Following The Rough Guide to Góra Kalwaria: Constructing Memory Tourism of Absence in Post-Communist Poland

Abstract

This article uses comparative analysis of the editions of The Rough Guide to Poland published in the 1990s to argue that a memory tourism of absence was being offered to western visitors. This differed from existing categories of tourism — dark tourism, Holocaust tourism, Jewish heritage tourism — by directing visitors to see the places where Jews lived before the Holocaust, and where their memory was in danger of being erased in both the communist and post-communist era. In this context, western visitors were not only directed to sites to witness absence, but also to engage in acts of memory tourism that were charged with a sense of moral purpose. A concern with absence was more widely shared in the decade following the fall of the Berlin Wall, and this memory tourism of absence is one that — like all acts of tourism — can and needs to be historicized.

KEYWORDS:

• memory tourism
• post-communist Eastern Europe
• Poland
• Jewish heritage
• The Rough Guide
• guidebooks
• absence

Acknowledgements

I thank the anonymous reviewers of this article and the editors of the special edition of this journal for their incisive criticism and comments as well as the comments of audiences in Liverpool and Aarhus who responded to earlier versions of this paper.

Notes on contributor

Tim Cole is a Professor of Social History at the University of Bristol where he is also the Director of the Brigstow Institute. He is the author of Images of the Holocaust (London 1999)/Selling the Holocaust (New York 1999), Holocaust City (New York 2003), Traces of the Holocaust (London 2011) and Holocaust Landscapes (London 2016) and a co-editor of Militarized Landscapes (London 2010) and Geographies of the Holocaust (Bloomington 2014).