Tourism to painful places

It is evident that visitor numbers to “painful/traumatic” sites are rising but what is behind this rise and how do people feel during and after a visit? I thought I’ll share two of my own experiences.

In 2011 I went on a holiday with my partner to Austria cycling along the Danube. When cycling along the Danube you inevitably have to cycle through Mauthausen, a pretty Austrian village but also the site of Austria’s largest former concentration camp. Due to my PhD (and my personal interest), my partner (who is English) decided to visit the memorial. We initially visited the variety of memorials established within the camp boundary when I suddenly realised that my partner was in tears after reading one of the inscriptions. He was so upset that he left the site. I continued visiting the rest of the memorial and although I was moved, I was not emotionally involved. Having grown up in Germany, I have visited memorial sites before and I am very familiar with the atrocities in these sites – I wonder whether prior knowledge makes a difference to visitors?

In 2014, I had to opportunity to visit the former KGB building in Riga. It was the first time since 1991 that the building was open to the public (as part of Riga’s European Capital of Culture celebrations). After the KGB had left, the building remained empty and no alterations to the building have been made since then. Hence, there was hardly any “tourism” infrastructure (e.g. in the form of exhibitions), the former KGB prison cells had remained in their “raw” state. For me, this visit was incredibly moving (much more so than Mauthausen). It reminded me of my time in East Germany – although I was very young I do remember my uncle being imprisoned due to political reasons. Are visits to sites which are still in living memory more emotionally moving? Or do visitors have to have a personal connection in order to fully understand the site? If so, how do we replicate this experience if there is no longer a personal connection? 

According to the Dark Tourism Research Centre at the University of Central Lancashire, cemeteries are also dark tourism sites. The most well-known site in the UK is Highgate Cemetery in London or the Necropolis in Glasgow. Whilst studying for my MA in Heritage Management I conducted visitor research at Arnos Vale Cemetery in Bristol. The results did not confirm that the site is a Dark Tourism sites. Visitors who attended the guided tours had a strong desire to find out more about the social history of the site and wanted to enjoy the wildlife in an otherwise very busy part of Bristol. Is it therefore appropriate to call these sites dark tourism sites? And more importantly, is death dark? I hope that this post demonstrates the complexity of the “Dark Tourism” concept and the importance of visitor research to gain an understanding of this complexity.