Dealing with difficult heritage: The case of Bückeberg, site of the Third Reich Harvest Festival

Abstract

From 1933From to 1937 the German National Socialist (Nazi) Party arranged an annual harvest festival at Bückeberg, close to the city of Hamelin. The festival was one of the symbolically most important celebrations in the Third Reich; at its height, more than one million people are reported to have gathered there. A special arena, designed by Albert Speer, was built to handle the large number of participants. Although extensive remains of this arena have survived, local feeling has prevented them from receiving official recognition as a historical monument. This article presents the Bückeberg site and discusses the responsibilities of heritage professionals towards sites which may have significance as testimony to the past but which are not actively championed by the public.

After Wheat: Revitalizing Sicilian Agriculture through Heritage Tourism

“…Using these material remains to mobilize a counter‐narrative of agrobiodiversity through heritage foods is an appealing reuse of the vestiges of a difficult past. As I have argued elsewhere (Samuels ), creative reuse can be a very effective means to overcome the historical weight of ideologically loaded material or architectural remains (see also Burström and Gelderblom ; Macdonald , ).…”

Contemporary Past, Archaeology of the

“…An exception is the study of the Bükeberg arena, where the Nazis celebrated a Harvest Festival which summoned hundreds of thousands of people every year. The scenario was cleverly devised to cause the highest impact on the masses: a 600 meter-long alley (Führerweg) flanked by flagpoles was laid out for Hitler to "walk through the people" before reaching the tribune (Burström & Gelderblom 2011). Fascist Italian colonialism used space to imprint in the local population the idea of the colonizers' racial superiority and Soviet urbanism resorted to large avenues and plazas to create dramatic scenarios of power (Andreassen et al 2010).…”

Schlachtfelder als touristische Destinationen: Zum Konzept des Thanatourismus aus kulturwissenschaftlicher Sicht

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