Mats Burström

Dealing with difficult heritage: The case of Bückeberg, site of the Third Reich Harvest Festival

From 1933 to 1937 the German National Socialist (Nazi) Party arranged an annual harvest festival at Bückeberg, close to the city of Hamelin. The festival was one of the symbolically most important celebrations in the Third Reich; at its height, more than one million people are reported to have gathered there. A special arena, designed by Albert Speer, was built to handle the large number of participants. Although extensive remains of this arena have survived, local feeling has prevented them from receiving official recognition as a historical monument. This article presents the Bückeberg siteand discusses the responsibilities of heritage professionals towards sites which may have significance as testimony to the past but which are not actively championed by the public.

Memories of a world crisis : The archaeology of a former Soviet nuclear missile site in Cuba.

Santa Cruz de los Pinos is a small town like most others in the Cuban countryside. But half a century ago it was the epicenter of the 1962 Missile Crisis. During that time it served as a Soviet base for middle-range nuclear missiles, and the US air reconnaissance photos of it were spread through media all around the world. The crisis was solved through negotiations without Cuban involvement, and as a result of this neglect the Missile Crisis has been an under-communicated part of history in Cuba. A Swedish—Cuban research project has now investigated what kinds of memories of the crisis remain today at the former missile base — in the ground as well as in people’s minds. Digging in the ground has proved to be an effective way to start a remembering process and to help disarm a politically loaded history and uncover stories other than those dominating ‘big history’.