HUBERT LOCHER 20 The Idea of Cultural Heritage and the Canon of Art Hubert Locher This contribution aims at a basic re-evaluation of the idea of a national cultural heritage in contrast to the concept of world heritage: a corpus of artefacts said to belong not to one nation but to humanity as a whole. Starting from the premise that the history of art is often motivated by the feeling of loss or deprivation, I will proceed to demonstrate how historians contribute to compensate for this loss, attempting to intellectually and ideologically regain, appropriate and even consecrate works of art as national monuments. My argument is that such appropriation is connected to ranking these national monuments within a larger body of works of art deemed to be important for all of humanity. Developing my argument systematically as well as historically, I will discuss the points of view and the choices of topics and objects of some German and one Swiss author with regard to their specific understandings of heritage and their conceptions of national identity. ‘Heritage’ has been a common term in cultural studies in general, and in cultural politics, for quite some time. So, one would expect that the term is used and the issue is discussed in art history as well. But, as a matter of fact, neither the term ‘heritage’ nor the problems connected with it have been discussed very much in art history until recently. Nevertheless, it seems obvious that art history has played a large role in defining what cultural heritage means today. As I want to argue, art history is deeply in- volved in the definition of works of art as cultural assets, objects that represent and symbolise the identity of a distinct social body, such as a nation or a state, within a system of values shared by humanity as a whole. Debating ‘heritage’ Today, the discussion of heritage or cultural heritage seems to be not only a transna- tional, but also a transdisciplinary enterprise, in which art history plays but a small role. Looking for recent contributions to the topic, one quickly comes across ‘her- itage studies’, invented about two decades ago as a scholarly discipline. In 1994 the The Idea of Cultural Heritage and the Canon of Art 21 International Journal of Heritage Studies was inaugurated, and it has been published since then by Taylor & Francis in London. In the introductory essay to the first issue, Peter Howard, one of the founding editors of the journal, tentatively defined what ‘the heritage discipline’ was going to be about. Here, we learn that heritage studies are not just about things or phenomena, but are intended to integrate contribu- tions by practitioners of those older disciplines that are traditionally concerned with identifying and evaluating cultural or natural objects as objects of heritage. Among these disciplines are biology, geography, architecture, archaeology and the history of art.1 While all of the mentioned disciplines are concerned with describ- ing and evaluating phenomena, only some of them are historically oriented: which, of course, is crucial for art history. ‘Heritage studies’ do not seem to be much in- terested in historical analysis. They neither aim at historical narrative nor do they focus on the reconstruction and interpretation of cultural artefacts, but rather they centre on the critical analysis of cultural processes and conditions involving cul- tural goods, as well as on the critical discussion and reflection of the management of cultural monuments, sites, museums, etc. in contemporary practice. A comprehensive research programme of heritage studies is offered in the Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity. The volume was edited by Brian Graham, a professor (now emeritus) of human geography at the University of Ulster, and by the above-mentioned Peter Howard, who is also a cultural geographer. The book contains a range of contributions by authors from different fields discussing heritage, mostly in connection with ‘identity’. There are more and less interesting contributions concerned with special regions and phenomena, but the intention of the book is mainly to give exemplary analytical accounts of basic issues in the new field of research. Of fundamental importance to the new ‘heritage studies’ is, as David C. Harvey writes in the first chapter of the book, that ‘heritage itself is not a thing and does not exist by itself, nor does it imply a movement or project. Rather, heritage is about the process by which people use the past – a ‘discursive construc- tion’ with material consequences,’ which obviously has a historical dimension.2 It is interesting that both mentioned publications quote hardly any scholarly literature in languages other than English. This is surprising, considering the fact that ‘heritage’ obviously – and also according to the authors mentioned so far – has much to do with