In the wake of the American and French revolutions, European culture saw the evolution of a new 'leisure regime' never previously enjoyed. Now we speak of modern leisure societies, but the history of leisure, its experiences and expectations, its scope and variability, still remains largely a matter of conjecture. One message that has emerged from a multiplicity of disciplines is that research on leisure and consumption opens up a hitherto untapped mine of information on the broader issues of politics, society, culture and economics.How have leisure regimes in Europe evolved since the eighteenth century? Why has leisure culture crystallized around particular practices, sites and objects? Above all, what sorts of connections and meanings have been inscribed in leisure practices, and how might these be compared across time and space? This book is the first to provide an historical overview of modern leisure in a wide range of manifestations: travel, entertainment, sports, fashion, 'taste' and much more. It will be essential reading for anyone wishing to know more about European history and culture or simply how people spent their free time before the age of television and the internet.

The Weimar Moment's evocative assault on closure and political reaction, its offering of democracy against the politics of narrow self-interest cloaked in nationalist appeals to Volk and "community"-or, as would be the case in Nazi Germany, "race"-cannot but appeal to us today. This appeal-its historical grounding and content, its complexities and tensions, its variegated expressions across the networks of power and thought-is the essential context of the present volume, whose basic premise is unhappiness with Hegel's remark that we learn no more from history than we cannot learn from it. The challenge of the papers in this volume is to provide the material to confront the present effectively drawing from what we can and do understand.

In the wake of the American and French revolutions, European culture saw the evolution of a new 'leisure regime' never previously enjoyed. Now we speak of modern leisure societies, but the history of leisure, its experiences and expectations, its scope and variability, still remains largely a matter of conjecture. One message that has emerged from a multiplicity of disciplines is that research on leisure and consumption opens up a hitherto untapped mine of information on the broader issues of politics, society, culture and economics.
How have leisure regimes in Europe evolved since the eighteenth century? Why has leisure culture crystallized around particular practices, sites and objects? Above all, what sorts of connections and meanings have been inscribed in leisure practices, and how might these be compared across time and space? This book is the first to provide an historical overview of modern leisure in a wide range of manifestations: travel, entertainment, sports, fashion, 'taste' and much more. It will be essential reading for anyone wishing to know more about European history and culture or simply how people spent their free time before the age of television and the internet.

Travel guidebooks are an important part of contemporary culture, but we know relatively little about their history and importance to the evolution of tourism. Germany not only produced the first international standard for travel handbooks, the Baedeker, but also became a major tourist destination early in the twentieth century. This is the first comprehensive discussion of the history of tourist guidebooks for any modern nation.
Selecting representative texts - the first Baedeker to unified Germany, guides to Berlin sex life and sites of Nazi martyrdom, a tour guide for the German worker and American tourbooks to West Germany - this fascinating study relates the history of tourist literature to the formation of distinct 'travel cultures' oriented to specific audiences, tastes and ideologies.

Travel guidebooks are an important part of contemporary culture, but we know relatively little about their history and importance to the evolution of tourism. Germany not only produced the first international standard for travel handbooks, the Baedeker, but also became a major tourist destination early in the twentieth century. This is the first comprehensive discussion of the history of tourist guidebooks for any modern nation.
Selecting representative texts - the first Baedeker to unified Germany, guides to Berlin sex life and sites of Nazi martyrdom, a tour guide for the German worker and American tourbooks to West Germany - this fascinating study relates the history of tourist literature to the formation of distinct 'travel cultures' oriented to specific audiences, tastes and ideologies.

"In this elegant and provocative study, Rudy Koshar describes the myriad ways in which Germans, over the past 150 years, have sought to memorialize various parts of their history--or to forget them. Koshar's treatment is comprehensive, offering detailed discussions of imperial-era attempts to craft a national history, Weimar's attempts to 'remember' the Great War, the grandiose aspirations of the Nazi era, the East/West memory divide after 1945, and the difficulty of commemorating the intertwined histories of the victims, perpetrators and bystanders in the years after 1970. . . . A synthetic, yet subtle and original, account of the continuities in breaks in German cultural history since 1871."--Suzanne Marchand, Louisiana State University

"This book marks a turning point in the emerging subfield of studies of memory--not only because of its chronological and geographical range, and the breadth of the primary and secondary source material upon which it draws, but especially because of its analytical incisiveness. With its balance between detailed example and overarching interpretation, this engaging and smoothly written account will appeal to general readers interested in the cultural history of Modern Europe, as well as specialists in German and European history."--Harold Marcuse, University of California, Santa Barbara