Tourist literature and the ideological grammar of landscape in the Austrian Danube Valley, ca. 1870–1945

Tourist literature from the Austrian Danube Valley, particularly focusing on the Wachau region, reveals how narratives and myths have shaped the landscape's ideological grammar between 1870 and 1945. The study demonstrates that guidebooks and other tourist materials embedded the river landscape with powerful symbolic meanings, reflecting contested claims to region, nation, and homeland during the decline of the Habsburg Monarchy and up to World War II. These narratives often invoked lures of Germanic nationalism, Austrianness, or a borderless Europe, illustrating how the Danube's metaphorical flow through space and time facilitated the scripting of history and spatial ordering of landscape for both tourists and local publics.

Ploner, J. (2012). Tourist literature and the ideological grammar of landscape in the Austrian Danube Valley, ca. 1870–1945. Journal of Tourism History, 4(3), 237–257. https://doi.org/10.1080/1755182x.2012.711376