Today, holidays are an integral part of modern life in industrialized countries, and tourism in-dustry is the second largest global industry. But we have still little knowledge about the history of holidays and tourism. Only during the last decade, tourism history has raised the interest of a growing number of international scholars and became a rather small, but flourishing research field – apart from Britain, where it has been an established field for many decades. Investigating the history of tourism enables us to gain basic knowledge about the formation of modern socie-ty. Made possible by an RJ sabbatical, I contribute to this research field with a comprehensive book about German seaside resorts and beach holidays between 1871 and 1945. During that period, tourism expanded and became a phenomenon of mass culture. My book sheds not only light on this dynamic and far too little investigated period of tourism history, but even on the formative period of modern consumer society, of which the consumption of holidays was an important part. On an international scope, my book is one of few studies submitting a compre-hensive history of a major tourism form.

The book, which I nearly finished during the sabbatical, has a twofold aim: (1) to explore gen-eral developments in the formation of modern tourism and consumer culture by taking beach holidays as an example, and (2) to investigate the specific character of seaside resorts and beach holidays. Today, beach holidays have become a symbol for holidays per se, obvious e.g. in tourism industry, which frequently uses beach holidays´ iconography in its advertising. In my project, I was interested in the question what was/is so special about beach holidays, and what makes them so generalizable at the same time. In my book, I answer this question by using the theoretical approach of liminality, which I use systematically to describe and theorize different aspects of seaside resorts. I can show that beach holidays´ liminoid quality made them both spe-cial and generalizable in relation to holidays in general.

Other central questions aim at both the resorts and their guests: The book investigates on the one hand how seaside resorts developed in a period of rapid social change, industrialization and modernization. On the other hand, it analyses how medical sea bathing performed by a small elite group turned into beach holidays for everyone. This happened during a period of only 50 years, between the 1870s and 1920s. At the end of that period, modern beach holidays as we still know them were fully developed and have barely changed since then. This is a major result of my research. While the German case is in many respects appropriate to shed light on the in-ternational history of seaside resorts, it is also used to highlight the characteristics of a develop-ment in a country facing three different political regimes and shifting national borders. It is, however, regarded in a transnational perspective, relating it consistently to developments in oth-er European countries.

My research has a holistic approach integrating social and cultural history. The book mirrors this broad approach presenting the history of seaside resorts and holidays in its entirety. It ad-dresses structures and socio-economic developments as well as discourses and cultural repre-sentations and not least the historical agents´ social practices. Moreover, and rather rare in tour-ism history, it includes a gender perspective, showing, e.g., how the development of bathing practices affected men and women differently. The research draws upon a broad range of source material: correspondence, guest lists, photographs, films, minutes and other unpublished rec-ords from several local and regional archives, tourism statistics, medical literature, guidebooks, magazines, advertisements, posters, postcards, literature and paintings.

The book is divided into three major parts with different foci. After an introductory chapter, part one stresses a perspective of social and cultural change over the investigation period of roughly 75 years. The three chronologic chapters of part one investigate structural and economic devel-opments of the resorts in their interdependence with changing social practices of the bathing guests: Chapter two, which was already finished before I started the sabbatical, deals with the early period of seaside resorts before 1870, when sea bathing still was a medical practice. Chap-ter three, of which I wrote main parts during the sabbatical, while some parts had been finished earlier, shows how sea bathing was democratized, turning from an elite phenomenon into a bourgeois project and a pleasure practice. Different from Britain, which even had seaside resorts for the working class, in German resorts both the operators of the baths and the resort guests originated from the middle classes. It were genuine bourgeois bathing and leisure practices that took place in the resorts. They were similar to those in other countries´ resorts, yet the bathing practices differed. I show even how deeply the structural changes in seaside resorts affected the inhabitants who had to look for new possibilities to earn their living, which was both a chal-lenge and a chance. During the period of the German Empire, seaside resorts reached their hey-day. In chapter four, mainly written during the sabbatical, the impact of World War I and its aftermath on seaside resorts and their guests are discussed as well as the effects of the Nazi re-gime and World War II. Different from the countries that won the war, the German economic crisis after WWI deeply affected the German seaside resorts. Throughout the whole Weimar Republic, they did not succeed in building on their grandeur and successes before the war. After the war, a nationalization of seaside holidays took place in Europe. Antisemitism grew rapidly in many German seaside resorts, some of them developing into well-known antisemitic resorts, few of them staying especially jew-friendly. During the Nazi period, seaside resorts had grow-ing numbers of visitors again, among them many “Strength through Joy” tourists. But more important than the often overestimated “Strength through Joy” tourism was the commercial tourism – that is a major result which sheds new light on the research about national socialism.

The second part of the book approaches the subject systematically and focuses on geo-cultural and historical structures: Chapters five (finished before the sabbatical), dealing with North sea resorts, and six (mainly written during the sabbatical), dealing with Baltic sea resorts, present different German regions of seaside resorts in a comparative perspective discussing similarities and differences both between and within regions. Since there have only been local studies be-fore, this is an innovative perspective which sheds new light on the history of seaside resorts. As a result of my research, I can show that in each region there was a broad range of seaside resorts for each taste and purse who had divided the regional market among themselves so that they did not have to compete with each other. Another result is that the most frequented resorts were those with the best train and ship connections to large cities, first of all Berlin, but even Hamburg and Cologne.

Part three eventually focuses on cultural representations and social practices: Chapter seven, which was partly written during the sabbatical, addresses both cultural representations of the seaside and bathing in art, literature and advertising and the agents who popularized (physicians, artists, writers) and commercialized (local communities, resort organisations) seaside resorts and beach holidays. One surprising result is that the medical discourse was still influential at the beginning of the 20th century, although bathing had become a mere pleasure. I can even show how the Association of German North Sea Resorts and the Association of German Baltic Sea Resorts, which have never before been investigated, successfully lobbied for their resorts. Chapter eight, which was written before the sabbatical, examines the change of bathing practices focusing on historical agents.

During the sabbatical, I pruned 250 already existing pages of the book down to 200, and wrote 150 new pages, so that the whole manuscript comprises 350 pages now. The introduction and the conclusion have still to be written. The book is written in German, has the title “To the sea! German Seaside Resorts and Coastal Tourism, 1871-1945” and will be published by Böhlau publishers, Vienna.

During the sabbatical, I also wrote a book chapter about sandcastles built by adults on German beaches since the late 19th century. It shows that sandcastles were not, as it is sometimes sug-gested, a manifestation of a typical German national character, but that they can be understood as metaphors for typical characteristics and principles of tourism, whose main feature is ambiva-lence. The text contributes to empirical tourism research as well as to theoretical considerations about tourism.

I spent three months of the sabbatical at the University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam School for Regional, Transnational and European Studies (ARTES), collaborating with the interdiscipli-nary European travel cultures and mobilities research group which is active there. The group were helpful discussants and commentators and I had the opportunity to present my work at their research seminar. On 20 November 2019, I presented the paper “Liminoid spaces: German and British seaside resorts in the 19th and 20th centuries”. Moreover, I presented results of my research on an international conference about European spas in Baden-Baden on 6 November 2019, with a paper called “Health and Leisure in the Seaside Resort: The De-medicalisation of Discourse and Practice”.