Tourist Landscapes and Regional Identities in Saxony 1878-1938 PDF

Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association
Tourist Landscapes and Regional Identities in Saxony, 1878-1938

Author(s): Caitlin E. Murdock
Source: Central European History, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Dec., 2007), pp. 589-621
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Conference Group for Central
European History of the American Historical Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20457283
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Central European History 40 (2007), 589-621.
Copyright (( Conference Group for Central European History of the American
Historical Association
DOI: 10.1017/S0008938907001057 Printed in the USA
Tourist Landscapes and Regional Identities in

Saxony, 1878-1938
Caitlin E. Murdock
I come from the mountains! ... Not too long ago ... tradespeople
traveled ... to the lowlands ... people from ... Lauter with baskets, from
Sch6nheide with brushes, from Seiffen with toys ...
How different it is now! Now ... lowlanders say to one another "I'm going to
the mountains!" The clean air, the clear water, the fresh meadows, the cool
valleys ... draw them (here).1
T | EHE 1905 Kalenderfiur das Erzgebirge und Vogtland described an apparently

spontaneous shift in the relationship between the German state of
Saxony's mountainous southern borderlands and its rapidly urbanizing
lowlands. Yet from the 1870s to the 1930s, the Kalender, the Erzgebirgsverein
that published it, and a host of similar Heimat (homeland) and tourist organi
zations pushed, prodded, and cajoled lowlanders into visiting the borderlands.
In the process, they repeatedly reframed the ways in which they portrayed the
landscapes they championed, rethought their reasons for enticing travelers to
the southern regions, and redirected their efforts to new audiences.2 Saxon
Heimatler and tourism promoters succeeded in defining southern Saxony's
regions, and eventually Saxony as a whole, in terms of three important charac
teristics: the interplay of nature and industry in their landscapes; the diversity of
those landscapes; and proximity to and interactions with Bohemia. So powerful
were these themes that they continue to shape ideas about southern Saxony to
the present.
I would like to thank Pieter Judson, James J. Sheehan, Barbara Murdock, Gordon Murdock, and
the anonymous readers at Central European History for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.
Thanks also to the German Marshall Fund of the United States for funding this research.
Friedrich Hermann L?scher, "Geleitwort," Kalender f?r das Erzgebirge und Vogtland (Annaberg:
Grasers Verlag, 1905).
Regional literature often referred to Saxony's regions as landscapes. For example, Dr. Bruntsch,
Die Heimat. Landeskunde vom K?nigreiche Sachsen (Leipzig: Verlag von H. A. Ludwig Degener, 1909),
4. The historiography of tourism highlights a nineteenth-century shift from elite "travel" to mass
"tourism." Saxon regional tourism literature did not make this distinction, perhaps since most of
southern Saxony did not experience an earlier era of elite travelers. For discussion of this distinction,
see James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800-1918
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 1-79.
589
590 CAITLIN E. MURDOCK
Tourists began to explore southern Saxony in the late nineteen
Regional tourism promoters-Heimat enthusiasts, district officia
and hoteliers-celebrated local landscapes in postcards, periodicals
pers in order to lure tourists to the southern regions.3 By defin
terms of landscapes, tourism promoters strove to balance th
multiple identities: local, regional, state, national. As borderland
sought to reconcile apparent discontinuities between these iden
central European territories, states, and institutions that claimed
their regions. Understandings of a German nation that extende
limits of the German state and of the multinational relationshi
borderlands were central to their portrayals of southern Saxon
instructed their audiences that the regions' political, social,
fates were inextricably bound to their landscapes and geogra
treated tourists as important historical actors whose engagement
regions played a vital role in shaping the outcome of that bond. In
those fates were particularly complex when landscapes and poli
failed to coincide.
Efforts to define landscapes were a response to dramatic c
political and economic fortunes of Saxony's southern regio
Oberlausitz, the Saxon Switzerland, the Erzgebirge, and the
results of local and international economic transformations,
and national politics. Many Saxons seized on tourism, whether a
promoters, to define why their regions were important, sometim
them as models for modernization, and sometimes as areas need
modernizing.
Regional tourism had emerged as a mass phenomenon in south
the early twentieth century; throughout the period, touris
southern regions enjoyed many of the same pastimes: hiking, adm
ular views, and celebrating local culture. Yet, while in the 18
promoters hailed tourism as a way to connect local people t
landscapes and to the German nation, by the 1930s, they had co
it as an economic resource and a means of winning reco
Germans throughout the Reich. Tourism promoters transfo
Promoters included people from Saxony's southern regions and its cities, in
Chemnitz, and Leipzig. Kalender f?r das Erzgebirge, Vogtland und s?chsische Schw
Kalender f?r das Erzgebirge und das ?brige Sachsen (1914), 76-79.
This contrasts with Al?n Confino's work, which locates Heimat national id
within the Kaiserreich, and even with Celia Applegate's treatment of the Pfalz bo
concentrates on the importance of outside influences rather than on local as
border relationships. Al?n Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: W?rttemberg, Im
and National Memory, 1811-1918 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Caro
Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: Univer
Press, 1990).
LANDSCAPES AND REGIONAL IDENTITIES IN SAXONY 591
landscapes into meaningful places, into lasting examples of German regional

diversity, and into objects for national engagement. This article traces the activi
ties of middle-class regional Heimat and tourism organizations in Saxony over
the fifty years between their founding in the 1870s and 1880s, through the Kai
serreich, World War I, Weimar, and the early years of the Third Reich. In the
interwar period, other social groups participated in regional tourism, and a
diversity of new "travel cultures" emerged.5 But Saxon middle-class Heimat
movements were not displaced by newcomers, but rather grew dramatically in
the 1920s and 1930s, adapting to new circumstances with remarkable flexibility
and resilience, and making tourism a primary tool of their efforts.
Regional Diversity in a Modernizing Central Europe

The economic and political developments, including industrialization, mass
mobility, widening political participation, and German unification, that trans
formed German-speaking central Europe between the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries took on specific characteristics in different regions.6
Developments that produced new affluence in some areas brought scarcity to
others. In light of such changes, ideas about which regions were significant,
what their crucial characteristics were, and the implications of those character
istics changed for local people and outsiders alike.
Southern Saxon tourism and place creation, and the conditions that shaped
them, demonstrate how people in German-speaking central Europe reinvented
their regions in the face of dramatic changes, creating ways to make a sense of
place increasingly central to modern nations, states, politics, and economies.
In creating a sense of place, Saxons explicitly associated cultural, political, and
economic identities with physical territories.
Modern tourism emerged across Europe in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. In German-speaking central Europe, tourism reflected
the dramatic changes of the late nineteenth century. Bismarck created a
united German Empire in 1871, incorporating some formerly independent
central European states into that Empire and excluding others. Many regions,
especially in the east, were multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic. At the same
time, industrialization and urbanization were transforming demographic pat
terns, daily life, landscapes, and economic relations-unraveling and reweaving
the very fabric of life. Germans in many regions began devising ways to situate
5Rudy Koshar, German Travel Cultures (New York: Berg, 2000), 65-114.
6Just as E. A. Wrigley argued industrialization happened unevenly, shaped by local conditions, so,
too, did industrialization and political change have varied regional effects. Wrigley, Industrial Growth
and Population Change: A Regional Study of the Coalfield Areas of North-West Europe in the Later Nine
teenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961). By German-speaking central
Europe I mean the German Reich, the German-speaking territories of Cisleithania, and the
German-speaking territories of their successor states.
their communities simultaneously within the diversity of centr
German nation, and the German nation state.7 Many of their
under the umbrella of Heimat movements.
Heimat movements celebrated the local and regional while conn
to larger state and national communities. Above all, Heimat gave
8
opportunity to celebrate and define a community of common purpose. Like
their counterparts elsewhere in the new German Empire, Saxon Heimat partici
pants, or Heimatler, were predominantly middle-class-teachers, businesspeo
ple, and civil servants from the borderlands and the cities who established
new institutions and organized publications, activities, and political agendas
around the idea of Heimat.9
Nineteenth-century Heimat advocates helped Germans conceive their
regional and national identities in new terms-emphasizing the importance of
nature, landscape, and place. By the 1880s, mid-century romantic ideas of
nature and landscape morphed into efforts to teach an increasingly urban popu
lation to celebrate, preserve, and explore the countryside.10 Heimat movements
varied their activities according to local circumstances. Thus concern about local
landscapes and traditions in one region came in response to the pressures of
industrialization; in another they emerged in response to industrial decline.
But in all cases, Heimat movements emphasized the importance of place in
peoples' lives.
The Landscape and Geography of Southern Saxony

As you travel through Saxony from north to south along the Elbe River, you
watch the terrain change from flat farmland to rolling countryside, the river
banks lined with vineyards. In Dresden, you see the facades of the baroque
and nineteenth-century city-a center of art and court life. Continuing
south, you pass the craggy sandstone cliffs of the "Saxon Switzerland." Finally,
James J. Sheehan argues German history should not be considered merely the story of the post
1871 German state. Saxon tourism promoters demonstrate the persistence of multiple ideas of
German state and nationhood well after 1871. Sheehan, "What is German History? Reflections
on the Role of the Nation in German History and Historiography," Journal of Modern History 53
(1981).
Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor, Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, 17.
The Erzgebirgsverein and the Gebirgsverein f?r die s?chsisch-b?hmische Schweiz were founded
in 1878, beginning institutionalized Heimat promotion in the region. Andreas Martin, "Der
Fremdenverkehr in der S?chsischen Schweiz. Zu offenen Fragen der Entdeckung und Entwicklung
einer touristischen Landschaft bis 1914," Volkskunde in Sachsen 1 (Dresden, 1999): 90. For association
membership, see Kalender f?r das Erzgebirge, Vogtland und s?chsische Schweiz (1908), 38?39; Kalender
f?r das Erzgebirge und das ?brige Sachsen (1914), 76-79. In 1913 a quarter of the Erzgebirgsverein s
and the Gebirgsverein fur die s?chsische Schweiz's members were from Dresden, Leipzig, Chemnitz,
or Zwickau. Kalender f?r das Erzgebirge und das ?brige Sachsen (1913), 76-78.
Thomas Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity,
1885-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 1-4.
flanked by mountains, you cross Saxony's southern border into Bohemia.

