, the latter often being left with no room to be collectively remembered and commemorated within the public realm. ...
... These voyages are designed to memorialise the Jewish past and to commemorate the Holocaust. However, keeping in mind that heritage is never neutral, but is made by someone, and for someone (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998), especially heritage that is a product of war and conflicts -in this case, heritage that participates in the transformation of 'holocaustic' landscapes into tourist terrorscape-destinations (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998;van der Laarse, 2013van der Laarse, , 2018) -the in-situ encounter with European landscapes included in Israel's many rootsjourneys can also be interpreted as nationhood (re-)appropriation by the national community of Jewish survivors. As part of this 'pilgrimage of national identity' (Feldman, 2008: 254), diasporic landscapes are consumed and reclaimed by acts such as the carrying of Israeli flags by the youthful participants. ...
What does it mean to represent trauma, heritage and/or terror-related landscapes in the present day? This article aims to offer a new perspective on the ability of such representations to initiate a journey by means of artistic creation; the author refers to such artworks as ‘ Artscapes’, claiming that Artscapes make feasible a seemingly contradictory act: on one hand, ‘time travel’ that assists in commemorating the past(s), and on the other, ‘space travel’ that has the ability to challenge collective memories, narratives and even myths associated with that past(s). By focusing on a growing trend towards diasporic Artscapes within Israeli art as a test case of this genre, the article explores the potential possessed by such works to negotiate ‘diasporic memories’ within Zionism’s national ethos.
... 65 According to van der Laarse, working under the fetish of 'landscape authenticity' translated into a need to frame heritage sites by narrowing their 'biography' to a unique national heritage, leading to an easy metamorphosis into conflicting notions of authenticity and identity. 66 Accordingly, the 'Zionist trees' manifest the core narratives 'told' by the 'biblical landscape' . Similarly to the German process of manipulating the image of the 'German forest' into one charged with a national meaning, the image of the 'biblical landscape' became a means of Zionist propaganda featuring the 'nationalization of nature' as well as 'naturalization of the nation' in both pre-and post-1948 Israel. ...
... Sites often seek to promote identification by means of name-giving, as in the case of a burned Westerbork barrack, used as a farm shed, which became known in the international press as the so-called "Anne Frank barrack". After realising the symbolic weight of that association the Dutch parliament voted immediately for a resolution "to return" the original barracks back to Westerbork as an orphaned heritage of the Holocaust, even though most of them had been sold to farmers in the late 1960s as "Moluccan" barracks ( van Ooijen & Raaijmakers, 2012;van der Laarse, 2013b). For what was demolished then was known as the Moluccan camp Schattenberg, where migrant families from the former East-Indies were housed since 1950. ...
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.
Keywords: conflict, heritage, tourism, Holoscapes, Europe
... Sites often seek to promote identification by means of name-giving, as in the case of a burned Westerbork barrack, used as a farm shed, which became known in the international press as the so-called "Anne Frank barrack". After realising the symbolic weight of that association the Dutch parliament voted immediately for a resolution "to return" the original barracks back to Westerbork as an orphaned heritage of the Holocaust, even though most of them had been sold to farmers in the late 1960s as "Moluccan" barracks ( van Ooijen & Raaijmakers, 2012;van der Laarse, 2013b). For what was demolished then was known as the Moluccan camp Schattenberg, where migrant families from the former East-Indies were housed since 1950. ...
Van der Laarse shows how 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 a shared, "heritagised" past. 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 Jewish heritage tourism often into a global kind of healing experience in local spaces where local communities often don't share memories to the past. More than being a matter of shared values, the conservation of such painful places often is often confronted with local amnesia, competing war memories, or new kinds of spatial grievability by designing memory. The essay shows how meaning 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 Van der Laarse named urban “Holoscapes”, ghostly spaces where visitors now walk in the footsteps of victims in re-enacted sites without Jews.
... Sites often seek to promote identification by means of name-giving, as in the case of a burned Westerbork barrack, used as a farm shed, which became known in the international press as the so-called "Anne Frank barrack". After realising the symbolic weight of that association the Dutch parliament voted immediately for a resolution "to return" the original barracks back to Westerbork as an orphaned heritage of the Holocaust, even though most of them had been sold to farmers in the late 1960s as "Moluccan" barracks ( van Ooijen & Raaijmakers, 2012;van der Laarse, 2013b). For what was demolished then was known as the Moluccan camp Schattenberg, where migrant families from the former East-Indies were housed since 1950. ...
