Preliminary Programme

As the seventieth anniversary of its conclusion approaches, we stand at a particularly interesting moment in the evolving remembrance of the Second World War. Commemorative events and broader cultural representations of the war are suffused with a sense that the era of living memory is coming to a close, just as post-Cold War developments have precipitated a huge upsurge in contestation around the war and its legacy. This has generated palpable anxieties about how to fix in place ‘desirable’ memories of the conflict once living witnesses are no longer on hand to validate and secure them. Simultaneously, the landscape of remembrance is being transformed as technological change gives birth to new forms of mimetic and prosthetic remembering in digital media and immersive museums, while experiential practices such as historical re-enactment and dark tourism proliferate in unprecedented ways. Periodically, controversies also flare around manifestly ‘fake’ memories such as fabricated Holocaust memoirs or acts of imposture at veterans’ parades. Yet the boundaries between the genuine and the fake are increasingly blurred, and collectively these developments have produced a pervasive obsession around the notion of ‘authenticity’ in collective remembrance of the war.
The aim of this paper is to interrogate the terms of the debate around authenticity in a range of cultural practices and discourses related to the Second World War, both in Europe and the wider world. It will explore how claims to authenticity are advanced, for example by the remediation of witness testimony, the display of period artefacts, the deployment of ‘expert’ opinion and by the orchestration of immersive experience. By the same token, it will analyse how such claims are received and negotiated by would-be ‘consumers’ of various kinds. It will also consider what is at stake politically in debates around this question, whether in terms of arguments around national identity, international contests over divisive pasts, or the transnational diffusion of broader narratives and norms. It will draw examples from: museums; virtual remembering in digital media; mimetic, prosthetic and fake practices of remembrance; and fictional representations in film, television and literature.
The primary aim of the paper is to cast new light on the current moment of Second World War collective remembrance. Yet the focus on the problematic of ‘authenticity’ will also offer a novel perspective on the transition beyond living memory and has significant potential to generate transferable conceptual insights. (Show less)

The eyewitness has always had a special status in society: s/he is seen to have unique access to the past by virtue of physically having ‘been there’. The power of witnessing is thus intimately linked to concepts of authenticity – it is the eyewitness who, it is believed, can truly give an account of ‘what it was really like’. Indeed, the witness has become ubiquitous in processes of remembering and representing catastrophic events, be it the Holocaust or the London Bombings. However, in order to ensure an impact on society’s ‘commemorative agenda’ (Erll/Rigney, 2009), witness testimony must be recorded and fixed in a way that allows wider distribution – this process takes multiple forms from memorial museums and documentary film, to internet fora and television shows.
Nonetheless, the recording and distribution of testimony poses a problem for witnesses. Such mediation can result in a perceived reduction in the authenticity of the narrative, as the person-to-person contact is lost. Mediation results in an apparent increase in the ‘veracity gap’ (Peters, 2009), that is, the ‘chasm of fallibility’ between experience and discourse (Frosh, 2009). The recipient of the testimony is necessarily at a greater distance from the witness spatially and temporally than s/he would be in ‘live’ conversation. The paper explores the methods deployed in diverse media to combat this effect and to lend authority and authenticity to the testimony they record. In the process, the presentation elaborates two new theoretical terms: complementary authenticities and mediated remembering communities, which will be highlighted with reference to a range of examples from audio-visual recordings of Holocaust testimony through the personal accounts that make up the 9/11 Tribute Centre in New York.
The study defines ‘remembering communities’ as groups of individuals who, quite literally, remember together through everyday conversation. Their memories overlap and intersect, strengthening and supporting the perceived authenticity of the story told (Assmann, 2006). In a similar way, in many media of public or popular history, multiple witness accounts are brought together, and, from the perspective of reception, appear to intersect, overlap and authenticate one another. However, this perception is an illusion created by the medium – the individual testimonies have been recorded separately, at different times and for different purposes – thus these are mediated remembering communities. The concept of mediated remembering communities demonstrates how remediation of fragmented testimonies harnesses the power of multiple witness voices to provide individual testimony with authority and thereby greater cultural-political impact.
The concept of mediated remembering communities leads into the second central term of the paper: complementary authenticities. Drawing on recent work in the study of popular history (Pirker/Rüdiger, 2010), three forms of authenticity are identified: witness authenticity (objects, sites or individuals with direct links to the past); experiential authenticity (replicas or re-enactments, which evoke a feeling of authenticity); and authenticity of affect (a sense of authenticity based on an emotive response). The paper demonstrates that mass mediated testimony combines all three forms to create the illusion that the visitor or viewer is directly experiencing ‘what it was like’, or ‘seeing the past through the victim’s eyes’. (Show less)