Southern Saxony's rich, varied landscape of mountains, cliffs, and rivers first
attracted attention for its beauty in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen
turies when artists began painting the Saxon Switzerland, and a few wealthy
travelers began visiting the area.11 Late-nineteenth-century Heimat writers
championed such landscapes as culturally and nationally significant, and often
ignored those they found undistinguished. They celebrated some well-known
landscapes and worked to promote others that they believed merited attention,
including those of southern Saxony.
Southern Saxon landscapes included the essential elements of picturesque
nature with rolling mountains and clear burbling streams. But they were also
modern industrial landscapes with some of Europe's most densely populated
territories.12 Local people had long survived as what Jean Quataert, in her
study of the Oberlausitz, dubbed "worker peasantries" by combining agri
culture, mining, cottage, and factory industries.13 The mountains were
laced with dense networks of towns and villages. Streams were lined with
factories, and half-timbered houses were built to withstand the vibrations
of cottage weavers' looms. This mix of human activity and natural landscapes
evoked both local traditions and Germany's emergence as a modern indus
trial society.
Between the 1870s and the 1930s, Saxon Heimatler played a critical role
in defining modern regions, making tourism one of their most important
tools. Some historians of German Heimat movements have described them
as peculiar to the development of modern identities in late industrializing
areas or as anti-modern-a reaction against industrialization and urbani
zation.14 Several historians have also examined the importance of early
Martin, "Der Fremdenverkehr in der S?chsischen Schweiz," 92-100; Erwin Hartsch, "Der
Fremdenverkehr in der S?chsischen Schweiz," Wissenschaftliche Ver?ffentlichungen des Deutschen Instituts
f?r L?nderkunde 19/20 (1963): 394-395.
Rudolf Forberger, Die Industrielle Revolution in Sachsen 1800?1861 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag,
1982); Frank B. Tipton, Regional Variations in the Economic Development of Germany During the
Nineteenth Century (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1976), 30-38; Hubert Kiesewetter,
"Bev?lkerung, Erwerbst?tige und Landwirtschaft im K?nigreich Sachsen 1815-1871," in Region and
Industrialisation, ed. Sidney Pollard (G?ttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1980), 91-92, 94, 96.
13Jean H. Quataert, "The Politics of Rural Industrialization: Class, Gender, and Collective Protest
in the Saxon Oberlausitz of the Late Nineteenth Century," Central European History 20, no. 2 (1987):
91-124.
14Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor; Siegfried Weichlein, "Saxons into Germans: The Pro
gress of the National Idea in Saxony after 1866," in Saxony in German History: Culture, Society, and
Politics, 1830-1933, ed. James Retallack (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 169
170. Celia Applegate argues that nineteenth-century German localism proponents should not be
dismissed as reactionaries. Applegate, "Democracy or Reaction? The Political Implications of Lo
calist Ideas in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany," in Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in
Modern Germany, ed. Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), 252.
environmentalism for Heimat ideas.15 Saxony shows that efforts to cre

landscapes through Heimat tourism not only gave Germans a cont
which to grapple with the uncertainties of modernity,16 but pro
model for transforming existing territorial regions into modern cultu
ties whose landscapes balanced nature and industry, the local an
national.17 Saxon regional actors contributed to German nation-b
and highlighted the significance of diversity in German political and
landscapes by emphasizing their reach and relationships beyond the b
of the German Reich.18 Heimatler played a critical role in shapi
terms in which specific places were discussed from the local to the n
level. Saxony was an important center of Heimat thinking, and after
of the Heimatschutz (homeland protection) movement.19 This was the
of local conditions as well as of the broad forces transforming
Europe. Saxon tourism promoters used Heimat ideas to define their
and state within the German nation and state in a period of mounting
For, even as many areas of central Europe were industrializing, by th
World War I, some southern Saxon industries were in decline.
The Emergence of Southern Saxon Regional Tourism

1878-1914
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tourism grew n
because Europeans wanted to travel, but because private citizens, busin
ple, and local officials promoted it.20 German tourism promoters were
sweeping changes in infrastructure and society. Steamships and train
travel faster, safer, and easier. Industrialization, rising middle-class pro
and changing labor laws gave middle- and working-class people ne
to leisure and travel. Less restrictive passport and visa requirements m
easier to cross borders. And widening trade networks made people un
Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature; William H. Rollins, A Greener Vision of Home:
Politics and Environmental Reform in the German Heimatschutz Movement, 1904-1918 (An
University of Michigan Press, 1997); John Alexander Williams, '"The Chords of th
Soul are Tuned to Nature': The Movement to Preserve the Natural Heimat from the K
to the Third Reich," Central European History 29, no. 3 (1996): 339-384.
Thomas Lekan makes this argument for the Rhineland. Lekan, Imagining the Nation in N
William Rollins argues Heimat thinking was a way to balance industrial modernism with
tionism, but that localism was not essential. Rollins, A Greener Vision of Home, 17-18, 12
Al?n Confino shows that W?rttemberg Heimatler also tried to balance nature and indus
he puts it preservation of national roots and modernity. Confino, The Nation as a Local M
120-121. The Saxon case suggests that Heimatler worked to shape landscapes rather th
preserve them.
Siegfried Weichlein, Nation und Region. Integrationsprozesse im Bismarckreich (D?sseldorf:
Verlag, 2004), 25-26.
Rollins, A Greener Vision of Home, 83-85; Williams, "The Chords of the German So
?Historians have tended to focus on tourists, and on travel as leisure and consumption
themselves in wider geographic contexts, a change that sparked the urge to

travel.21
These changes led to the emergence of national and international tourist net
works such as those of the Murray and Baedeker guides or of Cook's tours.22 But
they also opened the way for regional efforts. In contrast to larger-scale tourism
promotion's emphasis on the virtues of wide-ranging leisure travel, regional pro
moters in southern Saxony responded to a period of unprecedented mobility
with efforts to connect their readers to particular places and to give national
and cultural values spatial dimensions.23 They often focused on social and
natural landscapes outside large cities. They made natural landscapes something
that tourists should not simply observe from the windows of their train compart
ments,24 but places in which they should linger, reflect, and engage with their
homeland.
Saxon Heimatler urged their fellow countrymen to explore local landscapes as
a way of building their local affinities and understanding themselves in a wider
national and international context. Under their direction large-scale tourism
first emerged in southern Saxony in the 1880s and 1890s. Like other
Germans in this period, Saxons learned to understand their landscape as
central to their identities. Tourists, by their very presence, turned landscapes
into meaningful places. After 1900, local people also learned to regard tourists
as the solution to the growing social, economic, and political problems. Heimat
ler encouraged tourists to visit the area with promises of leisure, health, and
beauty. But Saxons also gave tourists the responsibility for preserving and
enhancing the region they visited.
Small numbers of tourists began visiting Saxony's southern borderlands in the
early nineteenth century. People such as Hans Christian Andersen visited
Saxony's cultural sites, especially Dresden, known for its beauty, art, and
music. But they also ventured south to the Saxon Switzerland to complement
their admiration of human aesthetic accomplishment by contemplating a
Hans Warnecke, Der Fremdenverkehr, seine volkswirtschaftliche Bedeutung und seine Regelung (Halle:
W Hendrichs, 1921), 26-32; Helena Waddy Lepovitz, "Pilgrims, Patients, and Painters: The
Formation of a Tourist Culture in Bavaria," Historical Reflections 18, no. 1 (1992): 130, 133-139.
From the 1860s on German-speaking central Europe abolished passport and visa requirements,
greatly increasing freedom of movement. John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance,
Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 82-83.
For these models, see Koshar, German Travel Cultures, 19-64; Lynne Withey, Grand Tours and Cook's
Tours: A History of Leisure Travel 1750 to 1915 (New York: William Morrow, 1997), 135-166; Buzard,
The Beaten Track. Koshar and Buzard make clear that they are not examining Heimat or "environmental"
tourism, and Saxon Heimat tourism developed differently from the cases they describe.
23Rudy Koshar argues that modern German travel cultures included worries about a national loss
of a sense of place. Heimat tourism promoters had similar concerns, but used tourism to connect
people to specific places. Koshar, German Travel Cultures, 8, 10.
Baedeker guides allowed people to sightsee from the train. Karl Baedeker, Southern Germany and
Austria (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1887), 294-296.
striking natural landscape. Such travelers were foreigners or member
elites: nobles, officers, academics.25
The earliest visitors were observers, not themselves part of the socia
ical landscape. There were no restaurants, hotels, shelters, or scenic
built with tourists in mind. But as more tourists appeared in the Saxo
land, locals began to accommodate them. Guides licensed by the Saxo
ment showed wealthy visitors around; writers developed guidebo
region. A few local people began offering visitors refreshments.26 Nev
tourists to southern Saxony were rare for much of the nineteenth cen
many visitors seem to have assumed that outside Dresden and the Sa
zerland, there was little to see.27
In the late 1870s, that began to change. Some middle-class Saxons, li
counterparts elsewhere in the new German Empire, embraced t
Heimat. Above all, they urged their fellow Saxons to explore their h
shifting the emphasis of that exploration away from traditional urban
tinations such as Dresden. Both the Erzgebirgsverein and the Gebirgsvere
sdchsisch-bohmische Schweiz were founded in 1878, beginning the inst
tion of Heimat in their regions.28 Early visitors had taught Saxons th
their southern landscapes were worth a trip. Leisure travelers helpe
specific landscapes, such as the Saxon Switzerland, as distinct.
Saxony's population became one of the most urban in central E
became increasingly important to Heimatler to teach city dwellers t
their state's rural and natural landscapes.
This new tourism demanded vigorous engagement: tourists were t
themselves in the natural landscape by hiking, rock-climbing, or sk
Heimat organizers encouraged such activities by building hiking
lookout towers from which tourists could admire the countrys
5Anderson visted in 1831. Hans Christian Andersen, Reise nach Dresden und in die S
Schweiz (Hamburg: Christians Verlag, 1990); Hartsch, "Der Fremdenverkehr," 416, 452.
HStA Dresden, AH Dresden 2246, 7; H. E. Maukisch, Die S?chsische und B?hmische Sc
treuer Wegweiser zu allen Sehensw?rdigkeiten dieses Hochlandes (Leipzig: Verlag von Robert
Hartsch, "Der Fremdenverkehr," 396; Martin, "Der Fremdenverkehr in der S?chsisch
98.
Heinz Wehner, "Die Entwicklung der S?chsischen Schweiz zur Tourismusregion," S?chsische
Heimatbl?tter 40, no. 4 (1994): 210; Walter White, A July Holiday in Saxony, Bohemia, and Silesia
(London: Chapman and Hall, 1857), 43. In the early nineteenth century the idea that only
certain landscapes were worthwhile was common. Monika Wagner, "Ansichten ohne Ende?oder
das Ende der Ansicht? Wahrnehmungsumbr?che im Reisebild um 1830," in Reisekultur. Von Pilger
fahrt zum modernen Tourismus, ed. Hermann Bausinger, Klaus Beyrer, and Gottfried Korff (Munich:
Verlag C. H. Beck, 1991), 327-328.
28Martin, "Der Fremdenverkehr in der S?chsischen Schweiz," 90. The first Gebirgsvereine Lusatia
were founded in 1880. Lusatia Jahrbuch 1931: 42.
Hartsch, "Der Fremdenverkehr," 351.
?This contrasts with national and international tourism promotion that directed tourists to cul
tural and urban sites. Koshar, German Travel Cultures, 49.
lobbied the Saxon government to improve transportation to the southern

borderlands.31 Heimat publications urged their readers to hike for health,
gave information on organized hikes, and published opening dates for restau
rants in order to encourage tourists to explore their regions.32 Southern
Saxon Heimat organizations kept in touch with one another. Those in the
Oberlausitz, for example, published reports on tourism associations in the
Saxon Switzerland and Erzgebirge as well as in neighboring Bohemia.33
A variety of leisure travelers visited Saxony from the 1880s on: Germans and
foreigners, hikers and music lovers, skiers and art enthusiasts. Some visited cities
as they had in the past, but others increasingly ventured into the villages, small
towns, and the countryside. In focusing their efforts on these latter tourists,
Saxon Heimatler promoting the southern borderlands understood themselves
as part of a larger modern project of shaping Saxon and German society, and
made engagement with non-urban landscapes and a sense of place crucial to
that project.
By the eve of World War I, Heimatler had established southern Saxony's
regions as tourist destinations, greatly increased the number of visitors to the
regions, and transformed those regions' tourism into a middle-class pursuit in
which businesspeople and civil servants were among the most numerous
travelers.34
A Cross-Border Tourist Landscape, 1878-1914

