Tourist Experience, Digital Memory and Nazi Heritage

The Heidelberg Thingstätte on TripAdvisor

Bibliographic Data

ID2967057
AuthorsStefanie Samida (0000-0003-2243-331X, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume34
Issue1
Pages123-146
Publication date2025-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAnthropological Journal of European Cultures (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1755-2923 • E-ISSN: 1755-2931
PublisherBerghahn Books (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.3167/ajec.2025.340110
OpenAlexW4410154718
LanguageEN
References cited8

Online review platforms such as TripAdvisor remain an underexplored resource in both cultural anthropological and historical research into the experience of cultural heritage. Yet they are an integral part of both tourism and our digital everyday life, and there is hardly a place or historical site that is not reviewed on such sites by visitors. This includes large-scale sites associated with Nazi heritage such as the Thingstätte on Heidelberg's Heiligenberg hill. Delving into this topic provides insights into a doubly neglected field in heritage studies: the Thingstätten themselves and the tourist experience as such, conveyed in digital space. The results of the qualitative content analysis conducted here reveal how tourists envision the past and experience the present at such sites and how they digitally deal with it. In so doing, visitors reflect on various aspects of this distinctive form of Nazi heritage

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · German · Nazism · Tourism · Computer Science · History · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration

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Open DOIOpen Access