Tourist literature and the ideological grammar of

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Journal of Tourism History

ISSN: 1755-182X (Print) 1755-1838 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjth20

Tourist literature and the ideological grammar of landscape in the Austrian Danube Valley, ca. 1870–1945 Josef Ploner To cite this article: Josef Ploner (2012) Tourist literature and the ideological grammar of landscape in the Austrian Danube Valley, ca. 1870–1945, Journal of Tourism History, 4:3, 237-257, DOI: 10.1080/1755182X.2012.711376 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1755182X.2012.711376

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Journal of Tourism History Vol. 4, No. 3, November 2012, 237257

Tourist literature and the ideological grammar of landscape in the Austrian Danube Valley, ca. 1870 1945 Josef Ploner*



Carnegie Faculty, Leeds Metropolitan University, Headingley Campus, Macaulay Hall, Leeds LS6 3QN, UK (Received 19 March 2012; final version received 6 July 2012) With its allure of transnationalism, border-crossing and timelessness, the Danube, unlike any other European river, has provided a rich and diverse image reservoir for travel and tourism writing for centuries. Symbolizing the continuous flow through space and time, the river metaphor lends itself perfectly to the selected scripting of history as well as the spatial ordering of landscape, both ‘outwardly’ for the journeying tourist as well as ‘inwardly’ for local, regional and national publics. This article explores the ways in which the Austrian Danube, and its adjacent landscape, have been fashioned from narratives and myths that mirror contested spatio-cultural claims to region, nation and homeland from the fading Habsburg Monarchy up to the Second World War. Drawing on the emblematic Danube valley ‘the Wachau’, the article explores how guidebooks and other tourist literature have invested the river landscape with a powerful ideological grammar that, over time, conjured up lures of Germanic nationalism, imaginaries of Austrianness or emergent ideas of a borderless Europe. Keywords: Danube River; tourism; narrative; heritage landscape; Austria; nationalism; ideology

Introduction The ‘Wachau’ is the name of a 36 km long stretch along the Danube in Lower Austria, located between the towns of Krems and Melk to the west and in the vicinity of the country’s capital Vienna. Situated along a major historic European trading and travel route, the area has featured prominently in a host of travel accounts from the eighteenth century onwards, and has been frequently described as one of the most ‘picturesque’, ‘sublime’ and ‘scenic’ parts along the entire river. Today, the Wachau gorge is popular with cycling and cruising tourists, climbers, hikers, culinary and wine tourists, second home owners, as well as weekend excursionists from nearby Vienna and elsewhere. Designated a UNESCO world heritage site in 2000, the area exhibits a number of historically, archaeologically and architecturally significant features, reaching from prehistoric excavation sites, remains from Roman times, medieval castles and town structures, to the renaissance and baroque architecture of the abbeys Go¨ttweig and Melk. The official UNESCO report, issued in 2000, describes the region as exhibiting historically ‘homogenous’ towns, villages and architectural ensembles of the highest European level and ‘. . . located in the midst of *Email: [email protected] ISSN 1755-182X print/ISSN 1755-1838 online # 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1755182X.2012.711376 http://www.tandfonline.com

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a stunning natural setting where many spatial structures and single objects have remained unchanged’.1 Stressing ‘authenticity’ and art-historical ‘integrity’ throughout, the UNESCO report is one of the most recent examples of narratives to fashion the Wachau valley as a unique European ‘cultural landscape’. In line with current attempts to boost wine and culinary tourism in the region, the Wachau’s status as UNESCO World heritage site has become a major theme in tourism promotion and marketing and, most recently, led to the launch of a World Heritage Visitor Centre in the town of Krems in 2011. What makes heritage landscapes so attractive for tourism is, according to RicklyBoyd2, their ‘textual richness’. Whilst they provide a host of meta-narratives related to their national, indeed ‘universal’ (UNESCO) significance, they also offer seemingly endless opportunities to create personal stories by combining lived experience with existing place myths and imaginaries. Like the Danube Valley, river landscapes lend themselves ideally to narrative appropriation in travel and tourism. Characterized by linearity, flow and continuity, rivers, like words in a sentence, describe an unbroken sequence of landscape features, places and events and, as such, have been a preferred subject of travel writing over the centuries.3 It is perhaps an obvious, yet striking analogy that tourism is often described in terms of currents and flux, forming a sequential ‘stream of impressions’ along which diverse elements can be ‘storied’ and organized.4 At the same time, tourism has been used as a prime metaphor of ‘liquid modernity’,5 or conceptualized as a quasi-organic, self-ordering continuum that, like a river, constantly branches out into ever-new networks and directions.6 Many authors have explored the interrelationship between tourism and narration from various disciplinary angles.7 Recently, contributions have paid particular 1

UNESCO, Wachau Cultural Landscape. Description, 2000, http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/970 (accessed March 2012), 22. 2 J.M. Rickly-Boyd, ‘The Tourist Narrative’, Tourist Studies, 9, no. 3 (2009): 25980. 3 C. Ely, ‘The Origins of Russian Scenery. Volga River Tourism and Russian Landscape Aesthetics’, Slavic Review, 62, no. 4 (2003): 66682; N. Hester, Literature and Identity in Italian Baroque Travel Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); J. McGregor, ‘The Victoria Falls 1900 1940. Landscape, Tourism and the Geographical Imagination’, Journal of Southern African Studies 29, no. 3 (2003): 71737; B. Prideaux, D. Timothy, and M. Cooper, ‘Introducing River Tourism: Physical, Ecological and Human Aspects’, in River Tourism, ed. B. Prideaux and M. Cooper (Wallingford: CABI, 2009), 122; V. DiPalma, ‘Flow: Rivers, Roads, Routes and Cartographies of Leisure’, in Routes, Roads and Landscapes, ed. M. Hvattum, B. Brenna, B. Elvebakk and J. Kampevold Larsen (Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 2744. 4 D. MacCannell, The Tourist. A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken, 1976). 5 A. Franklin, ‘The Tourist Syndrome. An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman’, Tourist Studies 3, no. 2 (2003): 20517. 6 A. Franklin, ‘Tourism as an Ordering. Towards a New Ontology of Tourism’, Tourist Studies 4, no. 3 (2004): 277301. 7 G. Dann, ‘Writing Out the Tourist in Space and Time’, Annals of Tourism Research 26, no. 1 (1999): 15987. R. Bendix, ‘Capitalizing on Memories Past, Present, and Future. Observations on the Intertwining of Tourism and Narration’, Anthropological Theory 2, no. 4 (2002): 469 87; S. Hom-Cary, ‘The Tourist Moment’, Annals of Tourism Research 31, no. 1 (2004): 6177; S. McCabe and E.H. Stokoe, ‘Place and Identity in Tourist Accounts’, Annals of Tourism Research 31, no. 3 (2004): 60122; M. Robinson, ‘Narratives of Being Elsewhere: Tourism and Travel Writing’, in A Companion to Tourism, ed. A. Lew, C. Hall and A. Williams (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 30315; N. Morgan and A. Pritchard, ‘On Souvenirs and Metonymy: Narratives of Memory, Metaphor and Materiality’, Tourist Studies 5, no. 1 (2005): 2953;