The paper will examine notions of the authentic in UNESCO World Cultural and Natural Heritage, which has played a very important role for the broadening and transnationalization of the concept over the last few decades. Firstly, the presentation will reconstruct concepts of authenticity in the history of the foundation of the World Heritage programme up to the International Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage of 1972 and the Operational Guidelines for the Implementations of the World Heritage Convention, which were published in 1977 and were revised several times in the following years. “Authenticity” was therein a key concept. Secondly, the paper will investigate the subsequent practice of the nomination procedure and of addition to the World Heritage List up to 1994 – and the role authenticity played in it. The paper offers a critical analysis of the cosmopolitanization of collective memory and of “post-national memory culture”. Additionally, conflicts between representatives of the international organizations, of national and local authorities, and users and inhabitants of the heritage will be investigated. At what points did conflicting interests and diverging concepts and interpretations of the actual sites occur? Here, we will see that the public discourse and scholarly debates on the politics of remembrance are often expressed as conflicts over authenticity. The presentation will investigate the instrumental character of authenticity claims in various national, regional and transnational contexts.
The contribution is related to the research project “Knowledge of the World – Heritage of Mankind” at the Leibniz Institute of European History (Mainz), which brings together studies on the first German World Heritage Site, Aachen Cathedral, the World Heritage Site Old City of Jerusalem and its City Walls, the World Heritage Site Auschwitz Concentration Camp, and the World Heritage Site Galápagos Islands National Park. (Show less)

Today, attitudes to the past are characterised by an intense longing for historical authenticity, which seems to be an important parallel to the discourse on nostalgia. Both phenomena began to assume new potency in the last third of the twentieth century as modern societies started to vacillate between preserving and forgetting the past in new ways.
From a historical perspective, authenticity may be viewed primarily as a phenomenon of the modern age used to reconcile the growing gap between experience and expectation (Reinhart Koselleck) and to suspend the transitory nature of time. To date, researchers have adopted a critical distance to the ubiquitously employed term “authenticity” and have distinguished between two forms of authenticity: subject-oriented authenticity (in the sense of personal credibility) and object-oriented authenticity (in the sense of materially genuine). What both have in common, however, is a wish for “direct” and “original” experience. Although there is a strong desire for authenticity in the public sphere, from a scholarly perspective authenticity remains something fictitious (Lethen, 2006). Scholars tend to emphasise that attributions of authenticity are a construct. They highlight the contrast between “authentic” and “constructed” memory and between “authentic” records of history and those that have been transformed through reception and transfer processes and are hence no longer viewed as “authentic”. Seen from this perspective authentic memory and authentic historical records are actually a myth, but one with a powerful social impact, precisely because they link the subjective experience of the recipient with the authenticity ascribed to historical objects and narratives (Loewy/Moltmann, 1996). This explains – in contrast – ¬why there are such concerted efforts to achieve historical authentication – whether by art historians trying to distinguish between genuine works of art and forgeries, or preservers of historic monuments attempting to draw as precise a dividing line as possible between original substance and reconstruction.
The paper will therefore differentiate between personal, object-oriented and empirical aspects of this key concept in cultural history and public memory and try to analyse historically our current understanding of authenticity. (Show less)