The Spring School, organized by the IFZO Shared Heritage project (Antje Kempe), University of Szczecin, MOBI (Jörg Hackmann), TU Berlin (Stephanie Herold), Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn (Kristina Jõekalda), and European University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder (Paul Zalewski), is focusing on the notion of uncomfortable heritage, by which we mean monuments, objects, and sites whose status has become uncertain and contested due to political upheavals and political, cultural, or social transformation processes. This could sometimes even mean that monuments that were previously seen as heritage are excluded from that category. Scrutinizing these categories will provide a productive approach to discuss concepts and practices of heritage. Uncomfortable or unwanted heritage is thereby perceived not only as a reverse side of common heritage practices but also as an expression of the re-semanticization of memory cultures, as demonstrated by Aleida Assmann’s nine techniques of disremembering (delete, cover up, hide, silence, overwrite, ignore, neutralize, deny, lose).

The understanding of heritage as purely preserving and managing the remains of cultural/national value has been increasingly disputed during the last decades. The approach of multidirectional memories (Michael Rothberg), critical heritage (Sharon Macdonald, Rodney Harrison), and post-colonial studies have each shifted this understanding towards broader definitions of heritage as a negotiation of social and cultural participation. Furthermore, the events of the Black Lives Matter movement and the ongoing war in Ukraine shed light on previously excluded aspects of heritage, on the one hand, and the growing refusal of certain monuments, on the other. It is precisely in this regard that concepts such as unwanted, uncomfortable, contested, or dissonant heritage and related practices of adaptation, disremembering, loss, destruction, and/or decay expand into research.

Therefore, we want to explore objects, places, practices, narratives, legal and institutional frameworks, and communities that consider processes of violence, threat, ignorance, or destruction as a way of identity building, empowerment, and re-interpretation with a focus on the Baltic Sea Region – but not limited to it. This region has been shaped by numerous upheavals and antagonistic memories historically, which oscillate between ‘official’ memory cultures on the one hand, and various heritage communities, including indigenous cultures and dissident groups on the other hand. In addition, the commemoration of the Second World War and the Cold War is of particular relevance in all societies around the Baltic Sea. This includes the museums and sites of the Holocaust, but also military, scientific, and industrial legacies from the post-war era, various historical monuments, or intangible heritage of indigenous or religious groups.

The Spring School aims to understand forgetting, destroying, sorting out, re-evaluating, or decaying unwanted, uncomfortable, or contested legacies as a complex entanglement of social, legal, and cultural re-evaluation. Therefore, we are interested in what is considered and perceived as uncomfortable heritage in certain contexts. What is its specific temporality? How are these processes presented and framed in the media and narratives? How are the material legacies dealt with?

Programme