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attention to the human agent as generator of narrative in relation to performance,8 (auto-)biography,9 embodiment or memory10 and looked at the ways in which intimate forms of storytelling intersect with existing master-narratives of place and landscape.11 In their semiotics of the sequence, Barthes and Heath12 explore this interplay between representation and agency and consider narrative to be processed into an identifiable order only by the ‘reader’ who develops an inner ‘meta-language’ in order to grasp every logical succession of actions as a nominal whole. In a similar vein, Ricoeur and Kearney13 refer to the activity of ‘emplotment’, which implies that the formation of a coherent storyline not simply requires adding one episode to another but to construct meaning out of scattered objects and events. As such the tourist narrative can move beyond the individual frame and connect familial, national and institutional narratives in an ongoing narrative construction.14 Whilst the multiple and complex dynamics between narrative and tourists’ performances and experiences continue to be explored,15 this article looks, from a historical perspective, at the narrative formation of place and landscape in guidebook literature. Although guidebooks themselves may be described as ‘performances’ in their own right,16 the recent interest in the immediate and intimate aspects of ‘doing tourism’ often fails to account for the historical trajectories, myths and ideologies that are already inscribed in place and continue to shape the ways in which heritage landscapes are experienced and negotiated, both by hosts and guests.

Landscape, tourist literature and the national storyline As conveyors of local histories and mythologies, guidebooks and related publications play a significant historical role in the narrative formation of landscape. The principal function of guidebooks is, as Buzard states, ‘. . . to rationalise and bring together the disparities of the tourism infrastructure, to help, advice and warn tourists, to steer them through the morass of alien lifeways’.17 Selective and E. Bruner, Culture on Tour. Ethnographies of Travel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Rickly-Boyd, ‘The Tourist Narrative’; C.A. Santos and S. Rozier, ‘Travel Writing as a Representational Space: ‘‘Doing deviance’’’, Tourism, Culture and Communication 9, no. 3 (2009): 13750; I. Keighren and C. Withers, ‘The Spectacular and the Sacred: Narrating Landscape in Works of Travel’, Cultural Geographies 19, no. 1 (2012): 1130. 8 M. Haldrup and J. Larsen, Tourism, Performance and the Everyday. Consuming the Orient (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009); R.C. Thompson, ‘‘‘Am I Going to See a Ghost Tonight?’’ Gettysburg Ghost Tours and the Performance of Belief’, Journal of American Culture 33, no. 2 (2010): 7991. 9 Hom-Cary, ‘The Tourist Moment’. 10 McCabe and Stokoe, ‘Place and Identity’. 11 Rickly-Boyd, ‘The Tourist Narrative’. 12 R. Barthes and S. Heath, Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). 13 P. Ricoeur and R. Kearney, Paul Ricoer: The Hermeneutics of Action. Philosophy & Social Criticism (London & Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996). 14 Rickly-Boyd, ‘The Tourist Narrative’. 15 Haldrup and Larsen, Tourism; Rickly-Boyd, ‘The Tourist Narrative’; Thompson, ‘Am I Going to See a Ghost Tonight’? 16 S. Olbrys Gencarella, ‘Touring History: Guidebooks and the Commodification of the Salem Witch Trials’, The Journal of American Culture 30, no. 3 (2007): 27184. 17 Buzard quoted in Dann, ‘Writing Out the Tourist’, 163.

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programmatic in scope, guidebooks always hegemonize some stories over others and, in so doing, shape, refine and distil cultural meaning.18 Through the provision of legible itineraries, guidebook narratives produce a distinctive inventory of space because they tend to elevate some localities over others and have the strange power to ‘. . . transform emptiness into dramatic stages, ordering historical space out of undefined space’.19 In this way, guidebooks also manipulate time, not only by segmenting journeys according to estimated travel durations, timetables, ‘local time’ routines and so on, but also by conveying history as a linear and evolutionary process that conjoins rather generic ideas about ‘cultural epochs’, ‘eras’ and past events into a condensed rhetorical sequence. As Dann observes in relation to travel writing more generally, ‘[i]t is particularly the ability to move backwards through time that allows authors to exploit the idea of regressively travelling to a Golden Age where a place and its inhabitants are frozen in time’.20 Perhaps most importantly, and considering their programmatic tenor, guidebooks have a political and ideological dimension in that they direct audiences towards certain moral judgements and attitudes. In Barthes and Lavers’ view,21 they reflect the bourgeois ‘disease of thinking in essences’, they legitimize certain discursive practices and ‘. . . attempt to control a community’s symbolic resources during periods of flux and endurance’.22 These ideological elements are also enmeshed in other forms of tourist literature such as magazines, brochures, travelor coffee-table books, travel booklets and so on, which play a significant role in the representation and narrative formation of particular places and landscapes. Unlike the guidebook, however, few authors have critically engaged with these formats and analysed their visual and textual components equally.23 These basic observations on the narrative makeup of tourist literature are significant for exploring the emergence of the modern nation state as a tourist destination and the ways in which particular localities, landscapes and sub-regions 18 Dann, ‘Writing Out the Tourist’; C. Aitchison, N. MacLeod and S. Shaw, Leisure and Tourism Landscapes: Social and Cultural Geographies (London & New York: Routledge, 2000); P. Travlou, ‘Go Athens: A Journey to the Centre of the City’, in Tourism: Between Place and Performance, ed. S. Coleman and M. Crang (Oxford: Berghahn, 2002), 10827; R. Koshar, ‘What Ought to be Seen’: Tourist Guidebooks and National Identities in Modern Germany and Europe’, Journal of Contemporary History 33, no. 3 (1998): 32340; D. Michalski, ‘Portals to Metropolis: 19th-century Guidebooks and the Assemblage of Urban Experience’, Tourist Studies 4, no. 3 (2004): 187215; D.C. Knudsen, M. Metro-Roland, A.K. Soper and C.A. Greer, Landscape, Tourism, and Meaning (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 19 Olbrys Gencarella, ‘Touring History’, 272. 20 Dann, ‘Writing Out the Tourist’, 169. 21 R. Barthes and A. Lavers, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972). 22 Olbrys Gencarella, ‘Touring History’, 272. 23 C. Palmer, ‘Tourism and the Symbols of Identity’, Tourism Management 20, no. 3 (1999): 31322; T. Schweiger, Zur Repra¨ sentation von ‘‘Landschaft’’, ‘‘Kunst’’ und ‘‘Volkskultur’’ in ¨ sterreichische Zeitschrift fu ¨ sterreich-Bildba¨ nden der Nachkriegszeit. O O ¨ r Volkskunde 109 (2006): 397433; M. Ponstingl, Wien im Bild. Fotobildba ¨ nde des 20. Jahrhunderts (Beitra¨ ge zur ¨ sterreich, Band 5) (Wien: Brandsta¨ tter, 2008); J.J. Lou, Geschichte der Fotografie in O ‘Chinatown Transformed: Ideology, Power and Resources in Narrative Place-making’, Discourse Studies 12, no. 5 (2010): 62547; S. Francesconi, ‘Images and Writing in Tourist Brochures’, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 9, no. 4 (2011): 34156.

