From Unwanted Heritage towards Difficult Heritage

This article published in the RIHA journal analyses the trajectory, debates around and consequent uses of Arno Breker’s portrait busts of Peter and Irene Ludwig (1984) in Germany and Hungary. In my analysis I bring to the fore an important shift in curators attitudes in framing this work in the 2020s in the course of which it has been turned from ‘unwanted heritage’ into a piece of ‘difficult heritage’.