Old cities, new pasts: Heritage planning in selected cities of Central Europe

G.J. Ashworth, J.E. Tunbridge

• Heritage is the contemporary usage of a past that is consciously shaped from history, its survivals and memories, in response to current needs for it
• If these needs and consequent roles of heritage, whether for the political legitimacy of governments, for social and ethnic cohesion, for individual identification with places and groups, or for the provision of economic resources in heritage industries change rapidly, then clearly we expect the content and management of that heritage to do likewise
• The cities of Central Europe have long been the heritage showcases that reflected the complex historical and geographical patterns of the region's changing governments and ideologies
• The abrupt economic and political transition and reorientation of the countries of Central Europe has, thus, unsurprisingly, led to many equally abrupt changes in the content and management of urban heritage throughout the region
• The uses made of heritage are clearly drastically changing but so also is the way that heritage is currently managed
• What is happening, as well as how, is however uncertain and investigated here
• The revolutionary eradication of a rejected past, a return to some previous pasts or the beginnings of a new past in the service of a new present are all possibilities
• Answers are sought to these questions through the examination of a selection of cases of types of heritage city and their management in the region
• These include an archetypical European gem city (Eger, Hungary), a tourist-historic honey-pot (Cesky Krumlov, Czechia), a medium-sized multifunctional city (Gdansk, Poland), a major metropolis (Budapest, Hungary), the relict anomaly (Kaliningrad/Konigsberg, Russia) and the national cultural center of Weimar
• It may seem perverse to include an article concerned with the pasts of the cities of Central Europe in a special issue that focuses upon their drastically changing present and uncertain futures
• However, a central part of the transition now underway is a rejection of many aspects of an immediate past, a resuscitation of other, previously suppressed, pasts and  a reconstruction of a new past in the service of the newly envisaged futures
• The argument here is based upon the definition of heritage as the contemporary uses of the past
• The interpretation of the past in history, the surviving relict buildings and artefacts and collective and individual memories are all harnessed in response to current needs, which include the identification of individuals with social, ethnic and territorial entities and the provision of economic resources for commodification within heritage industries, of which tourism is the most apparent
• The focus here will be upon the built environment as the most visible of such heritage resources and the point where the link between a conserved past and more general planning and management aspects of cities is most obvious
• Despite its historical and geographical differences, the region shares, however, a number of common characteristics relevant to the management of heritage
• Its geopolitical position between German-Hapsburg and Russian-Slavonic realms and subsequent history had created a social and ethnic spatial complexity 
• Clearly changes in the management of heritage cannot be divorced from the many other changes that have impacted on, or are just reflected and amplified by, the cities of the region in their functions as national or regional symbols, showcases or experimental archetypes
• One of the most noticeable consequences of the change in economic philosophy and almost symbolic of it, is the shift in emphasis from public to private responsibility: from the nationalization in the collective interest to privatization and commercialization
• Although a large part of the preservation and presentation of heritage has always been a public sector responsibility, the direct impact of this change has been less in other spheres of public responsibility such as housing, industry, or transport
• The change in political ideology led inevitably and rapidly to a dismantling of much of the apparatus of the directive state and has left a legacy of a distrust of planning systems
• The abolition of some existing planning structures and their replacement by others, as the need for some forms of regulation became obvious, has created uncertainty
• There is an additional simple point that much of the preservation of heritage resources whether monuments or museums has been, and remains, a public sector responsibility 
• Attempts to correct currently perceived injustices of previous regimes have focused upon the return of dispossessed properties to former individual or collective owners
• The largest institutional disposed owner in some parts of Central Europe was the Catholic Church
• The return of properties, many of which in this case are major historic buildings, not only is a form of privatization of a collective past, but in practical terms presents an enormous financial cost of maintenance, as well as management of potential major tourist resources, to an organization, lacking, at least within these jurisdictions, both the appropriate financial and managerial resources
• In terms of heritage there is also a positive side of the balance sheet in that communist stewardship of the past was guilty of much neglect,  especially in the latter period of economic stringency, and especially when the heritage was a reminder of previous dynastic or religious allegiances
• There are thus various general changes in economic and governmental philosophy whose effects are being felt upon the management of the conserved build environment but whose actual impact remains unpredictable
• Not only has the way that heritage is managed changed, so also have the uses made of it and thus the context of this heritage