The tourist and Heimat landscapes that Saxon tourism journals, guidebooks,
and hiking maps described were not neatly aligned with Saxon political districts
or even with the borders of the new German Empire. By defining their Heimat
territories in terms of landscapes, late-nineteenth-century promoters situated
regions and localities within a variety of larger communities, including the
Saxon state and the German nation.35 But they also allowed them to overlap
the boundaries of such communities, creating a sense of fluid and accessible
places in which state boundaries played little role as barriers. If regions were
Lusatia. Organ einer Anzahl touristischer und naturwissenschaftlicher Vereine der Lausitz und der
zun?chst angrenzenden Theile B?hmens (hereafter Lusatia) III, no. 5 (1887): 40; Lusatia IV, no. 5
(1888): 38; Lusatia IV, no. 10 (1888): 80.
32For example, Lusatia I, no. 1 (January 1885): 5; Lusatia I, no. 3 (March 1885): 23; Gebirgsverein
fur die s?chsische Schweiz Ortsgruppe Sebnitz, Vereins- und Wander Kalender auf das Jahr 1913
(Sebnitz: n.p., 1913).
33For example, Lusatia I, no. 1 (January 1885): 7; Lusatia I, no. 2 (February 1885): 13-14. Others
published information on Heimat organizations across southern Saxony. Kalender f?r das Erzgebirge
und das ?brige Sachsen (1914), 76-79.
Hartsch, "Der Fremdenverkehr," 416.
Saxon Heimat and tourism literature usually subdivided territory by landscapes. For example,
"Zu unseren Landschaftsbildern," Kalender f?r das Erzgebirge und das ?brige Sachsen (1910), 64-65;
Dr. Bruntsch, Die Heimat, 4; Otto Eduard Schmidt, Sachsenland (Leipzig: Friedrich Brandstetter,
1925), vii-xii.
to be defined by their landscapes, as Heimat proponents often sugg
southern Saxon regions extended beyond the bounds of the S
German state. The Oberlausitz included territory in Bohemia
the Erzgebirge included a Bohemian component; there was a
well as a Saxon Switzerland; and even the Vogtland extended
Bohemia and Bavaria. In this context, southern Saxon Heimatle
invoked ways in which their regions were connected to northern
territory that belonged to the Habsburg rather than to the Germa
These representations illustrated that the relationship of Germ
the German Reich, to one another, and to German-speaking cent
more broadly remained ambiguous for some time after 1871, and
a realm in which people could explore and express such ambigu
nineteenth-century regional tourism promoters took landsca
guides, acknowledging state boundaries, but taking for granted t
northern Bohemia was a natural part of getting to know souther
The borderlands on either side had similar landscapes, industries,
norms, and both populations primarily spoke German.
The complex roles that geography, landscape, and political affiliat
shaping regional identities, as well as Heimatlers' ability to play w
identities simultaneously, were evident at an 1886 meeting of the G
Bernstadt where a member read a poem that asserted: "Lusatia ...
gaze falls on Prussia's neighboring lands, on Saxony's districts, or B
ders ... the Lusatian Volk remains undivided." The reading was
toasts to Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm and Saxony's King Albert, th
the Saxon state anthem, and a report on the activities of the Erzgeb
The poem asserted a Lusatian identity that extended beyond the b
Saxon Oberlausitz. It distinguished Lusatia (including both the Ob
the Niederlausitz) from Prussia, Saxony, and Bohemia while i
importance of these states that subdivided the region. And the eve
lowed reminded association members of their allegiance to
Reich and Saxon state. Finally, as Heimatler they were reminded
to colleagues in the Erzgebirge.
Similarly, tourists were frequently instructed in the ways that the
border with Bohemia left the natural landscape uninterrupted and
tors the simultaneous benefits of a unified landscape and the inter
ditions. A 1910 description of places to visit in the Oberlausitz sa
6Rudy Koshar argues that the first Baedeker guide exclusively for the Germa
signaled new levels of nationalization and the continuing ambiguity of Germany's p
and cultural boundaries. Koshar, German Travel Cultures, 19-20.
37Lusatia II, no. 9 (1886): 70.
The border goes right over the top of the mountain. We can drink a beer in a
Saxon pub, or fortify ourselves nearby with Bohemian wine. We gaze... .into
the richly blessed land on either side of the border.38
And Saxon literature was not alone in making this connection. As a northern
Bohemian tourist publication declared in 1888:
Where the borders of the German Empire and Austria, of Saxony and of the
beautiful lands of Bohemia meet, in the middle of the ... Zittau mountains, is
the castle of Oybin, not only treasured by the people of the Oberlausitz, but
also venerated by the people of neighboring Bohemia.39
The article staked Oybin out as territory for Bohemian as well as Saxon tourists, and
emphasized cultural and geographic connections across the border. Furthermore, it
made the case that Oybin marked the convergence of a variety of complementary
territories: Germany and Austria, Saxony and Bohemia, the Saxon Oberlausitz and
its Bohemian neighbors.40 This convergence gave tourist destinations such as Oybin
and the tourists who visited them more than local significance. Similarly, southern
Saxon Heimat publications often invoked historical ties to Bohemia. In his book on
Dresden and the Saxon Switzerland, Sophus Ruge pointed out that the Oberlausitz,
the Erzgebirge, and the Saxon Switzerland had all at one time been considered part
of the Bohemian woods.41
In the late nineteenth century, Saxon Heimat and tourism promoters, like
many Saxons in the southern borderlands, treated northern Bohemia as an
extension of their Heimat. While they were well aware that this was not
Saxon territory, they emphasized shared landscapes over political divisions. In
the 1880s, the journal Lusatia served as a publication for Heimat organizations
in both the Saxon Oberlausitz and in neighboring northern Bohemia. Lusatia
reported on both sides of the border, and included such associations as the
Gebirgsverein fir die sachsisch-b6hmische Schweiz and the deutsch-osterreichische
Alpenverein, which straddled the political border.42 Heimat associations from
both sides of the border attended each others' festivals, held joint meetings,
and even proposed to work together to create a cross-border tourist region.43
"Zu unseren Landschaftsbildern," Kalender f?r das Erzgebirge und das ?brige Sachsen (1910), 64.
Nordb?hmische Touristen-Zeitung 3, no. 6 (June 1888): 94. Oybin and the Oberlausitz belonged to
Bohemia until 1635, a fact often noted in Saxon and Bohemian Heimat literature. By 1920 when
Baedeker published a guide to Saxony, this Saxon-Bohemian connection was well established and
it, too, included information on Bohemian border towns. Karl Baedeker, Sachsen. Handbuch f?r Rei
sende (Leipzig: Baedeker Verlag, 1920).
Siegfried Weichlein argues that nation- and region-building should be understood as interrelated
projects of integration and consensus-building. Weichlein, Nation und Region, 13, 30.
Sophus Ruge, Dresden und die s?chsische Schweiz (Leipzig: Velhagen & Klasing, 1913), 63-64.
42Lusatia I, no. 1 (January 1885): 7; Lusatia I, no. 4 (April 1885): 29.
4 Statni okresni archiv Decin (SOA Decin), Turnverein VDF #23, June 1910, February 1910,
February 1911, June 1911; Lusatia I, no. 7 (July 1885): 54. Associations do not seem to have had
comparable ties to other neighbors such as Prussia or Bavaria.
When tourist associations in the Oberlausitz and neighboring Bohem
ated their achievement in attracting tourists and providing facilities fo
they compared themselves to neighboring areas in both Saxo
Bohemia.44 Hiking clubs often organized excursions that cut acr
border. Hiking trails and hikers themselves treated the borderlands as
geographic and leisure region, paying little heed to the political d
Saxon travel guides put out by the Erzgebirgsverein and similar organ
included neighboring Bohemian communities among the places th
ommended to stay, eat, and visit.46 In the 1880s publications often ref
the Saxon-Bohemian Switzerland rather than clearly designating the tw
of the border as separate entities.47 The assumption was that visitors
treat the area as a unified landscape, in spite of the political border b
Germany and Habsburg Austria.
At first glance, Saxon and Bohemian hikers straying into one another
tories, or even celebrating the interconnectedness of those territorie
harmless enough. But participants in Heimat activities were doing mo
stretching their legs. The idea that their regions were defined in par
that extended across the borders of the German Empire into n
Bohemia expressed at least ambivalence about having their positio
German state limit their social and cultural affinities.48 And tourists' a
peoples' embrace of the borderlands as a shared landscape lent substance
sistent understanding that the German nation extended beyond the bor
the German state. Saxons in the southern borderlands were aware not
historical connections between Saxony and Bohemia, but routinely
the border in their daily lives. Many had family on both sides; m
workers crossed back and forth; people did business, went shopping, d
and hiking on both sides of the border.49 Since the populations on bo
were primarily German-speaking, local people saw clearly that the bou
"Lusatia I, no. 1 (January 1885): 5; Lusatia I, no. 5 (May 1885): 38; Kalender f?r das Erz
und das ?brige Sachsen (1909), 69.
45Lusatia I, no. 5 (May 1885): 37; Lusatia IV, no. 2 (1888): 13; SOA Dec?n, Turnverein
June 1910; Abwehr (Warnsdorf) May 13, 1911: 4; Hartzsch, "Der Fremdenverkehr," 400.
For example, Erzgebirgsverein Chemnitz, Verzeichnis von Sommerfrischen im Erzgebirge (
Gebhardt und Wilisch 1891); Erzgebirgverein Ortsgruppe Sebnitz, Vereins- und Wande
auf das Jahr 1913 (Sebnitz: n.p., 1913); Erzgebirgsverein, Verzeichnis von Sommerwohnungen i
birge (Schwarzenberg und Schneeberg: C. M. G?rtners Buchdruckerei, 1901); Gebirgsvere
S?chsische Schweiz, Ratgeber bei der Auswahl von Sommerwohnungen (Pirna: F. J. Eberl
Guidebooks connecting the Saxon and Bohemian Switzerlands predated Heimat touri
Maukisch, Die S?chsische und B?hmische Schweiz.
41 Lusatia I, no. 7 (1885): 54; Lusatia III, no. 8 (1887): 57.
4 Siegfried Weichlein shows that German regions and the Reich government worked to
populations' loyalties for some time after 1871. Weichlein, Nation und Region, 14.
Caitlin E. Murdock, '"The Leaky Boundaries of Man-Made State': National Identi
Policy, and Everyday Life in the Saxon-Bohemian Borderlands, 1870-1938," (Ph.D. diss
University, 2003), 39-65.
of the German nation, both regionally and internationally, did not correspond
precisely to those of the German state. In the simple mechanics of tourism
before World War I, this was not highly significant. It was easy to cross the
border, and in doing so tourists posed no direct challenge to either the
German or the Habsburg state.50 Nevertheless, Saxon Heimat leaders' con
ception of home regions defined by relationships beyond the state border was
in keeping with the grossdeutsch thinking and politics that persisted in Saxony,
despite the state's inclusion in a kleindeutsch German Empire.51 It suggested
that for decades after German unification, Saxons understood their state and
its regions as having a variety of relationships within central Europe, of which
affiliation with the German state was only one. Tourists both reflected and
were instructed in such beliefs in their patterns of travel.
In the late nineteenth century, tourism became a way for tourists and their
organizers to lay claim to territories, to give them meaning, and to connect
them to larger ideas, institutions, and communities.52 Heimat movements
used tourism to build regional consciousness, and central European nationalists
increasingly considered tourism a tool. In the 1890s, German nationalists in
Habsburg Austria were already working to build a specifically "German"
tourism to regions they claimed for the German nation. Similarly, tourists in
the Habsburg Monarchy's major cities-Vienna, Budapest, and Prague
reframed the central European landscape in nationalist terms in the 1890s.53
Torpey, The Invention of the Passport, 82-83.

