Dissonant Heritage and European citizenship
Introduction
‘Dissonant heritage’ and its significance for the Euroculture Master programme
Since its introduction in 1996, the term ‘dissonant heritage’ has swiftly become one of the seminal concepts in the field of heritage protection and interpretation. It is enshrined in the Council of Europe’s Faro Convention (2005), and by the European Union which in 2019 initiated the ‘Partnership on Culture and Cultural Heritage.’ This partnership launched an Action Group (a ‘network of networks’) specifically dedicated to the topic of integrated approaches to dissonant heritage.
Over the span of a generation, more than 25 years, the use of the term and its significance has inevitably evolved. For its ’inventors’ John E. Tunbridge and Gregory J. Ashworth, the cultural geographers working on an erased Jewish ghetto in Groningen (a small town in northern Holland which many Euroculture students are intimately familiar with…), it meant foremost a ’difficult’ heritage, which many prefer to forget, but which, through the work of memory specialists can be given a new life – and also be exploited for tourism.
In the light of Critical Heritage Studies by authors such as Laurajane Smith (2006), the focus shifted from the object (a place of painful memory) to the discourse that unveils dissonance in the public space. Seemingly self-evident places of heritage are, in fact, the result of power-struggles that refuse to admit their true nature. These places are sanctified as valuable and memorable places by the rich and powerful, while minorities are excluded. Recent theoreticians, such as Višnja Kisić (2016), go as far as to propose a supplementary shift, and speak of ’Heritage dissonance‘, in order to underline that almost every place of heritage can appear as dissonant. This perspective allows us to question ’sedimented narratives‘ (p. 176) and it positions heritage in larger societal, political and cultural contexts. Tuuli Lähdesmaki (2020) and her colleagues have shown how the various forms of discourse propagated by European institutions assimilate already existing narratives and transform them for their own purposes. According to Bo Stråth, these institutions frequently use them as a kind of societal glue to maintain coherence for the unification process, particularly after the failure of the European constitution in 2005. The main characteristic of the different forms of narratives surrounding this process is to generate a feeling of belonging, particularly evident in the flagship project, the ‘European Heritage Label’ (fully implemented 2007).
The main characteristic of Euroculture Master programme is to bring together various disciplines and reflect on salient issues of the European society in its largest definition. From this perspective, it becomes valuable to use this approach to question old and, particularly, new ‘heritage objects’, such as environmental issues, gender biases, generational dissonances, suppressed or emerging memories of minorities, “ordinary” racism, to name a few.
‘Cognitive’ and ‘tragic’ dissonance
To enlarge the debate on heritage, we may consider the term ’cognitive dissonance.' Cognitive dissonance is a term introduced in 1957 by the American psychologist Leon Festinger (1919-1989), which is widely used (and sometimes contributes to banalising explanations of ‘dissonance’). He defines cognitive dissonance as a stress syndrome which results from the difference between a state a person wishes to be true, and the actual state. For example, an individual who likes to smoke, but knows that this is detrimental to their health, will feel a strong discomfort from which they will try to escape. The most coldly logical solution would be to simply stop smoking, and then what they think and what they do are consonant (still leaving them craving a smoke.). But they can also remove this awkward dissonance by equivocating about the problem itself, (‘smoking is actually not so bad, Churchill smoked cigars all the time and he died old’). The theory was further developed in the latter half of the twentieth century, when scholars of the Free World were trying to understand the inner mechanisms of totalitarian societies, still trying to make sense of the crimes of the Third Reich and facing the new anxieties of the Cold War. This seems, with the privilege of hindsight, a very American and, more precisely, Puritan approach, where there is actually not a conflict between two elements of information of equal value, but a mental confusion. It is, in fact, a lack of good judgement which a scientific attitude ought to be able to overcome (by means of education, as a gradual procedure of logical explanation). And yet, in the light of all that has passed since the 20th century, this seems overly optimistic.
