I am happy to announce that my new book, Revisiting Austria: Tourism, Space, and National Identity, 1945 to the Present, has just been published by Berghahn Press.
75 years ago, in April 1945, Soviet troops entered Austria through Hungary, dislodged the remaining Nazi divisions and installed a provisional government. A few weeks later, American, British, and French troops crossed into Austria from Western and Southern directions. Each of the four Allied nations now occupied a section of the country they had just liberated from National Socialism. And by July 1945 the preliminary demarcation lines between the Allied sectors became semi-permanent borders that would last–at least in the case of the one between the Soviet zone in Eastern Austria and the Western Allied Zone–for another ten years.
Tourism, one would think, was the last topic on anyone’s mind. And yet: in the fall of 1945 then Chancellor Karl Renner made what must have been a surprising plea: “We love our Heimat, but we need the foreigners! We need tourism and invite the whole world to be our guests. Vienna and Salzburg as sites of art, our Alps as tourist destinations of the first order, will joyfully greet the foreigners.”
It would take several more years before tourists actually returned to Austria in significant numbers, but Renner’s invitation illustrates the central thrust of this book: instead of a history of tourism, Revisiting Austria investigates how tourism served as a discursive framework through which people could reimagine Austria as reconstructed; rehabilitated from its involvement in National Socialism; and reintegrated into the community of nations. The book also demonstrates how tourism provided a prism for the critique of Austrian national identity as superficial; as based on the repression of the country’s Nazi past; and as symbol for postwar Austria’s alleged self-commodification in response to a capitalist vacation industry.
Revisiting Austria offers an interdisciplinary account of how tourism shaped the emergence of Austria’s national and cultural identity over the last 75 years. Discussing a range of primary cultural texts, from government documents to student essays, and from literary novels to The Sound of Music film and the related guided tours in Salzburg, the book illustrates how tourism is not just a form of leisure but a performative practice whose analysis provides rich insights into identity formations at the individual, collective, and institutional level.
Here is what some of the editorial reviews say:
“Revisiting Austria is one of the best works that I have read on the issue of coming to terms with the Nazi past—in this case, Austria’s difficulty in confronting it. The author’s suggestions that this legacy is less repressed than disruptive is a significant contribution.” • Shelley Baranowski, University of Akron
“This is an impressive piece of interdisciplinary work, drawing on a range of diverse sources and demonstrating a confident command of the literature. Despite covering quite a lot of ground, it is a pleasurable and easy read.” • Tim Kirk, Newcastle University
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