Can there be a conciliatory heritage?

Abstract

The scholarship on heritage has been preoccupied with discussions of conflict and discord. But might heritage not also be deployed for conciliatory functions after national trauma? Kazimierz, the historical Jewish district of Cracow, Poland is a unique urban space whose recent Jewish‐themed development both reflects and extends grassroots Polish–Jewish relationship building in the post‐Holocaust, post‐Communist era. It is one of the few sites in the world today where (non‐Polish) Jews and (non‐Jewish) Poles regularly encounter one another. Based on the everyday interactions and understandings of local participants, rather than top‐down memorial schemes or official proclamations of the achievement or expectation of reconciliation, this paper considers heritage spaces and landscapes as key sites for conciliatory civil society development through meaningful engagement with difficult histories.

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