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
About this Dissertation
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