by Luke Bennett
Table 10.1. Projects and corresponding arrangements that become a context for the bunkers through performance
So, beyond common denominators in organizational structure (how to encounter a bunker in the field) and consensus in their respective arrangements (the bunkers as places of a time past), multiple links like this crisscross between these practices of memory. According to Schatzki (2010b, 73), any individual practice is a social entity bound up with the material world in a practice-arrangement-bundle. Here, the three practice-arrangement-bundles of monument protection, bunker-hunting and geocaching also form a more complex bundle that, seen from a distance, shares a number of common practice organizations. These are most importantly shared general understandings of the historicity of our life-world and of commemorative culture. Assmann’s cultural memory comes to life here not just within elite communities, but as the performance of largely independent but interrelated social practices of memory that are anchored at what is contextualized as artefactual evidence of the past. In my view, this constitutes a truly popular historical geography that is both social praxis and imaginative geography.
I argue that this stance can take geographies of memory further. It has as yet conceptualized memory in four distinctive ways: ranging from remembering as a performative practice to artefacts as meaningful materiality on the one hand and from notions of collective forms of memory to individual performance of memory on the other hand (Maus 2015b). While highlighting one of these conceptualizations at a time in a study has distinctive strengths and weaknesses, geographies of memory have fallen short of pursuing that into a structured account of these processes as an inseparable whole. Practice Theory as a social ontology offers a perspective that can achieve this synthesis while still being analytically rigid.
NOTES
1.I would like to thank Luke Bennett for his insightful comments on earlier versions of this chapter and my supervisor Florian Dünckmann for his continuing support. This research has been funded by the German Research Foundation DFG under grant DU 415/4–2.
2.The Wallmeister organization within the Bundeswehr, the German military, is a special pioneer unit specializing in the construction of obstacles. Today, the few remaining Wallmeisters are charged with deconstructing the sites.
3.In the Federal Republic of Germany, education and culture policies are the domain of a Bundesland or short Land, that is, an individual federal state.
4.http://www.cold-war.de/; the database is available at http://www.sperranlagen.de/
5.http://www.geschichtsspuren.de/datenbanken/bunker-datenbank.html
6.http://www.unter-hamburg.de/ and http://www.hamburgerunterwelten.de/
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Chapter 11
‘A Nice Day Out?’
Exploring Heritage (and) Tourism Discourses at Cold War Bunker Sites in Britain
Inge Hermann
For my PhD in tourism studies I researched visitors’ engagements with a handful of regional nuclear bunker command centres now operating as small-scale Cold War–themed ‘visitor attractions’ across the UK. In this chapter I present an account of my fieldwork, and of the ways in which I came to interpret visitors’ experiences of these strange blank-seeming places. My analysis focuses in particular on identifying the interaction between dominant experience-framing ‘discourses’ (Fox 2010) – culturally persuasive ideas and forms of meaning making associated with tourism and heritage – and individual visitors’ actual, active performance of meaning making during their bunker site visits.
Conducting fieldwork in these largely underground and enclosed places, made for war and mass destruction, was, at times, an apprehensive and embodied experience for me. My fieldwork activities ended in 2011, and it has been a while since I last visited any of my study sites, but they made a lasting impression upon me. I still recall being in those concrete, relatively cold and dim places, standing around for days on end trying to generate data from visitors. Being in these bunkers made me think more deeply than I was expecting, both about the experience of being in such places and of their links to cultural and social ideologies, values and meanings about the Cold War, its historical events and its physical sites.
My fieldwork revealed that for many the visit to a Cold War site was predominantly regarded as ‘a nice day out’ touristic experience. However, from my data I was also able to show how these sites often provoked visitors, by inadvertently forcing them to make some sense of the Cold War, in order to make sense of their visit. The Cold War is often seen as an ‘imaginary’ period in recent history, a war which directly touched the lives of few in the UK; therefore, little – in terms of the visitor experience – comes ‘ready-made’. Instead, a visit to these places requires the visitor to actively make some sense of both the Cold War and its built environment remains. The fieldwork data also showed that visitors made sense of the experience of passing through a Cold War site by summoning a sense of history in order to construct the present-at-hand. Due to this active (and pragmatic) process of meaning making, it became clear to me that a post–Cold War experience of these places was something made in the present.
Yes, it drew upon the past; it could particularly feed off the experiences of those who had actually lived through the Cold War, and it had some connection to the tangible features presented at the site. But the visit itself was an active part of the visitor’s meaning making, a process in which the visitor took from the place what they needed for the present, and that engagement in turn (in big or small ways) affected each visitor’s identity and sense of self/place in and for the present. I also saw that this meaning making was a social, collaborative process, anchored in the practice of sharing experiences of the visit with others either there or at some other place thereafter. This interpretation emphasizes that what makes these places valuable and gives them meaning as heritage is not solely defined by the site itself, by the curation of the objects or artefacts on display or by the manner in which visitors are organized and directed through the site (Franklin 2003). In this regard, Cold War sites are able to provide a stage on which contradictory experiences and feelings can be (re)constructed and negotiated into a diverse set of meanings and experiences.
However, as this chapter will show, the historical narratives that are displayed and represented at Cold War ‘attraction’ sites often offer little appreciation of the intangible present-day meaning making that visitors actually perform at these sites. I argue that this ‘gap’ is the product of the dominance of a self-referential and professionally produced ‘authorized heritage discourse’, which ‘privileges expert values and knowledge about the past and its material manifestations’ (Smith 2009, 4). This dominant framing of Cold War bunkers presents them as a particular type of heritage, locking them into a version of the past that is distant and too rigid to fully engage with the active way in which visitors actually make sense of their visits. I will show the multiple ways in which individuals and collectives construct memories, meanings and commonly held truths about the Cold War era, and Britain’s role within that period, and seek to attach them to the otherwise ‘blank’ walls of Cold War bunkers. This projection of meaning onto these places is achieved via the imaginative use of symbols, monuments, commemorations and performances. My argument, then, is that these ‘landmarks’ (Halbwachs 1992) have no inherent identity; the meaningfulness of these particular sites is constructed by human behaviour in reaction to places (Osborne 2001, 4).
OUR COLD WAR: VISITORS’ DISCOURSES OF COLD WAR HERITAGE (AND) TOURISM
My study was based on an extensive investigation of the nature, past and current uses and complexity of Cold War locations in Britain, resulting in a list of criteria for the selection of Cold War ‘attraction’ sites for my fieldwork. Staff at five of the seven sites that were approached agreed to participate in the fieldwork: Hack Green Secret Nuclear Bunker (Cheshire) (Figure 11.1),1 Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker (Essex),2 Cold War Bunker (York),3 Royal Air Force Neatishead (Norfolk)4 and Scotland’s Secret Bunker (Fife).5 Data were generated during a three-month period in 2011 and were gathered using observation, interviews and questionnaires. The fieldwork took place during school holidays to ensure a wide range of participants, and generated 10 site observations, 40 interviews and 251 questionnaires.
Based on the descriptive findings deriving from the data the group of participants was fairly evenly distributed between males (56 per cent) and females (44 per cent). The age of the participants ra
nged from 18 to 70 years and older, and scores were normally distributed with most scores occurring in the 40–49 years age range and tapering outwards to extremes. Initially there seemed to be no difference in education between the age groups; however, there was a significant effect for gender as the results indicated that male participants were more highly educated than female participants.