Touring memories of the erased city: memory, tourism and notions of ‘home’

Abstract

This paper focuses on survivors and their immediate descendants who travel to places that were once their home, settlements from which they were forcibly removed through political forces, natural or human-made disasters and which are often damaged or even completely erased. These travellers may not regard themselves as ‘tourists’, or be recognized as such by tourism authorities. The destinations of their journeys may not be declared heritage sites or dark tourism attractions, but rather they are idiosyncratic places of subjective meaning, associated with memories of trauma. Engaging with recent scholarship in the field of memory studies, it is argued that destruction and erasure, through natural disaster, war or as political strategy, does not necessarily promote forgetting, but can in fact foster a commitment to remembrance, not least through the deliberate journey, which generates, consolidates and transfers memories. Concept of re-memory is used to discuss the ‘second-hand’ memories of descendants. Tourism is positioned as an extension of the process of remembering and as an act of resistance – against forgetting and, in some cases, against the erstwhile act of erasure. Methodologically, the paper is based on autobiographical reflexivity and auto-ethnography, notably the author’s 1987 journey to the city of Glogau/Głogow in formerly German Silesia, now southwest Poland. The author's own memories and personal photographic records are integrated with a small sample of interview responses and a content analysis of travel reports written by other tourists to the same destination. The wider significance of this paper is that the phenomenon of ‘homesick tourism’, well known in the German context, is arguably a far broader, international trend, largely unrecognized by tourism authorities and scholars alike.