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have come to be preferred exponents of shared national imaginaries.24 Various forms of tourist literature have played an influential part in what Hobsbawn and Ranger25 famously coined as the ‘invention of tradition’  the creation of continuities propelled by the interpretative and pedagogical agency of authoritative structures which select, designate and value objects of knowledge as universally located within an evolutionary narrative of historical community. In this context, the formation of the modern nation state heavily relied on the reading (and readability) of space as a coherent spatial entity and history as a comprehensible sequential narrative. Whilst they represent powerful means of scripting and imagining national space/time, guidebooks need to be worked by their readers, the tourists, who appropriate and personalize narrative in an interpretative, explorative and, at times, playful manner.26 In line with these observations, and referring to the role of travel manuals in nineteenth-century nation-building processes, Lo¨ fgren27 speaks of the guidebook rather fittingly as a ‘gigantic do-it-yourself-kit’, attesting the tourist a creative and imaginative agency of piecing together scattered elements into a nominal whole, thereby learning to identify with the then still unfamiliar concept of the nation state. In a similar vein, and describing tourism as the logical extension of the general principle of industrial capitalism towards the realm of leisure, Koshar refers to the guidebook as the ‘proper’ medium to be constantly ‘at hand’ for more and more mobile consumer publics who were to consolidate and assemble touristic sites and objects into a more precise image of the nation.28 Homi Bhabha29 argues that a national storyline becomes especially manifest in narratives of ‘everyday life’ and is frequently situated in liminal and marginal spaces in which details emerge as metaphors for a holistic understanding of national culture or way of life. Ironically, such ‘grand narratives’ frequently envision the microscopic aspects of nationhood by revealing very particular historical events, regions and localities. In what Bhabha evocatively calls the ‘spatialisation of historical time’, landscape narratives play a pivotal role in providing powerful metaphors for the ‘creative humanisation’ of the nation state. This is because landscapes emphasize ‘(. . .) the quality of light, the question of social visibility, the power of the eye to naturalise the rhetoric of national affiliation and its forms of collective expression’.30 Bhabha’s analysis is relevant for understanding the emergence of modern tourism and its power to produce coherent narratives about national landscapes, histories and identities in guidebooks, coffee-table books, magazines or brochures. Providing legible ‘scripts’ and ‘plots’ for a steadily increasing number of tourists, these media 24 Aitchison, MacLeod and Shaw, Leisure and Tourism Landscapes; S. Cousin, ‘The Nation State as an Identifying Image. Traditions and Stakes in Tourism Policy, Touraine, France’ Tourist Studies 8, no. 2 (2008): 193209; S. Pitchford, Identity Tourism  Imaging and Imagining the Nation (Bingley: Emerald, 2008); E. Marine-Roig, ‘The Image and Identity of the Catalan Coast as a Tourist Destination in Twentieth-century Tourist Guidebooks’, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 9, no. 2 (2011): 11839. 25 E.J. Hobsbawn and T.O. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: University Press, 1992). 26 Bruner, Culture on Tour. 27 O. Lo¨ fgren, ‘Learning to be a Tourist’, Ethnologia Scandinavica 24, no. 1 (1994): 10225. 28 Koshar, ‘What Ought to be Seen’, 332. 29 Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). 30 Ibid., 2945.

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would allow the composition of consistent itineraries by connecting previously disparate sites, places and histories which ‘ought to be seen’ through an increasingly national lens. Narrative analysis between guidebook and ‘Heimatliteratur’ Whilst this article primarily focuses on guidebook narratives, it also draws attention to related ‘touristic’ genres such as the ‘coffee-table book’, as well as reports and articles published in tourism/travel periodicals between 1870 and 1945. Unlike Fussell’s and Dann’s31 definitions of the tourist guidebook as being different from more generic ‘travel books’ due to its factual character, its avoidance of narrative, the lack of autobiographical as well as fictional elements, the texts presented in this paper suggest a different reading. Having examined some 40 publications on the Austrian Danube Valley issued over a period of 75 years, and selected a representative sample of excerpts, the author observes striking narrative similarities between and across various formats, making a clear distinction between them a difficult analytical task. The rather indistinct narrative structure of these publications has various reasons. First, one has to consider that in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the tourist guidebook as condensed, factual and slim-volumed manual32 was still a genre in the making, continuously re-edited, formally standardized and internationalized only gradually by the leading publishers in the field, notably Baedeker in Germany and John Murray in England.33 The influence of these two prominent houses on the development of modern tourism has been well explored,34 but fairly little attention has been paid to other, at times more regional, amateurish and imitative formats during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A second, related reason for the blurry literary cross-overs is certainly linked to the cultural and linguistic context in which the selected publications are situated. Drawing on texts published in Austria and Germany for an exclusively German-speaking audience, the quoted examples suggest intimate connections with other coexistent literary genres, most strikingly perhaps with the so-called Heimatliteratur35  a romanticized, ‘vernacular’ form of both factual and fictional writing, aimed at conveying the mythical idea of national ‘homeland’ to an increasingly mobile domestic readership. This relationship becomes apparent in poetic and sentimental forms of expression playing upon the reader’s imagination rather than presenting a concise guidebook-style inventory of the traversed landscape. It is precisely this allusive historicist aspect which makes these texts 31 P. Fussell, Abroad. British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Dann, ‘Writing Out the Tourist’. 32 Dann, ‘Writing Out the Tourist’. 33 R. Koshar, German Travel Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2000). 34 E. Allen, ‘‘‘Money and Little Red Books’’: Romanticism, Tourism, and the Rise of the Guidebook’, Literature Interpretation Theory 7, no. 23 (1996): 21326; Koshar, ‘What Ought to be Seen’; Koshar, German Travel Cultures; J.M. MacKenzie, ‘Empires of Travel: British Guide Books and Cultural Imperialism in the 19th and 20th Centuries’, in Histories of Tourism. Representation, Identity and Conflict, ed. J.K. Walton (Clevedon: Channel View, 2005), 1938; Marine-Roig, ‘The Image and Identity’. 35 E. Boa and R. Palfreyman, Heimat: A German Dream: Regional Loyalties and National Identity in German Culture, 18901990 (Oxford: University Press, 2000); H.V. Uffelen, Heimatliteratur 19001950  Regional, National, International (Vienna: Praesens, 2009).