Saxons did not have historical claims to Bohemian territory (though Bohemia did to the Ober
lausitz), and cross-border connections increased in the late nineteenth century. This thinking was not
simply latent regionalism, but was shaped by debates over German nationhood. Saxons' inclination
to think along grossdeutsch lines is illustrated by the prominence of the Pan-German League in the
state's cities and southern borderlands. Gerald Kolditz, "Der Alldeutsche Verband in Dresden. Anti
tschechische Aktivit?ten zwischen 1895 und 1914," in Landesgeschichte in Sachsen. Tradition und
Innovation, ed. Rainer Aurig, Steffen Herzog, and Simone L?ssig (Bielefeld: Verlag f?r Regional
geschichte, 1997), 235-236, 238; Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural
Study of the Pan-German League 1886-1914 (Boston: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), 144-145.
The inclusion of Bohemia in Saxon tourism literature continued long after other guides separated
treatment of Germany and Austria as Baedeker did in 1884.
Rudy Koshar argues that Europeans' use of tourism to promote national identity was part of
a search for meaning outside economic relations. Koshar, '"What Ought to be Seen': Tourists'
Guidebooks and National Identities in Modern Germany and Europe," Journal of Contemporary
History 33, no. 3 (July 1998): 325.
Pieter Judson, "The Bohemian Oberammergau: Nationalist Tourism in the Austrian Empire," in
Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe, ed. Pieter Judson and Marsha Rozenblitt (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2004); Judson, '"Every German Visitor has a V?lkisch Obligation He Must Fulfill':
Nationalist Tourism in the Austrian Empire, 1880-1918," in Histories of Leisure, ed. Rudy Koshar
(New York: Berg, 2002); Jill Steward, '"Gruss aus Wien': Urban Tourism in Austria-Hungary
before the First World War," in The City in Central Europe: Culture and Society from 1800 to the
Present, ed. Malcolm Gee, Tim Kirk, and Jill Steward (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Press, 1999).
Saxon regional tourism promoters sometimes shaped their own effor
attitudes in response to the Bohemian example, especially in using tou
define national territory. In 1889 Lusatia wrote:
The youth hostels which the German-Bohemian Gebirgsvereine

built ... including in areas bordering on the Saxon Switzerland ... hav
goal of making it easier for German schoolchildren ... to vacation
beautiful German parts of the Bohemian woods. ... These facilitie
national importance ... and are visited primarily by student
Bohemia, but also from Vienna, Dresden, Halle, Breslau, and Berli
would be desirable for our Saxon associations in the Saxon Switzerlan
the Oberlausitz to build similar facilities.54
This recommendation was clearly driven in part by local interests in cap

part of the tourist market. But it also reminded readers that the
Bohemian effort had national importance that extended far outside th
tourists were visiting and even outside Habsburg Austria, and tha
efforts might as well.
The influence of Bohemian tourism politics was also evident in the C
German linguistic politics that emerged around tourism in the late nin
century.55 Some Saxon nationalists declared that public use of Czech o
foreign languages was an assault on Germandom with the potential to
the German meaning of Saxon territories. They worked to impose pub
guistic conformity, opposing advertising printed in Czech or Polish. A
same time, Czech visitors and advertisers who targeted them emphasiz
the borderland regions were more diverse than nationalists admitted.56
learned to endow the places they visited with a variety of national, polit
cultural meanings. Thus, tourists' use of the Saxon-Bohemian borderla
common landscape could not fail to have political resonance. Some decl
proof that the landscape was innately German. Others emphasized the
tance of its diversity and accessibility rather than national homogeneity
Nature, Industry, and Landscape, 1878-1914

Heimatler all over central Europe emphasized nature in the landscapes th
brated. But Saxons faced the dilemma of celebrating a landscape that, wh
endowed with mountains and forests, also had more than its share of in
54Lusatia V, no. 3 (1889): 23.

Language was used to define national ownership of political territory in the Bohemian
German conflict. Pieter M. Judson, '"Not Another Square Foot!': German Liberalism
Rhetoric of National Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Austria," Austrian History Ye
(1995): 83-97.
56Stadtarchiv Dresden, 13.1 Alldeutscher Verband 38: 147, 195. In the 1890s German-Bohemian
nationalists urged Saxons to visit the Bohemian woods to reinforce that territory's Germanness.
Stadtarchiv Dresden, 13.1 Alldeutscher Verband 17: 268.
smokestacks. Still, Saxon Heimatler were undeterred. Far from rejecting indus
trialization or seeking to juxtapose it with nature, they suggested that their com
munities were a model of balance between natural landscapes and industrial
production.57 They celebrated manufacturing and craft traditions as part of
the regions' cultural landscape. They urged visitors to enjoy the coexistence
of nature and human productivity. It is hard to know whether visitors embraced
this vision. The town of Eibenstock's advertisement that it had "No factories, no
smoke!" demonstrates that some promoters thought they might not.58
Heimatler tried to minimize the ways in which new industries changed local
landscapes. By 1900, modern factories were displacing the regions' small work
shops and cottage industries. Craft traditions declined. New factories were
bigger and more mechanized than old ones. Workers from farther away
needed new housing. All of this led to a wave of new construction. To make
matters worse, local industries faced competition from neighboring Bohemia,
from Saxony's big cities, and from growing German industrial regions such as
the Ruhr.59
Heimat proponents quickly recognized that these changes threatened to
transform the human and natural landscapes they celebrated. They made archi
tecture a focus of discussion and policy-making. They did not object to new
industries and factories, but to having their forms imposed from outside.
Writers pointed to older factories in the southern regions as exemplars of
how to build so that form and function were in harmony with local climatic
and cultural conditions. They advocated the use of local building materials
and styles. By 1900, industry was a well-accepted part of southern Saxony's tra
dition, but writers urged new industries to keep in touch with local traditions.60
Nor were Heimatler alone in this. In 1903, a Saxon Ministry of Finance direc
tive observed, "In different parts of the country various styles of architecture
have developed as the result of tradition, climate, and local building materials.
It is thus to the detriment, not only of beauty but also of practicality ... that a
Other German regions also grappled with the interplay of industry and nature. In contrast to
Saxons who tried to reconcile the two, Rhineland conservationists called for the separation of
"nature" from materialism and criticized the development of tourist landscapes. Lekan, Imagining
the Nation in Nature, 30-36. Rudy Koshar shows that many historians have framed tourism as a sep
aration from urban industrial life. He also shows that while Baedeker guides discussed industry and
nature, neither was highly developed. Further, he argues that pre-1914 Baedeker guides and their
readers viewed nature as something to admire rather than engage with. Koshar, German Travel Cul
tures, 2, 48, 56-57.
58Erzgebirgsverein, Verzeichnis von Sommerwohnungen im Erzgebirge (Schwarzenberg: C. M. G?rtners
Buchdruckerei, 1901), 17.
Bruntsch, Die Heimat, 16; Tipton, Regional Variations, 122-123.
6 "Fabrikbauten und Heimatschutz," Kalender f?r das Erzgebirge und Vogtland (Dresden, 1909),
47-50. See also "Bauet heimatlich!," Kalender f?r das Erzgebirge und Vogtland (Annaberg: Grasers
Verlag, 1906); "Heimatliche Bauweise," Kalender f?r das Erzgebirge und Vogtland (Annaberg: Grasers
Verlag, 1905).
thoughtless imitation of urban architectural styles ... has been ado
state building projects." The ministry then took measures to ensur
tects be trained and buildings planned with an eye to local traditio
To some degree, Saxon Heimatlers' recommendations were simpl
building factories with flat roofs in an area that gets heavy winter sn
idea. But they reflected other considerations as well. Southern Sa
ditional multiplicity of economic endeavors-industry, crafts, agr
mining-resisted dominance by any one. But pressure to control lo
tural styles also demonstrated a desire to create a landscape that itse
Not only might local people better understand their identities as
Germans through immersing themselves in that landscape, but in
tourism promoters saw the landscape as a way to draw visitors fr
afield. Thus a variety of considerations led local Heimatler to sug
industrial architecture, aesthetic and economic considerations cou
peacefully.62
In giving such attention to architecture, aesthetics, and landscape preser
vation, Saxon Heimatler and government officials anticipated the emergence
of the broader German Heimatschutz movement after 1904.63 But unlike acti
vists elsewhere who sought ways to balance industrialization with landscape
preservation, turn-of-the-century Saxons suggested that they already had a
model for balance.
Saxon Heimat and tourist literature portrayed human productivity in the
midst of a spectacular natural world as distinctive of southern Saxony. The Erz
gebirgsverein adopted " Gluck Auf!," a phrase that evoked its region's mining tra
ditions, as a greeting and the title of one of its publications. Similarly, Saxon
Heimat publications used several kinds of iconography in their graphic depic
tions of the southern regions. They included images of middle-class visitors
admiring mountains, castles, or natural wonders such as the cliffs of the Saxon
Switzerland. These images suggested leisure and intimacy with nature and the
history embodied in the landscape. Yet alongside these images were those of
local people engaged in traditional crafts and industries-peddlers, lace
makers, and nminers represented a tradition of skilled work.64 Indeed by the
turn of the century, Saxon Heimatler and industrialists began marketing such
products as folk art in order to build markets and tourism for southern
Saxony. Finally postcards and tourism publications depicted communities as
industrial centers, highlighting local industries while presenting them nestled
61"Bauet heimatlich!"
"Fabrikbauten und Heimatschutz," 48.
63Rollins, A Greener Vision of Home, 5, 81, 83.
For example, Kalender f?r das Erzgebirge und Vogtland, 1905, 1911, 1914, 1916. This contrasts
with Baedeker guides, which described landscapes devoid of people. Koshar, German Travel Cultures,
49-50.
in forested natural landscapes.65 Thus, tourist and Heimat literature portrayed

the regions as a crossroads between tradition and innovation, industry and
nature in which urban life and large-scale industry were distinctly absent.
Images were of regions engaged in early industry and manufacturing-produc
ing goods in small workshops with skilled labor. Working people and their
communities were part of the natural landscape. At the same time, this landscape
offered middle-class visitors leisure, easy travel, well-groomed trails, and tidy vil
lages. Tourist literature promised that modernity, nature, and regional traditions
need not be at odds. This image of southern Saxony had resonance, as the
German travel writer P. D. Fischer demonstrated when he wrote,"... the
many industrial towns of Saxony [are] scattered along long deep valleys up to
the crest of the Erzgebirge, and into the heights of the Saxon Switzerland and
the Lusatian mountains."66
Indeed, Saxon Heimatler argued that tourism and exploration of local land
scapes could not only accommodate modernity, but were themselves distinctly
modern. As an 1887 article about Nathanael Gottfried Leske's 1785 study of
Saxony asserted:
The aspiration for as complete and multifaceted an understanding of our

