Playing with fire: struggling with ‘experience’ and ‘play’ in war tourism

Abstract

This paper takes up the ambiguities of embracing ‘experiential’ and ‘playful’ ways of learning at war sites. It takes as its point of departure the widespread tendencies in the heritage industry to align communication to new emotional and playful ways of learning about the past and goes on to demonstrate and discuss how these assert themselves at a specific Danish war site. The links between the concepts of heritage, experience, romanticism and nationalism are investigated with historical reference to the Scandinavian open air museology and theoretical inspiration drawn from Scott Lash and his notion of a ‘second’ modernity. It is argued that the current obsession with ‘experience’ in the heritage sector displays a range of neo-romantic traits. At the Danish centre, staff and visitors are shown to negotiate and struggle to ‘balance off’ their playful and romantic engagements against more distanced, non-involved stances towards the war past.