Guest Editor’s Introduction

In second half of the 1940s, as Europe emerged from the most devastating war the world had ever seen, tourism became a means—if perhaps an unlikely one—of aiding in the continent's reconstruction. This reconstruction built on the experiences of the interwar years, when tourism experts, travel agents, hoteliers, and government officials recognized tourism's significant contributions to national economies. Yet in contrast to the interwar period, the American government was closely involved with postwar tourism in Europe, both through the Marshall Plan (officially known as the European Recovery Program) and through the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), which coordinated the Marshall Plan from the spring of 1948. In June 1948, for instance, the European Travel Commission (ETC)—an offshoot of the Marshall Plan closely associated with the OEEC's Tourism Committee—was established and charged in part with promoting Europe as a tourist destination among Americans. The OEEC Tourism Committee's first meeting was held in January 1949 and attended by Austrian tourism expert Harald Langer-Hansel.1 In this initial meeting, the Tourism Committee acknowledged the sheer size of the tasks ahead (rebuilding tourism infrastructure, coordinating policies, reviving intra-European tourism, and attracting American tourists to Europe—all crucial issues for Austrian tourism) and signaled the need for close collaboration with organizations such as the International Hotel Alliance and private partners.2This kind of collaboration between state entities, private actors, and international organizations defines the complex and multifaceted ways in which tourism, as both an economic sector and a social and cultural phenomenon, developed during the twentieth century. This special issue focuses on these developments in postwar Austria and beyond. Katharina Scharf begins with an overview of how visual and narrative depictions of Austria and Austrian landscapes, especially Alpine landscapes, were mobilized for tourism from the late eighteenth century onward. It comes as no surprise to learn that Austria was, and continues to be, identified with its natural landscapes and that the "tourist gaze," as Scharf writes, is "predefined by ideal images" of Austria. Scharf explains that the images took shape during the First Republic and have remained relatively unchanged. In turn, these discursive representations and narratives helped shape how Austrian landscapes were transformed as Austria's tourism industry developed (a process in which Scharf stresses the importance of the Marshall Plan). Here, the author examines the paradoxical antagonism between preservation and conservation on one hand and tourism development on the other, through telling examples such as the American National Parks' influence on the creation of the High Tauern National Park in Austria; the debates surrounding the Grossglockner High Alpine Road; the preservation of the Krimml Waterfalls; and the Kaprun hydroelectric power plant, whose construction was seen as a "victory over nature" and which also became a tourist attraction. These examples show convincingly, as Scharf asserts, that landscapes are "by no means static, stable, or unchanging."Andreas Praher's article also examines natural landscapes. Considering Austrian skiers and ski instructors who moved to the United States between the 1930s and the 1960s, Praher asks how downhill skiing, as a sport, a culture, and a business, impacted natural landscapes, contributed to the economy, and shaped the lifestyles of generations of Austrian and American skiers. Anchoring his analysis in the concept of cultural transfer, Praher argues that American skiing culture, resort infrastructure and architecture, as well as teaching methods, were shaped to a large degree by Austrian skiers and Austrian skiing culture. Intertwined with considerations of gender and antisemitism (several of the skiers were Jewish, and settled in the United States in the aftermath of the Anschluss), together with Americanization and modernization, the story Praher tells brings us to Sun Valley, Idaho; Sugar Hill and Jackson, New Hampshire; Stowe and Jay Peak, Vermont; Mount Rainier, Washington; and Aspen, Colorado. The phenomena Praher describes are not restricted to the United States, as Austrian knowledge of downhill skiing was also in demand in Italy, France and North Africa, Japan, Australia, and South America. Praher's article reminds us of the importance of understanding cultural transfers as, in Michel Espagne's words, "complex interactions" that are not limited to two countries but that take place "between several cultural poles, several linguistic areas."3In his article, Hannes Richter focuses on Austria's national branding in the United States. Richter argues that Austria's image in the United States—that of a Sound of Music alpine fairyland—served two purposes. It aimed to boost tourism revenue, but at the same time, it "served as a convenient distraction from the country's recent, less fairytale-like past," including