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‘ideological’ because they represent literary means of translating the abstract idea of Heimat into an intimate and accessible national habitation. While evoking sentiments of longing and belonging, however, their sequential structure and recurring directive rhetoric (characterized by expressions such as ‘we have to . . .’, ‘one ought to . . .’ etc.) resonates key narrative features typical of the tourist guidebook. This also becomes clear in various ‘paratexts’ such as prefaces, dedications, introductions as well as advertisements, which represent particularly rich sources and have been analysed in greater depth for this study. Considering the prevailing imprecision in defining guide- and travel-book labels in academic literature,36 the author thus refers to the selected texts as ‘tourist literature’ which implies their principal purpose of promoting, informing and guiding through the landscape in question. The selected texts have been translated from the German by the author with key expressions highlighted in the original language in brackets and italic lettering. The timeframe between 1870 and 1945 was mainly chosen for two reasons. First, this period marks critical moments in Austria’s transition from being part of a territorially large European Empire to a small modern nation state where tourism was hugely influential for relocating and defining national identity in geographical, economical and political terms.37 A second reason is bound up with the micro-geographical scope of this study: whereas the formation of an Austrian national identity through the lens of tourism has been well explored in more generic terms,38 this study interrogates the role of a particular landscape or region and thus seeks to provide a more detailed view on the complex historical processes of nation building in Austria.39 The following sections offer a chronological sequence of tourist literature narratives about the Wachau beginning with late nineteenth-century accounts, and discuss them in relation to the wider political contexts within which they emerged. ‘A gateway to the Orient’



late nineteenth-century narratives of the Danube Valley

A pivotal international trading route and river gateway, the Danube and its adjacent landscapes have been subject to written travel accounts for many 36

Dann, ‘Writing Out the Tourist’. C. Peniston-Bird, ‘Coffee, Klimt and Climbing: Constructing an Austrian National Identity in Tourist Literature 19181938’, in Tourisms, Histories and Identities: Nations, Destinations and Representations in Europe and Beyond, ed. John K. Walton (Clevedon, Buffalo, NY: Channel View, 2005), 21434. 38 J. Steward, ‘Tourism in Late Imperial Austria: The Development of Tourist Cultures and Their Associated Images of Place’, in Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America, ed. S. Baranowski and E. Furlough (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 10836; G. Heiss, ‘Tourismus’, in Memoria Austriae I.  Menschen, Mythen, Zeiten, ed. Emil Brix, Ernst Bruckmu¨ ller and Hannes Stekl (Vienna: Oldenbourg, 2004); Peniston-Bird, ‘Coffee, Klimt and Climbing’; W. Kos, ‘Landschaft zwischen Verstaatlichung und Privatisierung’, in Memoria Austriae. Bauten  Orte  Regionen, ed. E. Brix, E. Bruckmu¨ ller and H. Stekl (Mu¨ nchen & Wien: Oldenbourg, 2005), ¨ sterreich und Irland von 1900 bis 1938 20035; A. Penz, Inseln der Seligen. Fremdenverkehr in O (Wien: Bo¨ hlau, 2005). 39 G. Graml, ‘(Re)mapping the Nation: Sound of Music Tourism and Austrian National Identity, ca 2000 CE’, Tourist Studies 4, no. 1 (2004): 13759; C.E. Murdock, ‘Tourist Landscapes and Regional Identities in Saxony, 18781938’, Central European History 40 (2007): 589621. 37

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centuries.40 From the eighteenth century onwards a number of German, French and English travellers would rather loosely refer to a ‘note-worthy’ and ‘picturesque’ stretch between the towns of Melk and Krems, characterized by a ‘grotesque’, and ‘barren’ natural ‘physiognomy’ as well as some peculiar local customs.41 Besides numerous Viennese painters and art students, who were among the first to ‘colonize’ the Wachau in the mid-1700s, Austrian travellers and topographers would soon be documenting in greater detail the ‘picturesque’ and ‘sumptuous’ qualities of the riverine landscape from the early nineteenth century onwards.42 The number of written travel accounts clearly increases with the introduction of a scheduled steamboat line between Vienna and Linz in 1836 by the Royal and Imperial Danube Steamship Company (K.u.K. DonauDampfschiffahrts-Gesellschaft). Commensurate with the completion of a railway link between Vienna and Krems in 1872, this marks the beginning of regularly scheduled trips to the area. The Vienna-based Austrian Tourist Club (O¨ sterreichischer Touristenklub, established in 1869) played a significant role in promoting the region to a greater, notably Viennese, public through exhibitions, excursions and various publications. In an 1877 edition of the club’s periodical ‘Der Tourist’, Ludwig Folga´ r reports in great detail on a steamship cruise from Regensburg to Vienna. Folga´ r, having graduated in philosophy, modern languages and law from the University of Vienna, started working for the Royal & Imperial Danube Steamship Company in the 1840s, which gave him the opportunity to travel extensively across Europe and to publish numerous travel accounts and essays in newspapers, magazines and journals of the period. A prolific, yet less successful poet and novelist, Folga´ r’s writing style is allusive and laden with metaphor. This is reflected in his travel account for ‘Der Tourist’ which starts with a comparison of the Austrian Danube with the far more popular Rhine, speaking of the two rivers as ‘. . . vital arteries of two civilisations in the heart of Europe’. Unlike the ‘monotonous’ and ‘invariant’ Rhine, however, the unjustly less travelled Danube is hailed to be far more ‘cosmopolitan’ (weltma ¨ nnisch), offering a ‘. . . pleasantly varied landscape of wild splendour and astonishing diversity’, and exhibiting ‘. . . primitive nature, colourful nations, and the fauna and flora of two zones’. In another paragraph, the river is allegorized as a ‘gateway to the Orient’ (‘Tor zum Osten’), which brought the ‘. . . spiritual achievements of the West back to the countries of the Orient where the first civilisations originated’.43 In this truly orientalist allusion, the author highlights the Wachau Valley as a ‘centrepiece’ of Austrian ‘culture and character’, a landscape exhibiting both untouched nature and lively human industry. 40

S. Schaber, ‘Donaureisen’, in Die Donau. Facetten eines europa ¨ ischen Stromes, ed. Kulturreferat der Obero¨ sterreichischen Landesregierung (Linz: Landesverlag, 1994), 2915; E. Englisch, ‘Die Erschließung der Wachau fu¨ r den Tourismus’, in Denkmal  Ensemble  Kulturlandschaft am Beispiel der Wachau, ed. G. Hajos (Wien: Berger, 1998), 18794; C. Stadelmann, ‘Die Donau’, in Memoria Austriae, ed. E. Brix, E. Bruckmu¨ ller and H. Stekl, 23664. 41 W. Myss and M. Schlandt, Die Donau in alten Reisebildern  Reiseberichte und Reisebilder aus sechs Jahrhunderten (Innsbruck: Schadewald, 1975). 42 J.A. Schultes, Donau-Fahrten. Handbuch fu ¨ r Reisende auf der Donau (Vienna: Doll, 1819 1827); C.N. Klein, Beschreibung der bei der Donau-Reise von Linz bis Wien ersichtlichen Ortschaften, Schlo ¨ sser und Gegenden (Linz: Schmid, 1841); J.G. Kohl, Die Donau von ihrem Ursprung bis Pesth (Triest: Oesterr. Lloyd, 1854); A. Schmidl, Die Donau von Ulm bis Wien (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1858). 43 L. Folga´ r, ‘Donaufahrt’, Der Tourist. Organ fu ¨ r Touristik und Alpenkunde IX, no. 7 (April 1877): 10813.