Heimat district (as possible) ... was not always as widespread as it is today.
In the past, there was more interest in that which was foreign and distant
than in the local. ... Thus the geographic literature of the past is richer in
often fantastical descriptions of distant lands ... than in reports of our domes
tic nature and social conditions. ... Indeed, only recently has science recog
nized the connection between nature and human lives. ... The rise of the
scientific study of the Heimat is the product of modernity.67
The study of the local and regional was thus not about simple preservation of the
past or connection to a mythical German nation, but a sign of engagement with
modern science. Identification with, and knowledge of, local landscapes and
regions would connect Saxons to the wider worlds of the German nation and
modern thought.
Manuel Schramm, Konsum und regionale Identit?t in Sachsen 1880-2000 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner
Verlag, 2002), 128-129; Martin Lauckner, ed., Sachsen in alten Ansichtskarten (Frankfurt a.M: Flech
sig Verlag, 1979), 31, 32, 66, 71, 89. From the 1880s, German postcards combined cityscapes and
landscapes. Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor, 111. But Saxon postcards put particular emphasis
on the industrial nature of many communities.
P. D Fischer, Betrachtungen eines in Deutschland reisenden Deutschen (Berlin: Verlag von Julius
Springer, 1896), 129.
Krushwitz uses "Heimat" to refer to Saxony in general and to the Oberlausitz in particular.
P. Kruschwitz, "Nathanael Gottfried Leske und seine Reise durch die Oberlausitz," Lusatia 3, no.
3 (March 1887): 17. This is important because many historians have characterized Heimat move
ments as anti-modern or, as Al?n Confino argues, as expressions of historical memory; Confino,
The Nation as a Local Metaphor. Saxons focused as much on contemporary circumstances as they
did on the past.
Heimatler argued that tourists were active participants in the creatio
modern world, shaping themselves and the regions they visited in
travels. "[The tourist] carries his heart bursting with idealism into natu
what the first of his kind preached has become scripture to thou
others ... a new creed of higher moral power, the love of forest, cliff
field."68 Tourists symbolized a new era when better transportation an
safety opened the highways and byways to more than the merchants an
bonds of the past. Thus Heimat literature celebrated the tourist as the p
fication of new individual, social, national, and economic health.69
The Emerging Econormics of Tourism, 1900-1919

By the eve of the First World War, a variety of Saxons recognized that
the Saxon borderlands were in economic decline, and Heimatler rethou
purpose of regional tourism. One of Germany's earliest industrial states
was, by 1900, losing ground to the heavy industries of the Ruhr. The
decline first became evident in the southern borderlands. Modern
brought railroads and tourists, but also began a gradual de-industrializ
some areas. Saxon urban industrial centers such as Chemnitz, Leipz
Zwickau increasingly displaced Erzgebirge and Vogtland manufacturing
The villages also faced new competition from outside Saxony and even
Germany. The regions continued to produce a variety of luxury and co
goods for markets around the world. Plauen lace, Seiffen toys, and art
flowers from Sebnitz found markets across Europe and the United Sta
these products were no longer as profitable as they once had been,
victim to declining demand, growing international competition, and t
ception that Saxon industries were not keeping pace with modern tast
remedy this, regional leaders in southern Saxony turned to tourism as a
antidote.70
Tourists did not flock to southern Saxony on their own. Although travel to
the regions had grown significantly since the 1880s, three decades later visitors
were still neither so numerous, nor so well distributed as to revive the flagging
economies of the southern borderlands. Heimat organizations such as the
Erzgebirgsverein continued to tout the beauties of the southern regions and
the health benefits of fresh air. But they also took on more pragmatic projects
to encourage tourism, building hiking trails and lookout towers, lobbying for
new railway lines between Saxony's cities and the mountains, and expanding
Carl Max Fischer, "Berg- und Wandersport, ihre moralische und wirtschaftliche Bedeutung,"
Dresdner Kalender 1913, 89.
69Ibid., 88-92.
Schramm, Konsum und regionale Identit?t, 31. Visitors spent on food and lodging, but also aided
local industries by buying their products. Siegfried Sieber, Studien zur Industriegeschichte des Erzgebirges
(Cologne: B?hlau Verlag, 1967), 11.
and improving such tourist facilities as pensions and restaurants. They under
stood that human intervention could facilitate access to nature.
By the eve of World War I, the Erzgebirgsverein was trying both to increase
the number of tourists who visited and to expand the geography of their visits.
The point was to promote and aid the Erzgebirge (and other parts of the Saxon
borderlands) as a whole. They saw publicity as the key to expansion. As a 1912
publication explained:
Until recently little was known beyond Saxony's borders of the beauties in our
Saxon Erzgebirge. People knew nothing of the glorious, wide-reaching
forests, nothing of the deep, densely settled valleys.... People valued the
products of the (region's) skilled residents (lace . . . toys, and wood products),
but knew little of where, how, and under what conditions their makers
produced these goods.71
Once again the message was clear: the industrial and craft traditions-long the
region s main connection to a wider world-were no longer sufficient. To sup
plement them, southern Saxony's natural landscapes and the tourism they could
attract would win the regions new economic strength and status.
Local branches of the Erzgebirgsverein advertised more, produced guide
books to their local areas, and printed postcards of local landscapes. In 1910,
they organized an Erzgebirge display for a travel exhibition in Berlin.72 In
1914, they began planning a new museum in the Augustusburg-already an
established tourist destination-to highlight less well-known localities in the
Erzgebirge. Far from promoting abstract goals of regional pride or national
virtue, organizers saw this as an economic effort and promised innkeepers and
hoteliers concrete benefits from tourism.73 The Saxon state also worked to
build tourism. In 1908 the Saxon Railway opened an information office in
Berlin, which the Erzgebirgsverein credited (along with its own advertising)
with raising the number of visitors not just to Saxony, but to the borderlands
in particular.74
Local officials also began to consider how they could enhance their regions'
aesthetic appeal for tourists in their search for the natural and the picturesque. In
May 1914, the mayor of Lauter urged communities in his district to reshape their
7S?chsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden (HStA Dresden), Erzgebirgsverein 13: 44. This fits Rudy
Koshar's observation that modern tourists learned that certain places ought to be seen. Koshar,
'"What Ought to be Seen.'" After 1900 Saxons tried to convince their co-nationals that southern
Saxony was among those places.
72Gl?ckauf! 31, no. 2 (February 1911): 24. Most German communities first embraced such mar
keting in the 1920s. Christina Keitz, "Grundz?ge einer Sozialgeschichte des Tourismus in der
Zwischenkriegszeit," in Reisekultur in Deutschland. Von der Weimarer Republik zum Dritten Reich, ed.
Peter J. Brenner (T?bingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1997), 67.
73HStA Dresden, Erzgebirgsverein 12: 2, 4; HStA Dresden, Erzgebirgsverein 13: 31, 40, 44, 79.
74Gl?ckauf! 30, no. 3 (March 1910): 41.
local landscapes to make them both more "natural" and more convenie
tourists. Communities needed a good water supply, clean streets, and
beauty. He urged his listeners to preserve old trees and plant new one
effort to give communities the "picturesque" quality that tourists wa
attracting birds and enhancing the impression that the natural l
defined the district. He noted that old Germanic mythology endowed
with souls, implying that catering to tourists' desires could coinc
national virtue.75 At the same time, modern conveniences were as im
as charming views. Travelers wanted clean sheets, good food, and reliab
portation. Only if those were available would they come to southern Sa
learn to value it.
By 1914, after three decades of development, significant numbers of
had embraced Heimat and tourism in southern Saxony. The Erzgebirgs
one of the most prominent, but not the only organization in Saxony
these agendas, boasted nearly 18,000 members.76 Enthusiasm for
southern landscapes and efforts to draw visitors to the regions were cl
the rise.
But in the summer of 1914, Germany's entry into World War I dashed Saxon
tourism promoters' hopes for rapid economic revival in the borderlands. The
war turned southern Saxony's creeping economic decline into abrupt crisis. It
cut faltering industries off from international markets and obliterated domestic
demand for luxury goods, such as lace and toys. Craft and industrial traditions
that had been sources of regional pride became symbols of poverty. People in
the southern regions soon faced more severe unemployment and hunger than
in most of Germany.77
Tourism promoters responded to the war by redefining their audience.
Southern Saxony's economic difficulties alone made wartime seem an unlikely
moment to promote tourism. But for some communities, the war's economic
toll made developing tourism more important than ever. They made new
efforts to attract visitors from outside Saxony, unlike the Heimat organizers of
the 1880s who had seen Saxons as their primary audience. The Lauter city
council placed ads in newspapers in Leipzig and Berlin, more communities
printed postcards of local sights, and organizers made new efforts to train local
people who rented rooms to tourists to meet basic standards of cleanliness and
HStA Dresden, Amtshauptmannschaft (AH) Schwarzenberg 127: 1. Lauter is an Erzgebirge

town that was known for its basket industry.
Kalender f?r das Erzgebirge (Annaberg: Grasers Verlag, 1914), 76-77.
77"Die erzgebirgische Spitzenkl?ppelei in alter Zeit," Kalender f?r das Erzgebirge und das ?brige
Sachsen (Annaberg: Grasers Verlag, 1916), 51-53; Erich Glier, Die s?chsische Spitzen und Stickereiin
dustrie seit 1914. Niedergang und Existenzkampf einer deutschen Mode- und Exportindustrie (Plauen:
F. Neupert, 1932); Stephan Pfalzer, '"Der Butterkrawall' im Oktober 1915. Die erste gr?ssere Anti
kriegsbewegung in Chemnitz," in Demokratie und Emanzipation zwischen Saale und Elbe, ed. Helga
Grebing, Hans Mommsen, and Karsten Rudolph (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 1993), 197.
comfort. In 1918, an Erzgebirge tourism association proposed publishing their

