Bavarian Tourism and the Modern World, 1800–1950 by Adam T. Rosenbaum (review)

In this learned, deeply researched monograph, Adam Rosenbaum examines Bavarian tourism, which he defines as a "set of processes, industries, and discourses that evolve over time in relation to the particular societies in which they are embedded" (17), to offer nothing less than a history of the fraught German engagement with "modernity" from 1800 to 1950. Rosenbaum uses tourist propaganda (brochures, advertisements, and guidebooks), the archives of tourism clubs and associations, government documents, and press coverage drawn from over a dozen city, state, federal, and private archives across Germany to develop a cultural-discursive history of tourism in Bavaria. Following a historiographical overview in chapter 1, the remaining four chapters present focused case studies on Franconian Switzerland in the nineteenth century, the spa town Bad Reichenhall at the fin de siècle, Augsburg in the Weimar era, and Munich and Nuremberg during the Third Reich. Rosenbaum presents tourism as at once an individual and social act, a form of secular pilgrimage through which travelers pursued authentic experiences and cultivated communitarian bonds. Bavarian Tourism and the Modern World explicitly frames tourism as a form of cultural modernism that the tourism industry sold as therapy for the alienating, destructive forces that comprised modernization.

Touristic modernism produced what Rosenbaum calls "grounded modernity." Because the stresses of socioeconomic and political modernization in Germany were universal, so, too, was the cure: a return to eternal nature in Franconian Switzerland or the Bavarian Alps would soothe exhausted bodies and harried minds, while visiting medieval Nuremberg or Renaissance Augsburg would remind Germans of their glorious common past. In short, nature and history would "ground" Germans in their turbulent transition to the modern era. But this "grounded modernity," as Rosenbaum calls it, did not amount to a simplistic rejection of the present. Instead, it was an attempt by touristic producers and consumers alike to synthesize timeless nature and the deep German past with modern conveniences, navigating between the seemingly unbridgeable dichotomies of tradition and progress, rural and urban, natural and technological, and local and cosmopolitan. Rosenbaum's term carries echoes of Jeffrey Herf's "reactionary modernism"; but whereas this latter attitude was confined to a small group of Weimar intellectuals, Rosenbaum's "grounded modernity" was perceptible as early as the nineteenth century and appealed to traveling Germans of all classes and occupations (and can be identified in other contemporaneous Western travel cultures). Neo-Romanticism and technophilia coexisted and even complemented one another in modern tourism. And paradoxically, as much as tourism seemed a cure for the ills of the current age, it was equally a carrier of modernity, prompting the transformation of remote Bavarian landscapes. By allowing Germans to find roots in the midst of rapid change, tourism eased often disorienting socioeconomic, cultural, and political transitions.

This book reframes German history in spatial and temporal terms. As Rosenbaum demonstrates, attention to tourism decenters dominant geographical framings of German history. Tourism altered real and imagined geographies, as when the Nazi selection of Munich and Nuremberg as "Hauptstadt der Bewegung" and "Stadt der Reichsparteitage," respectively, fueled tourism in the cities and helped to turn Bavaria into "the symbolic center of the Third Reich" (241). The competition among tourist destinations also undermines the false coherence of Bavaria, which Rosenbaum contends always remained a "region of localities" (4) with distinct cultures. Tourism also shifts the dominant periodization of German history. Rosenbaum highlights continuities across regimes between 1800 and 1950; tourism was an activity and industry through which individuals living in the German Confederation, the Second Empire, the Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich grappled with how to produce a "grounded modernity." Indeed, tourism in the Third Reich represented not a departure, but the apotheosis of the ongoing German project to balance nature, history, and modernity.

The great strength of this book lies in its ambition and breadth, as well as its deep engagement with a variety of archives. Rosenbaum has...