Cultural heritage, collective memory and their relation to history

Originally, the German term for heritage – ‘Erbe’ – first documented in the Middle Ages, had a very precise set of meanings that denoted the passing of a bequest from one person to another after death (Grimm 1854–1960, III, 709–10). ‘Erbe’ included both the heir and the things he inherited. These were initially concrete, immobile objects, such as a house or a plot of land. Later the word referred also to chattels including animals and money (Grimm 1854–1960, III, 710). This gave it a different set of connotations from the English word ‘heritage’ or the French ‘patrimoine’. The English ‘heritage’ could refer to the legacy of immaterial traditions, rights or titles while, in contrast to the German and English terms, the French ‘patrimoine’ refers to material and immaterial heritage in a less private but more public sense, even on a national scale, as the Latin roots ‘pater’, ‘patria’ and the french root ‘la patrie’ implicate the State and the nation (Choay 1997).

In the course of the last century the meaning of the concept has been constantly expanded; as such, it has become a ‘perpetually nomadic term’ (Choay 1997, 9). In the sense of ‘historical and cultural heritage’, following Françoise Choay’s global definition, heritage today consists of all works of art and applied art, and all the products of all spheres of human knowledge and science handed over by the past to the present (Choay 1997, 11). Throughout the 20th century new categories and objects have been added: ensembles, historic city centres, natural environments and cultural landscapes (Sauerländer 1993). Therefore, distinctions are drawn between various kinds of heritage – cultural, architectural, natural or archaeological as well as intellectual – in order to generate a more complex meaning. However, there remains one basic difference between this modern, broad meaning of heritage and its original definition. European legal history since the times of Roman law was always eager to pronounce that ‘heritage’ comprised not only the activa but also the passiva; the heir officially had to accept or refuse his legacy as a whole – in the sense of ‘take it or leave it’.