Views on Tourism

First and foremost, I am a tourist. Reluctant maybe, eager to escape the bind of compulsion that shepherd the herd from one photo opportunity to the next, almost certainly; but a tourist nonetheless.

Whenever taking a photograph of some such famous site, I instinctively engineer the shot to exclude as many people as possible from the frame, obscuring the reality just the same as if the face of a photogenic building is marked by the acne of scaffolding. Instinctively I yearn to depopulate my image, isolating the subject as though in a museum, in so doing stripping it of its touristic appeal and hence rendering my own intrigue strangely artificial.

I was given cause to consider this anew on a recent short stay in Munich (incidentally my first visit to Germany). On consecutive days I made excursions out of the city to two sites that despite the differences, offer significant parallels in terms of tourist behaviour – the first was to Schloss Neuschwanstein in the Bavarian Alps (the basis of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty castle), and the second was to the Dachau concentration camp.

Firstly, there is no denying the picturesque charm of Schloss Neuschwanstein, perched as it is like a kitsch nest amidst the spectacular Bavarian foothills; indeed, considering the glorious surroundings, it would be a real architectural carbuncle that failed to wrest some measure of warm appreciation from those who behold it. Its towers and turrets seem to have been inflated like a giant bouncy castle, its multiple levels and tessellations invoke all the Grimm Brothers fairy tales that lay their foundations deep in the imagination.

The aesthetic charm loses its shine slightly when you consider that mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria, in his desire to construct his fantasy castle in the mountains, tore down the ruins of the original structure that had stood there since the Middle Ages.

In the knowledge that the castle is in fact a 19th century Romanticised simulation of authentic medievalism, it places in a new and more sceptical frame the motives of the hordes who flock here, puffing and panting up the hill-climb towards it, buying the usual gift shop paraphernalia as happily as they buy into the illusion of historicity that the castle symbolises.

To me, the castle stands as testament to blind human ambition and absurd folly. By pursuing his lunatic dream amidst financial difficulties and ill health, dying mysteriously in 1886 with the castle only a third completed, Ludwig could almost be the archetypal Werner Herzog film protagonist (played necessarily by the crazed Klaus Kinski).

It gave me cause to ponder what it is we seek when, in our own slightly mad way, we descend en masse upon places adorned with the ‘Lonely Planet’ stamp-of-approval as a genuine ‘tourist site’. Whether it’s Westminster Bridge, the Sistine Chapel, the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower, we progress in unison, pausing to take the same photographs before moving on. There is a necessary suspension of disbelief implicit in these locations and we generally revel in playing our part.

A particularly bizarre example of this that I’ve witnessed was in Brussels, where one of the prime tourist destinations (indeed the talisman of the city), is Manneken Pis, a diminutive bronze statue of a little boy pissing away into a pool below, around which crowds bustle and compete for vantage points and selfie opportunities.

It is no surprise that this production line tourism grew in ascendency along with the post-WWII consensus for rampant consumerism, fuelled by a new-found Western prosperity that allowed for jet-setting lifestyles, helping to conform to the Keynesian belief that people were working less and playing more. It is only really tolerable for most to toil away in the sedentary and prosaic routines of capitalist economies in the knowledge that for one or two weeks you are free to indulge a sense of adventure and exploration of far-flung lands.

Manifestations of the consumer mentality permeate many aspects of the tourist experience. The writer Susan Sontag in ‘On Photography’, observed that psychologically the capturing of a photographic image is a form of discreet ownership, of taming the wild (consider the terminology – ‘capture’, ‘shoot’, ‘aim’), of trying to sanitise the abstract, foreign surroundings and cultures of which we have limited experience through the solidity of the frozen image.

A recent incarnation of this is the odious phrase “I’ve done Munich” or “I’ve done London”, as though visiting these places were an action with a defined duration like a fairground ride; an ‘I [heart] XYZ’ T-shirt to be stowed away in the wardrobe of experiences. It was only when crossing the Marienbruke bridge (with its prestigious photo opportunities of the castle), that I hit upon a theory for another of these modern trends...

It has become common at tourist sites (bridges over the Seine, along canals in Venice and Amsterdam) to find padlocks affixed in great numbers, personalised with names or initials. Padlocks signify of course ownership and personal possession, and accordingly the psychological implications for the individual of this mass padlocking is the sense, however slight or imagined, that the tourist site has been consumed in some way, if only ticked off as complete on a mental bucket list.

Of course, tourism is also a destructive passion, with places such as Ankhor Wat, Machu Picchu, the Great Barrier Reef, Mount Everest and even the submerged wreck of the Titanic under increasing threat from large-scale tourist activity exacerbating their natural fragility. It is notable how, in the wake of Alex Garland’s novel ‘The Beach’, the paradisal location was reported to be under siege by people desperate to emulate the sense of escapist utopia romanticised by the book and Danny Boyle’s film adaptation.