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Characterized by the ‘. . . steady struggle of man with the elements’, the Wachau is then compared to a ‘. . . grand and majestic garden . . . teeming with romantic myths and legends that stem from different eras and events in history’.44 Similar descriptions can be found in Rabl’s ‘Wachau Fu ¨ hrer’ (Wachau Guide),45 also published by the Austrian Tourist Club, and Fo¨rster and Ro¨nninger’s Touristenfu ¨ hrer Wachau,46 which are among the first guidebooks promoting the Wachau distinctly as a hiking area. In these and other contemporaneous accounts, the garden gradually emerges as a leading metaphor for the Danube Valley. Associated with enclosure, structure and intimacy, the garden alludes to the colonization and domestication of what previously had been referred to as wild, barren and grotesque landscape. Being both cultivated and natural, the garden also represents a varied, yet ordered, idealized and miniaturized model of the world,47 which, in late nineteenth-century guidebook publications, increasingly invokes ideas of a cohesive national space. The garden metaphor also mirrors the late Habsburg ideal of ‘unity and diversity’, the notion that AustriaHungary represents a common meeting ground of diverse peoples and cultures, and the promotion of an mythologized ‘imperial identity’ that ‘. . . demanded only partial allegiance, and never strove to impose the bounded and historicized homogeneity of national belonging’.48 The narrative themes of the ‘cultural meeting ground’ and ‘unity in diversity’ continued to be used long after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and were instrumental in the touristic reinvention of the Austrian Federal State following the First World War,49 as well as some Eastern European regions in the aftermath of the ‘cold war’.50 The beginning of the twentieth century also marks the rise of photography as the dominant visual medium to complement Wachau tourist book narratives. Reiffenstein and Bartsch’s ‘Die Wachau’51 and Gerlach and Wichner’s ‘Die Wachau in Wort und Bild’ (The Wachau in Word and Image)52, both joint publications by professional photographers and established writers, are typical examples of this development which coincided with growing efforts by regional and national tourist associations to visually showcase the area to domestic and foreign audiences, as well as a rapidly growing number of amateur photographers.53 Rather than being explicit ‘ready at hand’ guides, these ‘coffee-table’ publications had a larger format and were 44

Ibid., 109. ¨ sterreichischen Touristen Club, 1890). J. Rabl, Wachau-Fu ¨ hrer (Wien: Verlag des O 46 F. Fo¨ rster and K. Ro¨ nninger, Fo ¨ rsters Touristenfu ¨ hrer in Wiens Umgebungen. Wegweiser bei Ausflu ¨ gen im Wiener-Walde, im ¨osterreichisch-steirischen Alpenlande und in der Wachau. 11th ed. (Vienna: Eigenverlag, 1906). 47 D. Picard, Tourism, Magic and Modernity. Cultivating the human garden (New Directions in Anthropology) (New York & Oxford: Berghahn, 2011). 48 L. Bialasiewicz, ‘Another Europe: Remembering Habsburg Galicja’, Cultural Geographies 10, no. 1 (2003): 2144, 28. 49 J. Ploner, ‘Narrating Regional Identity in Tourism  Sketches from the Austrian Danube Valley’, Language and Intercultural Communication 9, no. 1 (2009): 214. 50 Bialasiewicz, ‘Another Europe’. 51 B. Reiffenstein and R. Bartsch, Die Wachau (Wien: Rosenbaum, 1911). 52 M. Gerlach, ed. Die Wachau in Wort und Bild. Photographisch aufgenommen und herausgeben von Martin Gerlach. Text von Josef Wichner. Einleitungsgedicht von Hermann Hango (Vienna & Leiptzig: Verlag von Gerlach & Wiedling, 1912). 53 F. Grassegger, Wachau um 1900: Lichtbilder des Wiener Landschafts-photographen Konrad Heller (18751931) (Wien: Bo¨ hlau, 1996). 45

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primarily used for promotion purposes. Much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century photographic Wachau guidebook imagery, however, imitated the work of earlier generations of Wachau painters, depicting, with elaborate detail, town views, picturesque cobbled lanes, courtyards and gardens, crumbling ruins, baroque fountains and ivy-covered facades, renaissance portals and staircases and so on. Flooded with light, and rarely depicting human presence and activity, these visuals sought to capture the timeless beauty of national art and architecture, harmonically assembled with natural elements such as fissured cliffs, vineyards, woods and the Danube River. At the same time, graphical illustrations such as woodcuts and engravings were interspersed as vignettes, allegories and borders, depicting town views or minuscule architectural details, and giving evidence of the rich heritage of Austrian graphic design associated with the Secessionist movement prior to the First World War. Together with the poetic text sequences, this imagery of a both culturally and ‘organically’ grown garden accentuates Bhabha’s thoughts on the ‘spatialisation of historical time’ and the power of the eye to naturalize the rhetoric of national affiliation.

The road of the Nibelungs



the Danube landscape and the rise of German nationalism

Whilst much of the late nineteenth-century travel literature on the Wachau would emphasize the theme of diversity in relation to an ethnically and culturally heterogeneous ‘Danube Monarchy’,54 an increasing number of guidebooks, published from the 1890s onwards, echo strong German nationalist (and Pan-Germanist) ideological sentiment. Arising in a tense climate of political separatism across the multinational Habsburg Empire, the so-called ‘Pan-German’ movement had gained significant political influence following the ‘Austro-Hungarian Compromise’ of 1867, and eventually led to the formation of a political party by Georg Ritter von Scho¨ nerer, whose anti-Semitic, anti-Slav and anti-Catholic ideas grew considerably popular among Germans across the multi-ethnic, yet internally divided Empire.55 Much tourist literature published in the late 1890s up to the outbreak of First World War would thus harness the Wachau valley as a ‘border-zone’ between east and west, or speak of an ‘outpost’ of Germanic culture and heritage towards the Eastern/Slavic territories of the monarchy. One representative example is the already mentioned coffee-table book Die Wachau in Wort und Bild (The Wachau in Word and Image) by Martin Gerlach and Josef Wichner. While Gerlach, a professional photographer and publisher, provides the imagery of a romantic, backward-looking architectural landscape almost deserted by humans, the introduction by the teacher and folklorist Wichner stresses, once again, the Danube’s ‘sisterhood’ to the Rhine, now symbolizing an ancient and natural lineage between Germany and Austria. Accordingly, the Wachau is said to be ‘. . . heavily charged with ancient Germanic virtue’ (Germanische Urkraft), and described as ‘. . . imposing bulwark able to withstand looming eastern pressures’. The deliberately chosen point of departure in Wichner’s literary journey is the highly symbolic Leopoldsberg near Vienna, the very site where the Ottoman army had been defeated by an alliance of Austrian and 54

Stadelmann, ‘Die Donau’. B. Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship (in German), trans. Thomas Thornton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 55

