Paper short abstract:

The reconstruction of heritage after conflict presents contemporary society with unique challenges. Decisions made have the power to either aid the reconciliation process or leave festering wounds. This paper will analyse the issues in light of our greater awareness of the role of physical environment in creating collective memory.

Paper long abstract:

The reconstruction of cultural heritage after conflict presents unique challenges in the 21st Century. This begins with decisions about what to restore of the (sometimes deliberately) destroyed cultural heritage and often includes confronting the appropriate way to record the conflict itself and commemorate the dead of all sides. The technical choices available to record cultural heritage have also multiplied. Handled sensitively the process can contribute to reconciliation, handled badly it can leave festering wounds. The issues are particularly pressing as we are now more aware than ever aware of the role that our physical environment plays in forging memory. This paper will examine these issues.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the role of the tactical model as simulacrum for military terrain that has the potential to be reimagined as a cultural landscape in miniature.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will consider the role of the tactical model as a manifestation of materiel culture. While ostensibly a tactical tool facilitating planning and preparation for military operations they may also embody multiple meanings. While many models are disposable products of a particular circumstance or situation some have enduring existences reflecting not only their primary function but a range of mutable meanings. Through the life of a model it may be an instructional tool but may, as a simulacrum of terrain, stand as a proxy for the actual landscape in a context beyond the purely functional. As such the model becomes not only a representation of terrain but also of the landscape itself encompassing a broad definition that includes cultural, political and social readings. Where models survive into the present day their meanings continue to be renegotiated and contested for they are truly landscapes in miniature and remain sites of conflict.

The paper will focus on two models associated with the 1917 Battle of Messines but will also consider other examples, including the great recreation of the Battle of Waterloo.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the concept of mud on the Western Front. The intense and mechanical destruction of the First World War created a new and terrifying world that had hitherto only ever been imagined: one of mud and death and dissolution of form.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will look at the mud of the Western Front as material culture and explore its many narratives. Almost every painting, photograph, poem, diary or book about the First World War involves mud. It is as much a part of the war as artillery or trenches, barbed wire or machine guns, hopelessness or heroism. Yet mud as material culture from the war does not exist for modern day observers to see, except in the literature and imagery of the time. Therefore the role of mud in the Great War is often overlooked, taken for granted and not fully understood. The terrain of the Western Front hugely affected how the war was fought as well as how life was experienced by the men in the front lines. It produced social and cultural landscapes that affected every aspect of a soldier's life. The landscapes it created were felt, tasted and smelt. Mud was lived on and in and became a living object that the soldiers grew to understand and admire as well as dread and hate. This paper will adopt a multi-disciplinary approach to explore the impact that the "Mudscape" of the Front had on the way this modern war was fought and experienced.

Paper short abstract:

This paper maps diverse attitudes towards the German material heritage in the northern wilderness of Finland, and touches upon the role the German-inflicted destruction of material culture as an agent of memory.

Paper long abstract:

Finland had close ties with Germany during the Second World War, and German troops were stationed in northern Finland as part of Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union forced Finland to turn against Germany in 1944, which resulted in the so-called Lapland War and the German retreat from Finland. The German troops destroyed not only their own military sites upon their retreat but, disappointed with their former brothers-in-arms, engaged in massive destruction of northern Finnish towns, villages, infrastructure and private property as well. The Germans, in the Finnish perspective, were friends and enemies who provided much needed support in the war but also 'burned down Lapland'.

Small wonder, then, that the Finnish-German relations during WWII have remained a tender subject in Finland until recently. This paper maps diverse attitudes towards the German material heritage in the northern wilderness of Finland, and touches upon the role the German-inflicted destruction of material culture as an agent of memory. The remains of German military sites and materiel, abundant as they are in certain areas of Lapland, lack 'official' status as cultural heritage and are neglected, overlooked, looted and generally regarded in rather negative terms. This material heritage, however, has also a potential to be put into positive uses.

