Safeguarding “Negative Historical Values” for the Future? Appropriating the Past in the UNESCO Cultural World Heritage Site Auschwitz-Birkenau
4/2015
SUMMARY:
In 1979 the former concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau was included in UNESCO’s World Cultural Heritage. This article analyzes how the function of Auschwitz-Birkenau in the appropriation of the past was perceived as well as constructed by this process in national and international contexts. The historical lessons drawn from the camp’s “material testimony” formed the didactic base material inevitable for the building of a better future. The conservation paradigms of the ecological management and the buffer zone of the site, from the 1970s to the 1990s, reveal how Auschwitz-Birkenau was translated from a pool of authentic evidence into a transmission belt for a vision of the future. They show how temporal references were mediated on the site and reveal the implications for understandings of the past that have been produced in this manner.