Tourism in late Imperial Austria: the development of tourist cultures and their associated images of place

TLDR: In this article, the authors present the first study of early Austrian tourism in English and the first that attempts an analysis of the commercial and cultural impact of tourism across Habsburg, Austria, in a comparative and systematic way.

Abstract: This chapter, an invited contribution to an edited volume, demonstrates that in the multi-national Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the usefulness of tourism in forging the bourgeois nation was problematic and that by 1914, it fostered ethnic division rather than cohesion within many of the Habsburg territories. The invitation followed from a paper on urban tourism in the region, given at the 1996 conference of the European Urban Historians Association. The collection brings together new and international scholarship in an exploration of the contribution of tourism to major historical developments within geographically specific areas, showing that the history of tourism reveals the intersections of commerce, culture and politics. The chapter is the first study of early Austrian tourism in English and the first that attempts an analysis of the commercial and cultural impact of tourism across Habsburg, Austria, in a comparative and systematic way. A particular theme of the chapter is the attraction of Austria for the British, a subject developed in an essay in Wolfgang Goertschacher and Holger Klein (eds.), Austria and the Austrians: Images in World Literature (Tubingen, 2002). A further theme was the role of the media and visual culture in the formation of tourist culture. A Northumbria Small Research Grant funded travel for multi-archival research. As a result of this research Steward participated as an invited speaker in an international workshop organised by the Universities of Saarbrucken and Aachen, ‘Culture, Economy and the City’ (2007) and contributed an invited chapter on the relationship between the cultural industries and urban tourism, ‘The attractions of place: the making of urban tourism: 1860-1914’, to Martina Hessler and Clemens Zimmermann (eds.), Culture, Economy and Cities (Campus 2008).