Following The Rough Guide to Góra Kalwaria: Constructing Memory Tourism of Absence in Post-Communist Poland. (3rd July 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Cole, Tim
• Is Part Of: Journal of war & culture studies. Volume 11:Number 3(2018)
• Page Start: 255
• Page End: 268
• Publication Date: 2018-07-03
• Subjects: memory tourism -- post-communist Eastern Europe -- Poland -- Jewish heritage -- The Rough Guide -- guidebooks -- absence; War and society -- Europe -- Periodicals; War and society -- Periodicals; War -- History -- Periodicals; War and civilization -- Europe -- Periodicals; War and civilization -- Periodicals; 303.6605
• DOI: 10.1080/17526272.2018.1490074
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1752-6272

Abstract

Abstract : This article uses comparative analysis of the editions of The Rough Guide to Poland published in the 1990s to argue that a memory tourism of absence was being offered to western visitors. This differed from existing categories of tourism — dark tourism, Holocaust tourism, Jewish heritage tourism — by directing visitors to see the places where Jews lived before the Holocaust, and where their memory was in danger of being erased in both the communist and post-communist era. In this context, western visitors were not only directed to sites to witness absence, but also to engage in acts of memory tourism that were charged with a sense of moral purpose. A concern with absence was more widely shared in the decade following the fall of the Berlin Wall, and this memory tourism of absence is one that — like all acts of tourism — can and needs to be historicized.