Communist Heritage Tourism and its Local (Dis)Contents at Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin

Abstract

This article focuses on a conflict that developed at Checkpoint Charlie in 2004 about the representation of the history of the famous site. It is argued that, in the deregulated Berlin heritage industry, urban streets prove to be the contested arenas in which questions of historic agency and display, as well as those of self and other, are (re)negotiated between public, private, local, and international actors, providing no ready-made scripts, but offering highly different negotiation powers for each of them.