Britain and Baedeker’s Germany

Abstract

If scholarship on travel and travel writing is ‘best described as cluttered’, with the anthropological, ethnological, geographical, literary and sociological fields far more developed than historical scholarship, then the impact of travel and tourism upon Anglo-German relations is a field largely devoid of any historical analysis.² Indeed, much of the work done to date concerning British travel to the Continent has focused squarely on excursions to the major tourist destinations of France, Switzerland or Italy, leaving Germany somewhat on the outer.³ Those authors who have dealt with travel in Germany in this period are primarily concerned with the impact of growing tourism on the Germans’ own national identity. Recently, several key scholars have argued that from the early nineteenth century, the greater acquaintance of the Germans themselves with the cities, population and landscape that were included in the Reich in 1871 made a significant contribution to the growth of a widespread German identity.⁴ Hagen Schulz-Forberg in particular argues that British tourists made a significant contribution to this, given their travel to and romanticisation of the Rhineland from an early period.⁵ Indeed Schulz-Forberg is the only scholar who has examined in any depth the impact of travel in Germany on the British tourists of the nineteenth century (and down to 1914), but he restricted his discussion in the main to their experience of the Rhine region, and this is subordinated somewhat to his interest in the rise of the Rhine as a German national emblem.⁶