The 1905 Kalender für das Erzgebirge und Vogtland described an apparently spontaneous shift in the relationship between the German state of Saxony's mountainous southern borderlands and its rapidly urbanizing lowlands. Yet from the 1870s to the 1930s, the Kalender, the Erzgebirgsverein that published it, and a host of similar Heimat (homeland) and tourist organizations pushed, prodded, and cajoled lowlanders into visiting the borderlands. In the process, they repeatedly reframed the ways in which they portrayed the landscapes they championed, rethought their reasons for enticing travelers to the southern regions, and redirected their efforts to new audiences.Footnote ² Saxon Heimatler and tourism promoters succeeded in defining southern Saxony's regions, and eventually Saxony as a whole, in terms of three important characteristics: the interplay of nature and industry in their landscapes; the diversity of those landscapes; and proximity to and interactions with Bohemia. So powerful were these themes that they continue to shape ideas about southern Saxony to the present.

Tourists began to explore southern Saxony in the late nineteenth century. Regional tourism promoters—Heimat enthusiasts, district officials, publicans, and hoteliers—celebrated local landscapes in postcards, periodicals, and newspapers in order to lure tourists to the southern regions.Footnote ³ By defining regions in terms of landscapes, tourism promoters strove to balance the demands of multiple identities: local, regional, state, national. As borderland people, they sought to reconcile apparent discontinuities between these identities and the central European territories, states, and institutions that claimed to represent their regions. Understandings of a German nation that extended beyond the limits of the German state and of the multinational relationships common to borderlands were central to their portrayals of southern Saxon regions.Footnote ⁴ They instructed their audiences that the regions' political, social, and economic fates were inextricably bound to their landscapes and geography, and they treated tourists as important historical actors whose engagement with Heimat regions played a vital role in shaping the outcome of that bond. In borderlands, those fates were particularly complex when landscapes and political divisions failed to coincide.

Efforts to define landscapes were a response to dramatic changes in the political and economic fortunes of Saxony's southern regions—the Saxon Oberlausitz, the Saxon Switzerland, the Erzgebirge, and the Vogtland—the results of local and international economic transformations, World War I, and national politics. Many Saxons seized on tourism, whether as travelers or promoters, to define why their regions were important, sometimes envisioning them as models for modernization, and sometimes as areas needing help with modernizing.

Regional tourism had emerged as a mass phenomenon in southern Saxony by the early twentieth century; throughout the period, tourists in Saxony's southern regions enjoyed many of the same pastimes: hiking, admiring spectacular views, and celebrating local culture. Yet, while in the 1870s and 1880s promoters hailed tourism as a way to connect local people to their home landscapes and to the German nation, by the 1930s, they had come to regard it as an economic resource and a means of winning recognition from Germans throughout the Reich. Tourism promoters transformed specific landscapes into meaningful places, into lasting examples of German regional diversity, and into objects for national engagement. This article traces the activities of middle-class regional Heimat and tourism organizations in Saxony over the fifty years between their founding in the 1870s and 1880s, through the Kaiserreich, World War I, Weimar, and the early years of the Third Reich. In the interwar period, other social groups participated in regional tourism, and a diversity of new “travel cultures” emerged.Footnote ⁵ But Saxon middle-class Heimat movements were not displaced by newcomers, but rather grew dramatically in the 1920s and 1930s, adapting to new circumstances with remarkable flexibility and resilience, and making tourism a primary tool of their efforts.

Regional Diversity in a Modernizing Central Europe

The economic and political developments, including industrialization, mass mobility, widening political participation, and German unification, that transformed German-speaking central Europe between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took on specific characteristics in different regions.Footnote ⁶ Developments that produced new affluence in some areas brought scarcity to others. In light of such changes, ideas about which regions were significant, what their crucial characteristics were, and the implications of those characteristics changed for local people and outsiders alike.

Southern Saxon tourism and place creation, and the conditions that shaped them, demonstrate how people in German-speaking central Europe reinvented their regions in the face of dramatic changes, creating ways to make a sense of place increasingly central to modern nations, states, politics, and economies. In creating a sense of place, Saxons explicitly associated cultural, political, and economic identities with physical territories.

Modern tourism emerged across Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In German-speaking central Europe, tourism reflected the dramatic changes of the late nineteenth century. Bismarck created a united German Empire in 1871, incorporating some formerly independent central European states into that Empire and excluding others. Many regions, especially in the east, were multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic. At the same time, industrialization and urbanization were transforming demographic patterns, daily life, landscapes, and economic relations—unraveling and reweaving the very fabric of life. Germans in many regions began devising ways to situate their communities simultaneously within the diversity of central Europe, the German nation, and the German nation state.Footnote ⁷ Many of their efforts fell under the umbrella of Heimat movements.

Heimat movements celebrated the local and regional while connecting them to larger state and national communities. Above all, Heimat gave local people an opportunity to celebrate and define a community of common purpose.Footnote ⁸ Like their counterparts elsewhere in the new German Empire, Saxon Heimat participants, or Heimatler, were predominantly middle-class—teachers, businesspeople, and civil servants from the borderlands and the cities who established new institutions and organized publications, activities, and political agendas around the idea of Heimat.Footnote ⁹

Nineteenth-century Heimat advocates helped Germans conceive their regional and national identities in new terms—emphasizing the importance of nature, landscape, and place. By the 1880s, mid-century romantic ideas of nature and landscape morphed into efforts to teach an increasingly urban population to celebrate, preserve, and explore the countryside.Footnote ¹⁰ Heimat movements varied their activities according to local circumstances. Thus concern about local landscapes and traditions in one region came in response to the pressures of industrialization; in another they emerged in response to industrial decline. But in all cases, Heimat movements emphasized the importance of place in peoples' lives.

