Touching war : an ethnographic analysis of war tourism in Europe

"In this dissertation, I study the motivations, experiences, and reflections of war tourists. I argue that war tourism should be understood as a phenomenon that revolves around the possibility of engaging with place-bound war memories and histories in an embodied, affective, and meaningful way. Through four empirical case studies, I draw an image of the way different groups of visitors motivate, experience, and value their visits to former war sites in Europe. The four case studies focus on different groups of people--groups of people that all have specific reasons to visit these sites and that seem to defy the label of the general 'day tourist': the military, volunteers, war veterans, and peace marchers. These groups of people all have an established or desired connection with particular wars and the places associated with those wars. The sites that they visited are associated with twentieth-century wars that (partially) took place in Europe: the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, and the wars in former Yugoslavia. By means of scrutinizing four specific groups of visitors, I aim to get a better understanding of the experiences of these groups, and give more depth to the concept of 'wartourism.' I provide insight into the many layers, complexities, and tensions that pertain to war tourism, and probe into the role and value of war heritage in today's society. This means that I pay ample attention to discussing the different facets and layers that constitute visitors' experiences. I approach the experience of visiting a war site as an integral part in the lives of the visitors: an experience that is anticipated, lived through, and reflected upon, and whose consequences are sometimes only understood long after the experience took place. In the dissertation, I argue that integrating theories on (secondary) witnessing, historical re-enactment, 'authenticity', affect, place, and memory in the field of war tourism contributes to existing knowledge on the appeal of visiting former war sites. War tourism is not only a very diverse form of tourism, but also fulfills a desire to engage with a war history in a personal, affective and embodied way." Dissertation,Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam,2020 255 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm