Revisiting Austria

Tourism, Space, and National Identity, 1945 to the Present

Gundolf Graml

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781789204483
• eBook ISBN: 9781789204490
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: History

Following the transformations and conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century, Austria's emergence as an independent democracy heralded a new era of stability and prosperity for the nation. Among the new developments was mass tourism to the nation's cities, spa towns, and wilderness areas, a phenomenon that would prove immensely influential on the development of a postwar identity. Revisiting Austria incorporates films, marketing materials, literature, and first-person accounts to explore the ways in which tourism has shaped both international and domestic perceptions of Austrian identity even as it has failed to confront the nation's often violent and troubled history.

Part I

“WHERE IS THIS MUCH-TALKED-OF AUSTRIA?”

Remapping Post-World War II Austria

Where is this much talked-of Austria?
What is her place in space and time, in history and culture?
—Ernst Marboe, The Book of Austria (1948)

Tourism is a matter for the entire state, the entire people.
Each misstep does not only produce negative results for the one who caused it,
but for the entire nation, for Austria’s reputation at home and abroad.
—Tibor Szinovacz, former chair of Slovakian National Railroad,
in consultation letter to Austrian Ministry of Reconstruction (1946)

Chapter 1

“WE LOVE OUR HEIMAT BUT WE NEED FOREIGNERS!”

Tourism and the Reconstruction of Austria 1945–55

In the fall of 1945, Chancellor Karl Renner¹ made what must have been a surprising plea amid the ruins of Vienna: “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.”² The fact that the country’s chancellor discusses tourism at a rather inopportune moment, a few months after the collapse of the murderous National Socialist regime that a significant number of Austrians had supported, seems to underscore the perception that references to tourism serve the purpose of deflecting from more serious political and historical topics. Furthermore, Renner’s invitation to the world appears to illustrate the very notion of Austrian economic and cultural self-colonization through tourism. In other words, Renner’s brief statement symbolizes the complex and contradictory role tourism has played with regard to Austrian national identity and history over the past decades.

Indeed, Austrian governments, corporations, politicians, academics, and teachers have used tourist stock images and narratives of Austria in order to reposition the country internationally, to sell goods, and in general, avoid taking responsibility for an inconvenient past. However, in doing so they have never been able to completely erase or cover up this inconvenient past, no matter how beautiful the images or how convincing the revisionist historiography. Again and again, literary and journalistic critical treatments of Austria’s tourism economy reveal that it is precisely by way of the tourism-related construction, exhibition, and dissemination of Austria’s places, its history, and its culture that the Nazi past becomes visible. Thus, instead of dismissing tourism as the “fake” surface covering up the “real” Austria, I will analyze tourism as a conglomerate of complex and often contradictory performances that also manage to display the not-so-beautiful aspects of Austria. In adapting historian Alon Confino’s question—“Why did some Germans think of tourism after 8 May 1945?”—for Austria, we can thus ask, “Why did Chancellor Karl Renner talk about Fremdenverkehr in 1945?”³

One plausible reason was that tourism constituted an important element in the effort to rebuild Austria’s economy after the destruction caused by World War II and that Chancellor Renner followed the blueprint used in the wake of World War I. After the Habsburg Empire’s dissolution, the newly-founded First Austrian Republic had to cope with the loss of most of the Habsburg realm’s more distinguished tourist destinations, many of which now belonged to other countries: Meran, the small South Tyrolean town renowned for its air quality, had become part of Italy; the well-known spas at Karlsbad, Marienbad, and Franzensbad were now within the borders of the newly created Czechoslovakian Republic; and the Mediterranean tourist destinations around Trieste and Rijeka had ended up in Yugoslavia or Italy.⁴ Aristocratic and upper-middle class Sommerfrische activities in these places had already been an important element of the Habsburg Empire’s economy around the turn of the century, covering about 80 percent of the dual monarchy’s export deficit.⁵ At the same time, many of these destinations had been at the forefront of the nationalist upheavals that dominated the Empire’s last phase leading up to World War I. Tourism in Bohemia, for instance, often turned into a highly nationalistic turf war between Czech-speaking hosts and German-speaking visitors, a development mostly overlooked in the nostalgic descriptions of imperial Austria’s lost grandezza but highly relevant for discussions of tourism’s role in the context of national identity.⁶

Faced with this dramatic redrawing of Austria’s tourism map, the regional governments of the First Austrian Republic needed to develop new regions for a Fremdenverkehr, as tourism activities were mostly called then and well into the twentieth century. A large credit from the League of Nations in 1922 supported the expansion and electrification of the Austrian Federal Railways, which subsequently became the backbone of Austria’s public transportation system and an important agent in Austria’s tourism marketing and organization efforts. The Austrian government successfully negotiated visa waivers for visitors from a number of European nations, with the German Reich, Czechoslovakia, and the United Kingdom being among the most important markets. These developments paid off, insofar as official registrations of tourists increased significantly from 2.5 million in 1922 to 4.2 million in 1929. Most importantly, the percentage of foreign visitors from hard-currency countries increased from 37 percent in 1923 to 43.6 percent in 1929.⁷ Germans formed by far the largest segment with 54.4 percent of all foreign tourists in 1932. By comparison, the second-largest contingent of tourists from Czechoslovakia reached only 15.1 percent the same year.⁸