The Landscape and Geography of Southern Saxony

As you travel through Saxony from north to south along the Elbe River, you watch the terrain change from flat farmland to rolling countryside, the riverbanks lined with vineyards. In Dresden, you see the facades of the baroque and nineteenth-century city—a center of art and court life. Continuing south, you pass the craggy sandstone cliffs of the “Saxon Switzerland.” Finally, flanked by mountains, you cross Saxony's southern border into Bohemia. Southern Saxony's rich, varied landscape of mountains, cliffs, and rivers first attracted attention for its beauty in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when artists began painting the Saxon Switzerland, and a few wealthy travelers began visiting the area.Footnote ¹¹ Late-nineteenth-century Heimat writers championed such landscapes as culturally and nationally significant, and often ignored those they found undistinguished. They celebrated some well-known landscapes and worked to promote others that they believed merited attention, including those of southern Saxony.

Southern Saxon landscapes included the essential elements of picturesque nature with rolling mountains and clear burbling streams. But they were also modern industrial landscapes with some of Europe's most densely populated territories.Footnote ¹² Local people had long survived as what Jean Quataert, in her study of the Oberlausitz, dubbed “worker peasantries” by combining agriculture, mining, cottage, and factory industries.Footnote ¹³ The mountains were laced with dense networks of towns and villages. Streams were lined with factories, and half-timbered houses were built to withstand the vibrations of cottage weavers' looms. This mix of human activity and natural landscapes evoked both local traditions and Germany's emergence as a modern industrial society.

Between the 1870s and the 1930s, Saxon Heimatler played a critical role in defining modern regions, making tourism one of their most important tools. Some historians of German Heimat movements have described them as peculiar to the development of modern identities in late industrializing areas or as anti-modern—a reaction against industrialization and urbanization.Footnote ¹⁴ Several historians have also examined the importance of early environmentalism for Heimat ideas.Footnote ¹⁵ Saxony shows that efforts to create lived landscapes through Heimat tourism not only gave Germans a context from which to grapple with the uncertainties of modernity,Footnote ¹⁶ but provided a model for transforming existing territorial regions into modern cultural entities whose landscapes balanced nature and industry, the local and the national.Footnote ¹⁷ Saxon regional actors contributed to German nation-building and highlighted the significance of diversity in German political and cultural landscapes by emphasizing their reach and relationships beyond the borders of the German Reich.Footnote ¹⁸ Heimatler played a critical role in shaping the terms in which specific places were discussed from the local to the national level. Saxony was an important center of Heimat thinking, and after 1900, of the Heimatschutz (homeland protection) movement.Footnote ¹⁹ This was the result of local conditions as well as of the broad forces transforming central Europe. Saxon tourism promoters used Heimat ideas to define their regions and state within the German nation and state in a period of mounting crisis. For, even as many areas of central Europe were industrializing, by the eve of World War I, some southern Saxon industries were in decline.

The Emergence of Southern Saxon Regional Tourism, 1878–1914

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tourism grew not only because Europeans wanted to travel, but because private citizens, businesspeople, and local officials promoted it.Footnote ²⁰ German tourism promoters were aided by sweeping changes in infrastructure and society. Steamships and trains made travel faster, safer, and easier. Industrialization, rising middle-class prosperity, and changing labor laws gave middle- and working-class people new access to leisure and travel. Less restrictive passport and visa requirements made it easier to cross borders. And widening trade networks made people understand themselves in wider geographic contexts, a change that sparked the urge to travel.Footnote ²¹

These changes led to the emergence of national and international tourist networks such as those of the Murray and Baedeker guides or of Cook's tours.Footnote ²² But they also opened the way for regional efforts. In contrast to larger-scale tourism promotion's emphasis on the virtues of wide-ranging leisure travel, regional promoters in southern Saxony responded to a period of unprecedented mobility with efforts to connect their readers to particular places and to give national and cultural values spatial dimensions.Footnote ²³ They often focused on social and natural landscapes outside large cities. They made natural landscapes something that tourists should not simply observe from the windows of their train compartments,Footnote ²⁴ but places in which they should linger, reflect, and engage with their homeland.

Saxon Heimatler urged their fellow countrymen to explore local landscapes as a way of building their local affinities and understanding themselves in a wider national and international context. Under their direction large-scale tourism first emerged in southern Saxony in the 1880s and 1890s. Like other Germans in this period, Saxons learned to understand their landscape as central to their identities. Tourists, by their very presence, turned landscapes into meaningful places. After 1900, local people also learned to regard tourists as the solution to the growing social, economic, and political problems. Heimatler encouraged tourists to visit the area with promises of leisure, health, and beauty. But Saxons also gave tourists the responsibility for preserving and enhancing the region they visited.

Small numbers of tourists began visiting Saxony's southern borderlands in the early nineteenth century. People such as Hans Christian Andersen visited Saxony's cultural sites, especially Dresden, known for its beauty, art, and music. But they also ventured south to the Saxon Switzerland to complement their admiration of human aesthetic accomplishment by contemplating a striking natural landscape. Such travelers were foreigners or members of social elites: nobles, officers, academics.Footnote ²⁵

The earliest visitors were observers, not themselves part of the social or physical landscape. There were no restaurants, hotels, shelters, or scenic overlooks built with tourists in mind. But as more tourists appeared in the Saxon Switzerland, locals began to accommodate them. Guides licensed by the Saxon government showed wealthy visitors around; writers developed guidebooks to the region. A few local people began offering visitors refreshments.Footnote ²⁶ Nevertheless, tourists to southern Saxony were rare for much of the nineteenth century, and many visitors seem to have assumed that outside Dresden and the Saxon Switzerland, there was little to see.Footnote ²⁷

In the late 1870s, that began to change. Some middle-class Saxons, like their counterparts elsewhere in the new German Empire, embraced the idea of Heimat. Above all, they urged their fellow Saxons to explore their homeland, shifting the emphasis of that exploration away from traditional urban travel destinations such as Dresden. Both the Erzgebirgsverein and the Gebirgsverein für die sächsisch-böhmische Schweiz were founded in 1878, beginning the institutionalization of Heimat in their regions.Footnote ²⁸ Early visitors had taught Saxons that parts of their southern landscapes were worth a trip. Leisure travelers helped define specific landscapes, such as the Saxon Switzerland, as distinct.Footnote ²⁹ And as Saxony's population became one of the most urban in central Europe, it became increasingly important to Heimatler to teach city dwellers to value their state's rural and natural landscapes.

