Daniela Mysliwietz-Fleiß's informative study of factory tourism in late-nineteenth-century Germany is very welcome in that it focuses attention on a rather different kind of spectacle from the usual kind of tourist attraction—the factory. Histories of nineteenth-century European tourism have shown the importance of middle-class recreational travel for national, regional, and local economies, and its impact on the formation of regional and local identities, while touristic experiences played a part in the self-imagining of their participants and the shaping of their identities. The transformation of places into tourist attractions and their occupants into spectacles was made possible by improvements in transport and the new wealth and prosperity of the bourgeoisie, who provided new reading publics for an expanding print media. A well-examined feature of tourism is the spectacular nature of its practices, evidenced in the way that aesthetic, historic, and cultural interest sites were constructed, framed, and represented in the media, which identified and depicted places and sites of interest, encouraging touristic practices and ways of seeing as the omnivorous and aestheticizing “tourist gaze” consumed everything from mountains and coasts, to zoos and shop windows. A key factor in this was the expansion of the print media and the publics to which they catered. Magazines, journals, memoirs, and guidebooks identified sites of interest and encouraged touristic practices and “ways of seeing.”

People often traveled for reasons other than sightseeing, however, and individual travel journeys performed a variety of functions, particularly those associated with professional and business activities. Mysliwietz-Fleiß sets out to demonstrate that, although factory tourism was heavily influenced by the standard framing and aestheticizing conventions and practices of tourism, its popularity and the meanings and values associated with it were also linked to the particular economic and social situations of the different social groups comprising the German bourgeoisie. The nature of the German Bürgertum and the structures, institutions, values, and aspirations associated with bürgerlich culture have been thoroughly rehearsed, but Mysliwietz-Fleiß revisits the debate in order to contextualize the way that, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, as divisions within the bourgeoisie grew stronger and class conflict sharpened, the identification of the factory as a tourist attraction, as well as the actual experience of industrial visiting, influenced the way that individual members of the bourgeoisie perceived themselves and others, particularly the workers.

Factory visiting allowed the professional and business classes to engage in a form of recreational activity involving the conspicuous consumption of free time while simultaneously enabling educative self-improvement through exposure to direct evidence of the ways in which new scientific and technical knowledge was being profitably applied. The framing of factory sites and the processes of production was assisted by the way that visits were controlled and regulated, inviting the same kind of experiential expectations and performative behaviors invoked by conventional tourist sites. Places considered worth visiting were widely publicized, not only through guidebooks and articles in newspapers and family magazines like Die Gartenlaube, but also through a plethora of promotional materials that businesses produced for the many trade fairs and exhibitions that took place all over Germany, contributing to the growth in urban tourism. Making extensive use of the new printing technology, companies used advertisements, posters, brochures, and postcards depicting factory subjects in order to promote their products and reach out beyond their established consumer base, to an audience encompassing the greater part of the bourgeoisie. Many of the sources referenced in this study highlight the value of ephemera for the historian of tourism and remind us of its problems because, until recently, material of this kind was generally undervalued and, therefore, often lost or under-archived. The author is to be congratulated on the range of source materials she cites, particularly factory records and postcards with helpful messages printed and written on the back.

Women as well as men (and not just those interested in social reform or the workers’ living conditions) appear to have been fascinated by material about this aspect of modern life, even if they encountered it only in print. Reports dealing with new kinds of workplaces revealed changes in the types of work becoming available to women. Part of the attraction for curious tourists seems to have been the way that the factory workplace represented a world that, although alien to their middle-class visitors, also appeared more familiar and closer to the everyday than other kinds of tourist spectacle. Sometimes encounters with modern industry and working-class life, the effects of which were increasingly evident in the built environment, promoted deeper reflection, but for the most part, the reality of the lives of the workers was hidden behind the way they were depicted, as for example in picturesque postcards of workers’ colonies (367).

The popularity of factory tourism as a form of recreation indicates the symbolic value adhering to these secular cathedrals, which stood as the visible embodiments of the forces driving social and economic change. Despite the dirt, noise, heat, and stench, the interior of works like the giant Krupp factory in Essen, the center of a giant steel and armaments empire, or the chemical works of Bayer in Eberfeld, fascinated visitors because, as well as their spectacular appearance, their powerful machines testified to the rapidity and scale of Germany's economic and industrial prowess and the importance and value of modern science and technology—something about which the divided members of the bourgeoisie could at least achieve some measure of agreement. This lively and generously illustrated study offers an important insight into the way that the phenomenon of industrial tourism revealed something of the values, attitudes, and concerns of the German bourgeoisie, and the way that its members perceived themselves and their place in the world.