Austria's contributions to the Third Reich, the Waldheim affair in the 1980s, and the controversy around the right-wing populist politician Jörg Haider in the 1990s. Richter aptly juxtaposes two sets of sources. First, he stresses continuities in twentieth-century visual representations of Austria through the example of tourist posters. To be sure, these posters present traditional and stereotypical views of Austria: Alpine landscapes, skiing (stereotyped as a male sport, as Praher also observes), women in dirndls, churches, cultural refinement, and references to cultural centers such as Vienna and Salzburg. For Richter, these "stereotypical variables" "defined the Austrian brand in the United States" after 1945. Yet, conveniently, the second Austrian Republic did not have to create these stereotypes, as they had nourished the tourist gaze on Austrian lands since the nineteenth century. This point is supported by Richter's analysis of his second set of sources: public-opinion surveys produced between 1989 and 1998, a social media analysis from 2015, and a series of focus groups conducted in 2022. Based on these resources, Richter observes the longevity and power of stereotypical images of Austria, noting that they are especially potent among younger American generations.Given Austria's controversial interwar and wartime past—Austrofacism, its ties with Nazi Germany—this post-World War II "rebranding" was no minor affair. As Gundolf Graml explains in Revisiting Austria, the emphasis and "performative reenactment" of discourses surrounding Alpine landscapes, classical music, and living folklore are precisely what helped Austria position itself as a "separate Austrian (and not a second German) nation-state in 1945."4 For post-1945 Austria—a small landlocked country devastated by the war, which carefully crafted a narrative about itself as the first victim of Nazi aggression—the revival of its tourism industry and of winter sports such as Alpine skiing were of prime importance. The rationale behind tourism development was thus, as the contributors to this special issue discuss, a matter of both economics and identity: reestablishing a positive image of Austria, but now as a prosperous, mountain-loving nation and a land of exceptional natural landscapes.For Austrians, this Alpine branding was not unproblematic, and it revealed internal divisions. In this sense, Chancellor Karl Renner's 1945 proclamation that both the Alps and "Vienna and Salzburg as sites of art" will "joyfully greet foreigners" was ambitious and certainly not immediately effective in the aftermath of the war.5 Anti-Viennese feelings in western Austria were at play here, as was Vienna's initially difficult posture as a war-torn city located in the Soviet zone until the State Treaty of 1955. Yet for tourism, the disconnect between Austria's sites of culture and its Alpine regions was not long-lived. In fact, as Richter asserts, it seems that "the Alpine landscapes and Viennese high culture worked well in tandem," especially for foreign tourists without whom Austria's postwar tourism recovery would have been impossible. Some of the tourists were American, but not the majority.6 Indeed, during the Cold War as in the interwar period, most of Austria's foreign tourists came from Germany and Central Europe, and one of the immediate challenges of postwar Austrian tourism was to attract such visitors, including those from West Germany. As Günter Bischof explains, the opening of the border between Austria and West Germany in 1951 was a breakthrough for tourism: "While the percentage of German tourists was negligible before 1950, by 1952/53 German tourists made up 54% of the foreign vacationers in Austria," and the foreign currency earnings increased precisely at that moment as well.7This, in turn, explains why Austria engaged so enthusiastically with intra-European tourism and with the ETC's, OEEC's, and Marshall Plan's work to attract more Americans to Europe. In Bischof's words, "Austrian prosperity after World War II—in which tourism played a major role—would not have occurred to the same degree or with such rapid speed were it not for the Marshall Plan."8 Recent research has clearly showed the Marshall Plan's impacts on Austrian and European tourism; it has also showed how tourism provides access for analysis of broader societal and environmental issues, in Austria and elsewhere.9 For all that, however, the history of tourism in post-1945 Austria (and in postwar Europe and beyond) remains underexamined.10 The contributors to this special issue address this gap, while illuminating the various angles that research on tourism can take. Their contributions remind us not only of the fruitfulness of a longue durée approach to tourism and related questions, e.g., sport, environmental history, advertising, but also of the shortcomings of a national framework. Indeed, directly or indirectly, each contribution takes a transnational approach, showing how a myriad of individual actors and institutions helped shape the tourism industry in Austria, the United States, and beyond.