Das Foto zeigt eine Gruppe von Badenden an einem See. Einige sitzen auf einem Steg und blicken lachend in die Kamera, andere befinden sich im Wasser.

Photo credit:

Displaced Persons auf Reisen. Sammlung Hintzer / Bildarchiv, Herder-Institut für historische Ostmitteleuropaforschung, CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0

Travel and Tourism

Travel and Tourism

An Introduction by David Feest, Jan-Hinnerk Antons, and Karsten Brüggemann

To the article

Das Bild zeigt eine Wandergruppe auf einem Felsen am Borschen bei Bilin.

Appropriations

Background Article
Into the Jungle with the Reichsbahn
Sorbian Images in Spreewald tourism in the early 20th century
The Spreewald, south-east of Berlin, was already a popular local recreation area for city-dwellers in the early 20th century. By including the Sorbian minority in their natural idyll, the tourist industry created an association between them and the consumer’s longing for an exotic escape.
Friedrich Pollack
Background Article
Off the Beaten Track? The Communist Legacy of East-Central Europe as a Tourism Resource
The legacy of state socialism is one of many resources that Eastern Europe can harness for urban tourism. From rides in a Trabant to guided tours of authentic historical sites, “Communism Tours” aim to bring recent history to life through tangible experiences.
Sabine Stach
Background Article
Travelers exploring Eastern Europe
New possibilities offered by the railway in the 19th century
In the 1860s the railway network of the Russian Empire became connected to that of Western Europe, making travel quicker and cheaper for ever-larger parts of the population.
Jan Musekamp
Background Article
Marketing in Soviet Foreign Tourism
Between Propaganda, Foreign Currency, and Cultural Performance
From its beginnings in the late nineteenth century, the tourism industry relied heavily on marketing. But how did an ideologically driven state like the Soviet Union present itself abroad as an attractive travel destination?
Lilija Wedel

Searching for the Familiar

Cycling into the Past
Shtetl Journeys of Young Jewish Intellectuals in the 1980s
Background Article
How were young Jewish people in the final decades of the Soviet Union able to discover and live out their Jewish identity? A network of friends from Leningrad set out to visit places of former Jewish life in Ukraine and Belarus that had been left behind after the Holocaust.
Ulrike Huhn
Return to Silesia
Written accounts of journeys back to the “old homeland” from the HAUS SCHLESIEN Collection
Background Article
For more than sixty years, Germans have been traveling back to the Silesian towns and villages they once called home. Personal written accounts of these journeys reflect how displaced people came to terms with the loss of their homeland as well as with changing political and social realities.
Silke Findeisen
A German Professor’s Stopover in Riga, 1810
Background Article
Riga Society through the eyes of a traveler—and what sources from the time reveal
Hermann Beyer-Thoma

Competing Spatial Narratives

How Moldavia became “Romanian”
Travel reports from Moldavia and Wallachia in the 18th and 19th centuries
Background Article
For many years travel reports from West and Central Europe described Moldavia and Wallachia as border regions between Europe and the Orient. This perception changed following the union of 1859 – Moldavia came to seem increasingly peripheral and “less Romanian”.
Hannah Riedler
Crossing the Iron Curtain in an “Ulm Box”
A Journey Down the Danube in June 1961
Background Article
In 1961, twenty-one members of the Society of Danube Friends in Ulm travelled down the Danube River from Vienna to Budapest—crossing the border into communist Europe along the way.
DZM-Team
New villages for the future of the “German East”
Sightseeing tours through the regions of the Prussian Settlement Commission around the turn of the twentieth century
Background Article
Around the year 1900, the Prussian State built dozens of villages in its Eastern provinces. Countless people travelled to these settlements in search of quite different things: a farm of their own, rural charm, a national identity or colonial expertise.
Daniel Benedikt Stienen

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