Beyond the Nation

Abstract

In this chapter the author explores the effects of the exclusive potential of heritage in culturally heterogeneous European societies and investigates initiatives that seek to make heritage more inclusive and pluralistic. How do minority groups negotiate heritage practices and discourses formulated by the dominant national population? From a war monument in South Tyrol, an Italian province inhabited by a large German-speaking minority, to the role of migrant memories in the making of national heritage discourses, the chapter focuses on processes that seek to include minority voices and contrasting heritage interpretations in what Laurajane Smith terms the “Authorized Heritage Discourse.”

Transforming a Controversial Heritage: The Case of the Fascist Victory Monument in South Tyrol

“…In direct contrast to this homogenizing aim, the BZ '18-'45 exhibition embodies the spirit of the Faro Convention and emphasizes South Tyrol's heterogeneity by embracing and openly exploring pluralistic, often divergent interpretations of South Tyrol's past and heritage. 110 Members of both the Italian and the German political right have criticized the exhibition, which is testimony to its success, according to one of the historians in the Commission. 111 The debates surrounding the Victory Monument have concerned primarily the feelings of the German and the Italian communities.…”

“…The intimate relationship of these heritage sites to a circumscribed, territorially rooted past tends to exclude recent immigrants, whose pasts are rooted elsewhere and for whom a monument may carry little, if any, significance. 112 To what extent have considerations about the inclusion of "new" South Tyroleans played a role in the making of the Victory Monument exhibition? According to Silvia Spada and Hannes Obermair, the exhibition's creators did not consider people with migrant backgrounds to be a target group.…”

“…The curators' approach opens up the possibility for people to engage with heritage in fluid, ever-changing ways, without the need to belong to a community with an age-old connection to a particular heritage. 115 Interpretations and approaches to the past do not necessarily need to be shared. They may be conflictual or dissonant, as this paper has shown, and they may be of varying (ir)relevance.…”