Tourist Experience, Digital Memory and Nazi Heritage

Abstract Online review platforms such as TripAdvisor remain an underexplored resource in both cultural anthropological and historical research into the experience of cultural heritage. Yet they are an integral part of both tourism and our digital everyday life, and there is hardly a place or historical site that is not reviewed on such sites by visitors. This includes large-scale sites associated with Nazi heritage such as the Thingstätte on Heidelberg's Heiligenberg hill. Delving into this topic provides insights into a doubly neglected field in heritage studies: the Thingstätten themselves and the tourist experience as such, conveyed in digital space. The results of the qualitative content analysis conducted here reveal how tourists envision the past and experience the present at such sites and how they digitally deal with it. In so doing, visitors reflect on various aspects of this distinctive form of Nazi heritage.