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Polish troops at the so-called ‘Second Siege of Vienna’ in 1683, ‘delivering’ the Christian Occident from a threatening Muslim invasion. Similar travel books, like one published in 1915 by Rudolf von Enderes, a chief secretary in the Royal and Imperial Ministry of Trade, and Josef Kallbrunner, an archivist and local historian from Krems, present the Wachau as the ‘ideal’ landscape for those travellers who wished to explore the ‘. . . lesser known corners of the German Heimat’. The authors, both of whom were affiliated with the Austrian Tourist Club, herald the Danube valley as ‘essence’ of Germanic culture and history at the very doorsteps of the Reich and as ‘heartland’ of the medieval ‘German Eastern March’ (‘Ostmark’), where the landscape bears testimony to a rich culture that had been brought to the region under Charlemagne by courageous Franks and Bavarians, only to be ‘trampled down’ by repeated Magyar and Slavic invasions. In another section, von Enderes and Kallbrunner56 dwell on the ‘golden era’ of the Frankish Margraves of Babenberg and develop historical links between the region and the early medieval German epic drama of the Nibelungen, in which the two local towns of Melk and Mauthern are mentioned. The Nibelung heroic epos, telling the journey of the mythical Germanic Burgundian people to the court of king Etzel (Attila, leader of the Huns) eastwards along the Rhine and Danube, had become ideologically instrumental for the rising ‘Pan-Germanic’ movement, which strongly promoted the unification of Austria with Germany. The myth, which had already gained popularity in the wake of German national romanticism (most notably in the operatic work of Richard Wagner), would assist to legitimize ancient Germanic legacy in Austria (Figure 1). By then, however, this heritage was exclusive to the multi-ethnic capital Vienna, which by the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century was ridden by anti-Slav and anti-Semitic sentiment.57 In German nationalist (and later National Socialist) rhetoric, the Burgundians’ epic journey down the Danube became the Germanic ‘route of fate’ (‘Schicksalsweg’), an allegedly ancient ‘yearning towards the East’ (‘Drang nach Osten’) as well as the embodiment of ‘Nibelungentreue’  a mythical interpretation of Austro-German companionship during the Great War and thereafter.58 The interwar years The end of the First World War marks a critical shift in the conception of ‘Austria’, which, following the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, was reduced to a mere fragment of its previous territory. This decisive change and the emergence of the so-called ‘First Republic’ led to a prolific production of national identity markers in order to communicate and legitimize Austrianness to both domestic and international publics.59 As part of this symbolic nation-building process, tourism provided a fitting narrative inventory that aided to compensate territorial smallness with a still 56

R. von Enderes and J. Kallbrunner, Fu ¨ hrer durch die Wachau: und eine kurze Beschreibung ¨ sterreicher, 1915). der in derselben liegenden gro ¨ sseren Ortschaften (Krems: Verlag fu¨ r O 57 Ibid.; Stadelmann, ‘Die Donau’. 58 J. Vermeiern, ‘The ‘Rebirth of Greater Germany’: The Austro-German Alliance and the Outbreak of War’, in Untold War: New Perspectives in First World War Studies, ed. H. Jones, J. O’Brien and Ch. Schmidt-Supprian (Boston: Brill, 2008), 20932. 59 Peniston-Bird, ‘Coffee, Klimt and Climbing’; W. Posch, ‘Die Wachau und die Heimatschutzbewegung’, in Denkmal  Ensemble  Kulturlandschaft am Beispiel der Wachau, ed. G. Hajos (Wien: Berger, 2000), 195204.

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Figure 1. Historicized Germanic Wardens overlooking the Danube Valley, reproduction of a historical postcard, (ca. 1910), purchased by the author in Du¨ rnstein, Wachau, 2009.

‘intact’ diversity of cultural treasures and landscapes, now stretching from the snowcapped mountains of the Tyrol, through picturesque riverscapes and lake districts, to the plains of the Hungarian borderland.60 Publications promoting this imaginary ‘much-in-little’ geography not only refashioned pre-war narratives associated with the multicultural Danube Monarchy (Figure 2), but equally assisted to stabilize, ideologically, the novel and still abstract political concept of a federal republic consisting of nine provinces (or Bundesla ¨ nder).61 Taking a close look at guidebooks 60

Kos, ‘Landschaft’. W.D. Bowman, ‘Regional History and the Austrian Nation’, Journal of Modern History 67, no.4 (1995): 87397.

61

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Figure 2. ‘From the Alps to the gates of the Orient’, advertising poster, Danube Cruise Ship Company, 1935, courtesy Austrian National Library.

dating from the 1920s, the Wachau Valley continues to present a preferred landscape interface on which to project circulating and widely indistinct imageries of a ‘new Austria’, which at the time, was considered economically barely viable among its citizens,62 and was ideologically fought over by a wide range of political camps. This state of widespread confusion as to how a ‘new’ Austrian national identity ought to look like is well reflected in post-First World War guidebook texts. In the light of the ongoing attempts of the German nationalists to force political unification with Germany, pre-First World War narratives of the Danube Valley as an Ur-Germanic landscape re-emerge in a number of publications. This is the case in 62

Peniston-Bird, ‘Coffee, Klimt and Climbing’.

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Josef Wichner’s Auf der Nibelungenstrasse (‘On the Nibelungs’ Road’),63 a guidebook harking back on the myth of the valley as primordial and fateful ‘cultural gateway’ (Kulturstrasse) towards the east. Wichner, originally from Vorarlberg in Western Austria, worked as a teacher in Krems and became an influential local historian with a strong commitment to public and national education. A prolific writer, he authored a series of Wachau ‘Heimat’ books themed around history, art, architecture and folklore of the area. ‘Auf der Nibelungenstrasse’, Wichner’s last publication before his death in 1923, hails the Wachau as a ‘. . . site of glorious and faded German knighthood’, materialized in the region’s numerous castles and ruins, and a stretch of land that resembles ‘European history in a nutshell’. In overtly national-romantic fashion, the author goes as far as to interpret the name ‘Wachau’ as etymologically deriving from the German term Wache which translates as ‘guard’ (or ‘warden’) and would symbolize steadfast Germanic vigilance over looming ‘threats’ from the Oriental ‘Other’. By the mid 1920s, the demand for and production of Wachau guidebooks for a German-speaking readership appears to have reached an unprecedented peak, not least due to the growing popularity of affordable tourist destinations in the economically struggling and inflation-stricken countries of Austria and Germany. This is reflected in the re-edition of successful Wachau tourist books such as Reiffenstein’s and Bartsch’s ‘Die Wachau’ (1911/1923),64 as well as in Huber’s foreword to the second edition of his successful ‘Wachau-Fu ¨ hrer’ (Figure 3) where he states: Literature on the Wachau has grown to such an extent that there is indeed no shortage of descriptions and guides. Yet, the first edition of this guide, which received the most favourable judgement in numerous reviews, was out of print within a relatively short span of time.65

Among the growing number of Wachau books, and in contrast to prevailing proGerman narratives, some publications refashioned pre-First World War imaginaries of a borderless and multicultural Danube space. At this point, however, they frequently echoed emergent political ideas of the pacifist and catholic-conservative ‘Pan-European’ movement. Initiated by the Austrian diplomat Coudenhove-Kalergi in the early 1920s, the Pan-European idea gained significant support among intellectuals, politicians and aristocrats who sought to reinvigorate the Habsburg ideal of ‘unity and diversity’ and to maintain Austria’s ‘mission’ as mediator between the peoples of Europe. For example, this ideological stance is reflected in Die Nibelungenstrasse  ein kulturgeschichtliches Wanderbuch (‘The Nibelung Road  a cultural-historical hiking guide’), authored by the influential art historian and Augustinian cleric Oskar Vinzenz Ludwig.66 Considering the title of the book, the author appears to challenge omnipresent Pan-German romanticism and mythmaking. This is also reflected in the programmatic introduction, where Ludwig 63

J. Wichner, Auf der Nibellungenstrasse. Geschichtsbilder aus dem Donautale Wachau (Stuttgart: Bonz & Comp, 1922). 64 Reiffenstein and Bartsch, Die Wachau. 65 J. Huber, Wachaufu ¨ hrer Kremstal-Dunkelsteiner Wald. 2nd ed. (Krems: Verlag fu¨ r ¨ sterreicher, 1927), 3. O 66 O.V. Ludwig, Die Nibelungenstrasse. Ein kulturgeschichtliches Wanderbuch (Berlin: Volksverband der Bu¨ cherfreunde, 1927).

