The Iced Coffee Dilemma: Reflections of the EHL Youth Event
When young people don’t engage with heritage, who needs to change: them or the people designing the experience?
I work around European heritage, which means I’m probably supposed to answer “do young people care about history?” with an immediate, enthusiastic yes. The problem is that I’m not entirely sure what we mean by “care about history.” Do we mean visiting museums, remembering what we see, or caring about what the past has to do with our lives now? When it comes to democracy, migration, war and borders, it’s difficult to argue that young people don’t care about the past when so much of what we argue about in the present is shaped by it. But whether we recognise those things as heritage, or whether heritage gives us a way into those conversations, is a different question.
I started wondering about this while watching the internet tear itself apart over iced coffee. A recruiter went viral this week for warning young candidates against bringing one to an interview, on the theory that it makes the whole thing look like a quick stop between errands. I couldn’t help but wonder: isn’t this exactly what we do with heritage? We watch a teenager drift through a gallery, phone in hand, and decide they don’t care. But perhaps the better question is whether the gallery gave them a reason to care in the first place.
When Maria, a Romanian business student and national student evaluator, visited the Sighet Memorial at age twelve, anyone watching her might have seen an indifferent child. “I recall almost nothing concrete,” she admits. “I remember thinking about how lonely it must have been to be a prisoner there. That’s what a twelve-year-old can grasp, not injustice or repression, which are abstractions, but loneliness.”
“A Child with Flowers and a Prison Cell”
Three very different places in Romania offer three different ways into the past. They are the Sighet Memorial, the Romanian Athenaeum and the Palace of the European Commission of the Danube in Galaţi. Each carries a European story, but they ask something quite different of the person standing in front of them.
1. Sighet Memorial
At Sighet, the question is difficult to separate from democracy. The prison held students, political opponents, journalists and members of the clergy, and the memorial now presents the experience of communist repression in Romania and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Its European significance is explicitly connected to the fight for freedom and democracy. Maria describes growing up with her mother’s memories of being a young pioneer: the red scarf, the oath and being chosen to hand flowers to Nicolae Ceauşescu on one of his visits. It is a strange thing to carry, having been part of a ritual of loyalty as a child, before she could really have an opinion about it. When Maria asked her mother to explain what it was like, she wrote her a list where every sentence began the same way. “We weren’t allowed foreign books. We weren’t allowed to listen to Radio Free Europe, or to talk about it afterwards. We weren’t allowed to travel without approval from the secret services.”
The distance between the historical event and the political questions of the present is remarkably short. What does political repression look like when it is part of our parents’ stories?
2. Romanian Athenaeum
The Romanian Athenaeum offers a very different proposition. Since the nineteenth century, it has hosted concerts, conferences, exhibitions and lectures, and it became an important part of Romania’s cultural modernisation and its connection to wider European cultural life. A young person standing inside it is therefore being asked to consider what makes society decide that culture should be public and who gets access to it.
3. Palace of the European Commission of the Danube
Then there is the Palace of the European Commission of the Danube in Galaţi. Built in 1896, it served as the administrative headquarters of the European Commission of the Danube, an organisation created in the wake of the Crimean War. It was the second international organisation in the world and the first international institution to have the word “European” in its name.
Mura în Gurǎ (Handing History on a Plate)
This doesn’t mean every heritage site needs to reinvent itself for young people. Sometimes the value of heritage is that it takes us somewhere we would not have chosen to go. The responsibility of the institution is not necessarily to make the past resemble the present but to create enough of an entry point that a visitor can find a reason to stay with it.
“We have an expression in Romanian, mura în gurǎ, which normally means handing someone something they should have worked for themselves, and I think in this case that is precisely what heritage sites should be doing. They should walk young people through the entire story without assuming any prior knowledge, because most of us never got the background at school or at home. The mistake isn’t being too simple. It’s starting in the middle. If I’m given a date and a number, there is nothing for me to hold onto. But if I’m told that this courtyard is where it happened, that the person in the photograph was nineteen years old, and that the building looked perfectly ordinary before and after, then I’m already inside the story rather than standing outside it.
What actually keeps me somewhere is not a site performing youth, but someone willing to assume I know nothing and explain it anyway, without making me feel foolish for not knowing it already.”
The Iced Coffee Dilemma
And that brings me back to the iced coffee. We are often very quick to decide what engagement looks like. Someone stops in front of an object, reads the text, listens to the guide and spends twenty minutes in the room, so we assume they are interested. Someone else walks through quickly, checks their phone, takes a photograph and leaves, so we assume they are not. But those behaviours tell us very little about what happens afterwards. Just as we cannot know very much about someone from the iced coffee in their hand, perhaps we cannot know very much about a young person’s relationship with the past from the way they move through a museum.