Between Education, Commerce and Adventure. Tourist experience in Europe since the Interwar Period.

Over the course of the twentieth century, tourism in Europe and North America experienced a veritable earthquake: it ceased to be confined to the upper and middle classes and became increasingly accessible to the working class. Mass tourism took on many forms, among which commercial tourism featured prominently. However, we wish to concentrate on Europe, since it was a testing field of numerous seemingly antagonistic models of mass tourism that have emerged since the 1930s: apart from commercial tourism, social tourism undertaken by non-profit enterprises and state-sponsored tourism in Nazi Germany as well as in socialist European countries. The conference is going to revolve around two issues. In order to better illuminate the diversity of tourist experience, it seeks to critically investigate the argument of the prevalence of commercial tourism; thus, it intends to further scrutinize interconnections among the abovementioned and seemingly competing tourist models. Moreover, it aims to help rethread the scholarly analysis of a plethora of profound economic, social, cultural and political transformations that shaped Europe in the 20th century through the lens of mass tourism. We are going to concentrate on mass consumption, the unfolding of Cold War, migration and the emergence of youth cultures.

Program (PDF)