This new tourism demanded vigorous engagement: tourists were to immerse themselves in the natural landscape by hiking, rock-climbing, or skiing.Footnote ³⁰ Heimat organizers encouraged such activities by building hiking trails and lookout towers from which tourists could admire the countryside. They lobbied the Saxon government to improve transportation to the southern borderlands.Footnote ³¹ Heimat publications urged their readers to hike for health, gave information on organized hikes, and published opening dates for restaurants in order to encourage tourists to explore their regions.Footnote ³² Southern Saxon Heimat organizations kept in touch with one another. Those in the Oberlausitz, for example, published reports on tourism associations in the Saxon Switzerland and Erzgebirge as well as in neighboring Bohemia.Footnote ³³

A variety of leisure travelers visited Saxony from the 1880s on: Germans and foreigners, hikers and music lovers, skiers and art enthusiasts. Some visited cities as they had in the past, but others increasingly ventured into the villages, small towns, and the countryside. In focusing their efforts on these latter tourists, Saxon Heimatler promoting the southern borderlands understood themselves as part of a larger modern project of shaping Saxon and German society, and made engagement with non-urban landscapes and a sense of place crucial to that project.

By the eve of World War I, Heimatler had established southern Saxony's regions as tourist destinations, greatly increased the number of visitors to the regions, and transformed those regions' tourism into a middle-class pursuit in which businesspeople and civil servants were among the most numerous travelers.Footnote ³⁴

A Cross-Border Tourist Landscape, 1878–1914

The tourist and Heimat landscapes that Saxon tourism journals, guidebooks, and hiking maps described were not neatly aligned with Saxon political districts or even with the borders of the new German Empire. By defining their Heimat territories in terms of landscapes, late-nineteenth-century promoters situated regions and localities within a variety of larger communities, including the Saxon state and the German nation.Footnote ³⁵ But they also allowed them to overlap the boundaries of such communities, creating a sense of fluid and accessible places in which state boundaries played little role as barriers. If regions were to be defined by their landscapes, as Heimat proponents often suggested, all the southern Saxon regions extended beyond the bounds of the Saxon or the German state. The Oberlausitz included territory in Bohemia and Prussia; the Erzgebirge included a Bohemian component; there was a Bohemian as well as a Saxon Switzerland; and even the Vogtland extended into both Bohemia and Bavaria. In this context, southern Saxon Heimatler continually invoked ways in which their regions were connected to northern Bohemia, a territory that belonged to the Habsburg rather than to the German Empire.

These representations illustrated that the relationship of German regions to the German Reich, to one another, and to German-speaking central Europe more broadly remained ambiguous for some time after 1871, and tourism was a realm in which people could explore and express such ambiguities.Footnote ³⁶ Late-nineteenth-century regional tourism promoters took landscapes as their guides, acknowledging state boundaries, but taking for granted that exploring northern Bohemia was a natural part of getting to know southern Saxony. The borderlands on either side had similar landscapes, industries, and cultural norms, and both populations primarily spoke German.

The complex roles that geography, landscape, and political affiliation played in shaping regional identities, as well as Heimatlers' ability to play with multiple identities simultaneously, were evident at an 1886 meeting of the Gebirgsverein Bernstadt where a member read a poem that asserted: “Lusatia … whether our gaze falls on Prussia's neighboring lands, on Saxony's districts, or Bohemia's borders … the Lusatian Volk remains undivided.” The reading was followed by toasts to Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm and Saxony's King Albert, the singing of the Saxon state anthem, and a report on the activities of the Erzgebirgsverein.Footnote ³⁷ The poem asserted a Lusatian identity that extended beyond the bounds of the Saxon Oberlausitz. It distinguished Lusatia (including both the Oberlausitz and the Niederlausitz) from Prussia, Saxony, and Bohemia while invoking the importance of these states that subdivided the region. And the events that followed reminded association members of their allegiance to the German Reich and Saxon state. Finally, as Heimatler they were reminded of their ties to colleagues in the Erzgebirge.

Similarly, tourists were frequently instructed in the ways that the German state border with Bohemia left the natural landscape uninterrupted and offered visitors the simultaneous benefits of a unified landscape and the intersection of traditions. A 1910 description of places to visit in the Oberlausitz said:

And Saxon literature was not alone in making this connection. As a northern Bohemian tourist publication declared in 1888:

The article staked Oybin out as territory for Bohemian as well as Saxon tourists, and emphasized cultural and geographic connections across the border. Furthermore, it made the case that Oybin marked the convergence of a variety of complementary territories: Germany and Austria, Saxony and Bohemia, the Saxon Oberlausitz and its Bohemian neighbors.Footnote ⁴⁰ This convergence gave tourist destinations such as Oybin and the tourists who visited them more than local significance. Similarly, southern Saxon Heimat publications often invoked historical ties to Bohemia. In his book on Dresden and the Saxon Switzerland, Sophus Ruge pointed out that the Oberlausitz, the Erzgebirge, and the Saxon Switzerland had all at one time been considered part of the Bohemian woods.Footnote ⁴¹

