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Abstract
Between 1800 and 1850 the language and artifacts of the developing tourist industry helped bring the vocabulary of German identity to an audience that came to understand itself as part of the German community. This study examines three centers of tourist activity whose development drew upon that emerging discourse and took shape in its shadow: the Rheinreise, the Cologne Cathedral, and the Bavarian Walhalla.
This study examines early guidebooks and visual sources to locate the “eternal Germany” that tourism proclaimed throughout the Rhineland and Bavaria. It treats the creation of the emerging popular discourse on the German nation as a cultural issue informed by, but not restricted to, contemporary political developments. It further positions this dialogue within a period of dynamic technological developments that multiplied the effect of that dialogue. Tourist sites that acted as repositories of the collective German memory developed in a piecemeal fashion, mirroring the ever-increasing traveling public's impact on the regions studied. Articulating the messages of the collective German past and displaying certain tourist sites as representatives of that legacy created and sustained a mode of regard for them that resonated with contemporary tourists and persists to this day. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
