8 DARK TOURISM
Vanessa Agnew
Reenactment is often drawn to the cloaca of the past—its slop buckets and sluices, bandages, trenches, and killing fields. In simulating people's pinched lives and untimely deaths, it foregrounds dirty materiality in order to affect an understanding of the past that casts the present in a light that is at once brighter and dimmer.
Yet the phenomenon referred to as “dark tourism” since the 1990s (Lennon and Foley, 1996; Seaton, 1996) pursues the investigation of past calamities and suffering to new levels. Concerned with more than the merely base, the dark tourist seeks sites associated with death, slaughter, genocide, tragedy, crime, and environmental disaster (Hohenhaus, 2019). The medialized nature of the catastrophe affords the site itself a special status in the public imagination (Cottle, 2012). At Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chernobyl, and Ground Zero, the dark tourist is exposed to a frisson of danger and depravity. This both allows for contemplating individual mortality and contributes to a sense of collective identity. Dark tourism wrangles with the conflictual present while forging narratives about the past.Sometimes referred to as “difficult” or “dissonant” heritage (Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996; Logan and Reeves, 2009), dark tourism emerged as a subfield of heritage and tourism studies in the late 1990s and saw a surge of interest after 9/11 (Light, 2017, pp. 276-277). With its emphasis on spectacle and Mediality, some scholars regard it as a postmodern phenomenon, albeit one with a long history (Rojek, 1993; Lennon and Foley, 2000, p. 147; Light, 2017, p. 278). Since it does not necessarily restage calamity, dark tourism is generally held distinct from reenactment, which spans broader representational possibilities and modes of inquiry. Rather than using reenactment as a framework, dark tourism scholars favor analytic categories such as site interpretation and visitor management, the commodification and marketing of“dark” sites, tourist motivations for visitation, ethical dilemmas associated with the subject matter, dark tourism's contribution to collective memory, and its potential role in post-conflict resolution (see Stone et al., 2018; Reynolds, 2018; Bathory, 2018; White and Frew, 2013).
Dark tourism typologies have variously distinguished between penal, genocide, disaster, grief, suicide, atrocity, poverty, favela, atomic, conflict, and other species of dark tourism, and proposed gradations of suffering (dark, darker, darkest; pale versus dark) (Miles, 2014). Yet as Duncan Light adds in a comprehensive review of the field, there is little scholarly consensus: since its inception, the field has broadened to encompass various forms and dispositions (2017, p. 281). These typologies and subtypes are united mainly by their concern with places and things associated with death and suffering.Yet public interest in death and suffering is not limited to the chopping blocks and burial sites of bygone times. Passively observing material residues of past suffering is often augmented by a desire to restage and vicariously experience the cataclysm. Commercial dark tourist sites incorporate reenactment into tourist packages. Visitors to Latvia's Karostas Cietums military prison, for example, can “live the part of a prisoner,” while “fans of especially extreme adventures” are invited to spend the night in a prison cell and eat a prison meal (quoted in Tezenas, 2015, pp. 93—98). Tourists to Rwanda can venture into the highlands to observe mountain gorillas before being led to sites of human mass killing, where reenactment was incorporated into the 20th-anniversary genocide commemoration, and blood-soaked clothing and bodies remain on display (Hohenhaus, 2013, p. 142; Wosinska, 2017, p. 199). American Civil War reenactments, generally construed in terms of national heritage and commemoration, draw thousands of participants and tens of thousands of spectators to places like Gettysburg.
As early as the mid-19th century, slave auction reenactments mounted by abolitionists like Henry Ward Beecher fostered antislavery sentiment, even while such events underscored the institution of slavery by inviting antebellum audiences to participate in the purchase of slaves and to revel in the affected role of slave owner (Auslander, 2013; Beecher and Scoville, 2006 [1888], p.
