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Overview & Synopsis

On ‘communism tours’ in Warsaw, Prague and Bratislava, and the staging of history in the age of mass tourism. History is increasingly being consumed as an experience. This is particularly true of historical tourism. What exactly happens when a local past is marketed to an international audience? Sabine Stach explores this question through a key form of tourism: the city tour. Using the example of the increasingly popular ‘communism tours’, she examines how the legacy of the Cold War in Warsaw, Prague and Bratislava is interpreted for tourists and staged as an authentic experience. Adopting an ethnographic perspective, the author explores the interplay between travellers, guides and urban space, demonstrating how the recent history of these various locations becomes ‘walkable’ through interactions and performative elements. By combining perspectives from memory and heritage studies with approaches from tourism research, the work sheds light on the complex relationship between local knowledge, transcultural memories, tourist needs and economic logics. The communism tours, which present state socialism in a manner that is partly humorous and partly critical, thus reveal much more than superficial entertainment: they shed light on the dynamics through which history is communicated and consumed in the age of mass tourism.