The role of architectural heritage in the discourse and practice of the populist far right is examined, referring to examples in Germany and focusing on the Alternative für Deutschland. The findings reveal that the Alternative für Deutschland appropriates historic buildings and sites in a number of ways, including visual and oral rhetoric and embodied performance, and instrumentalizes them to specific ends. Built heritage in particular serves to naturalize and therefore to legitimize and authorize populist positions by anchoring them not only in time but also at places, thus reinforcing populism’s exclusionary logic along territorial lines – including those describing the space of ‘European civilization’. This implies challenges for heritage professionals and institutions, as actors such as the Alternative für Deutschland attempt to map the notion of a national or a civilizational ‘Heartland’ onto existing heritage objects and sites or else engage in ‘making’ heritage in the urban environment.
In German conservation, the criteria and the system of values applied in assessing the significance of historic buildings and ensembles is often unable to capture the wider range of artefacts from the past that hold meaning for 'heritage communities'. These artefacts are often 'mundane' and their importance lies less in their architectural qualities than in their function as a 'substrate' for the personal stories and memories shared by the community. From the perspective of conservation authorities, they therefore remain "below the threshold of significance for a 'monument'" and tend not to be accorded protected status, with the result that they often disappear. The shift from an object-centered to a people-centered understanding of heritage which is taking place in wider international discourses, however, is now challenging the German conservation field to recognize the processes by which people create meaning and to formulate approaches to assessing value that take heritage communities and their practices into account.
This challenge is examined with reference to decommissioned Allied military bases in Germany and the close-knit and active heritage communities that are gathered around them. Many of these are 'virtual communities' comprised of former servicemen and women who perform their memory-work in online fora and thus play little role in discussions of significance that take place locally. It is proposed that conservationists incorporate the interrogation of these and other groups into their assessment procedures. The suggestion is that a 'hybrid' approach of investigating both buildings and people might reveal different thresholds of significance, and thereby define a body of heritage that is more socially relevant and of greater potential benefit to communities.