In the late nineteenth century, Saxon Heimat and tourism promoters, like many Saxons in the southern borderlands, treated northern Bohemia as an extension of their Heimat. While they were well aware that this was not Saxon territory, they emphasized shared landscapes over political divisions. In the 1880s, the journal Lusatia served as a publication for Heimat organizations in both the Saxon Oberlausitz and in neighboring northern Bohemia. Lusatia reported on both sides of the border, and included such associations as the Gebirgsverein für die sächsisch-böhmische Schweiz and the deutsch-österreichische Alpenverein, which straddled the political border.Footnote ⁴² Heimat associations from both sides of the border attended each others' festivals, held joint meetings, and even proposed to work together to create a cross-border tourist region.Footnote ⁴³ When tourist associations in the Oberlausitz and neighboring Bohemia evaluated their achievement in attracting tourists and providing facilities for them, they compared themselves to neighboring areas in both Saxony and Bohemia.Footnote ⁴⁴ Hiking clubs often organized excursions that cut across the border. Hiking trails and hikers themselves treated the borderlands as a single geographic and leisure region, paying little heed to the political divide.Footnote ⁴⁵ Saxon travel guides put out by the Erzgebirgsverein and similar organizations included neighboring Bohemian communities among the places they recommended to stay, eat, and visit.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the 1880s publications often referred to the Saxon-Bohemian Switzerland rather than clearly designating the two sides of the border as separate entities.Footnote ⁴⁷ The assumption was that visitors would treat the area as a unified landscape, in spite of the political border between Germany and Habsburg Austria.

At first glance, Saxon and Bohemian hikers straying into one another's territories, or even celebrating the interconnectedness of those territories, seems harmless enough. But participants in Heimat activities were doing more than stretching their legs. The idea that their regions were defined in part by ties that extended across the borders of the German Empire into northern Bohemia expressed at least ambivalence about having their position in the German state limit their social and cultural affinities.Footnote ⁴⁸ And tourists' and local peoples' embrace of the borderlands as a shared landscape lent substance to a persistent understanding that the German nation extended beyond the borders of the German state. Saxons in the southern borderlands were aware not only of historical connections between Saxony and Bohemia, but routinely crossed the border in their daily lives. Many had family on both sides; migrant workers crossed back and forth; people did business, went shopping, dancing, and hiking on both sides of the border.Footnote ⁴⁹ Since the populations on both sides were primarily German-speaking, local people saw clearly that the boundaries of the German nation, both regionally and internationally, did not correspond precisely to those of the German state. In the simple mechanics of tourism before World War I, this was not highly significant. It was easy to cross the border, and in doing so tourists posed no direct challenge to either the German or the Habsburg state.Footnote ⁵⁰ Nevertheless, Saxon Heimat leaders' conception of home regions defined by relationships beyond the state border was in keeping with the grossdeutsch thinking and politics that persisted in Saxony, despite the state's inclusion in a kleindeutsch German Empire.Footnote ⁵¹ It suggested that for decades after German unification, Saxons understood their state and its regions as having a variety of relationships within central Europe, of which affiliation with the German state was only one. Tourists both reflected and were instructed in such beliefs in their patterns of travel.

In the late nineteenth century, tourism became a way for tourists and their organizers to lay claim to territories, to give them meaning, and to connect them to larger ideas, institutions, and communities.Footnote ⁵² Heimat movements used tourism to build regional consciousness, and central European nationalists increasingly considered tourism a tool. In the 1890s, German nationalists in Habsburg Austria were already working to build a specifically “German” tourism to regions they claimed for the German nation. Similarly, tourists in the Habsburg Monarchy's major cities—Vienna, Budapest, and Prague—reframed the central European landscape in nationalist terms in the 1890s.Footnote ⁵³

Saxon regional tourism promoters sometimes shaped their own efforts and attitudes in response to the Bohemian example, especially in using tourism to define national territory. In 1889 Lusatia wrote:

This recommendation was clearly driven in part by local interests in capturing part of the tourist market. But it also reminded readers that the German-Bohemian effort had national importance that extended far outside the region tourists were visiting and even outside Habsburg Austria, and that Saxon efforts might as well.

The influence of Bohemian tourism politics was also evident in the Czech-German linguistic politics that emerged around tourism in the late nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁵ Some Saxon nationalists declared that public use of Czech or other foreign languages was an assault on Germandom with the potential to erode the German meaning of Saxon territories. They worked to impose public linguistic conformity, opposing advertising printed in Czech or Polish. At the same time, Czech visitors and advertisers who targeted them emphasized that the borderland regions were more diverse than nationalists admitted.Footnote ⁵⁶ Tourists learned to endow the places they visited with a variety of national, political, and cultural meanings. Thus, tourists' use of the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands as a common landscape could not fail to have political resonance. Some declared it proof that the landscape was innately German. Others emphasized the importance of its diversity and accessibility rather than national homogeneity.

Nature, Industry, and Landscape, 1878–1914

Heimatler all over central Europe emphasized nature in the landscapes they celebrated. But Saxons faced the dilemma of celebrating a landscape that, while well endowed with mountains and forests, also had more than its share of industrial smokestacks. Still, Saxon Heimatler were undeterred. Far from rejecting industrialization or seeking to juxtapose it with nature, they suggested that their communities were a model of balance between natural landscapes and industrial production.Footnote ⁵⁷ They celebrated manufacturing and craft traditions as part of the regions' cultural landscape. They urged visitors to enjoy the coexistence of nature and human productivity. It is hard to know whether visitors embraced this vision. The town of Eibenstock's advertisement that it had “No factories, no smoke!” demonstrates that some promoters thought they might not.Footnote ⁵⁸

Heimatler tried to minimize the ways in which new industries changed local landscapes. By 1900, modern factories were displacing the regions' small workshops and cottage industries. Craft traditions declined. New factories were bigger and more mechanized than old ones. Workers from farther away needed new housing. All of this led to a wave of new construction. To make matters worse, local industries faced competition from neighboring Bohemia, from Saxony's big cities, and from growing German industrial regions such as the Ruhr.Footnote ⁵⁹

Heimat proponents quickly recognized that these changes threatened to transform the human and natural landscapes they celebrated. They made architecture a focus of discussion and policy-making. They did not object to new industries and factories, but to having their forms imposed from outside. Writers pointed to older factories in the southern regions as exemplars of how to build so that form and function were in harmony with local climatic and cultural conditions. They advocated the use of local building materials and styles. By 1900, industry was a well-accepted part of southern Saxony's tradition, but writers urged new industries to keep in touch with local traditions.Footnote ⁶⁰

