Notes on: Retroland. Historical Tourism and the Longing for Authenticity
 

Groebner, V., 2018. Retroland. Historical Tourism and the Longing for Authenticity. German Literature Online, Goethe Institute (pp. 163-180 Translated by Jefferson Chase)

 

Firstly, Groebner talks about tourism. I think this is important because tourism is all about people experiencing places that they consider profound, important or sacred. The question of why they visit recurring specific places is important to understanding the idea of sacred and that is what Groebner goes into. He argues in ‘This Place is a Time Capsule’, that; “parts of our own reality are made up on fictions. One such part is tourism, which consciously stages things that never existed anywhere outside of itself.” pg. 1

 

He believes that tourism is a fundamental longing for a journey into the past, to experience a part of the world as it was at a particular point in time. That this desire to see an ‘authentic’ past is unreachable, and this is its fundamental fiction. “Why, I ask, can tourism cannot exist without constant references to authenticity from the past? Why does it stubbornly insist on stories of origin as the roots and sources of its own identity?” pg.1

 

Groebner argues that since the places tourists tend to visit are historical, they are not a living part of contemporary life, and are artificially resuscitated by tourism. He argues this in ‘Islands, Layers, Reflections’; “We can in fact see the distinction between the past - unchangeable, off limits over and done with - and history, which is the reproduction and re-narration of the past at a given present time.” He makes clear this distinction by the example of a holy shrine which is rebuilt in exactly the same form every few years as a continuing tradition which transforms “into history, into today, the here-and-now, an effective narrative and visualization, and the result of the work of still living protagonists.” pg.2 The shrine is therefore a ‘living history’, rather than a ‘past’.

 

He argues that another example of the fiction or inauthenticity is the choosing of the “‘correct’ phase of the past, when the attraction was most worth seeing.” Removing later changes to a historic building to return it to a more attractive form that it took at an earlier stage. 

 

He is quite stringent about what is authentic and inauthentic. “... augmentations [eg repairs to historic buildings] are merely doublings of whatever came before”. Page 6

 

He believes that tourists do not really care about the specific history of a place; “visitors don’t care a whit which time period the streets they explore come from, as long as they can purchase gingerbread, mulled wine and sneakers made in Asia there?” This is to emphasise his point about their lack of care about authenticity which has allowed them to recreate antiquated places in a false contemporary setting. 

 

“The narrative upon which tourism is based is one of traveling into time as a site of enhanced experience, a site on which visitors can dive into the past without threatening or questioning their own place as a part of modernity.” page 6

 

“People visit in order to recharge and rejuvenate themselves with something fresh from the past, the remnant, the trace, the monument must first be reconstructed, installed and restored - and the attendant stories must be constantly updated to be effective.” (note; or perhaps people imagine a place as it might have been?” page 7.

 

His view is really that historical places should be confined to the past because are from a past time and therefore, they have to be revived in order to be relevant for contemporary life. He uses the phrase; “making history come alive” as proof of this. Page 7.

 

An important insight into his view of people visiting historic places is his view of why tourists visit them. He argues that the emphasis on “experience” in travel brochures is a trick they use to get over the fact that the thing that is merely “experienced” is lacking in reality. The tourist companies “bring history to life” just in “one’s own subjective here-and-now… putative access to events that happened a long time ago.” page 9. 

He questions people going to places as a merely theatrical experience. It seems that the tourist is in search of a simulacra of profound experiences and this simulacra appears fake, especially when a tourist company spices it up. 

“Experience the most authentic traditional greek cuisine!” they read. The picturesque landscape where the visitors already are is apparently not Greek enough. The superlative in the advertisement promises something more genuine and original… The use of history for tourism entails a whole series of magic spells, formulas and promises. ‘You are allowed to forget that the past has passed.” 

This is his argument that tourism therefore truly lacks authenticity, especially when appropriating history for its own ends.