• The change in uses of the past most obvious to both residents and casual visitors has been in its ideological component 
• All new governing ideologies recast heritage: and communism has left an enormous legacy of monuments, street names and public iconography 
• Answers to the first question necessitate separating currently undesirable from other messages
• For example liberation war memorials commemorate not only the triumph of communism but also the sacrifice of ordinary Soviet soldiers in the welcome defeat of a fascist tyranny
• More generally, the question is raised as to whether a past should and could be publicly ignored
• There are many arguments in favour of an official policy of collective amnesia
• Changes in political uses of heritage involve more than just the negative removal of past communications
• They also involve new interpretations in support of the new state structures
• There are a number of arguments in favour of promoting an explicitly nationalist heritage
• However, merely to turn the clock back, replacing one iconography with its predecessor, is rarely possible, or given the political character of most of the pre-1940 regimes, considered desirable
• The two states least encumbered with embarrassing and distracting internal minorities and external claims are post-Trainanon Hungary and the Czech Republic, which expelled its German minority, and more recently shed its minorities in Slovakia
• Post-1945 Poland is similarly much more culturally homogenous than the post-1919 state, having largely lost its Ukranian, Lithuanian, German, and Jewish minorities
• All national heritage interpretations face the problem of managing the heritage of non-conforming socio-cultural groups
• These may threaten the integrity of the national narrative by presenting an alternative competing nationalism or just by their presence raise distracting and possibly discordant heritage messages
• Thus, it is overseas voices, largely from Israel and the US who question the ownership of heritage property or the appropriateness of adaptive reuse 
• The discovery of the potential functions of heritage in local economic development has been encouraged by the example of western role-models in which heritage, and more broadly culture, has been an integral part of development strategies
• If cities such as Edinburgh or Florence can be seen to successfully base their development upon cultural resoruces, and even cities with few previous cultural pretensions such as Frankfurt am Main, Lille or Glasgow are investing in aspects of culture for its perceived economic benefits, then the temptation for the Central European cities to follow such examples is almost irresistible
• However, there are three already apparent, but as yet immeasurable difficulties
• The first is that although policies for high quality environmental and cultural amenity have become important in the competition between established western cities for economic enterprises, it is not self-evident that such strategies alone can initiate development
• Secondly, new economic impulses, however generated, are as likely to require new building much of it in the central historic districts, as to provide new uses for old structures
• Such changes in the context and method of heritage management and in the demands made upon heritage needs exemplifying in specific cities
• The choice of cities for consideration is inevitably somewhat arbitrary and each is necessarily unique in both its endowment and the demands made upon it
• Eger, national symbol or European resource?
• This small town in Hungary can stand as the archetypical sacralised historic city whose symbolic importance far outweighs any other function
• Its history is easy to sketch
• Its heritage role however can be dated to the last decades of the nineteenth century corresponding to the burst of self conscious Hungarian nation-building that was released by the Imperial 'compromise' of 1867 which culminated in the celebration of the Magyar state in 1896
• The post-Second World War period witnessed the implementation of systematic preservational measures, but also some major threats to the resource
• On the one hand the new communist government had a programme of planned industrialization and extensive social housing provision for a rapidly growing population, which rose from 38,000 in 1960 to 60,000 in 1980: both led to unsightly high-rise intrusions in both the Medieval and Baroque towns
• On the other hand, while having little official interest in monuments to either bourgeois nationalism or baroque Catholocism, both local and national governments had a considerable interest in legitimating their rule and associating themselves with Hungarian self-identity as purveyed through the state-building mythologies
• The post-1990 period opened up so many towns as this throughout Central Europe to Western tourists eager to expand new horizons and attracted to the remarkable ensemble of Baroque buildings of international importance
• Cesky Kumlov: a future in tourism?
• The small Czech town of Cesky Krumlov, 160 km south of Prague is a UNESCO designated World Heritage Site on the basis of the quality and intact integrity of its built environmental heritage
• It is typical of many such small towns, which in Western Europe have fostered a considerable and profitable tourism industry and which in Central Europe are awaiting imminent mass discovery by heritage tourists tourists with a mixture of over-optimistic expectations and over-pessimistic foreboding
• The simple economic equation is to use the profits from heritage tourism to provide the support for the maintenance and restoration of the heritage resource
• The first two are more widely applicable, namely; the equitable distribution of tourism's economic costs and benefits and the potential dissonance in the heritage product itself
• The third difficulty stems from the consequences of the problem of the 'right of return'. 