Nor were Heimatler alone in this. In 1903, a Saxon Ministry of Finance directive observed, “In different parts of the country various styles of architecture have developed as the result of tradition, climate, and local building materials. It is thus to the detriment, not only of beauty but also of practicality … that a thoughtless imitation of urban architectural styles … has been adopted even in state building projects.” The ministry then took measures to ensure that architects be trained and buildings planned with an eye to local traditions.Footnote ⁶¹

To some degree, Saxon Heimatlers' recommendations were simply practical: building factories with flat roofs in an area that gets heavy winter snows is a poor idea. But they reflected other considerations as well. Southern Saxony's traditional multiplicity of economic endeavors—industry, crafts, agriculture, and mining—resisted dominance by any one. But pressure to control local architectural styles also demonstrated a desire to create a landscape that itself had value. Not only might local people better understand their identities as Saxons and Germans through immersing themselves in that landscape, but increasingly, tourism promoters saw the landscape as a way to draw visitors from farther afield. Thus a variety of considerations led local Heimatler to suggest that in industrial architecture, aesthetic and economic considerations could coexist peacefully.Footnote ⁶²

In giving such attention to architecture, aesthetics, and landscape preservation, Saxon Heimatler and government officials anticipated the emergence of the broader German Heimatschutz movement after 1904.Footnote ⁶³ But unlike activists elsewhere who sought ways to balance industrialization with landscape preservation, turn-of-the-century Saxons suggested that they already had a model for balance.

Saxon Heimat and tourist literature portrayed human productivity in the midst of a spectacular natural world as distinctive of southern Saxony. The Erzgebirgsverein adopted “Glück Auf !,” a phrase that evoked its region's mining traditions, as a greeting and the title of one of its publications. Similarly, Saxon Heimat publications used several kinds of iconography in their graphic depictions of the southern regions. They included images of middle-class visitors admiring mountains, castles, or natural wonders such as the cliffs of the Saxon Switzerland. These images suggested leisure and intimacy with nature and the history embodied in the landscape. Yet alongside these images were those of local people engaged in traditional crafts and industries—peddlers, lace-makers, and miners represented a tradition of skilled work.Footnote ⁶⁴ Indeed by the turn of the century, Saxon Heimatler and industrialists began marketing such products as folk art in order to build markets and tourism for southern Saxony. Finally postcards and tourism publications depicted communities as industrial centers, highlighting local industries while presenting them nestled in forested natural landscapes.Footnote ⁶⁵ Thus, tourist and Heimat literature portrayed the regions as a crossroads between tradition and innovation, industry and nature in which urban life and large-scale industry were distinctly absent. Images were of regions engaged in early industry and manufacturing—producing goods in small workshops with skilled labor. Working people and their communities were part of the natural landscape. At the same time, this landscape offered middle-class visitors leisure, easy travel, well-groomed trails, and tidy villages. Tourist literature promised that modernity, nature, and regional traditions need not be at odds. This image of southern Saxony had resonance, as the German travel writer P. D. Fischer demonstrated when he wrote,“… the many industrial towns of Saxony [are] scattered along long deep valleys up to the crest of the Erzgebirge, and into the heights of the Saxon Switzerland and the Lusatian mountains.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Indeed, Saxon Heimatler argued that tourism and exploration of local landscapes could not only accommodate modernity, but were themselves distinctly modern. As an 1887 article about Nathanael Gottfried Leske's 1785 study of Saxony asserted:

The study of the local and regional was thus not about simple preservation of the past or connection to a mythical German nation, but a sign of engagement with modern science. Identification with, and knowledge of, local landscapes and regions would connect Saxons to the wider worlds of the German nation and modern thought.

Heimatler argued that tourists were active participants in the creation of a modern world, shaping themselves and the regions they visited in their travels. “[The tourist] carries his heart bursting with idealism into nature, and what the first of his kind preached has become scripture to thousands of others … a new creed of higher moral power, the love of forest, cliff, and field.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Tourists symbolized a new era when better transportation and public safety opened the highways and byways to more than the merchants and vagabonds of the past. Thus Heimat literature celebrated the tourist as the personification of new individual, social, national, and economic health.Footnote ⁶⁹

The Emerging Economics of Tourism, 1900–1919

By the eve of the First World War, a variety of Saxons recognized that parts of the Saxon borderlands were in economic decline, and Heimatler rethought the purpose of regional tourism. One of Germany's earliest industrial states, Saxony was, by 1900, losing ground to the heavy industries of the Ruhr. The gradual decline first became evident in the southern borderlands. Modernization brought railroads and tourists, but also began a gradual de-industrialization in some areas. Saxon urban industrial centers such as Chemnitz, Leipzig, and Zwickau increasingly displaced Erzgebirge and Vogtland manufacturing villages. The villages also faced new competition from outside Saxony and even outside Germany. The regions continued to produce a variety of luxury and consumer goods for markets around the world. Plauen lace, Seiffen toys, and artificial flowers from Sebnitz found markets across Europe and the United States. But these products were no longer as profitable as they once had been, falling victim to declining demand, growing international competition, and the perception that Saxon industries were not keeping pace with modern tastes. To remedy this, regional leaders in southern Saxony turned to tourism as a possible antidote.Footnote ⁷⁰

Tourists did not flock to southern Saxony on their own. Although travel to the regions had grown significantly since the 1880s, three decades later visitors were still neither so numerous, nor so well distributed as to revive the flagging economies of the southern borderlands. Heimat organizations such as the Erzgebirgsverein continued to tout the beauties of the southern regions and the health benefits of fresh air. But they also took on more pragmatic projects to encourage tourism, building hiking trails and lookout towers, lobbying for new railway lines between Saxony's cities and the mountains, and expanding and improving such tourist facilities as pensions and restaurants. They understood that human intervention could facilitate access to nature.

