Narrating History in Guided Tours

Narrating History in Guided Tours Sabine Stach (bio) and Irmgard Zündorf (bio) Guided tours are a popular form of communicating history in museums, at memorials, and in urban spaces.1 Tour guides act as cultural mediators between visitors, locals, and the sites being toured (Feldman and Skinner; Holloway; Cohen, "The Tourist Guide"; Salazar, "Tourism and Glocalization"). By interacting with their audiences, the guides tell stories about the past, present, and future, thus inscribing a temporal narrative into space. Guided tours play a special role in cultural or heritage tourism, which generally takes its participants to "authentic sites" of historical events and promises them encounters with something original. The task of the guide—as formulated in 1977 by Freeman Tilden in his classic introduction, Interpreting Our Heritage—is to "tak[e] the visitor beyond the point of his aesthetic joy" and "reveal meanings and relationships through the use of original objects, by firsthand experience, and by illustrative media" (6, 8). For Tilden, interpretation is both a passion and an art capable of being learned. The point is not to present a wealth of details but a perfect whole, "that would stir the imagination [and] leave an indelible impression" (40–46, 42). Local heritage should not merely be explained but told in a narrative fashion. And yet the cliché of the boring guide holding an endless monologue and [End Page 217] reciting long lists of facts and figures is proof that, in practice, the guide often falls short of this ideal. Only in the last two decades has this image begun to improve. With the pressure to attract broader audiences increasing, the importance of guides as facilitators of interaction would appear to have increased, too. This finding is particularly interesting given that their services are facing new kinds of competition from the many non-human methods of interpretation that are springing up, including audio and video guides and various multimedia presentations via phones and tablets. Yet it seems that machines cannot replace face-to-face contact completely. On the contrary, in fact: The more interactive media render the role of the guides as information givers less important, the more their value as storytellers increases (Bryon 29–30; Feldman and Skinner 10; Skinner 96). This is true for freelance guides as well as those employed directly by an institution. New kinds of city guides—the alternative, entrepreneurial, and relational guide—have broken the monopoly of the "official guide" (Bryon 27–29); museums, for their part, are increasingly training their guides to be moderators rather than mere explainers (Schrübbers). As Betty Weiler and Rosemary Black have noted, guides in the 21st century have become multifaceted "experience brokers." In response to new needs and global flows, they are facing the challenge of choreographing special "memorable experiences" (364). Guided tours can thus be seen as part of a vast storytelling industry. The spectrum is broad and ranges from educational services and entertaining tours conducted in costume or vintage vehicles to civil-society initiatives that aim to present a place through the eyes of marginalized groups.2 In comparison to the Anglo-American world, the need for distinction between providers with educational aspirations and more entertainment-focused offerings would appear to be higher in Germany, the country in which we live and research, and from which a number of the contributions gathered here originate. This is especially true for guiding programs in museums, which are often the responsibility of specific education departments. Whatever the educational aspirations of the guides, an ever-greater degree of thematic and formal differentiation can be observed with regard to the interpretation of history. Historically themed guided tours are focusing increasingly on individual periods in history and specific personalities or events, with contemporary history enjoying particular popularity. Here, guides transform the "unpresentable large but fragmented past" (Groebner, "Touristischer Geschichtsgebrauch" 410) [End Page 218] into history using its visible remains. Some guide people through cities and landscapes, i.e., places not originally made for conveying history. Others take people on tours through museums and memorial sites, spaces whose very purpose is the presentation of history—though not necessarily ones that were developed with the work of a guide in mind. Quite the

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Cliché · Interpretation (philosophy · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Passion · Point (geometry · Political science · Public history · Sociology · Tourism · Visitor pattern · Visual arts · Witness · Computer Science · Digital Games and Media · History · Law · Libraries and Information Services · Psychology