Bavarian Tourism and the Modern World, 1800-1950

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the tourism industry of Bavaria consistently promoted an image of ‘grounded modernity’. This romanticized version of the present reconciled continuity with change, tradition with progress, and nature with science. In an era of rapid and unprecedented change, simultaneously nostalgic and progressive grounded modernity produced an illusion of continuity. It helped make the experience of modernity more tangible by linking impersonal and abstract ideas, like national identity, with familiar experiences and concrete sights. Bavarian Tourism and the Modern World, 1800-1950 examines the connections between Bavarian tourism and the turbulent experience of German modernity during this period. It gauges Germany’s long and often unsettling journey to modernity using Bavarian tourism and travel as a lens. Closely examining guidebooks, brochures, postcards and other tourist propaganda, Adam Rosenbaum argues that by pointing visitors to the past, tourism illuminated the present, and produced signposts to the future.