• A high proportion of the building stock especially in the central areas, was previously owned by either Germans, expelled by the Benes decrees of 1945, or Jewish victims of the Holocaust
• All three difficulties can be related in that German investment may be dependent upon some solution in the dispossession issue perhaps within wider discussions of accession to the European Union
• Heritage in Budapest reflects the oscillation between national and supra-national roles: between the exclusive heritage of a distinct ethnic group, being used to define and separate Hungarians from neighbouring peoples, and the more all inclusive heritage of a multi-ethnic imperium which places Hungary within much wider ideological and cultural European contexts
• The idea of Hungary as the eastern bastion of western Christendom against the Turk created a single consistent race enemy which could be used in two different ways
• The post-Mohacs Turkish conquest, occupation, and subsequent liberation, provides an interpretative theme uncomplicated by any surviving Turkish or convert Islamic cultural group (as in Bulgaria or Bosnia) or by any notable surviving physical structures
• Although all the Eastern European and Balkan states make some use of the 'eastern barbarian hordes', it has been of particular value in Hungarian state building
• To these contradictions from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be added those deriving from the subsequent Hapsburg liberators/conquerors
• As an imperial capital Budapest participated in the nineteenth century urban-industrial development of the empire
• The heritage of Hungarian ethnic nationalism stands in stark contradiction to the imperial heritage
• The numerically small, culturally distinct, Magyar identity is seen as threatened from both strangers within and enemies without
• Thus, Budapest illustrates both the potential contradictions between national and European heritage and flexibility in heritage policy that can resolve these
• A distinctive national Hungarian heritage (with the crown of St Stephen, returned from exile in the US, in the national museum as its central icon) can be supplemented with a "Roman Budapest' (notably the 'Aquincum' excavations) that predates the first Magyar settler by a thousand years and German, Jewish, Slavonic and perhaps even Turkish legacies, appropriate for a 'European' capital
• Gdansk: compositing a multi-cultural heritage
• The ambiguity of the heritage of Gdansk reflects its position between Germany and Poland
• Historically a Polish foundation, it was gemanised by a combination of military and economic conquest in the fourteenth century
• The obvious heritage question therefore is what and whose heritage have the Poles reconstructed and reinterpreted in Gdansk since 1945 and how have the reorientations since 1990 affected this heritage
• Despite these political changes and military disasters, centuries of mercantile wealth have contributed a streetscape of outstanding buildings in the historic core which have associations with both the Hansa period for Germans and with the Polish nobility for Poles
• Each of these themes could be interpreted as either the national heritage of resistance and eventual overthrow of alien political and cultural domination or, conversely, as the composite heritage of German/Polish historical interaction or as a more general European heritage commemorating major European, even world, themes and events
• The reconstruction of Gdansk accordingly raises particularly delicate issues of heritage identity
• However, sufficient continuity of architectural and mercantile tradition persisted throughout the city's political vicissitudes that the Poles had no difficulty identifying with the results of their reconstruction
• Medieval and Renaissance architectural styles in Gdansk have wide currency in Europe and also have a local accent which, although associated with the Hansa traditions emanating from Northern Germany and Flanders, has Baltic regional rather than nationalistic overtones
• Furthermore Polish iconographic elements persisted into the twentieth century, although subject to some Nazi removal
• Naturally all specifically German streetscape iconography has now disappeared
• The pressures against developing an exclusively Polish national heritage relate to both the demand for and supply of heritage products
• On the demand side Germany is the most obvious tourism market for formerly German cities in Poland 
• In practice, however, some market segmentation is occurring both in the heritage sold and the medium of its sale
• In the historic core, the Germans are the dominant market and official Polish tourism perspectives are available to them in German brochures 
• Gdansk is peculiarly well equipped to project a recast European heritage identity rather than a Polish nationalist one
• It is a product of two main cultures, with minority contributions from Jews and others (notably Flemish/Dutch architectural styles)
• Its distinctive Hanseatic identity, while of Germanic origin, is nonetheless a multinational Northern European regional idiom that does not in itself carry overtones of nationalistic oppression and is generally recognized in the tourism industry 
• Kaliningrad/Konigsberg is the only major German city to have fallen to direct Soviet annexation in 1945; as such it presents a unique heritage problem, only superficially comparable to that of Gdansk
• Konigsberg was a thirteenth century Teutonic Knights foundation and thus of unambiguous Germanic origin
• Unlike Danzig/Gdansk, however, it remained in essentially continuous German occupance until 1945, when this 700-year identity was terminated and its population, function and even name was abruptly changed and the city became a monofunctional military base, closed to foreigners for 45 years
