Conference: Difficult Heritage and Nature

Difficult Heritage and “Nature”:

Greening as Forgetting – Greening as Healing?

Universität Hamburg, 19-21 September 2024, Warburg-Haus

In post-World War II Germany, many National Socialist monuments fell into disrepair, and the overgrowth of their stone architecture by vegetation was readily accepted as a matter of course. Trees were planted as well in order to deliberately interrupt view axes. This strategy of “allowing the grass to grow over” a difficult historical legacy has been criticised in the research, and even interpreted as a strategy for repressing controversial memories. The conference relates this specifically German post-war situation to recent and current approaches to dealing with fascist and colonial monuments in many different countries. “Greening” as a strategy for addressing a difficult heritage – the use of nature as a transformative material – is currently experiencing an astonishing renaissance, although up to this point, researchers have not perceived significant parallels with the post-war situation. In some discussions, it has been suggested that toxic monuments should be abandoned to a natural process of decay, or instead that their transformation, assisted by nature, with its positive connotations, is implicitly related to processes of healing.

The conference will pursue two main lines of inquiry: analysed first will be the role of nature in dealing with the Nazi heritage during the post-war period; and secondly, current approaches to using nature when dealing with difficult heritage in the present.

Call for Papers

The first central aim of the conference is to offer new perspectives on the redesign of Nazi architecture in the 1950s and 1960s: To what extent did conservators of monuments, architects, artists and landscape designers in Germany seek adequate responses to the brutal monumentality of Nazi-era political rhetoric and propaganda, while at the same time avoiding the erasure of the memory of National Socialist criminality? Secondly, subjected to a critical review is the role of “greening” in current transformations of relics that are seen as embodying a difficult heritage: e.g. certain cases document the ways in which the park is often understood - like the museum - as a place that allows poisoned memories to be “detoxified.”

The conference will explore the ways in which nature has been deployed in spatial remodelling and in the landscape design of historical parks and archaeological sites that are devoted to difficult historical legacies. Also discussed will be the problematical short-circuiting of nature and indigeneity that may result from the transformation of colonial monuments, so that “indigenous” heritage is implicitly attributed to premodern times. It also seems necessary, however, to address the ways in which the members of First Nation communities seek, in the context of difficult historical legacies, to reclaim specific narratives when it comes to the relationship between nature and culture.

Far from being stable, the concept of “nature” is hence shown to be highly mutable, both historically and culturally. And therefore “nature” becomes recognizable not as a neutralizing tool for reframing political iconographies, and instead as an instrument of political coding in and of itself.

We welcome proposals on the following panels:

The German Post-War Situation – “Greening” and Forgetting?
The Use of Archaeological Sites, Historical Parks, and Landscape Design in Framing and Reshaping Difficult Historical Legacies
Artistic Interventions into Difficult Historical Legacies: Conceptualizations of Nature and Imaginations of Indigeneity
Translocations of “Toxic” Monuments into Nature – The Park as Site of Detoxification?
Final discussion, final remarks: Greening as Forgetting – Greening as Healing?

The conference language is English, but contributions in German, Spanish and Portuguese are also welcome. Travel and accommodation costs will be covered. Please send abstracts (max. one page) for a 30-minute paper by 29^th of March 2024 to: Margit.Kern"AT"uni-hamburg.de. A publication of the conference papers in a series by De Gruyter is planned.

Program

Program "Difficult Heritage and 'Nature': Greening as Forgetting – Greening as Healing?"

Registration

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Funding

ERC Advanced Grant Horizon 2020: “Visual Scepticism. Towards an Aesthetic of Doubt“

Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Margit Kern