However, what we can keep of the approach of ’cognitive dissonance’ is the idea of a very strong psychological tension, which can even lead to physical discomfort. This leads to the will to suppress the suffering, or to shift it to other more easily explainable domains. Often, this simple explanation can help to understand why painful aspects of heritage objects are simply ignored or presented in a very bland and secondary way. After the Second World War, for instance, the cognitive dissonance theory was right in assuming that the less painful solution for an individual, who was compelled to feel responsible for the horrors of the Nazi period, was to simply suppress the memory of what had happened and to concentrate on the mere task of survival (see text by Walter Dirks on the reconstruction of the Goethe House, 1947, in this reader). Only when the immediate pain was receding, it became possible to evoke the traumatic experiences in an open way. In Germany, the prosecution of the staff of Auschwitz concentration camp in the 1960s, the so-called ‘Frankfurt trials’ (1963-1968) launched by the prosecutor Fritz Bauer, triggered a nationwide reflection about what had actually happened. Only then did it become possible to think about the involvement of the army and the population in general in regard to the Holocaust. The progressive lifting of cognitive dissonance is inscribed in the works of Jan and Aleida Assmann about the collective memory process, recognizing the possibility to progressively modify (with a time span of approximately 40 years) the active cultural memory of society. It can happen that the memory of (old) decision-makers is not the memory of young climate activists – everyone remembers Greta Thunberg’s outburst ‘How dare you!' at the UNO’s General Assembly: an emblematic expression of ‘generational dissonance'.
Today’s climate activists — who glue their hands to the highways of larger cities and works of art, accepting being put in prison — remind us that the classic formulation of cognitive dissonance is insufficient to explain what is happening in this specific case. The dissonance here is more like the dilemmas presented by Greek tragedy, where the hero is not confronted with a good or a bad option to be reconciled, but with two options, neither of which can produce a victorious outcome. Whilst Antigone maintains the values of familial piety, Creon upholds the priority of the State. And this is more analogous to the right of future generations as compared to the rights of the present society. The dissonance, in this case, is not a misfunction of cognition, but the absence of valid criteria which could, in the end, solve the pain induced by the confusion of the mind. Such “generational dissonance” may not be felt as tragic by those who are most concerned, the young generation of today and their children. However, for the older generation and the leaders of nations living in developing countries, the perspective is different. The strength of the tragic hero is found in facing this extreme situation, which brings out the deepest and strongest feeling a human life can experience, even at the price of death. The idea of tragedy is not to show that one option is an illusion, or a trap, but that both elements of information express legitimate claims. Ongoing struggles remind us that cultural heritage is strategically used as a claim of legitimacy and presented by each side with the reproach of the other side ‘not wanting’ to understand (cognitive dissonance), while it is impossible for the other side to do so (tragic dissonance). The Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s, which brought back concentration camps to Europe, can be placed in this perspective. For instance, Serbia was bent on the sacred places of sacrifice against the Ottoman Army (1389), symbolized by the Kosovo fields, while the Muslim population living there for centuries considered it to be their legitimate home. There can be mixed forms, too: Russia presents Ukraine as not wanting to admit its rootedness in the larger Russian heritage complex, tricked by ‘fascist leaders' (cognitive dissonance), while Ukraine sees its position (in every sense of the term) as ‘tragic'.
Finally, we might add another category of dissonant heritage, which is created by events resisting all interpretation and which should not give rise to instrumentalization (such as “only the European Union can prevent such horror from coming back”). The Holocaust or the use of nuclear bombs belong to this category, which have a “unique” quality and should therefore, as underlined by Jürgen Habermas, not be compared to other historic cruelties, such as the Soviet death camps. Such dissonances can have no representation which fits our understanding. The Jewish Museum in Berlin, architected by Daniel Libeskind (2001), evokes the Shoah by inaccessible “voids” dispersed in the building. Peter Eisenmann’s memorial for the Holocaust in the same city (2005) consists of a mass of dark concrete cubes, which create a “place with no meaning”.
Dissonant heritage in Strasbourg
In Strasbourg, a city which changed nationalities four times in a century, the ‘dissonant’ qualities of the German architecture (and the German heritage as such) have been largely forgotten. Indeed, younger people, when placed before a German monument, even if it is overcharged with propaganda, such as the Imperial Palace (1886, presently known as the ‘Palais du Rhin’), would in most cases simply identify it with the French category ‘Haussmannien’. Because it is old, they categorise it in the French sedimented heritage narrative: the natural frame of reference across France for everything that belongs to that period is the transformation of Paris initiated by Baron Haussmann on the command of Napoleon III.
