Timeless, Modern, and German? The Re-Mapping of Bavaria through the Marketing of Tourism, 1800-1939 Public

Rosenbaum, Adam Trent (2011)

Permanent URL: https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/3484zh451?locale=fr
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Abstract

Over the course of the long nineteenth century, industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of the nation-state dramatically altered the face of Germany. What was once a loose assemblage of agrarian states had become an industrial giant and a military superpower by 1914. How did Germans decide to represent this new nation to visitors from home and abroad, and how did it reflect changing conceptions of nature, history, and modernity? How did a growing tourism industry respond to widespread feelings of displacement and anomie? This dissertation examines the connections between Bavarian tourism and the turbulent experience of modernity during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A close examination of "tourist propaganda" (guidebooks, brochures, postcards, etc.) reveals that the tourism industry of Bavaria consistently promoted an image of "grounded modernity," an alternative vision of modern society that synthesized old and new identities, as well as local, national, and cosmopolitan perspectives. This vision was part of a larger process of "grounding modernity," as the tourism industry worked to make the experience of modernity more concrete by linking impersonal and abstract ideas, like national identity, with tangible and familiar experiences and sights. Excursions into "nature" and sojourns in health resorts provided visitors with an antidote to an urban existence increasingly experienced as hectic, dirty, and stressful. The tourism industry often marketed these destinations as retreats from modern life, but they were actually therapy, allowing the tourist to return to the real world rested and reinvigorated. Trips to cities themselves allowed Germans to reacquaint themselves with the historical roots of the fatherland, in addition to providing a new perspective on the modern nation, exemplified in industrial progress and political triumph. This balanced representation of the nation was also available to international tourists, who were presented with the image of a hospitable and peace-loving Germany. Tourism thus accommodated and grounded modernity, even when it was ostensibly fixated on the natural environment and the past. By discussing this process in the German context, I demonstrate that neo-romantic sentiments were not always explicitly reactionary, and that the acceptance of modernity did not preclude pre-modern sensibilities.

Table of Contents


Introduction: Grounded Modernity and Bavarian Tourism
- Regionalism and Bavaria
- Modernity and Tourism
- Findings and Organization

Chapter I: In Pursuit of Salvation, Cultivation, and Recreation: A Brief History of German Travel
- From Travails to Tourism
- Middle-Class Tourism in Nineteenth-Century Germany
- The Origins of Mass Tourism
- Tourism in the Swastika's Shadow

Chapter II: A Romantic Respite: Landscape Tourism in "Franconian Switzerland"
- Romanticism, Urbanization, and the Return to Nature
- The Discovery of the Tourist Idyll
- Simplicity, Distance, and Modern Conveniences

Chapter III: The Reichenhall Cure: Nature, Modernity, and Cosmopolitanism in the Bavarian Alps
- Nature and the Cure in the Nineteenth-Century Spa
- The Construction of a Kurort
- Selling Nature, Modernity, and Cosmopolitanism
- Total War and the Nationalized Cure

Chapter IV: The City of the German Renaissance: Augsburg Tourism Between Past and Present
- Marketing Modern Germany
- Trials, Tribulations, and Tourism
- New Directions, Old Habits

Chapter V: The Sights of Brown Bavaria: The Nazified Tourist Culture of Munich and Nuremberg
- Hitler's Bavaria and the People's Community
- Munich, The Athens on the Isar
- The Capital of the Movement and German Art
- Nuremberg, The German Reich's Treasure Chest
- The City of the Reich Party Rallies

Epilogue: Of Continuity and Rupture

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