Baedeker's Germany

[Dave Monroe]

>From Rudy Koshar, German Travel Cultures (New York:
Berg, 2000), Ch. 1, "Baedeker's Germany," pp. 19-64
...

   "The history of German identity is a dialectical
dance between dispersal and concentration,
individualism and collectivism, 'the many' and 'the
one.'  The traces of this tension can be read in the
opening lines of the first German-language Baedeker
guidebook to unified Germany, published in 1906, more
than thirty years after the founding of the Second
Empire in 1871 ....  A single-volume guide to Germany
had emerged from a proliferation of regional and
'cross-German' guides, which in turn issued from the
single guide to Germany and Austria of 1842.
   "What did this act of condensation signify?  It is
my argument that the new single-volume guide was the
product of a deeper process of nationalization.  The
tour book was mainly for German speakers ....  It made
sense that there should be a new guidebook to the
German nation in an age when national identities
became more exclusive ....
   "The need for crystallization was simultaneously a
response to the dispersal of national visions....
   "Baedeker was a collector and traveler.... 
Collecting and traveling were intimately related
throughout the history of modern tourism.  Whereas
scientific travelers of the eighteenth century
collected minerals and flowers, later tourists, more
inclined to recreation, collected 'views and moods'
....  The link between collecting and traveling has a
direct bearing on the Baedeker firm's later
preeminence as tour guide to the German nation.  Like
traveling, colecting may be regarded as one of those
modes of reading by which, as de Certeau ...
maintained, individuals insert themselves into (and
thereby change) environments others created.
   "Walter Benjamin once wrote that the art of
collecting was shaped by 'a dialectical tension
between the poles of disorder and order.'  The objects
of collecting ... are disorderly because they present
a 'cahos of memories' to the collector, who like a
tourist contemplating his travels, recalls the places
the items were found and purchased.  The true
collector values his collection because it has little
utilitarian value.  He or she revels in the individual
deatils of each piece ....  He drwas these details
into a 'magical circle' for which the 'thrill of
acquisition' is the defining moement.  Collectors are
passionate owners, wrote Benjamin, and ownership is
based on a tactical instinct through which 'the
smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most
remote stationery store a key position.'  A memory of
the tactics of collecting results in a mental
itinerary where the topography of purchases ...
becomes inscribed in the collection itself ....
   "Karl Baedeker's skills as a collector were
transferable to the emerging world of modern tourism. 
Just as the collector gloried in the details of his
purchases, the tourist, as imagined by Baedeker,
studied maps, itineraries ....  He collected
information in his own circle of experience ....  For
a true colector, 'the whole background of an item adds
up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the
fate of the object' ....  The colector's mystcal
relationship with objects resulted in a highly
individualized manner of appreciating the collection. 
For the traveler, the background of tourist sites adds
up to a no less individualized magic encyclopedia
whose quintessence is that sense of fate ....
   "As he did with his autograph collection, Baedeker
assembled tourist destinations, publishing the results
in a way taht enabled travelers to regard the national
community as a tangible entity.  But there was more
than a metaphorical realationship at work here....
Karl Baedeker's youthful travels were the functional
equivalent of the middle-class Bildungsreise, a key
early precedent for modern tourism....  Baedeker's
peripatetic drew on many traditons and experiences to
create a hybrid, emergent practice.
   "Bourgeois travel had both collective (national,
class) and individual dimensions.  It was a symbolic
practice through which the middle strata discovered
and reinforced their membership in a tangible
community bounded by share rituals and self-images. 
At the same time, it contributed to personality
development and a sense of individuality ...." (pp.
19-22)

https://www.b-bold.com/berg/us/book_page.asp?Title_ID=613

Koshar citing here ...

Lofgren, Orvar.  On Holiday: A History of Vacationing.
   Berkeley: U of California P, 1999.

De Certeau, Michel.  The Practice of Everyday Life.
   Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.

Benjamin, Walter.  "Unpacking My Library:
   A Talk about Book Collecting."  Illuminations.
   New York: Schocken, 1969 [1931].  59-67.

Fortress, key position, seige party ...

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