The significant percentage of German tourists was related to the linguistic and cultural ties between Germany and Austria and to the high purchasing power of the German mark relative to the Austrian schilling. It was in these two areas that troubles arose with the beginning of the world economic crisis in 1929. Fearing a depletion of its monetary reserves, the German government implemented a fee of one hundred marks for all foreign trips taken by German citizens.⁹ While this caused a significant decrease in the number of German visitors, it paled in comparison to the developments in 1933–34: after Adolf Hitler’s election as chancellor in January 1933, the German National Socialist regime tried to break the anti-Nazi stance of the authoritarian Austrian government by undermining tourism with the “1000-Mark Sperre” (customs fee), which required every German citizen who traveled to or through Austria to pay a fee of one thousand Reichsmark. As a result, the percentage of foreign tourists decreased by almost 30 percent in general, but by more than 50 percent in Tyrol and Salzburg, the preferred vacation destinations of German tourists.¹⁰ Eventually, Austria gave in to Nazi Germany’s pressure and relaxed the ban against National Socialist activism on its soil. A supposedly mutual agreement between the German Third Reich and the Austrian Republic in 1936 led to the cancellation of the fee. Austria’s tourism industry briefly recovered until the country’s annexation by Hitler’s Germany in 1938.¹¹

Notwithstanding the dramatic disruption in 1933–34, during the interwar years Austria’s tourism industry helped to cover up to a third of its trade deficit, putting it just behind France and Germany in terms of revenue from tourist activities.¹² It was the memory of this kind of development that after 1945 spurred the mantra-like references to the tourism industry’s importance by government officials, economists, and tourism representatives. It is certainly one of the reasons why Chancellor Renner talked about Fremdenverkehr.

In light of the widespread destruction of the transportation infrastructure in 1945, this focus on tourism as path to economic recovery appeared premature, to say the least. Visiting Austria a few months after the end of hostilities, the American author John Dos Passos was amazed “to find [him]self so deep in Russia so soon.” The combination of destruction and destitution led him to describe Vienna as a city “dying by inches.”¹³ In the city of waltzes and operettas alone, more than 270,000 people had lost their apartments and homes, and an area the size of the entire inner city of Vienna had been completely destroyed by bombing raids and artillery.¹⁴ But it was not just the Soviet-occupied area around Austria’s capital that illustrated the destruction caused by World War II. The partition into different occupation zones underscored the impression that only fragments were left of the country formerly known as Austria. The military demarcation lines between the occupation zones resembled borders between “hostile nations,” and the increasing animosities between the Western allies and the Soviet Union produced anxiety about the country’s future.¹⁵ The various Austrian provinces acted like sovereign nations when it came to foreign trade. Even the commercial interactions between the various occupation zones were hardly different from trading with foreign countries, a situation that resulted in a veritable “latent trade war” (latenter Handelskrieg).¹⁶

Rather than dismissing Renner’s statement as untimely, I read his remark about tourism as performative enactment of Austria as a spatially and politically cohesive nation-state at a time when geopolitical realities seemed to make this all but impossible. By naming Austrian landscapes and cities as hosts, Renner does more than simply reference older historical elements of Austria. He cites older tourist discourses about Austria; he appeals to the citizens within and the world outside alike to remember and re-enact these discourses; and, in so doing, he devises a road map for the performative reconstruction of Austria in the discursive terrain of tourism long before a spatially and politically unified Austria would again become a political reality. In other words, Renner’s statement underscores that Fremdenverkehr—tourism—is more than a distorted representation of an already existing Austrian nation. Rather, to quote Weber, the idea of an Austrian nation after 1945 is “performatively constituted by the very expressions that are said to be its result,” meaning by the tourist images and narratives that circulated about it.¹⁷

What invites further analysis is the discrepancy between the lack of actual tourism activity on an economic level and the importance of tourism on a symbolic, political and cultural level. Due to Austria’s prominent status as a tourist destination and to the sizable portion of Austria’s GDP generated by the tourism industry from the late 1950s on, many analyses of Austrian tourism after World War II have focused on quantifiable aspects.¹⁸ However, for the immediate postwar period, a quantitative approach appears rather meaningless. According to statistical data, tourism only gradually became an economically significant sector in the years 1947–48, with no exact numbers for overnight stays available for the years 1946–48.¹⁹ Simultaneously, Fremdenverkehr was debated with great fervor in daily newspapers, magazines, and in the correspondence between Austrian government officials on the one hand, and US officials in the various military and civil occupation departments on the other. Since “crude consumption figures do not reveal very much of spatial practice,” as cultural geographer David Crouch formulates it,²⁰ I will take a closer look at the narratives, images, and practices related to tourism, in order to trace to what degree tourism enabled the reconstruction of Austria as a coherent place and as a national, cultural, and, in some cases, even ethnic community.

Where, and What, Is Austria?

In 1948, the Austrian Federal Press Service decided it was time for an official act of postwar Austrian self-representation. Under the guidance of its director, Ernst Marboe, the service published The Book of Austria. A hybrid of popular history, visitor’s guide, and pocket museum, the volume was distributed widely as an official gift for diplomats and foreign visitors.²¹ Despite the editor’s claim that the book “does not set out to be . . . a Baedeker . . . nor an encyclopedia,” the sequence of chapters, the stylistic blend of journalistic, literary, and scholarly writing, and the extensive use of pictures and maps firmly embed the book in the discourse of tourism.²²

Unsurprisingly, the volume provides a highly nostalgic perspective on Austria’s Habsburg ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I. “Where Is This Much-Talked-Of Austria?” Remapping Post-World War II Austria
• Part II. Dark Places: Tourism and the Representation of Austria’s Involvement in National Socialism and the Holocaust
• Part III. Austrian Narratives of Place and Identity in the Context of Globalization
• Conclusion. When Austria Moves to China
• Index