By the eve of World War I, the Erzgebirgsverein was trying both to increase the number of tourists who visited and to expand the geography of their visits. The point was to promote and aid the Erzgebirge (and other parts of the Saxon borderlands) as a whole. They saw publicity as the key to expansion. As a 1912 publication explained:

Once again the message was clear: the industrial and craft traditions—long the region's main connection to a wider world—were no longer sufficient. To supplement them, southern Saxony's natural landscapes and the tourism they could attract would win the regions new economic strength and status.

Local branches of the Erzgebirgsverein advertised more, produced guidebooks to their local areas, and printed postcards of local landscapes. In 1910, they organized an Erzgebirge display for a travel exhibition in Berlin.Footnote ⁷² In 1914, they began planning a new museum in the Augustusburg—already an established tourist destination—to highlight less well-known localities in the Erzgebirge. Far from promoting abstract goals of regional pride or national virtue, organizers saw this as an economic effort and promised innkeepers and hoteliers concrete benefits from tourism.Footnote ⁷³ The Saxon state also worked to build tourism. In 1908 the Saxon Railway opened an information office in Berlin, which the Erzgebirgsverein credited (along with its own advertising) with raising the number of visitors not just to Saxony, but to the borderlands in particular.Footnote ⁷⁴

Local officials also began to consider how they could enhance their regions' aesthetic appeal for tourists in their search for the natural and the picturesque. In May 1914, the mayor of Lauter urged communities in his district to reshape their local landscapes to make them both more “natural” and more convenient for tourists. Communities needed a good water supply, clean streets, and natural beauty. He urged his listeners to preserve old trees and plant new ones in an effort to give communities the “picturesque” quality that tourists wanted, attracting birds and enhancing the impression that the natural landscape defined the district. He noted that old Germanic mythology endowed trees with souls, implying that catering to tourists' desires could coincide with national virtue.Footnote ⁷⁵ At the same time, modern conveniences were as important as charming views. Travelers wanted clean sheets, good food, and reliable transportation. Only if those were available would they come to southern Saxony and learn to value it.

By 1914, after three decades of development, significant numbers of Saxons had embraced Heimat and tourism in southern Saxony. The Erzgebirgsverein, one of the most prominent, but not the only organization in Saxony pursuing these agendas, boasted nearly 18,000 members.Footnote ⁷⁶ Enthusiasm for Saxony's southern landscapes and efforts to draw visitors to the regions were clearly on the rise.

But in the summer of 1914, Germany's entry into World War I dashed Saxon tourism promoters' hopes for rapid economic revival in the borderlands. The war turned southern Saxony's creeping economic decline into abrupt crisis. It cut faltering industries off from international markets and obliterated domestic demand for luxury goods, such as lace and toys. Craft and industrial traditions that had been sources of regional pride became symbols of poverty. People in the southern regions soon faced more severe unemployment and hunger than in most of Germany.Footnote ⁷⁷

Tourism promoters responded to the war by redefining their audience. Southern Saxony's economic difficulties alone made wartime seem an unlikely moment to promote tourism. But for some communities, the war's economic toll made developing tourism more important than ever. They made new efforts to attract visitors from outside Saxony, unlike the Heimat organizers of the 1880s who had seen Saxons as their primary audience. The Lauter city council placed ads in newspapers in Leipzig and Berlin, more communities printed postcards of local sights, and organizers made new efforts to train local people who rented rooms to tourists to meet basic standards of cleanliness and comfort. In 1918, an Erzgebirge tourism association proposed publishing their own guidebook on the region, observing that existing travel guides described the region as prone to fog and rain, which the association feared might discourage visitors.Footnote ⁷⁸ So, while they could not actually change local weather, they saw no need to warn people about it.

Such efforts won southern Saxony some visitors. Perhaps the war even encouraged people who might otherwise have traveled farther afield to vacation closer to home. But in the post-war years, regional tourism advocates' efforts appear to have finally paid off. By the mid-1920s tourism was growing with the aid of more publicity, transportation, and facilities,Footnote ⁷⁹ and whole new segments of society were joining in.

Interwar Tourism

After the war, tourism promoters shifted their focus, arguments, and audience dramatically. In the 1920s, Saxons embraced tourism as an economic resource, and Heimat tourism promotion expanded to include not only established middle-class Heimatler, but also business owners, and local and state officials. In the 1930s, promoters began to urge tourists themselves to consider Saxony's economic troubles and increasingly peripheral status in the Reich a reason to visit.Footnote ⁸⁰ At the same time they did so by addressing familiar themes: the importance of industry and the Bohemian (by then the Czechoslovak) border to southern Saxon regions.

The shift reflected a profound change in tourism promoters' understandings of the economic, political, and cultural significance of the landscapes they championed in the German Reich and in central Europe. In 1925, Siegfried Störzner recommended a mountain to hikers, noting that it was “still too little visited and appreciated by tourists.”Footnote ⁸¹ Many Saxons appear to have taken a similar view of their southern regions as a whole during the late 1920s and 1930s. Once a center of production for markets around the world, southern Saxony had become a political and economic periphery. By the 1930s, efforts to attract tourists were not only motivated by economic need, but were a way to get the rest of Germany to recognize the borderlands as important. The role of tourism became the reverse of what it had been in the 1880s. It was no longer a way to connect local people to their own landscape and thus to a larger German nation, but to get the larger German community to pay attention to the locality.

Tourism promoters continued to encourage their fellow Saxons to visit the southern borderlands for reasons of health or regional and national consciousness. But their primary efforts now focused on building tourism's economic potential for the southern regions and attracting visitors from the rest of Germany, thereby cementing the strategy that had begun to emerge in the last years before the war.