• The questions arise as to not only whose heritage, but what heritage, recognizable in tourist terms, may be sold
• The German built environment has largely vanished; however the Russian inhabitants imported in 1945 have created an environment which could in theory constitute a saleable heritage
• However, in this respect a fundamental problem has arisen: the collective heritage identity useful to tourism and essential to sociopolitical stability is disintegrating, as a result of the failure of the Soviet state, the discrediting of the city's Stalinist name, and the physical severance from a post-Soviet Russia which in any case has other priorities than the reconstruction of Kaliningrad
• This has created a very unusual heritage dissonance problem
• Local interests are becoming consonant with the formerly very dissonant heritage of the Germans and to this extent aligned with the principal tourism market, but by seeking to assume themselves the identity they are selling back to visitors, generating a dissonance with their own past and the Soviet iconography still around them, and potentially so with their future identity within the Russian state
• The material base for the reconstruction of the German heritage of Konigsberg is thin
• The central focus of such reclaimed heritage identity is the internationally renowned philosopher Immanuel Kant who has a human significance devoid of hostility and transcending purely Germanic heritage and is also intrinsic to the regional sense of place
• While his reclamation does not therefore depend upon German identity (least of all that in local living memory) it has been conducive, along with the hope for German investment, to a more general 'Teutomania'
• Kant's material heritage is primarily his tomb, adjacent to the ruined cathedral
• From this his presence has diffused to other marking, notably a German-funded replacement of a statue lost in 1945; also an international Kant society is based in Kaliningrad and a Kant Museum in the cathedral is proposed
• However the historic core of Konigsberg, on and around the island in the Pregel (Pregolya), was destroyed in 1945; leaving only a shell of the cathedral, which now shares the central island with formally designed parkland containing Soviet/Russian statuary
• The castle had carried particularly hostile symbolism to non-Germans, as the anchor of German eastward colonization and coronation site of the kings of Prussia
• Its ruins were removed during 1960s redevelopment, no doubt wit contemporary satisfaction
• The alternative, namely the Stalinist architecture created largely on a tabula rasa on the principles of socialist planning, is an improbably basis of heritage identity
• It is mostly in poor repair, repetitive of socialist modernist design across the former Soviet Union, with uniform factory-produced apartments, and has specifically failed to replace the image-forming city centre
• The process of resurrecting the heritage of Konigsberg is multifaceted involving voluntary organisations; entrepreneurs renovating old buildings for Western consular offices and companies and the Kaliningrad Museum, the Museum of Capitulation, and the Amber Museum
• The German government has contributed to the reconstruction of the cathedral and help has been received from private German interests with Konigsberg roots 
• Thus a tentative Konigsberg heritage is re-emerging
• The ultimate demise of the Soviet iconography, as elsewhere in Russia, will remove an obvious dissonance; although perhaps qualified by the survival of such patriotic symbolism as the naval war memorial, close to the cathedral
• The apparent similarity with Gdansk is therefore quite misleading, most fundamentally in the relationship between the two cultural heritages involved
• Kaliningrad was a case of attempted total displacement of an entirely German heritage, now paradoxically showing aspirations towards a total reversion
• In practice, however, a complete denial of the heritage of Kaliningrad, inseparable as it is from victory in a brutal war, seems neither plausible nor attainable; the city's identity may become inexorably hybrid and to this extent akin to Gdansk
• The final example is Weimar, a special case in that it is only one of this largely German-impacted set of cities remaining in contemporary Germany, having been reabsorbed in 1990
• Its interest as a heritage city lies in its preeminence in german national culture
• Weimar has been associated with many famous artists and musicians but reached its apogee in the classical 'Goethezeit' two centuries ago
• Like the other tourist-historic gems it then experienced eclipse, material survival, and eventually iconic re-emergence for successive Germanies
• Under the DDR, Weimar suffered environmental blight (lignite and car emissions) and some material neglect, ultimately seeking UNESCO assistance
• Weimar's nemesis and enigma is Buchenwald, and the inescapable heritage of atrocity with which it is associated
• Heritage management and content has changed circumspectly rather than abruptly as elsewhere
• In addition to the ownership problems, discussed earlier, Weimar has been committed to a pluralist interpretation which recognizes various pasts (despite some early street renaming), which may be kept the more open and liberal by the warning of Bucenwald
• `It should not be concluded from the above brief account of difficulties, paradoxes and uncertainties of heritage planning in the cities of Central Europe, that this is a completely unique circumstance in time and place
• Many similar problems exist, or have existed quite recently, in the cities of Western Europe which have experienced similar
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