What History Tells: George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe

George Mosse and “Destination Culture”

George Mosse and “Destination Culture” Rudy Koshar Introduction Tourism is the biggest industry in the world, now employing more people globally than the oil industry, and arguably causing even greater environmental harm. Last year more than seven billion tourists took to the roads, the airways, and the sea routes. If there can be little doubt that tourism has had a massive impact on contemporary cultural perceptions, the nature of that impact remains a matter of dispute. Henry James once argued that just three words describe tourist culture: “vulgar, vulgar, vulgar .” American cultural critics of the 1920s warned against becoming permanently infected with the tourist’s disease, Bacillus wanderlusticus.1 Present-day scholars, active tourists all, are less likely to accept such characterizations , but they are more divided than ever as to how the tourist experience should be analyzed. A book by performance scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett entitled Destination Culture2 provides one of the more useful recent approaches to the subject. Its concern is the “political economy of display” that has evolved with considerable influence in the past quarter century in the Euro-American world. How do contemporary cultures transform “locations ” into “destinations,” asks the author, who ranges across a number of topics, including tourism, museums, kitsch, and what we now call the heritage industry. Her answer has to do with patterns in how the world is staged as a museum of itself. Contemporary “destination cultures” rely on tourism to transform life-worlds into sites to be displayed and consumed; they compel museums, strapped for funds and viewers, to emulate the experience of travel in constructing exhibitions; and they raise the expectation that what will be produced is something called “heritage.” In this recourse to the past, which is mediated by memory, “authenticity” and 164 “identity” do not merely result—they are performed. The artifact plays a central role in such performance, as a chunk of the Berlin Wall, a vintage car, or Jerusalem dust is called on to enact a ritual of cultural display far afield from the point of origin. Throughout this process, heritage does more than provide a pleasant refuge from everyday concerns or enhance civic education. Rather, through the touristic experience, heritage offers a new viability to ways of life, places, and objects whose previous meanings and uses have decayed or died. In this sense, one could say that history really does repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as a tourist site. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s book does not stand alone in the recent theoretical work on tourism. In researching my book on the history of German tourist guidebooks, I was impressed to find a broad array of sociological, anthropological, geographical, and ethnological studies of tourism, to say nothing of the vast policy literature generated by the tourist industry itself.3 Among the best recent academic works are the Swedish ethnologist Orvar Löfgren’s On Holiday, which discusses “elsewhereness ” as a human pursuit, and British sociologist John Urry’s The Tourist Gaze, which offers the historian important theoretical insights, shaped in part by Michel Foucault’s work on modern perception and modalities of power.4 In the worst cases, however, the theoretical literature is highly specialized and extremely limited in its willingness to connect the evolution of tourism with broader trends in cultural or political history. Focused analysis of the relationship between tourism and the heritage industry such as that provided in Destination Culture is the exception that proves the rule in this scholarship. Even so, for all its clutter, the theoretical literature seems highly developed and lively compared to historical research on the subject of European tourism.5 Except for a rather advanced scholarship on travel literature , for which we have our colleagues in literature and language departments in particular to thank, historical study of European tourism as a significant cultural practice is highly uneven. As John Walton remarked in a review article several years ago, “tourism has not been accepted into the charmed circle of acceptable themes in European history .”6 Pockets of activity in British and French social history contrast with a paucity of serious work in my field, late modern German history. Without rehearsing this scholarship, I should emphasize that historical research on the long-term evolution of tourism in German-speaking George Mosse and “Destination Culture” 165 Europe as well as more specialized studies of its impact in particular time periods and regions...