296). Mock slave auctions, like lynching reenactments and slavery tourism, persist into the present (Lelo and Jamal, 2016) and exemplify what is at stake in reenactive dark tourism. Whereas the dark tourist characteristically engages with the dead by visiting burial grounds, battlefields, ruins, and disaster sites, the task of the “dark” reenactor is to seemingly make dead or be dead (realism). This shift in emphasis provides us with a compelling argument for examining dark tourism within the context of reenactment. More than merely spectating sites of catastrophe, reenactive dark tourism blurs boundaries between spectator and spectated, living and dead, perpetrator and victim. In this sense, reenactive dark tourism goes a step beyond what Susan Sontag critiqued in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)—the tendency of photography to present suffering for the titillation of the viewer, thereby exhausting the viewer's sympathy and moral outrage. Resignation, she concluded, was the lamentable outcome of proliferating violent images. Reenactive dark tourism similarly highlights the problem of agency. In the Brechtian sense, restaging dark events is a form of “culinary” theater, but a performance of the past in which eater and eaten may be difficult to differentiate. Without a distinct space of reflection, eroded is the position of otherness that is usually reserved for the dead. It is an open question whether this is to be thought of as aesthetically ingenious, prurient, or significant to processes of historical reckoning. Further, the medialization of “dark” events foregrounds problems of mediation and narration. As Daniel P. Reynolds argues in Postcards from Auschwitz (2018), there is a tendency among dark tourists to blur distinctions between the original event and later representations (p. 22). Such undermining of historical evidence has implications for historical representation and for the ways in which we come to view the painful past. What is at stake, we might ask, when calamity and suffering are done over again. What kinds of cultural and political work is reenactive dark tourism meant to do and what work does it do?While the term dark tourism is comparatively new and contested within the scholarly community, the phenomenon has an ancient pedigree. The assigned place of religious rites, funerary rituals, and memento mori in daily life, and the visibility of corporal punishment and public executions have long ensured the quotidian familiarity of suffering, dying, and death. Recognizing this, along with the fundamentally Western underpinnings of dark tourism, many scholars make a formal distinction between contemporary dark touristic practices and thanatourism, a historical phenomenon characterized by visiting places associated with death and suffering (Light, 2017, p. 277). Eighteenth-century writer James Boswell, to take an example, observed that the
Vanessa Agnew
“irresistible” spectacle of an execution served a private as well as public function, for, he averred, dying in one's bed or at Tyburn were “only different Modes of the same thing; both [were] death” and attending an execution had the effect of “quiet[ing] and fortify[ing] [the] Mind” (2014 [1768], p. 80). Such regard for death sometimes served as an augment to the grand tour in the 18th and 19th centuries and to pilgrimages which took in culturally significant sites, including visits to ossuaries and repositories of saintly relics, as at the cathedrals in Santiago de Compostela and Canterbury (Seaton, 2002, p. 73). Reenacting death and dying was and remains part of ritualized spectacles like the Christian Eucharist and the stations of the cross staged at Easter (see The Wintershall Players, 2018).
In its modern, secular form, dark tourism is dominated by a concern with conflict. German- Jewish philosopher, Hannah Arendt, returning from exile, stressed the necessity for Germans to take stock of what had been destroyed by the war:
Amid the ruins, Germans mail each other picture postcards still showing the cathedrals and market places, the public buildings and bridges that no longer exist. And the indifference with which they walk through the rubble has its exact counterpart in the absence of mourning for the dead...
This general lack of emotion... is only the most conspicuous outwards symptom of a deep-rooted, stubborn, and at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened.(Arendt, 2005, p. 249, quoted in Hell, 2008, p. 124)
Only by inspecting the sites of destruction and practicing a form of domestic dark tourism would mourning be possible. Such reckoning was coupled with historical understanding. Differentiating between what had been lost and what remained—ruined cities, the human carcass, elapsed time—was preparatory to commemoration, but also to the possibility of reconstructing civil society.
We find similar gestures in recent examples ofWorld War II commemoration. German artist Yadegar Asisi's mammoth panorama, Dresden 1945, displaying the Allied firebombing of that city, attempts to bring a productive dimension to the dark touristic experience. The visitor takes in a 360o view of the destroyed city at a “1:1 scale,” in what is billed as a “journey back in time.” Arrayed around the 15m-high tower are flattened buildings, raging fires, columns of smoke, victims, and survivors. At the same time, the panorama draws attention to “interactions of Europe's war-torn history,” interactions that relativize the Allied destruction of Dresden and other German cities through reference to the German bombing of Rotterdam, Coventry, Stalingrad, and Warsaw (Dresden 1945). Yet if the panorama contributes to a universalizing discourse of wartime devastation through topographical correspondences that simultaneously relieve and inscribe German culpability, it also affects a temporal sleight of hand. A complementary panorama, Baroque Dresden, shown biannually at the same site and in alternation with Dresden 1945, is the un-dark corollary of the city before the cataclysm. Here, Dresden's Renaissance and Baroque architecture is enlivened by cacophonous street scenes showing sedan bearers, market-goers, and jesters in the town square. Asisi's twin panoramas of the same city at the turn of the 17th century and in the mid-20th are an historic-aesthetic instantiation of what Freud called fort-da (gone-there).