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Figure 3. Cover image of the ‘Wachau Guide’ by Josef Huber, 1923, author’s collection.

forcefully criticizes the ‘scarce and incorrect’ information provided by an increasing number of ‘pretentious’ guidebooks as well as the ‘ignorance’ of both foreigners and fellow Austrians towards the remarkable sites and curiosities of the Danube Valley. Such improper information would irreversibly lead to ‘. . . wrong attitudes towards the regional and notable art forms’ (i.e. the Baroque), and misrepresent ‘(. . .) the true character of our people and character’, since: (. . .) all historical knowledge of a travel guide is worthless without a common spiritual line which highlights the typical, the imaginative and the essential which has to surface in order to create the proper picture of the object of interest.67 67

Ibid., 78.

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Further, Ludwig provides a detailed account of the area’s history and cultural sites and describes the Wachau as ‘. . . iconic cultural epitome’ of the transnational Danube River, which, like a ‘grand aorta’, leads to and from the ‘heart of Europe’ and could make the still faint idea of a ‘United States of Europe’ a future reality.68 In contrast to publications echoing Pan-German and Pan-European ideology, a number of authors seek to convey the narrative of a genuinely sovereign Austrian ‘character’ of the Danube Valley. In much of this patriotic literature, the Wachau is either portrayed as a timeless garden and sentimental remainder of the old Imperial Austria,69 a small, yet abundant cornucopia of colours, natural attractions and cultural gems,70 or alternatively, associated with the vitality, clarity and light-flooded atmosphere of Mediterranean and Adriatic regions.71 The latter notion of the ‘southern landscape north of the Alps’ is a particularly recurring narrative theme that Kos72 interprets as compensational rhetoric related to the loss of the so-called ‘Austrian Riviera’ (Northern Italy and parts of the Dalmatian coastline) in the aftermath of the First World War. In consideration of the competing ideological struggles of how a ‘new Austria’ might be imagined, this narrative can also be interpreted as an attempt to outweigh the north-oriented ideological imagery promoted by the Pan-German (and soon to be National Socialist) movement in the country. Sentimental and nostalgic, however on a different note, is also Baedeker’s introduction to the Danube Valley in its 1931 ‘O¨ sterreich’ edition. It portrays the region as a historical site for the ‘exchange of peoples’ (‘Vo ¨ lkeraustausch’) and mentions the early medieval Bavarian and Frankish influx, of which the Song of the Nibelung gives testimony. Although Baedeker attributes the Wachau with ‘Rhinish features’ (‘Rheinische Zu ¨ ge’), she had preserved her ‘earnest beauty’ and ‘untouched nature’ to a far greater extent: The town and villages along the Danube are more ancient, the ruins not converted into palaces, the big monasteries still in the undisturbed ownership of the clerical orders. This is what the Rhine must have looked like to the traveller towards the end of the 18th century.73

Wachau narratives during Austro-Fascism and National Socialism In terms of ideology-driven national and regional tourist literature, a widely underresearched political era is the totalitarian Sta ¨ ndestaat regime between 1933 and 1938, which saw an unprecedented ideological production of symbols and narratives of Austrianness across all areas of public life. Influenced by Mussolini’s fascist ideology in Italy, this political system was represented by a single ‘Fatherland Front’ party, which sustained a ‘Christian-Social’ agenda and sought to overpower, albeit by similar means, growing National Socialist sentiment across the country. Propagating 68

Ibid., 9. Reiffenstein and Bartsch, Die Wachau. 70 Huber, Wachaufu ¨ hrer. 71 H. Cloeter, Donauromantik. Tagebuchbla ¨ tter und Skizzen aus der goldenen Wachau (Vienna: Scholl, 1923). 72 Kos, ‘Landschaft’. 73 ¨ sterreich. Ohne Tirol und Vorarlberg. Handbuch fu K. Baedeker, O ¨ r Reisende. (31. Auflage) (Lepzig: Karl Baedeker, 1931), 229. 69

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a distinct and inward-looking ‘Austrian’ national identity, the Sta ¨ ndestaat regime was well aware of the economic and ideological opportunities tourism had to offer. In publications of the period, ‘prototypical’ national landscapes such as the Alps and the Danube Valley were harnessed as authentic manifestations of national purity and Catholic endurance. For the Wachau in particular, the grand Benedictine Abbey of Melk and the town of Du¨ rnstein with their alleged genuine Austrian baroque architecture became particularly popular symbols for fostering imaginaries of Catholic faith and/as national cohesion. These two sites equally served as iconic vignettes to bridge the existing gap between representative national ‘high culture’ (then almost exclusively associated with the cities of Vienna and Salzburg) and the country’s predominantly rural hinterland. Considering growing Soviet influence in neighbouring eastern countries and forceful propaganda against ‘cultural Bolshevism’, it is not surprising that, once again, the Wachau represented a fitting narrative counterweight to constant ‘jeopardy from the East’.74 With the rise of National Socialism in Austria during the 1930s, and following the ‘Anschluss’ to Nazi Germany in 1938, the Nibelungen myth was again hugely instrumental for propagating and historically legitimizing German legacy in the country. For example, Egid von Filek’s guidebook ‘Besinnliche Wachaufahrt’ (Contemplative Wachau Journey, Figure 4)75 introduces the Danube as a ‘shimmering blue-silken ribbon’, along which a series of precious gems are lined up: ‘. . . small bourgeois towns surrounded by crumbling walls, peaceful villages, pilgrim churches and rising towers, mourning ruins, illustrious castles next to proud abbeys’. Once again, the theme of a dramatically altering landscape passing by the traveller’s eye provides the scenic backdrop for revealing the ‘. . . entire history of the German Eastern March [Ostmark] at its best’. The author, a doctor of law and grammar school teacher, speaks of the Wachau as the ‘germ cell’ (Keimzelle) of the German Ostmark, in which ‘(. . .) all momentous waves of German history are flowing through (. . .), the valley of the magnificent river has become the route of fate [Schicksalsweg] of our people’.76 The ‘history’ von Filek is referring to, loosely conjoins the age of the crusades with the peasants’ wars and the Lutheran period and is later continued to the age of empress Maria Theresia and Prince Eugene of Savoy (‘defeater of the Turks’), the time in which: (. . .) our culture expanded far into the South East. And if Germany was the sword, the will of power that is purposefully combatant for a place under the sun, then the German Ostmark was the shield held against the inrush from the East  a devotional and passionate heroism which wasn’t less precious than the active one.77

Von Filek’s account of the region is teeming with National Socialist pathos and reinvigorates formerly employed narratives about the Danube as a primordially German river, once again dwelling on the intimate historical bond between Germany and its vigilant eastern ‘outpost’. Another prevailing theme is the intimate relationship between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ when the author determines the ‘racial character’ 74 H. Trautsamwieser, Die Wachau  Zwischen Sta ¨ ndestaat und Staatsvertrag (Krems: Malek, 2005); Penz, Inseln der Seligen. 75 E. von Filek, Besinnliche Wachaufahrt (Vienna: Wiener Verlag, 1944). 76 Ibid., 15. 77 Ibid., 5.

