German Domestic Pedestrian Tourism and the Rhetoric of National Historical Memory, Empire, and Middle-Class Identity 1780s–1850s

Abstract

Between the 1780s and 1850s German domestic pedestrian tourism performed an important role in the shaping of historical memory and national identity for the middle class during a period of political division, inner-German military conflict, and defeat and occupation by a foreign power, resulting from the long-term effects of the French Revolution. In this context, it provided a communal vehicle toward discovering, consuming, and reenacting a distant past as a foundation for an empowered, distinctly modern German identity. The rhetoric of guidebooks marginalized feudal oppression and commemorated the continuous economic and political ascent of the burghers, the success of middle-class initiative and participation in the victorious military popular uprising against Napoleon, and consequent economic recovery. In tandem, the monarchies of the German states infused their own dominant imperial and military objectives into rhetorical and discursive aspects of pedestrian tourist culture by capitalizing on overlapping visions for a modern Imperial nation state.