Paper short abstract:

The ruin of the National Picture Theatre, Hull has stood untouched since being bombed in 1941. This paper examines the debates over its future to question the role of material representation of the past in invoking and creating narratives of the Blitz and its aftermath.

Paper long abstract:

On the night of the 17th of March 1941 the National Picture Theatre in Hull was bombed and largely destroyed, leaving only the grand façade standing. Sixty nine years later it remains an untouched, boarded-up ruin - the last 'Blitzed' building of its type in Britain not to have been demolished, restored or preserved as a memorial. Despite its listed status, the last three years have seen a continuing debate over the redevelopment of the ruins between those wishing to convert them to commercial use and voices calling for the preservation of the ruins as a memorial and educational site. This paper examines the ongoing battle between these competing interests and, in particular, asks questions about the role of material remains in memorialising events. It compares opposing claims of what is 'appropriate' use of the ruins and examines how the rival groups have sought to legitimise their own agendas through the motivation of narratives of both the conflict and the intervening years. In contesting the memorialisation of the Blitz, both groups have sought to map concepts of progress versus heritage, the local versus the national, remembrance, and heroism onto the landscape, whilst also advancing differing declamatory strategies for creating a suitable memorial. The paper seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the process of creating memorials, whilst also seeking to question the importance of the material form of ruins themselves in this process. It also examines how narratives of the past are organized spatially at historical sites and memorial spaces.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the contestation, from 1945-2010, between public and private memories of political prisoners and acts of resistance during the German occupation of the Channel Islands.

Paper long abstract:

Since the end of WWII, a plethora of books have been written and sold in the Channel Islands on the subject of the German occupation of 1940-1945. Nearly all of them describe acts of protest, defiance or resistance that took place during the occupation, and they preach to a long-converted local audience. The vast majority of resistance in the Islands was unarmed, as all Islanders know. When compared to armed resistance in other formerly occupied countries such as France, Islanders experience some anxiety that their resistance somehow doesn’t ‘count’ or compare well on the international stage, as it ‘didn’t further the British war effort’.

These feelings of insecurity were turned to anger by the publication, in 1995, of journalist Madeleine Bunting’s book, The Model Occupation, which was heavily biased in favour of an interpretation of collaboration. After this, Islanders turned inwards and were unwilling to share their occupation stories with outsiders who might distort their cherished occupation memory. At the same time, the sensationalism of Bunting’s work ensured that it was widely read in the UK, such that it became common ‘knowledge’ that the Islands collaborated during the occupation.

Have the islands’ authorities done anything to change this perception? What legacy or heritage have political prisoners left behind for islanders, tourists or researchers to see? How are they portrayed in museums? What memorials have been erected, when and where? This paper examines the contestation between the public and private memory of resistance in the Channel Islands, carried out in the heritage sphere, and examines how it affects the perception in the UK of the Channel Islands’ experience of occupation.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will show how Chile's National Stadium acts as a tool for the exposure of state terror and how it has been shaping people's personal and collective memory and identity.

Paper long abstract:

Things are not always what they appear to be from the outside. Often one has to physically dig up the ground or metaphorically dig into the minds and hearts of people to get to the essence of things. A football stadium might not merely be a place hosting sport activities. During the early weeks of Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile, the National Stadium had been temporarily transformed into the nation's biggest detention center. Along with numerous other concentration camps that dotted the country, the National Stadium turned into a place of terror and personal and collective memory and identity. People that the military considered opponents to Pinochet's authoritarian regime were tortured and often murdered at the National Stadium. In many cases the military disposed of their bodies in unknown locations, turning the victims into Chile's 'disappeared'. In the absence of bodies, this paper is going to establish the importance of the stadium as a physical marker of the regime's cruelty. In order to do so it will explore the stadium's different usages from the time of its erection up until the present day and draw comparisons to other torture sites. It will furthermore argue that material culture, such as photographs, and archaeological traces and architectural features form significant witnesses of Chile's past. The paper will then discuss the implications on turning a former concentration site into a museum. Finally, it will study the stadium as a symbol of democracy and human rights by looking at its use during the post-dictatorship years.