ABSTRACT
The fear of a "Disneyfication" process, which destroys local idiosyncrasies, is a common thread running through the tourism-critical commentary in the Berlin debate. The discussion participants considered it a foreign place because, just like when the property at the former border crossing had been sold to CEDC. Many private stakeholders at Checkpoint Charlie described their attractions in ways that touched on the semantic field surrounding the word "authenticity", something that was considered to be a trivialization of authenticity and a sign of "Disneyfication". The defenders of Hildebrandt's memorial, by contrast, were united in their belief that tourists approached Checkpoint Charlie with varying expectations of authenticity. In terms of assigning definitions of authenticity to different groups of stakeholders, the debate about Checkpoint Charlie can be seen as a typical case of the creation of heritage dissonance through multiple productions. Disneyfication that ran like a leitmotif through the debate about Checkpoint Charlie - namely, "farce".