... Only by what Marcuse has described for Dachau from the late 1960s as a symbolic repossession by the victims of Nazism, these former terrorscapes would soon become 'victims of tourism' (Marcuse 2001, andcompare Naeff 2014), Yet one could argue that exactly because of this, these 'perilous places' could be transformed into national mnemonic spaces (Milton, 2001, 257-258). And this was happening not only in the West but also in the East, as might be indicated by the impressive war and camp memorials of Bogdan Bogdanovic in Tito Yugoslavia, such as his Jasenovac monument (1966) and the Dudik memorial park in Vukovar (1978) (Van der Laarse, 2013b;Baillie 2013). Thus the loss of 'guilty' architecture sacralized the camps as memorial parks that offered survivors a possibility for reconciliation, based on the false assumption that art and nature are innocent. ...
Landscapes are in western culture considered as 'art', valuated by scenic qualities represented in landscape painting and reproduced in landscape architecture. Working under the fetish of authenticity by singling out aesthetic styles and iconic periods, connoisseurship is still a basic assumption of authorized heritage narratives. Although recent biographical approaches of historical landscape have opposed this reductionism, the prevailing metaphor of an archaeological layering of time prevents a thorough understanding of the landscape/mindscape nexus.
Building on Marvin Samuels's long-neglected notion of Authorship, this chapter offers a more dynamic perspective by drawing attention to the complex relationship of past motives and present meanings that are too often forgotten and neglected.
This is illustrated by the remarkable contrast between our attitude to Nazi Germany's 'traditionalist' landscape art and to its 'modernist' spatial planning and landscaping. Thus, while Hitler's taste is banned from the public sphere and Himmler's Auschwitz has become Europe's iconic heart of darkness, Nazi highways, the VW Beetle car, and 'Nordic' landscapes have lost nothing of their original attraction.
Yet the way we domesticate 'foreign' pasts and cultures by transforming them into 'our' common heritage has made us blind for some uneasy continuities of the Third Reich's Ordnungswahn, and its
'nationalization of nature' that confronts us with the uncomfortable
possibility that Nazism still 'speaks' to present generations.
Keywords: landscape biography, heritage of war, spatial cleansing, modernism, authorship, Nazism, Holocaust, terrorscapes, heritagescapes
Social identity theory argues that conflict between groups diminishes if they discover they have something important in common, and if they can build a new hybrid identity together. With this premise in mind, the article demonstrates how present-day experiences of refugees, displaced ethnic groups, political exiles, foreign-born workers, diasporic populations and other migrants may be incorporated into the existing body of predominantly national historical landscapes and stories addressing expulsions, exile and forced displacement experienced by European populations in the twentieth century. It is argued that we should look closer at the compositional processes and orchestration of migrant heritage in Europe as an inherently political concept that may both amplify and interfere with social cohesion. The article discusses the compositional strategies (grafting, bifurcation and suture) that loosen up the structure of representations and have been used experimentally by four cultural institutions in Italy, Spain, Germany and Poland. The article maintains that series of hands-on small-and middle-scale experiments and compositional adjustments may be highly instrumental in enhancing the value of the heritage of forced migrations, not only as a domain of conflicting academic interpretations, but also as a factor of intercultural cohesion in a broader perspective.
This article presents research on the material remains of Nazi and post-war communist prison and forced labour camps in West Bohemia (1939-1945 and 1949-1961). The location of a sample of 35 camps was carried out using historical evidence and aerial images from the 1940s and 1950s. Non-invasive surveys and small-scale excavations of selected camps revealed the preservation of the archaeological record and its attributes, which are closely linked to the subsequent use of the sites. The spatial context showed an interconnection of the camp system with WWII as well as Cold War armament production. The heritage protection of these sites, the current state of memorials and the contemporary utilisation of the camp areas has also been examined. Research has shown the potential of neglected archaeological evidence of places of mass repressions, where crimes against humanity were committed by totalitarian regimes in the former Czechoslovakia. It has also revealed the disturbing fact that these sites have been disappearing at an alarming rate without any documentation, as a result of development and construction activities.