In striking parallel to King Ludwig II, there was another figure in German history who wanted to realise the operatic splendour of Richard Wagner in a resurgent articulation of nationalism and grandiose power. This man was Adolf Hitler.

Through architecture and ceremony, Hitler wanted to create the monumentalism that would inspire the far-flung veneration of the Third Reich’s ruins in the same way as Athens or Rome. In his mind he would surely have relished the idea of the tourist hordes of the future flocking to marvel at the magisterial spectacle of the Third Reich’s legacy. Instead tourists flock to monuments of its calculated barbarity.

The museum at Dachau is excellent, full of well-written analysis charting the rise of Nazi Germany and life at the camp. A 30-minute train ride from Munich, Dachau was inaugurated in 1933 as a camp ostensibly for political opponents and dissidents, and became the prototype for all the other notorious camps that would follow across Europe. Whilst a gas chamber and crematorium were built there, mass extermination was never actually enacted (inmates were instead transported to places like Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen), yet somewhere in the region of 32,000 died as a result of execution, medical experiments, hunger and diseases such as typhus that swept through the camp in 1945.

Walking across the expansive courtyard and along the central road of poplar trees that divided the barracks, it is impossible not to feel drugged by an immensely dull ache. By the time you are confronted with the gas chamber and ovens, feelings of despair and sorrow begin to congeal around you both physically and mentally like rigor mortis.

It is imperative for those who visit, I feel, to try and imagine your way inside the head of both an inmate and an SS guard. And yet such effort is futile, for both oppressed and oppressor were so utterly dehumanised in their separate ways that there is no basis in reality with which to comprehend such horror. Instead the mind conjures up fantastical images such as Peter Bruegel’s ‘Triumph of the Death’, or the ground ripping open for a relatively brief period of time to expose the evil manifestations of one of Dante’s circles of hell, before closing up again to leave only psychical scar tissue.

Try as you might, you cannot hear the marching jackboots on gravel, nor the cries of prisoners for absent loved ones or the fate of strangers. Instead all you hear is the breeze whipping through the trees and across the empty spaces like so many bows playing the strings of a vast cello, welling up the most mournful threnody.

And yet even here it is possible to observe varying degrees of compulsive touristic behaviour. Groups of men on an excursion from the Munich beerhalls shuffle around with hungover eyes, whilst gaggles of schoolchildren are shunted here and there by dutiful teachers. There are only so many times you can watch people posing for photographs and selfies next to the infamous wrought-iron gate ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (Work Sets You Free) before you have to conclude that the innate absurdity and un-selfconscious banality of some people knows precious few boundaries.

Moving away from the crowded Marienbruke at Neuschwanstein I came across a trail. As I followed this it began to zigzag up the side of a mountain, the sounds of people drowned by the sound of a nearby waterfall, and the glorious sight of a patchwork quilt of trees, textured with different tones of green. I climbed higher, spurred on by the promise of more stunning vantage points until eventually I stopped on a natural promontory of rock, the fog starting to pour down the mountain-side, and Neuschwanstein now looking like a child’s piece of Lego discarded amongst the folds and creases of a vast green duvet. It was a moment of wonder and awe, I felt like I was Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer above the Mists’; the unexpected transcendence of a formulaic tourist experience.

In a similar vein, after returning from Dachau to the apartment I was staying in, I shared a bottle of wine with my host J, a German of the same age as myself. Despite, or perhaps because of, still feeling the depressive after-effects, I avoided mentioning my visit that day to the memorial site, but after a while and with no prompting, J raised the subject of the Nazis and the Second World War.

My impression was that the subject would be far too taboo and sensitive to broach with any German, let alone one from Munich (the birthplace of National Socialism), and so I was amazed at the candid honesty that J displayed. He described the continued underlying sense of shame and guilt that persists to this day amongst Germans of all ages, and the increasing desire to address the topic openly – as evidenced by the fabulous Museum of National Socialism on the site of the original Nazi ‘Brown House’ on the Konigsplatz.

This introspective analysis of the motives and impulses that lead to the Holocaust, on a personal and national level after so many years of silence and repression seemed to me most inspiring and gave me cause to consider the ways in which Britain and America continue to live in the glow of the Second World War as the moral victors triumphing over an unconscionable evil.

No discourse or analysis in mainstream British culture over the WW2 progresses, it seems to me, much beyond the patriotic Churchillian narrative of good defeating evil, with scant reflection on the level of anti-Semitism existing in Britain prior to the war or dreadful atrocities such as the firebombing of Dresden that were perpetrated by the Allied forces.

I was elevated psychologically by the unexpected nature of the conversation just as I had been elevated physically by the wonders that had largely eluded me from the tourist assembly line at Neuschwanstein. For all the calculated consumerism of so much touristic experiences, it is the serendipity of random events that undoubtedly makes travelling one of the most enlightening and rewarding experiences that life has to offer.