collective, and especially national identity. In fact, there are in- teresting scholarly discussions of cultural heritage outside the Anglophone world, particularly in Germany and in France. A key figure in the recent heritage debate in France is the historian Pierre Nora. As the editor of the multi-volume series Les Lieux de mémoire, he initiated a new kind of writing on the history of a social body, in his case the French nation, focusing less on facts and actions than on symbolic places and concepts. From 1984 to 1992 seven volumes were published. The first was dedicated to France as a republic; the second, appearing in three sub-volumes, dealt 1 P. Howard, The Heritage Discipline. – International Journal of Heritage Studies 1994, vol. 1 (1), pp. 3–5. 2 D. C. Harvey, The History of Heritage. – The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity. Eds. B. Graham, P. Howard. Aldershot, Burlington: Ashgate, 2008, p. 19. The quoted definition is explained with reference to Laurajane Smith (L. Smith, The Uses of Heritage. London, New York: Routledge, 2006). HUBERT LOCHER 22 with France as a nation; and the third volume, again in three even more voluminous parts, was entitled Les Frances, France in the plural.3 The issue of heritage is explicitly addressed in the first part of the second volume of Nora’s opus, the term héritage appearing as a subheading to a section dealing with techniques, institutions and processes of passing on traditions. In the second part of the second volume a different, but closely related term appears as the first sub- heading: patrimoine – perhaps this is the term we are looking for. Whereas héritage is more concerned with l’immatériel, the term patrimoine designates not so much the process as the goods that are to be inherited, le materiel.4 This new topic is in- troduced in a fundamental essay written by the famous art historian André Chastel. Based on several earlier articles, this essay from 1986 discusses not a practice but the history of the concept of patrimoine as developed in France since the end of the eighteenth century. Thus, the notion patrimoine itself is understood as a lieu de mémoire in its own right.5 Nora and Chastel prepared the ground for a lively historical debate on the cul- ture of patrimoine in France. Their approach was developed at an international con- ference in 1994, the acts of which were edited by Pierre Nora in 1997, under the title Science et conscience du patrimoine, as the first volume of a new series dedicated to discussing patrimoine.6 Since then, several volumes have been published, and ed- ited by such renowned historians as François Furet, Jacques Le Goff, Régis Debray and Henry Rousso.7 Several books of special or general interest on the institutions of patrimoine have been published during the last two decades, among them studies by Dominque Poulot8 and Jean-Michel Leniaud9. As concerns the discussion of heritage in Germany, the situation is remarkably different from those in France or the Anglophone world. In Germany, it is also very much a discourse within national borders, but the situation is distinct insofar as there was a rather strict division between different discursive traditions in Eastern and Western Germany before the unification of 1989. It is astonishing that until 3 Les Lieux de mémoire. 3 vols. Ed. P. Nora. Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1992. Vol. 1, titled La République (1984), in collaboration with Charles Robert Ageron. Vol. 2: La Nation (1986), 2.1 in collaboration with Colette Beaune, 2.2 with François Bercé, 2.3 with Jean-Pierre Babelon. Vol. 3: Les Frances (1992), 3.1 subtitled as Conflits et partages in collaboration with Maurice Agulhon, 3.2 subtitled Traditions in collaboration with Philippe Boutry, and 3.3 subtitled De l’archive à l’embleme in collaboration with Maurice Agulhon. Only part of this series has been translated into English (Realms of Memory. 3 vols. Trans. A. Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–1998). Later, a larger selection was published (Rethinking France: Les Lieux de Mémoire. 4 vols. Trans. D. P. Jordan et al. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001–2010). There is a German translation of a selection in one volume (Erinnerungsorte Frankreichs. Trans. M. Bayer. Munich: Beck, 2005) with a preface by Etienne François. The project has also been adapted for Germany (Deutsche Erinnerungsorte. 3 vols. Eds. E. François, H. Schulze. Munich: Beck, 2001). 4 See on this, P. Nora, Présentation. – Les Lieux de mémoire, 2.1, p. xi: Si l’ont voulait cependant en justifier la division [des trois volumes], on en trouverait aisément la logique. Chacun d’eux pourrait avoir pour sous-titre: l’immatériel, le matériel et l’idéel. Les trois thèmes qui composent le premier volume ne renvoient en effet qu’à des réalités au second degré...: Héritage, Historiographie, Paysages.