own guidebook on the region, observing that existing travel guides described
the region as prone to fog and rain, which the association feared might discour
age visitors.78 So, while they could not actually change local weather, they saw
no need to warn people about it.
Such efforts won southern Saxony some visitors. Perhaps the war even
encouraged people who might otherwise have traveled farther afield to vacation
closer to home. But in the post-war years, regional tourism advocates' efforts
appear to have finally paid off. By the mid-1920s tourism was growing with
the aid of more publicity, transportation, and facilities,79 and whole new seg
ments of society were joining in.
Interwar Tourism
After the war, tourism promoters shifted their focus, arguments, and audience
dramatically. In the 1920s, Saxons embraced tourism as an economic resource,
and Heimat tourism promotion expanded to include not only established
middle-class Heimatler, but also business owners, and local and state officials.
In the 1930s, promoters began to urge tourists themselves to consider
Saxony's economic troubles and increasingly peripheral status in the Reich a
reason to visit.80 At the same time they did so by addressing familiar themes:
the importance of industry and the Bohemian (by then the Czechoslovak)
border to southern Saxon regions.
The shift reflected a profound change in tourism promoters' understandings
of the economic, political, and cultural significance of the landscapes they cham
pioned in the German Reich and in central Europe. In 1925, Siegfried Storzner
recommended a mountain to hikers, noting that it was "still too little visited and
appreciated by tourists.,,81 Many Saxons appear to have taken a similar view of
their southern regions as a whole during the late 1920s and 1930s. Once a center
of production for markets around the world, southern Saxony had become a
political and economic periphery. By the 1930s, efforts to attract tourists were
not only motivated by economic need, but were a way to get the rest of
Germany to recognize the borderlands as important. The role of tourism
became the reverse of what it had been in the 1880s. It was no longer a way
to connect local people to their own landscape and thus to a larger German
nation, but to get the larger German community to pay attention to the locality.
78HStA Dresden, AH Schwarzenberg 127: 16, 28, 29, 50, 66, 143. There were also efforts to
expand tourist facilities during the war. "Neue Berggasth?user im Erzgebirge," Kalender f?r das Erz
gebirge und das ?brige Sachsen (1917), 35.
79HStA Dresden, AH Schwarzenberg 127: 189, 199; AH Schwarzenberg 1942: 56.
German nationalists in Bohemia used similar arguments to attract tourists from Germany in the
1930s. Judson, "The Bohemian Oberammergau," 102.
Siegfried St?rzner, "Vergessene Berge," Der Fahrtgesell 1, no. 8 (1925): 121.
Tourism promoters continued to encourage their fellow Saxon
southern borderlands for reasons of health or regional and national
But their primary efforts now focused on building tourism's econom
the southern regions and attracting visitors from the rest of Ger
cementing the strategy that had begun to emerge in the last years
In the early 1920s winning new visitors was a daunting task. W
devastated the already vulnerable southern Saxon economies, an
1920s, the regions continued to have higher rates of unemploym
and political unrest than the rest of Germany.82 Food and hous
shorter supply than elsewhere in Germany, and trains were few
and crowded. Under such conditions, local promoters and
found attracting tourists an uphill battle.83 Visitors expected to
comfortable hotels and to eat in restaurants. In 1920, the Zwornit
warned that exorbitant prices and corruption in food distributi
Saxon hotels' reputations.84 Organizations such as the Erzgebirg
nized that now, more than ever, attractive facilities were cruci
admirers of their landscapes and making tourism profitable. Th
lookout towers and expanded guesthouses to accommodate more
the economic crisis of the early 1920s, the Erzgebirgsverein aske
for donations to support a variety of local projects, with the id
regional network of tourist facilities was in everyone's interest.8
this, Heimat literature continued to emphasize the diversity of
scapes. As a 1925 article on Lusatia argued, "The wonderful dive
is so characteristic of our Saxony as a whole is especially true fo
Organizations such as the Erzgebirgsverein, regional officials,
nesspeople further sought to expand tourism by offering new ac
tinations, branching out from fair-weather hiking to wint
encouraging year-round tourist traffic. Professor Fritz Eckard
readers of Der Fahrtgesell that there was no such thing as bad
hiking.87 In 1925, a new office in the Dresden train station adv
Gerald Feldman, "Saxony, the Reich, and the Problem of Unemployment

Inflation," Archiv f?r Sozialgeschichte 27 (1987): 103-144.
HStA Dresden, AH Schwarzenberg 127: 154; Staatskanzelei Zeitungsaussc
(ZAS) 1154, Freie Presse (Chemnitz), Aug. 14, 1919.
4HStA Dresden, Staatskanzelei ZAS 1155, Zw?rnitztaler Anzeiger, Nov. 13, 1920
corruption of food distribution angered locals, too. HStA Dresden, Staatskanelei
Volkszeitung, Dec. 16, 1919.
HStA Dresden, Erzgebirgsverein 13: 1, 6, 10. Similarly in 1920 the Dresden
Tourism tried to coordinate its efforts with groups in the Saxon Switzerland and
Stadtarchiv Dresden, 13.13 Akte 1: Fremdenverkehrsverein, 141.
6Emil Roch, "Die Lausitz," in Sachsenland. Ein Heimatbuch, ed. Otto Eduard S
Friedrich Brandstetter, 1925), 373.
Professor Fritz Eckardt, "Der Plauensche Grund und sein Fr?hlingsdichter," D
no. 7 (April 1, 1926): 99.
about where to go, often directing those interested in hiking or skiing to the
southern borderlands.88 In 1926, the Erzgebirgsverein organized a trip to the
region for journalists from across Germany to further raise the region's profile
in the national press. The effort was rewarded by articles such as that in the
Neue Preussische Kreuzzeitung:
In Saxony, against the Czechoslovak border is a land that those of us in north

ern Germany know only by name. This land deserves to be rescued from
obscurity, it deserves to be visited. It is the Erzgebirge, the most beautiful
of the Mittelgebirge. ... It is remarkable that its lace and toys are known
around the world, and yet few are acquainted with their Heimat.89
Promoters also found new ways to pool their efforts. In 1931, the associations
Lusatia, the Gebirgsverein fur die sdchsische Schweiz, the Erzgebirgsverein, and
the Gebirgsverein fur das Vogtland jointly created a Saxon tourism and Heimat
association with more than 50,000 members.90 In the interwar period, tourist
numbers grew both because of Saxon promoters' efforts and because of
broader expansion of tourism in Weimar Germany, driven by working-class
people's dramatically greater vacation time and by a recognition of the economic
possibilities of mass tourism.91
Tourists wanted to visit picturesque landscapes, and in the early 1920s,
tourism promoters suddenly found themselves fighting to preserve those land
scapes from new threats. The region's post-war economic problems encouraged
local people to harvest firewood and other forest resources, contributing to
environmental degradation, and undermined tourism promoters' efforts to
keep hiking trails in good repair for "friends of nature." Heimatler began
calling for the creation of nature reserves throughout southern Saxony, includ
ing one in the Saxon Switzerland. As Curt Muller argued in 1925, the southern
Saxon landscape needed to be preserved because it had cultural and natural sig
nificance for everyone. Tourism forged a bond among modern society, local
landscapes, and people's experiences of nature.92
"Interessengemeinschaft Dresdner touristischer Vereinigungen?Beratungsstelle fur Turistik,"

Der Fahrtgesell 2, no. 17 (September 1926): 270.
89"?ber die Reichspressefahrt durch das Erzgebirge," Gl?ckauf! 46 (1926): 147-148.
90"Der Lusatia Verband im Jahre 1930/31," Lusatia Jahrbuch 1931: 45.
91Christine Keitz points out that statistics on Weimar tourism are hard to find. Keitz, "Grundz?ge,"
49; Keitz, "Die Anf?nge des modernen Massentourismus in der Weimarer Republik," Archiv f?r
Sozialgeschichte 33 (1993): 182-184.
Hermann Gebhardt, "Naturschutz in der S?chsischen Schweiz," Kalender f?r das Erzgebirge und
das ?brige Sachsen (Annaberg: Grasers Verlag, 1922), 36; J. Erler, "Naturschutz und Naturschutzge
biete in Sachsen," Kalender f?r das Erzgebirge und das ?brige Sachsen (1920), 42-44; Curt M?ller,
"Der Wald als Natur- und Kulturlandschaft," Kalender f?r das Erzgebirge und das ?brige Sachsen (Anna
berg: Grasers Verlag, 1925), 23-29; R. H. Viehbach, "Zur Entwicklung der Turistik im S?chsischen
Felsengebirge," Der Fahrtgesell 1, no. 17 (October 15, 1925): 257.
World War I also undermined the easy community between Sa
Bohemia that tourism and shared landscapes had helped create. In
1920s, tighter state control of Germany's borders and tense rela
other countries, including the new neighbor state of Czechoslovakia
tourist traffic. Tourism proponents were quick to object.93 Because m
and tourists conceived of southern Saxony and northern Bohemia as
Heimat and tourist region, locals and travelers again tried to cross t
to visit, hike, and shop as soon as the war was over. In 1920, such cr
were officially illegal, but local norms and local officials' and busine
desire to keep tourists happy often trumped official German and Cze
policies. Saxon border officials eased restrictions, ignoring requirem
photographs and signatures when they issued border passes. Som
newspapers advertised that tourists could cross the border without
and district officials petitioned the Saxon government in Dresden to
a tourist border pass that would both boost regional tourism and en
of the law.94
In the wake of the war some Heimatler even invoked grossdeutsch ideas by
imagining a day when northern Bohemian communities might become part
of Saxony. A 1920 article about efforts to create nature preserves declared:
One day when the formerly Saxon towns of Gottesgab, Albertham, and Joa
chimsthal and the pure German districts of northern Bohemia are united with
Saxony we will certainly get [nearby areas] that our German Bohemian broth
ers have striven to make into nature preserves.
Similarly, a 1924 songbook published by the Erzgebirgsverein included a song

that exhorted, "Germans, reach out your hands into Austria ... the German
fatherland lies not only within reach of the Rhine, [but] on the green banks
of the Danube ... Germans take each other's hands, on the Danube and on
the Rhine."96 They reminded people that the German nation still extended
beyond the boundaries of the German state.
In the 1920s, southern Saxon tourism literature continued to recognize
shared border landscapes, but it suggested that state intervention was dividing
these lands for tourists. A 1925 article reminded readers that the Saxon Vogtland
was only a part of the historic Vogtland, which included territory in Bohemia
and Bavaria: "In the tiny Bohemian community of Kaiserhammer ... the
three borders come together. Visitors are shown with pride that only a small
Such objections were voiced all over Germany. HStA Dresden, Staatskanzelei ZAS 578,
Frankfurter Zeitung, Aug. 5, 1920.
94HStA Dresden, Ministerium des Innern (Mdl) 11753: 180, 186, 199-207; Aussenministerium
1847: 8, 9, 29.
Erler, "Naturschutz und Naturschutzgebiete in Sachsen," 31. The claims to these towns date to
the Schmalkaldic war of 1546-1547.
Ergebirgsverein, Liederbuch des Erzgebirgsvereins (Leipzig: Verlag des Erzgebirgsvereins, 1924): 10.
stream separates them. The rulers of the three states could sit down to a meal
together while each remained in his own territory." But the author lamented
that new efforts to wipe out diversity threatened to erase this landscape.97
Even as late as 1929 the travel writer Fritz Gunther wrote, "The Bohemian
Saxon Switzerland is unquestionably one of the most beautiful landscapes in
the world.... Saxony and its neighbor, northern Bohemia, share equally in
the beauty of this landscape." But while the landscapes themselves remained
clearly interconnected, he observed that border police had grown strict.98
Thus while regional tourism promoters still sometimes emphasized the inter
connection of cross-border landscapes in the 1920s, they also pointed out the
ways in which political borders increasingly divided those landscapes for tourists.
Such divisions contributed to a dramatic fall in the number of foreign visitors to
southern Saxony.99
In the 1920s, tourism promoters began to bring their conception of the
Heimat and tourist regions they promoted in line with the borders of the
German state. And practical experience made many tourists do the same. As
Hans Rinke wrote in 1925:
Before the war, if one wanted to take two or three days to relax, it was taken
for granted that we went to Bohemia. It was so easy. One traveled for 1.30
Marks ... (by train) to Bodenbach and then ... wherever the heart led.
But today things are quite different. To travel to a "hostile foreign country,"
one needs a passport and in addition to the passport fees has to pay another
7.50 Marks for a visa.100
Rinke wanted to visit Bohemia and saw it as part of his Heimat region, but was
no longer able to go there often. Although economic considerations discour
aged Rinke in 1925, only a few years later, cross-border price differentials
attracted growing numbers of tourists from the German Reich to Bohemia.
In 1928, for example, a Saxon border official reported that although tourist
traffic was heavy near Schwarzenberg, most travelers were headed to less expen
sive northern Bohemia, rather than staying in the Saxon borderlands.101
In summer 1929, a Gendarme in Schwarzenberg reported that there was
heavy automobile traffic at local border crossings, and even Saxon schoolteachers
were taking class trips to Czechoslovakia. Tourists to Czechoslovakia added
Reinhold Hofmann, "Aus der b?hmisch-bayrisch-s?chsischen Grenzecke des Vogtlands," in