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Figure 4. Cover image of Egid von Filek’s ‘Besinnliche Wachaufahrt’, 1944, author’s collection.

of the German people living along the shores of the river as being ‘cheerful, convivial and full of life’. Here, the reader is guided through an ‘organically grown’ territory, resembling a culture which had developed in constant dialogue with nature, and a landscape where ‘(. . .) the spiritual and cultural life is based on the broad and dark foundations of geographical and geological conditions’.78 In line with Nazi ‘blood and soil’ ideology, such narratives are interwoven with recurring body metaphors, describing the Wachau as ‘heart’ and the Danube as a life-giving ‘blood vessel’ or ‘artery’ of the German Reich. Considering the publication date of 1944, the 78

Ibid., 89.

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metaphor of the armed body of conflict is perhaps an apt one. Equipped with sword and shield, this body alludes to Austria’s ‘historic mission’ as heroic warden against Eastern threats, which at the time was an actual ‘scenario’ in view of rapid Soviet advances at the German eastern front. Only four years later, another book by von Filek entitled ‘Komm mit in die Wachau’ (Come along to the Wachau)79 was issued by a Viennese publishing house. Dedicated to a juvenile urban readership (desperate to escape their bombed cities), and totally cleansed from Nazi phraseology, the chapters of the book bear inconspicuous titles such as ‘A sunny landscape’, ‘A little town on the Danube’, ‘Tree blossom in Du ¨ rnstein’ and so on. Von Filek’s ability to write out (and over) any contested ideology so swiftly not only reveals the ‘guilty victim’ status of a fair number of writers in post-Second World War Austria.80 It equally mirrors the constant malleability of a particularly rich narrative landscape whose representation in tourist literature would continue to change in the decades to come.

Conclusion In their collection of essays Mythologies, Roland Barthes and Lavers81 evocatively refer to the tourist guidebook as ‘agent of blindness’ because it tends to eradicate the social in favour of the monumental and therefore creates a space that is a historical, disembodied and lifeless. Although there may be some legitimacy in this judgement, the examples presented in this paper speak a rather different language. Brimming with ideological phraseology and moral values in relation to belonging, nation and ‘homeland’, the selected texts give expression to individual and collective ways of being and acting in the world and create what Wegner82 so appropriately calls a narrative space of ‘imaginary communities’. This narrative space has a strong social and political dimension in that it not only brings seemingly dispersed things together (i.e. objects, histories, nature, etc.), but also ‘nearer’, spatially, temporally and humanly. In this sense, guidebooks are not merely one-way instructions which require decoding by the reader/consumer in a linear sequence of causes and effects. As ideological frames of ordering, guidebooks ‘act’ as correspondents towards the consensual understanding of (national) space and help to negotiate and re-negotiate changing (con)texts of power, longing and belonging over time. It is hardly surprising that some of the key narrative themes explored in this paper continue to feature prominently in current tourist representations of the Wachau. For example, both the national and regional tourism boards present the area as a ‘magical’ and ‘timeless work of art’, or in line with current heritage and culinary tourism endeavours, as ‘garden of the senses’ in which diverse histories are not only tangible, but become ‘alive’. The texts discussed in this study show that metaphors relating to ‘life’ and the human organism are particularly powerful means 79

E. von Filek, Komm mit in die Wachau (Vienna: Wiener Verlag, 1948). H. Pick, Guilty Victim: Austria from the Holocaust to Haider (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000). 81 Barthes and Lavers, Mythologies. 82 P.E. Wegner, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 80

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of engendering a sense of cohesion and belonging in the narration of national landscape. A prime metaphor for the meaningful formulation of both physical and social space from the Middle Ages throughout modernity,83 the body image humanized the (nation) state and assisted to map out the utopian ideal of a harmoniously functioning society based on a common social contract. In the selected guidebook examples, such rhetoric is reflected in recurring images of the Danube as ‘vital artery’ or ‘blood vessel’, and of the region as ‘heart’, ‘essence’ ‘germ cell’ of the country or a larger, ideologically contested imaginary community (i.e. Germany, Europe). These biologistic imageries alternate and, at times, intersect with narratives of ‘diversity’, the idea that a vast array of landscapes, histories, natural and cultural features, and so on can be grasped all at once. This is mirrored in texts referring to the Wachau as a ‘pleasantly varied’ sequence of sites, an ancient ‘meeting place of peoples’, a feast of seasonal colours, the course of European history ‘in a nutshell’ or a perfect representation of the nation en miniature and so on. It was illustrated that the scripting of both ‘diversity’ and ‘magic’ in the Wachau in tourist literature owes much to the intriguing image of the ceaselessly flowing Danube, a space where different temporalities, be they regional, national or European, can be reconciled and synchronized into ever-new storylines. A meandering allusion to mythical time, the Danube River conjoins paleolithic ingenuity, the glory of the Roman Empire, the errant quest of the Nibelungs, the Europe of Charlemagne, the medieval German ‘Eastern March’, faded imperial glory, or utopian visions of a borderless Europe. Frequently, these (his-)stories of diversity mingle with other narrative tropes referring to the Wachau as ‘eternal’, ‘perpetual’ or ‘timeless’ space, a region where one can tune into the comforting rhythms of re-assurance, national continuity and belonging. In this guise, they speak of life itself as a form of travel. In contrast to the reconciling narrative themes of ‘timelessness’ and ‘diversity’, the assurance in national community is also articulated through stories of a mythical, yet always present ‘other’, which in the discussed guidebook excerpts repeatedly finds expression in a hostile Orientalism directed towards Slavs, Turks or Bolsheviks and so on. Picking up on these examples, it is certainly due to the textual richness of heritage landscapes that forms of ‘othering’ not only work for those travellers who, detached from their familiar environments, find a sense of self and belonging in relation to the culturally and geographically distant.84 The ideological mobilization of landscape in relation to the ‘other’ equally provides powerful narrative material for insider publics to rework myths of national affiliation.

Notes on contributor Josef Ploner holds a PhD from Leeds Metropolitan University (Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change) and currently works as a Researcher in the Carnegie School of Education at the same university. Besides education studies, his research focuses on

83

M. Schroer, Ra ¨ ume, Orte, Grenzen. Auf dem Weg zu einer Soziologie des Raums (Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp, 2006). 84 C. Minca and T. Oaks, Travels in Paradox. Remapping Tourism (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).

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tourism, heritage and landscape in the formation of regional and national identities in Europe, material culture; spatial concepts of tourism and travel theory; political and symbolic economies of tourism; tourism, heritage and processes of ‘Europeanization’. He also acts as Associate Editor of the Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change.