Military and Industrial Legacies of the Soviet Union as Cultural Heritage in the Baltic Sea Region?

Management: Prof. Dr. Michael North, Prof. Dr. Mathias Niendorf

Junior Researcher: Jakub Aleksander Ramelow

Military legacies represent a particular example of the divided heritage in terms of ideological as well as ecological burden. If not used by the respective national armies, they are marked as restricted areas and by their gradual decay. The treatment of industrial legacies is similar. However, examples such as the Lithuanian nuclear power plant "Ignalina" show that such sites can be transformed into places of remembrance and tourist attractions. Military and industrial legacies can therefore be used as examples to examine heritage constructions that reveal in a special way the negotiation processes of different memory cultures and social acceptance and appropriation.

With recourse to concepts of decay or "curated decay" and cultures of remembrance, the preservation claims on places designed for conservation and thus also new questions on spatial concepts are to be posed in order to pursue the problem of what is to be held on to as a meaningful moment - decay, the past, nostalgia and failure or the partly innovative and economically justified appropriation processes of such objects and landscapes?

The dissertation project in this work package entitled "The Military Legacies of the Soviet Union in Poland: Testimonies of Oppression or Cultural Heritage Worth Preserving?" aims to examine the culture of remembrance and heritage existing in contemporary Polish society with regard to the Soviet military legacies there, both in their social and spatial-material dimensions, using selected objects as examples, and to relate them to each other.
With the help of contemporary witnesses interviewed on site as well as sociological and cultural studies concepts, such as the sociological discourse analysis and the concept of collective memory, the social perception, conception and semantisation of these legacies will be examined.
The spatial-material dimension, which includes the current use, the current physical condition of the objects as well as the spatial changes currently taking place and those already completed, will be recorded and documented through the evaluation of satellite images as well as photographs and video recordings taken on site.