In a book published in 1947, but largely written before the Second World War, Pierre Francastel, a prominent French art historian who had been a professor in Strasbourg, claimed that looking at a building designed by German architects was not only aesthetically displeasing, but physically painful. However, any such impression seems now totally erased by time. Guided ‘dissonant heritage’ walks through the city with appropriate commentary will reveal to us again a more poly-focal history of the urban landscape, including the staging in the Nazi period of the most picturesque part around the cathedral, which was to become a symbol of German-ness itself, and to be stripped of its religious character. The Nazis, actually, prevented any mass taking place there between 1940 and 1944, as a sign of cultural appropriation of the most emblematic. While worship returned, their architectural modifications have mostly stayed in place until today, without any mention of their origin.
The ‘sedimented narrative’ of Alsace, and Strasbourg in particular, is that the horrors of the past (especially the occupation by Nazi Germany, 1940-44) and the identity conflict of a bilingual and bicultural population up to the Second World War, have been overcome by European unification. This is most visible in the Memorial to the population of Alsace Moselle above the former concentration camp of Schirmeck. The main building of the Council of Europe presents itself as a hard outer shell protecting a cushy interior replete with artwork – the context of the Cold War when it was built (1977) strangely anticipating the post-Schengen situation…
The dissonant heritage approach, applied to Strasbourg, allows us to question the legacies of its past in one of the capitals of Europe. In turn, we can generate questions about the heritage policies put in place by the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, now mainly taken over by the European Commission.
Strasbourg is also emblematic of another dimension of addressing the question of societal dissonance: the permanent struggle to uphold Human rights, which is one of the cornerstones of European unification.
Bridging dissonance through human rights
Written by Julia Kozma, Lecturer on Human rights at Euroculture Strasbourg
‘Being resolved, as the governments of European countries which are like-minded and have a common heritage of political traditions, ideals, freedom and the rule of law, to take the first steps for the collective enforcement of certain of the rights stated in the Universal Declaration, …’
Thus reads a clause of the preamble to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, better known as the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which was opened for signature in Rome on 4 November 1950 and entered into force seventy years ago, in September 1953. In light of the atrocities of the Nazi-regime, the Holocaust and the Second World War, which had just been overcome, the invocation of like-mindedness and a common heritage of political traditions, ideals, freedom, and the rule of law by the twelve original signatory States were reflections of a determined belief in common humanity-based values.
A little more than two decades later, the European Court of Human Rights, however, had to concede in a judgment relating to freedom of expression (Handyside v. the UK, 1976: confiscation of a book aimed at teenagers deemed to be obscene) that the diverse cultural and legal traditions embraced by each Member State made it difficult to identify uniform European standards of human rights. Hence, the margin of appreciation doctrine was born, as a concession to the fact that there was ‘no European consensus on the protection of public morals’. Similarly, a lack of a European consensus was found in cases involving, e.g., abortion, same-sex marriage and adoption rights or the wearing of religious clothing in public spaces, and wide margins of appreciation have been allowed, inter alia, regarding the organisation of the right to education as well as the rights to vote and to stand for elections.
While the ECHR has been described as a ‘living instrument’, which allows the European Court of Human Rights to interpret the Convention in light of present-day conditions, developments that were not foreseeable in 1950 — for example the increase in membership to currently 46 States and other modern-day challenges — enhance a feeling of dissonance among the Council of Europe Member States. These increasingly return to state- and nationality-centred policies and reject notions of ‘common traditions and values’. On the other hand, we must not lose sight of the harmonisation that has been achieved in many fields through the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, nor of the fact that tension and dissonance can serve as a driver for human progress. Strasbourg, with its human rights institutions, remains a symbol for this delicate balance and reminder that nothing in the field of human rights can be taken for granted.
It should be reminded here that human rights also include access to culture, as was underlined most forcefully in the Faro Convention by the Council of Europe in 2005. The convention (which has not been signed by France or Germany…) uniquely and innovatively establishes that cultural heritage in all its forms (tangible and intangible heritage) does not belong to states but to “heritage communities” which can transcend national boundaries, and even be situated in locations far apart from each other. This dimension is explored by a trilateral research project (Germany, Poland, France), for example, to which Euroculture Strasbourg and its students contribute; this project questions the “Dissonant heritage” of the German Past in two “showcase cities” of the Second German Empire, Strasbourg in the west and Posen (today Poznań) in the east, distant by more than 1000 kilometres.