Sachsenland, ed. Otto Eduard Schmidt, 267-268.
Fritz G?nther, Im Herzen deutschen Landes (Gro?sch?nau, Sachsen: Herman Engelhardt, 1929),
94, 97.
There was a sharp fall in overnight foreign visitors to the Saxon Switzerland in the 1920s. The
number of cross-border daytrippers probably fell off less steeply. Hartsch, "Der Fremdenverkehr," 435.
100Hans Rinke, "B?hmerland," Der Fahrtgesell 1, no. 17 (October 15, 1925): 265.
*HStA Dresden, AH Schwarzenberg 1942: 29. In contrast, there is little evidence that promoters
and officials blamed other Saxon regions for siphoning off tourist traffic.
insult to injury by smuggling goods back into Saxony, and kicking
their cars that obscured views of the countryside.102 Although c
tourist traffic continued in the interwar period, rather than cont
sense of cross-border community and common cause, it undermi
Saxon shopkeepers and hoteliers and convinced Saxon tourism
that they needed to keep tourists on their side of the border
Lusatia, which had once served organizations on both sides, now r
only the Saxon Oberlausitz.103 By the 1920s, the very similarities
areas that had once made local people regard the political border as
for tourists and local communities, now led local officials and busin
sides to compete for tourists, rather than conceiving of a shared c
region.
Economic considerations were clearly central to promoters' models of
southern Saxon tourism in the 1920s, and they created a new vision of the
southern regions as places characterized by a battle for scarce resources. But
the regions' economic interests and those of the tourists were often at odds.
Thus by the late 1920s, Heimat and tourist literature again began emphasizing
the national implications of tourism. In 1927, Gluckauf reported that Czechs
perceived new guesthouses in the Saxon borderlands as another attempt to
claim the region, including perhaps parts of northern Bohemia, for the
German nation. Gluckauf implied that this idea proved that the Czechs intended
to do the same in "German" areas of northern Bohemia, and perhaps even in
Saxony.104 German visitors were needed to combat the Czech threat.
Political Legitimacy through Tourism in the 1930s

By the early 1930s, Saxony attracted attention from across the Reich: it had now
become known for its suffering industries, high unemployment, and radicalized
politics including, before 1933, vigorous communist and Nazi organizations in
the state's large cities and in the southern borderlands. But to most observers,
these were hardly positive attributes. Indeed, after Hitler's rise to power,
southern Saxony's proximity to the Czechoslovak border and its ongoing diffi
culties made the Nazis decide not to invest in the area as they did with labor pro
grams and military production elsewhere.105 Thus, by 1931, and increasingly
102HStA Dresden, AH Schwarzenberg 1942: 4.

103Lusatia Jahrbuch (1931): 1, 3, 10-11.
"Unsere neuen Berggasth?user und der 'Klub tschechischer Touristen,'" Gl?ckauf! 47, no. 7
(1927): 149-150. This was an extension of the Bohemian language border debate into Germany.
For the Bohemian case, see Judson, "The Bohemian Oberamergau," and Mark Cornwall, "The
Struggle on the Czech-German Language Border, 1880-1940," The English Historical Review 109,
no. 43 (1994): 914-951.
10 Michael Schneider, "Die Wirtschaftsentwicklung von der Wirtschaftskrise bis zum Kriegs
ende," in Sachsen in der NS-Zeit, ed. Clemens Vollhals (Leipzig: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag,
2002), 75; Ulrich Hess, "R?stungs- und Kriegswirtschaft in Sachsen (1935?1945)," Sachsen und
after the Nazi rise to power, Saxons reframed their promotion of tourism yet
again, emphasizing their significance as a borderland in the German Reich
and nation. Borderland status was no longer limited to the Saxony's southern
territories, but expanded to include the state as a whole. Even the Saxon
Nazi party made efforts to highlight Saxon products, especially the handicrafts
of the south, to boost the state's image on the national stage.106
Saxon Heimatler tried to engage with the new political era. In 1935, the
annual report of a branch of the Erzgebirgsverein included the observation:
When we look back at the past year, we must thankfully recognize that our
incomparable Fuihrer and his genial colleagues have fulfilled all that they
promised when they took power in January 1933. We have not only won
the recognition and attention of the world in political affairs ... but in eco
nomic relations we are also seeing a highly desirable rise... . But unfortu
nately, we cannot see evidence of this rise in our Erzgebirgsverein.107
The organization had lost members. Perhaps ongoing economic problems made
some members focus their efforts elsewhere. Perhaps some found the increasing
Nazi influence on the organization off-putting. Certainly the organization had
changed under the new regime with pressure to conform to Nazi leadership and
rhetoric. But the Erzgebirgsverein leadership also seized on Nazism as an opportu
nity to expand the organization's influence, even at the expense of regional auton
108
omy, again adapting its methods to altered political circumstances.
In general the mid-1930s saw another upswing in efforts by Saxon organi
zations, the Saxon state, and the German central government to build tourism
in southern Saxony.109 The Depression had worsened an already bad economic
situation in the borderlands. But despite the decline in tourism during the
Depression, Saxons, and increasingly the German government, continued to
treat it as a long-term replacement for their failing industries.110
Mitteldeutschland. Politische, wirtschaftliche und soziale Wandlungen im 20. Jahrhundert (Weimar: B?hlau
Verlag, 1995), 76.
6Rolf Naumann, Sachsens Geschichte als Deutsches Grenzlandschicksal (Dresden: Verlag Heinrich,
1938); Friedrich Grosch, ed., Sachsen als Grenzland (Leipzig: Verlaganstalt List & von Bressensdorf,
1936); Arthur Graefe, Grenzmark Sachsen. Ein Vorposten im deutschen Schicksalskampf (Dresden:
Wilhelm Limpert-Verlag, 1934); Schramm, Konsum und regionale Identit?t, 51.
107HStA Dresden, Erzgebirgsverein 1:1.
Ibid., 29, 26; Thomas Schaarschmidt, Regionalkultur und Diktatur. S?chsische Heimatbewegung und
Heimat-Propaganda im Dritten Reich und in der SBZ/DDR (Weimar: B?hlau, 2004). Tourist organi
zations across Germany were politicized in the Nazi Gleichschaltung. Kristen Semmens, Seeing
Hitler's Germany: Tourism in the Third Reich (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 42. Saxony contrasts with
the Pfalz, where Heimatler did not contribute to Nazism. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, 18.
109HStA Dresden, Staatskanzelei ZAS 1159, Vogtl?ndische Zeitung, July 25, 1934; Neue Leipziger
Zeitung, Oct. 1, 1935; Das G?ltzschtal, Oct. 22, 1935; S?chsische Elbezeitung, Feb. 12, 1936.
110HStA Dresden, Staatskanzelei ZAS 1159, Dresdner Nachrichten, May 6, 1933; Vogtl?ndische
Zeitung, July 25, 1934.
Articles extolling Saxony's virtues appeared across Germany. In
reach a broader German audience than ever before, writers again
they increasingly treated as the contradiction between Saxony's r
ing) industrial center and the appeal of its natural landscapes in th
1920s and 1930s, tours of Sebnitz artificial flower workshops and t
industry museum showed visitors local crafts as artifacts of a pic
increasingly irrelevant, manufacturing past.111 Some Heimatler
point out the interplay of nature and industry in southern Saxo
In 1931, the journal Lusatia reminded its readers that historically
won a respected place in the German Fatherland through it
damask ... even today the forests, farms, and industries are naturally
the villages and cities conform to their natural surroundings."012 Bu
Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten bemoaned the fact that,"... eve
many's] borders there are people who imagine Saxony as nothing b
smokestacks.'"113 A 1934 article in the Stuttgarter Neues Tageblatt t
such impressions, insisting that friends of nature would revel in t
mountains and valleys of the Erzgebirge, and that the land's miner
possible numerous spas as well as mines. All this appeal, the a
readers, was capped by Dresden's cultural treasures. Far from sh
Saxony's diverse offerings meant that visitors could have a bit of
health, beauty, nature, and culture.114 Another 1935 article
Germans were embracing this message: ". .. we now have are
where tourism is just as important to the local economy as indus
development demonstrates that throughout Germany and abroad
no longer considered an industrial center, but is increasingl
tourist destination.,,115
As we have seen, Saxon tourism promoters had long claimed th
should understand the southern regions' combination of industr
culture as crucial to their identities. Yet the terms in which these
were discussed had changed dramatically. In the 1930s, factories, i
peripheral elements of the southern Saxon landscape that needed
A. von Schultz, "Die Spielwarenindustrie," Kalender f?r das Erzgebirge und das
(Annaberg: Grasers Verlag, 1925), 33-36; Neue Leipziger Zeitung, Oct. 1, 1935
and Rosemary Wakeman find state-sponsored promotion of tourism as economic
of integration in France. Furlough and Wakeman, "La Grande Motte: Regiona
Tourism, and the State," in Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Ide
Europe and North America, ed. Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough (Ann Arbor
Michigan Press, 2001), 350-351.
Dr. Heinke, "Unsere Heimat. Die Lausitz," Lusatia Jahrbuch (1931): 12?13.
113HStA Dresden, Staatskanzelei ZAS 1159, Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, Marc
114HStA Dresden, Staatskanzelei ZAS 1159, Stuttgarter Neues Tageblatt, June 2,
11 HStA Dresden, Staatskanzelei ZAS 1159, Neue Leipziger Zeitung, November
away. Southern Saxony's industries, though still integral to the regions' identities,
appeared as historical renmants rather than as beacons of modernity.
By the 1930s tourism became a means for securing national territory and
reaffirming regions' German national identities. German nationalists and the
Saxon government made new calls for tourism, declaring southern Saxony
the last bulwark of the German state and culture against the Czechs, and a criti
cal site in the struggle between German and Slavic civilizations.116 The Saxon
government began making the case to the Reich government and the German
public that Saxony was an endangered borderland.117 And promoters trans
formed tourism from an economic resource to a necessity, urging tourists to
consider Saxony's economic troubles and increasingly peripheral status in
the Reich as a reason to visit its southern territories. As the Neue Leipziger
Zeitung declared in 1935, "Saxony is a borderland, and now more than ever
deserves to be valued for what it really is ... On behalf of the German Volk
[tourism] must awaken and deepen the unity of the German people." While
in 1936, the Dresdner Nachrichten asserted, "It is ajoy to see that the Erzgebirge,
the Vogtland, and the Saxon Switzerland are more in demand as travel desti
nations today than ever before. Nevertheless, it is still necessary to redouble
our efforts to promote Saxony as a beautiful borderland throughout
Germany."118
Nazi ideology and institutions reinforced Saxon borderland rhetoric and local
efforts to promote tourism, but shifted control of tourism promotion out of the
hands of regional actors. Nazi ideology bolstered earlier efforts at shaping the
landscape for tourism, 19 and the Nazi state began to deliver tourists to
Saxony by the trainload. In 1934, the Nazis introduced the Strength through
Joy movement, which gave working-class Germans a chance to vacation on
state-subsidized trips. At first, such trips were within Germany. Rather than
teaching local populations to value the German nation and state through their
home regions, Strength through Joy asserted that Germans everywhere should
?l6Der Freiheitskampf, Aug. 10, 1933, 7; Oswin Poetschke, "Sachsen als Teil der deutschen Ost
front," in Sachsen als Grenzland, ed. Grosch; Ernst Neef, "Der s?chsisch-b?hmische Grenzraum,"
Zeitschrift f?r Erdkunde 5, no. 9/10 (1937): 407-408. This fit with the Ostforschung movement's
description of Germany's eastern borders, especially with Poland, as bulwarks against the Slavs.
Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), 3-39.
117HStA Dresden, AH Auerbach 78; AH Annaberg 592: AH Schwarzenberg 183. This idea was so
successful that by 1938 it shaped how Saxon emigrants in South America and New York thought
about their homeland. St?tn? ustredn? archiv Praha (SUA): Svaz N?mcu v Zahranici, Karton 17,
Oct. 12, 1938.
118HStA Dresden, Staatskanzelei ZAS 1159, Neue Leipziger Zeitung, Nov. 18, 1935; Dresdner
Nachrichten, May 4, 1936.
The Nazis decried wilderness and worked to produce garden-like landscapes. Joachim
Wolschke-Bulmahn, "All of Germany a Garden? Changing Ideas of Wilderness in German
Garden Design and Landscape Architecture," in Nature in German History, ed. Christof Mauch
(New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 86.
be interested in the various regions and Volksstamme (branches of the
of preserving German culture, writers argued, was to get to know it
variants. One article asserted, "Whosoever wishes to live a full
travel ... But one need not think of foreign lands ... the wonderland
Heimat is so diverse that it would be a sin to neglect it in favor
lands. Doesn't Germany have gorgeous forests, picturesque cities, ...
palaces, and castles enough?" 120
Strength through Joy made the Saxon borderlands a destination fo
from the beginning. Strength through Joy trips often visited "endan
derland areas with the idea of enlisting broad national support to pro
regions.121 Germans from elsewhere got to see the southern Saxon
firsthand, to appreciate its beauties, and to ponder its significa
Reich. Strength through Joy also furthered a trend in tourism that
in the Weimar period-the growth of working-class as well as middl
ticipation. The Erzgebirgsverein and other established Saxon tourism
zations began coordinating their efforts with the national Strength
Joy organization. The Zittauer Morgenzeitung observed that even wit
government support it remained difficult to convince Germans to vi
liar areas. But the paper concluded, "Those who came were impresse
beauty of our landscape." 122 The Adorfer Grenzbote struck a simil
note of optimism and caution when it was announced that Strength
Joy trips were going to begin visiting the area. The paper told its re
the program would bring lots of visitors, but that they should not e
matic improvements at first.123 After more than twenty years of wooin
for economic reasons, at least some Saxons had become wary of
promise as a cure-all.
Perhaps this skepticism, born of long experience, led tourism pro
pursue as many possible kinds of tourists as they could think of. U
Nazis, Saxon tourism promoters, in a variation of their nineteenth-
strategies, began trying to lure fellow Saxons who had moved
regions or countries back to the Heimat as visitors. After years of ne
had sent Germans to all corners of the Reich and the world, in 1935
120HStA Dresden, Staatskanzelei ZAS 1159, Stuttgarter Neues Tageblatt, June 2, 193
Th?ringische Landeszeitung, July 12, 1933.
121HStA Dresden, Staatskanzelei ZAS 1159, Adorfer Grenzbote, July 25, 1934; '"K
Freude' im Erzgebirge," Gl?ckauf! 55, no. 3 (1935): 52-54; Shelley Baranowski, Stren
Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge Univer
2004), 120-121.
Daniela Liebscher, "Mit KdF 'die Welt erschliesse.' Der Beitrag der KdF-Reisen zur Aussenpo
litik der Deutschen Arbeitsfront 1934-1939," Zeitschrift f?r Sozialforschung des 20. und 21. Jahrhundert
14, no. 1 (1999): 42-72; HStA Dresden, Staatskanzelei ZAS 1159, Zittauer Morgen Zeitung, Oct. 6,
1935.
123HStA Dresden, Staatskanzelei ZAS 1159, Adorfer Grenzbote, July 25, 1934.
organizers tried to encourage Saxon emigrants to return to their homeland as