Not unlike the postcards criticized by Arendt, the Dresden panoramas allow what was destroyed to be made whole again, and what was dead, alive.Gunter Demnig's Stolperstein Projekt (Stumbling Stone Project, 1996—) likewise attaches significance to place and plays with notions of past versus present. The project commemorates Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, the politically persecuted, Jehovah's Witnesses, and euthanasia victims
who were expelled and murdered by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945 (Stolpersteine in Berlin). Unlike state-sponsored commemorative forms that incline toward the impersonal and monumental, the Stolpersteine are noted for the ways in which individual agency is mobilized in the creation of a cultural landscape: private citizens and communities research, commission, and tend their own plaques (Cook and van Riemsdijk, 2014). Specifically, the Stolpersteine take the form of small brass plaques set among cobblestones on pavements in German and other European cities. Decisive is the coupling of victims' names with their former places of residence: each text opens with the words “Hier wohnte...” (Here lived...).The plaques thus link the past with the present, and current inhabitants with former ones, giving a sense of intermingled Jewish and non-Jewish households, and of once-Jewish neighborhoods evacuated of their inhabitants. Acting on the viewer today, the Stolpersteine facilitate what Alison Landsberg refers to as prosthetic witnessing, the possibility of testifying about past events that were never experienced firsthand (2004, p. 149).
Walking the streets of Germany's capital, mindful pedestrians swerve to avoid treading on the brass objects. Footfall is suspended and forward progress retarded, as pedestrians are momentarily disrupted from their purpose. This stumbling reenacts the victims' own faltering steps decades earlier, victims disrupted in their daily lives and dragged from their homes to trip into the street. Through this manipulation of the body's motor responses and the perception of a shared physiological disposition, past and present appear to collapse. The stumbler's body gives a sign of something it seems to know—perhaps the pupils dilate, heart rate increases, and goosebumps appear on the skin (authenticity). In the Stolpersteine, memory of the genocidal past is thus not relegated to the lieu de mmoire, where, according to Pierre Nora (1989), the past can be deposited and forgotten. Rather, the Stolpersteine appear where they are unexpected and unwished for. They lack decorum. And they produce a bodily encounter with earlier traumatic events that surprises and disturbs. This aleatoric dimension opens a window of receptivity that is a precondition for knowledge about the painful past (Figure 8.1).
Indicative of the growing interest in dark tourism are reality TV series like David Farrier's Dark Tourist (2018), in which the New Zealand journalist visits “places made famous by death and disaster.” Organized according to geographic location rather than thematic content or commemorative context, the series casts the presenter in the role of naive participant-observer with a gormless manner and incongruous pink shorts. He participates in a simulated illegal crossing of the Mexico-US border, where he is “captured” and roughed up by “border guards.” In the US, he participates in a JFK assassination tour in Dallas and tours the urban wasteland of deindustrialized Detroit. While in Japan, there is a visit to a radiation-contaminated town and to Aokigahara forest, notorious for its suicides.
The TV series also investigates World War II-themed reenactments like Paddock Wood in Kent. This so-called “Glastonbury of war” is designated the world's largest military reenactment, attracting 80,000 spectators annually. Viewers learn that participants enjoy “running around and shooting people” and “hang[ing] out in the mud.” Such discomfort seems to be a marker of historical fidelity: “I'm a muddy mess. This is authentic,” a reenactor is heard to proclaim. At the same time, reenactive dark tourism is caught in a bind: “It's a bit of a catch-22,” observes the presenter, “They want all this to be as authentic as possible without the inconvenient parts of history.” But, he concludes, “I'm not sure making a ghastly piece of history fun is the best way to understand it. Or to avoid repeating it” (episode 5, entire paragraph).
If dark tourism encapsulates a desire to engage with the finality of death, the reenacted dark event is about the future as much as the past. In reenacting, the dark tourist practices a form of counterfactual thinking that allows the ending to be imagined differently. It is a future that does
Vanessa Agnew
Figure 8.1 Vanessa Agnew, Refugee Plaque, 2016, granite, brass flashing. Recalling Demnig’s Stolperstein Project, Refugee Plaque invokes the Nazi past to draw attention to the situation facing refugees in Europe today. Plaques are inscribed with details of the refugee’s futile search for a new home: “Habibullah A. wanted to live here DOB 1983 Fled Afghanistan 10.2015 Denied housing in Berlin on 20.7.2016.” Source: Jobst von Kunowski.
not end with the annihilation of an entire ethnos or the extirpation of anthropotita itself, but in which biodiversity can be revivified from the global seed vault and the dead commemorated to rise again.
Further reading
Macdonald, S., 2015; McDaniel, K. N. (ed.) 2018; Puff, H. (2009); Schult, T., 2018; Sion, B. (ed.) 2014; Stole, B., 2018; Willis, E., 2014.