État présent: Dark Heritage

Jérémie Dres's 2011 graphic novel, Nous n'irons pas voir Auschwitz, recounts a road trip taken by the author with his brother to explore their Polish-Jewish roots.¹ For Paris-born Dres, the idea of going to Auschwitz seemed deplorable not simply because of its reputation as a 'dark' tourist destination but also because the aim of the trip was to discover places associated with the lives of his great-grandparents, not their deaths. What their visits to Warsaw and elsewhere in Poland show is the way in which Jewish history and heritage have been both erased from the city's architecture and re-activated in other ways as a response to those visiting (from the United States and elsewhere) in search of their Jewish origins. A different critical perspective on Auschwitz-Birkenau is offered in Georges Didi-Huberman's Écorces, a photo-essay that calls into question the 'museification' of the site.² Didi-Huberman's account of his visit to Birkenau begins with three pieces of bark he has taken from trees on the edge of the camp. The bark offers a different material encounter with the site to the 'official' displays offered but also serves as a conduit for thinking about writing, photography, and the complex personal stakes of visiting such a site. I cite these two visual ethnographies as examples of exciting and highly personal forms of 'research' produced within the last decade for three reasons. Firstly, to lay specific emphasis on the importance of the visual not just as a means of documenting heritage and tourism sites and practices but as a research practice in its own right, echoing Paul Virilio's Bunker Archaeology project, itself an ongoing source of inspiration for scholars working on twentieth-century ruins.³ Secondly, the texts produced by Dres and Didi-Huberman are indicative of how Auschwitz has come to operate not only as metonym for the collective atrocities of the Second World War but as site par excellence of 'dark tourism'. And finally, through their respective refusal of and encounter with Auschwitz, as a means of highlighting the deep-rooted suspicion amongst French and francophone scholars and heritage practitioners alike of tourism described in the anglophone world as 'dark'.

Coined in 2000 by John Lennon and Malcolm Foley in their now seminal Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster, the notion of 'dark tourism' has produced entire libraries' worth of scholarship largely dominated by an Anglo-American perspective.⁴ While the term 'thanatourism' had previously been proposed by Anthony Seaton to describe sites specifically dealing with death, 'dark tourism' has become the umbrella term for a great range of activities and sites dealing not only with death and atrocity but disaster, crime, and scandal.⁵ However, although France's battlefield tourism features as a key example in Lennon and Foley's early study, the term 'dark tourism' does not translate well into French. It is frequently translated as 'tourisme sombre', which loses its sense of the macabre, lurid, or sensational.⁶ Elsewhere these dimensions are given greater emphasis via the use of 'tourisme noir' or 'macabre', as found for example in Taïka Baillargeon's overview of existing anglophone scholarship for a 2016 special issue of the Canadian journal Téoros: revue de recherche en tourisme dedicated to the question Tourisme noir ou sombre tourisme?⁷ Another less common iteration, 'tourisme obscur', is adopted by Nathanaël Wadbled, writing in the same issue on the recreational agenda of many museums and sites associated with dark history.⁸ Ambroise Tézenas's photography project, Tourisme de la désolation, which is focused on tourism to former disaster sites, adds yet another term to the mix.⁹ An excellent bilingual engagement with the theme can be found in the 2017 dossier of the journal Mémoires en jeu / Memories at Stake on the theme Tourisme mémoriel: la face sombre de la terre?; worth noting in particular in the context of the semantic stakes of 'dark' tourism is Valérie Rosoux's discussion of how darkness might lead to light in the form of both...