Author Archive

Film and Tourism: Reading Luis Trenker’s “The Prodigal Son” through a Post-colonial Lens

12/02/2013
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I’ve recently created a short video based on my article “Black Bodies on White Snow: The Reconstruction of Germanness as White in Luis Trenker’s The Prodigal Son (1934),” which appeared in From Black to Schwarz: Cultural Crossovers between African America and Germany (2010), ed. by Maria Diedrich and Jürgen Heinrichs.   Graml GundolfMore Posts
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Confessions of a Tourist

25/09/2012
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Confessions of a Tourist This past summer I finally had a chance to read Christoph Ransmayr’s small book Geständnisse eines Touristen: Ein Verhör (2004). This small book is a compilation of many interviews and conversations that Ransmayr has given over the years. Responding to the questions of an imaginary interviewer, Ransmayr reflects...
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Tourism at the Wolfsschanze

19/09/2012
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Tourism at the Wolfsschanze Unanticipated teaching requirements and a study-abroad trip with students have more or less stalled my project on tourism and Austria for a while. I’m reporting back, however, with this link to a NYT article about tourism projects at Hitler’s Wolfsschanze. The article highlights a couple of developments there, but what I find most interesting in...
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The “Book of Austria”, Revisited

03/05/2012
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I just stumbled across an interesting article by Austrian cultural critic Wolfgang Müller-Funk in the Austrian literary magazine Wespennest. In this piece, entitled “So viel Österreich: Mutmaßungen über die Erfindung eines Landes”, Müller-Funk compares the Österreich Buch (about which I’ve had a lot to say here)–with a very recent publication titled Österreich and edited...
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“The Book of Austria”

23/04/2012
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IMG_2716 Exhibit one in my investigation of the performative reconstruction of Austrian national identity after 1945 is the Österreich Buch . The lavishly illustrated and carefully edited book was the brainchild of Ernst Marboe, a key figure working at the intersection of postwar Austria’s intersecting zones of politics and culture. (Close to...
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Soldier-Tourists in 1945 Austria

13/04/2012
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American soldiers relaxing at an Alpine lake in June 1945 Teaching, conferences, and administrative business has thoroughly interrupted my work on this project. I’m slowly coming back to it and recently began sorting information pertaining to tourism immediately after the end of the war. As I mentioned in my intro post, for that time period the term tourism is more a misnomer. But of...
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“What You See Is NOT What You Get!”

28/02/2012
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Musings on the Role of Seeing, Image, and Imagination in Media and Tourist Discourses. (I’m reposting a short piece I wrote for the 2011 Southeast German Studies Consortium-meeting in Atlanta.) A middle-aged woman lies in bed in a hotel room somewhere in Austria. Consuming the contents of the minibar, she zaps through the TV...
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Sex, Performativity, and the Nation State

27/02/2012
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Performance and performativity have developed into key terms in the more recent approaches to tourism. Examples are Tim Edensor’s previously quoted book National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life, as well as the anthologies Tourism: Between Place and Performance (2002), edited by Simon Coleman and Mike Crang, and Travels in Paradox: Remapping Tourism (2006),...
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Does Tourism Cover Up Austrian Reality?

10/02/2012
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Tourism and Austria–for most of the period since World War II, these two terms have been treated as an almost toxic combination. In the literary fiction of authors such as Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Franz Innerhofer, Felix Mitterer, and Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek–to name only a few of the more prominent names–the seminal images...
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Tourism and National Identity

09/02/2012
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This blog will accompany the writing of a book-length manuscript on the role of tourism in the reconstruction of Austria as a nation after 1945. Arguing against the mainstream notion that Austria only used superficial touristic images to distract from its problematic “real” past (the involvement in the crimes of National Socialism), my project...
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