Dr. Hartmann's new book, Tourism, Memorials and Landscapes of Violence: Remembering the Holocaust and the Pacific War, focuses on tourism, memorial sites of the Holocaust and the Pacific War, and the management practices for the visitors that they attract.
It provides an account of landscapes of violence as millions of people in Central and Eastern Europe, China, Japan and the United States were affected by wars, conflicts and crises. A special feature of the book is to reconstruct the changing management practices, significance these heritage sites have attained for different visitor groups and local populations, and to critically assess the current situation 80 years after the events. The book discusses the new directions of dark tourism, thanatourism, and dissonance in heritage tourism in contemporary tourism research. Several case studies and in-depth analyses of memorial sites allow the reader to understand the consequences of past or ongoing policy changes.
Rudi Hartmann, professor emeritus from the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Denver, where he has taught geography and tourism planning since 1992. He received his Ph.D. in Geography from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, in 1983. A long-time interest of his is the study of tourist experiences at heritage sites. He has closely examined heritage tourism at memorial sites of the Holocaust in Germany and in the Netherlands. He has published numerous articles and books on these and related topics.