How can a difficult heritage site exert a negative influence on a local community and even block the path to a future perceived as positive? How can such a difficult legacy be negotiated in order to transform it from an obstacle into an opportunity for positive development? What are the opportunities - but also the risks - of participatory approaches in dealing with such a difficult heritage site?

These questions characterised a participatory process that in 1996 dealt with a site with multiple burdens: ‘Prora’ on the German island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea.

Prora was planned and built by the Nazi regime. Intended as a gigantic ‘strength-through-joy’ seaside resort, it was meant to hold 20,000 beds, to provide low-cost seaside holidays for workers. However, Prora was the first time put into operation under communist rule. It served the GDR’s ‘National People’s Army’ as an important military base. In this new function, the building not only represented the military power of the communist regime, it also exerted an important influence on the island's economy and the lives of the local population for many years.

After the fall of the Berlin wall, the military was withdrawn from the site. However, due to its size and former importance, Prora soon turned into a battleground in the conflicts over Rügen's future. Various stakeholder — including residents of the complex, local communities, heritage activists, government agencies and international investors — attached different historical meanings to Prora and, upon that basis, projected conflicting futures on the site and the island.

When the growing conflicts threatened to block any solution, the federal government decided to cooperate with local actors and initiatives to find a solution for Prora.

The resulting participatory process took the form of a ‘discursive procedure’: Over the course of eight months, joint solutions for dealing with the complex were developed in workshops and discussion rounds. This process is at the centre of my article ‘Turning the project of dictatorship into an example of democracy? Chances and risks of participation at the Nazi relic Prora’.

My article argues that the participatory process in Prora opened a space of opportunity that demonstrates the potential of a transformative and future-oriented approach to difficult heritage. A burden that inhibited development on the island was transformed into a positive and active asset. It became a tool for actively shaping a new and different future. This tool was used to verbalise and manage conflicts that went far beyond the immediate significance of Prora and affected the entire region.

However, the framework in which the participatory process in Prora took place pointed to new risks and problems that can accompany such an approach. Under the conditions of market-liberal politics, the call for the withdrawal of the state, experts and institutional responsibility can easily serve as a vehicle for delegating responsibility for difficult heritage to market forces and profit-oriented local actors. This also became quite clear in the course of the participatory process in Prora and is discussed in more detail at the end of the article.

Turning the project of dictatorship into an example of democracy? Chances and risks of participation at the Nazi relic Prora by Florian Rietmann (Brandenburg University of Technology) is published in Architecture_MPS, volume 29.

Florian Rietmann is an architect, researcher and educator.

He holds a Degree in Architecture from Brandenburg University of Technology in Cottbus (Germany) and a Master of Advanced Studies in History and Theory of Architecture from ETH in Zurich (Switzerland).

Currently he is scholarship holder and lecturer at the Berliner Hochschule für Technik (BTH). His working experience include different positions in architecture firms in Germany and Switzerland as well as his work as a researcher in the DFG Research Training Group "Cultural and Technological Significance of Historic Buildings" at Brandenburg University of Technology, where he is currently working on his dissertation “Prora’s Rigid Resilience – The Long Shadow of an Unloved Structure”.

His publications in popular and scientific media reflect his research interests in architectural history and theory of the 20th century, the ambivalences of modern architecture, difficult and multi-layered heritage, and the negotiation processes between preservation and conversion of historic monuments.

heritage management heritage communities contested heritage difficult heritage participation