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

With its allure of transnationalism, border-crossing and timelessness, the Danube, unlike any other European river, has provided a rich and diverse image reservoir for travel and tourism writing for centuries. Symbolizing the continuous flow through space and time, the river metaphor lends itself perfectly to the selected scripting of history as well as the spatial ordering of landscape, both ‘outwardly’ for the journeying tourist as well as ‘inwardly’ for local, regional and national publics. This article explores the ways in which the Austrian Danube, and its adjacent landscape, have been fashioned from narratives and myths that mirror contested spatio-cultural claims to region, nation and homeland from the fading Habsburg Monarchy up to the Second World War. Drawing on the emblematic Danube valley ‘the Wachau’, the article explores how guidebooks and other tourist literature have invested the river landscape with a powerful ideological grammar that, over time, conjured up lures of Germanic nationalism, imaginaries of Austrianness or emergent ideas of a borderless Europe.