visitors. They declared that "all Saxons who now live abroad, far from their Hei
mat ... should visit Saxony in the summer of 1935 and spend weeks of relax
ation in the beautiful Saxon landscape." Such visitors would both benefit
from contact with the Heimat and contribute to its economic well-being
through their visits.124 The Dresden branch of the Organization of Germans
Abroad used Heimat newsletters to keep emigrants around the world, but
especially those in the United States, Mexico, and South America, in touch
with Saxon regional identities as well as the ideas of Nazi Germany.125 Thus
Heimat and the Saxon landscape itself became tools for building German
national and political consciousness around the world as well as for maintaining
regional affinities among Germans at home and abroad.
Conclusion
By the mid-1930s, local people and Germans across the Reich understood
southern Saxony, its landscapes, and the tourists who trekked through those
landscapes very differently from their counterparts of the 1870s and 1880s.
In the 1930s, tourism emphasized the southern regions' natural beauty and
either downplayed their industrial traditions or relegated them to the past.
Tourists themselves became economic resources, patrons of weakened
regions, and defenders of German national territory rather than explorers
of their own heritage. And Saxons increasingly treated their state and espe
cially its southern territories as delimited by the political border with
Czechoslovakia.
In that newly delimited landscape, ski slopes, lookout towers, and nature pre
serves emphasized the regions' significance for leisure and nature, rather than for
industry. Heimat tourism promoters shaped landscapes to suit tourists' tastes and
their own conceptions of regional identities. In the process, the southern Saxon
landscapes, the identities that tourism promoters assigned those landscapes, and
tourists' activities became aligned with the geographic boundaries of the
German nation-state.
Saxon Heimatlers' interactions with the German nation and state, with
international economies, and with World War I led them to re-imagine
their southern regions' place in the world and to spread that new vision
beyond their borders. The fallout of World War I transformed Saxony from
an industrial center with markets around the world to an impoverished border
land of the German Empire, a change that began in and was typified by the
Ibid., Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, March 24, 1935. Some Heimat organizations sent their pub
lications to their regions' emigrants to keep their regional attachments alive. Lusatia Jahrbuch (1931): 3;
SUA: Svaz N?mcu v Zahranici, Karton 17.
5SUA: Svaz N?mcu v Zahranici, Karton 17.
state's southern territories, and took on symbolic importance th
weighed concrete changes. Although the southern borderlands co
be home to industry, nature, and tourism in the 1930s, the image o
regions as an embattled economic and national borderland shape
policies of Saxon officials and the Reich government in Berlin
thus led to new policies for land use and landscape preservation and
critical role in delineating a new vision of Saxony's southern bo
and the Saxon state as a whole in Germany, Europe, and the world.1
Saxon Heimatler succeeded in putting their southern borderlan
national tourist map. They made Saxony's southern borderlands central
cussion of Saxon tourism or iconography of Saxon Heimat identity, a pat
continues to this day.127 They established persistent themes of natural l
industrial traditions, and borderland identity that shaped such disc
And they established a lasting idea that Saxony is an important terr
the German state and nation whose significance lies in a diverse mix
art, and industry. Thus Saxon tourism promoters, whether they we
Heimatler, 1920s economic boosters, or 1930s nationalists treated tou
something beyond material consumption. Rather it was a way to giv
to territory, to connect modern people to specific places, and to dis
new values.
This story shows the importance of place in modern societies, as well as the
ways in which historical actors transform spaces into meaningful places. While
Saxon tourists and tourism promoters learned to connect their home land
scapes, their national identities, and even leisure to modern nation-states,
they did so gradually, on their own terms, and in response to their particular
situations. Ultimately tourism in southern Saxony illustrates that the meanings
of places and the ways in which human ideas of community, nationhood, and
even modernity are imposed on the material world are always in flux.128
B. O'Connor argues that tourism's role in shaping a nation's (or region's) identity for outsiders is
most critical because that construction and outsiders' perceptions shape local identities as well.
O'Connor, "Myths and Mirrors: Tourist Images and National Identity," in Tourism in Ireland: A Criti
cal Analysis, ed. B. O'Connor and M. Cronin (Cork: Cork University Press, 1993): 68-85.
7Karl Rauch, Das Land Sachsen (K?nigstein: Karl Robert Langewiesche, 1960s); Illona Esche,
Unser sch?nes Sachsen (Frankfurt a.M.: Umschau, 1992); Heinrich Pleticha, Kulturlandschaft Sachsen
(Freiburg: Herder, 1992). Nineteenth-century Austrian tourist literature conflated the western
Alpine region with the whole state. Jill Steward, "Tourism in Late Imperial Austria: The Develop
ment of Tourist Cultures and Their Associated Images of Place," in Being Elsewhere, ed. Baranowski
and Furlough, 122.
This idea grows out of Rogers Brubaker's argument that nationhood should be understood as
dynamic, indeed as an event. Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in
the New Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Sarah Green and Geoffrey King
argue that people understand place through combined perceptions of the past, and contemporary
practices and experiences, leading to shifting understandings over time. Green and King, "Seeing
What You Know: Changing Perceptions of Landscape in Epirus, Northwestern Greece, 1945 and
1990," History and Anthropology 12, no. 3 (2001): 255-288.
People shape such ideas according to the situations in which they find them
selves, and those meanings can change. Those conceived at one historical
moment may fade and then reemerge at a later time when they again have res
onance. And in doing so, they shape not just human lives but also natural
landscapes.
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Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association

Tourist Landscapes and Regional Identities in Saxony, 1878-1938

Tourist Landscapes and Regional Identities in

T | EHE 1905 Kalenderfiur das Erzgebirge und Vogtland described an apparently

landscapes into meaningful places, into lasting examples of German regional

Regional Diversity in a Modernizing Central Europe

The Landscape and Geography of Southern Saxony

flanked by mountains, you cross Saxony's southern border into Bohemia.

environmentalism for Heimat ideas.15 Saxony shows that efforts to cre

The Emergence of Southern Saxon Regional Tourism

themselves in wider geographic contexts, a change that sparked the urge to

lobbied the Saxon government to improve transportation to the southern

A Cross-Border Tourist Landscape, 1878-1914

Torpey, The Invention of the Passport, 82-83.

The youth hostels which the German-Bohemian Gebirgsvereine

This recommendation was clearly driven in part by local interests in cap

Nature, Industry, and Landscape, 1878-1914

54Lusatia V, no. 3 (1889): 23.

in forested natural landscapes.65 Thus, tourist and Heimat literature portrayed

The aspiration for as complete and multifaceted an understanding of our

The Emerging Econormics of Tourism, 1900-1919

HStA Dresden, Amtshauptmannschaft (AH) Schwarzenberg 127: 1. Lauter is an Erzgebirge

comfort. In 1918, an Erzgebirge tourism association proposed publishing their

Gerald Feldman, "Saxony, the Reich, and the Problem of Unemployment

In Saxony, against the Czechoslovak border is a land that those of us in north

"Interessengemeinschaft Dresdner touristischer Vereinigungen?Beratungsstelle fur Turistik,"

Similarly, a 1924 songbook published by the Erzgebirgsverein included a song

Reinhold Hofmann, "Aus der b?hmisch-bayrisch-s?chsischen Grenzecke des Vogtlands," in

Political Legitimacy through Tourism in the 1930s

102HStA Dresden, AH Schwarzenberg 1942: 4.

organizers tried to encourage Saxon emigrants to return to their homeland as

CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY LONG BEACH

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