In the early 1920s winning new visitors was a daunting task. World War I had devastated the already vulnerable southern Saxon economies, and during the 1920s, the regions continued to have higher rates of unemployment, poverty, and political unrest than the rest of Germany.Footnote ⁸² Food and housing were in shorter supply than elsewhere in Germany, and trains were few, unreliable, and crowded. Under such conditions, local promoters and governments found attracting tourists an uphill battle.Footnote ⁸³ Visitors expected to stay in clean, comfortable hotels and to eat in restaurants. In 1920, the Zwörnitztaler Anzeiger warned that exorbitant prices and corruption in food distribution threatened Saxon hotels' reputations.Footnote ⁸⁴ Organizations such as the Erzgebirgsverein recognized that now, more than ever, attractive facilities were crucial to winning admirers of their landscapes and making tourism profitable. They repaired lookout towers and expanded guesthouses to accommodate more visitors. In the economic crisis of the early 1920s, the Erzgebirgsverein asked its branches for donations to support a variety of local projects, with the idea that a good regional network of tourist facilities was in everyone's interest.Footnote ⁸⁵ Through all this, Heimat literature continued to emphasize the diversity of Saxony's landscapes. As a 1925 article on Lusatia argued, “The wonderful diversity… that is so characteristic of our Saxony as a whole is especially true for Lusatia.”Footnote ⁸⁶

Organizations such as the Erzgebirgsverein, regional officials, and local businesspeople further sought to expand tourism by offering new activities and destinations, branching out from fair-weather hiking to winter sports, and encouraging year-round tourist traffic. Professor Fritz Eckardt admonished readers of Der Fahrtgesell that there was no such thing as bad weather for hiking.Footnote ⁸⁷ In 1925, a new office in the Dresden train station advised tourists about where to go, often directing those interested in hiking or skiing to the southern borderlands.Footnote ⁸⁸ In 1926, the Erzgebirgsverein organized a trip to the region for journalists from across Germany to further raise the region's profile in the national press. The effort was rewarded by articles such as that in the Neue Preussische Kreuzzeitung:

Promoters also found new ways to pool their efforts. In 1931, the associations Lusatia, the Gebirgsverein für die sächsische Schweiz, the Erzgebirgsverein, and the Gebirgsverein für das Vogtland jointly created a Saxon tourism and Heimat association with more than 50,000 members.Footnote ⁹⁰ In the interwar period, tourist numbers grew both because of Saxon promoters' efforts and because of broader expansion of tourism in Weimar Germany, driven by working-class people's dramatically greater vacation time and by a recognition of the economic possibilities of mass tourism.Footnote ⁹¹

Tourists wanted to visit picturesque landscapes, and in the early 1920s, tourism promoters suddenly found themselves fighting to preserve those landscapes from new threats. The region's post-war economic problems encouraged local people to harvest firewood and other forest resources, contributing to environmental degradation, and undermined tourism promoters' efforts to keep hiking trails in good repair for “friends of nature.” Heimatler began calling for the creation of nature reserves throughout southern Saxony, including one in the Saxon Switzerland. As Curt Müller argued in 1925, the southern Saxon landscape needed to be preserved because it had cultural and natural significance for everyone. Tourism forged a bond among modern society, local landscapes, and people's experiences of nature.Footnote ⁹²

World War I also undermined the easy community between Saxony and Bohemia that tourism and shared landscapes had helped create. In the early 1920s, tighter state control of Germany's borders and tense relations with other countries, including the new neighbor state of Czechoslovakia, curtailed tourist traffic. Tourism proponents were quick to object.Footnote ⁹³ Because many Saxons and tourists conceived of southern Saxony and northern Bohemia as a single Heimat and tourist region, locals and travelers again tried to cross the border to visit, hike, and shop as soon as the war was over. In 1920, such crossings were officially illegal, but local norms and local officials' and businesspeoples' desire to keep tourists happy often trumped official German and Czechoslovak policies. Saxon border officials eased restrictions, ignoring requirements for photographs and signatures when they issued border passes. Some German newspapers advertised that tourists could cross the border without passports, and district officials petitioned the Saxon government in Dresden to sanction a tourist border pass that would both boost regional tourism and end evasions of the law.Footnote ⁹⁴

In the wake of the war some Heimatler even invoked grossdeutsch ideas by imagining a day when northern Bohemian communities might become part of Saxony. A 1920 article about efforts to create nature preserves declared:

Similarly, a 1924 songbook published by the Erzgebirgsverein included a song that exhorted, “Germans, reach out your hands into Austria … the German fatherland lies not only within reach of the Rhine, [but] on the green banks of the Danube … Germans take each other's hands, on the Danube and on the Rhine.”Footnote ⁹⁶ They reminded people that the German nation still extended beyond the boundaries of the German state.

In the 1920s, southern Saxon tourism literature continued to recognize shared border landscapes, but it suggested that state intervention was dividing these lands for tourists. A 1925 article reminded readers that the Saxon Vogtland was only a part of the historic Vogtland, which included territory in Bohemia and Bavaria: “In the tiny Bohemian community of Kaiserhammer … the three borders come together. Visitors are shown with pride that only a small stream separates them. The rulers of the three states could sit down to a meal together while each remained in his own territory.” But the author lamented that new efforts to wipe out diversity threatened to erase this landscape.Footnote ⁹⁷ Even as late as 1929 the travel writer Fritz Günther wrote, “The Bohemian-Saxon Switzerland is unquestionably one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. … Saxony and its neighbor, northern Bohemia, share equally in the beauty of this landscape.” But while the landscapes themselves remained clearly interconnected, he observed that border police had grown strict.Footnote ⁹⁸ Thus while regional tourism promoters still sometimes emphasized the interconnection of cross-border landscapes in the 1920s, they also pointed out the ways in which political borders increasingly divided those landscapes for tourists. Such divisions contributed to a dramatic fall in the number of foreign visitors to southern Saxony.Footnote ⁹⁹

In the 1920s, tourism promoters began to bring their conception of the Heimat and tourist regions they promoted in line with the borders of the German state. And practical experience made many tourists do the same. As Hans Rinke wrote in 1925:

Rinke wanted to visit Bohemia and saw it as part of his Heimat region, but was no longer able to go there often. Although economic considerations discouraged Rinke in 1925, only a few years later, cross-border price differentials attracted growing numbers of tourists from the German Reich to Bohemia. In 1928, for example, a Saxon border official reported that although tourist traffic was heavy near Schwarzenberg, most travelers were headed to less expensive northern Bohemia, rather than staying in the Saxon borderlands.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In summer 1929, a Gendarme in Schwarzenberg reported that there was heavy automobile traffic at local border crossings, and even Saxon schoolteachers were taking class trips to Czechoslovakia. Tourists to Czechoslovakia added insult to injury by smuggling goods back into Saxony, and kicking up dust with their cars that obscured views of the countryside.Footnote ¹⁰² Although cross-border tourist traffic continued in the interwar period, rather than contributing to a sense of cross-border community and common cause, it undermined southern Saxon shopkeepers and hoteliers and convinced Saxon tourism promoters that they needed to keep tourists on their side of the border. The journal Lusatia, which had once served organizations on both sides, now represented only the Saxon Oberlausitz.Footnote ¹⁰³ By the 1920s, the very similarities of the two areas that had once made local people regard the political border as unimportant for tourists and local communities, now led local officials and businesses on both sides to compete for tourists, rather than conceiving of a shared cross-border region.

Economic considerations were clearly central to promoters' models of southern Saxon tourism in the 1920s, and they created a new vision of the southern regions as places characterized by a battle for scarce resources. But the regions' economic interests and those of the tourists were often at odds. Thus by the late 1920s, Heimat and tourist literature again began emphasizing the national implications of tourism. In 1927, Glückauf reported that Czechs perceived new guesthouses in the Saxon borderlands as another attempt to claim the region, including perhaps parts of northern Bohemia, for the German nation. Glückauf implied that this idea proved that the Czechs intended to do the same in “German” areas of northern Bohemia, and perhaps even in Saxony.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ German visitors were needed to combat the Czech threat.

Political Legitimacy through Tourism in the 1930s

By the early 1930s, Saxony attracted attention from across the Reich: it had now become known for its suffering industries, high unemployment, and radicalized politics including, before 1933, vigorous communist and Nazi organizations in the state's large cities and in the southern borderlands. But to most observers, these were hardly positive attributes. Indeed, after Hitler's rise to power, southern Saxony's proximity to the Czechoslovak border and its ongoing difficulties made the Nazis decide not to invest in the area as they did with labor programs and military production elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Thus, by 1931, and increasingly after the Nazi rise to power, Saxons reframed their promotion of tourism yet again, emphasizing their significance as a borderland in the German Reich and nation. Borderland status was no longer limited to the Saxony's southern territories, but expanded to include the state as a whole. Even the Saxon Nazi party made efforts to highlight Saxon products, especially the handicrafts of the south, to boost the state's image on the national stage.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Saxon Heimatler tried to engage with the new political era. In 1935, the annual report of a branch of the Erzgebirgsverein included the observation:

The organization had lost members. Perhaps ongoing economic problems made some members focus their efforts elsewhere. Perhaps some found the increasing Nazi influence on the organization off-putting. Certainly the organization had changed under the new regime with pressure to conform to Nazi leadership and rhetoric. But the Erzgebirgsverein leadership also seized on Nazism as an opportunity to expand the organization's influence, even at the expense of regional autonomy, again adapting its methods to altered political circumstances.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

In general the mid-1930s saw another upswing in efforts by Saxon organizations, the Saxon state, and the German central government to build tourism in southern Saxony.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The Depression had worsened an already bad economic situation in the borderlands. But despite the decline in tourism during the Depression, Saxons, and increasingly the German government, continued to treat it as a long-term replacement for their failing industries.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Articles extolling Saxony's virtues appeared across Germany. In this effort to reach a broader German audience than ever before, writers again tackled what they increasingly treated as the contradiction between Saxony's role as a (decaying) industrial center and the appeal of its natural landscapes in the south. In the 1920s and 1930s, tours of Sebnitz artificial flower workshops and the Seiffen toy industry museum showed visitors local crafts as artifacts of a picturesque, but increasingly irrelevant, manufacturing past.Footnote ¹¹¹ Some Heimatler continued to point out the interplay of nature and industry in southern Saxon landscapes. In 1931, the journal Lusatia reminded its readers that historically “Our Lusatia won a respected place in the German Fatherland through its linen and damask … even today the forests, farms, and industries are naturally interwoven, the villages and cities conform to their natural surroundings.”Footnote ¹¹² But in 1935 the Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten bemoaned the fact that,“… even inside [Germany's] borders there are people who imagine Saxony as nothing but industrial smokestacks.”Footnote ¹¹³ A 1934 article in the Stuttgarter Neues Tageblatt tried to counter such impressions, insisting that friends of nature would revel in the picturesque mountains and valleys of the Erzgebirge, and that the land's mineral wealth made possible numerous spas as well as mines. All this appeal, the article assured readers, was capped by Dresden's cultural treasures. Far from shortcomings, Saxony's diverse offerings meant that visitors could have a bit of everything: health, beauty, nature, and culture.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Another 1935 article asserted that Germans were embracing this message: “… we now have areas in Saxony where tourism is just as important to the local economy as industry … this development demonstrates that throughout Germany and abroad Saxony is no longer considered an industrial center, but is increasingly valued as a tourist destination.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

As we have seen, Saxon tourism promoters had long claimed that visitors should understand the southern regions' combination of industry, nature, and culture as crucial to their identities. Yet the terms in which these characteristics were discussed had changed dramatically. In the 1930s, factories, it seems, were peripheral elements of the southern Saxon landscape that needed to be explained away. Southern Saxony's industries, though still integral to the regions' identities, appeared as historical remnants rather than as beacons of modernity.

By the 1930s tourism became a means for securing national territory and reaffirming regions' German national identities. German nationalists and the Saxon government made new calls for tourism, declaring southern Saxony the last bulwark of the German state and culture against the Czechs, and a critical site in the struggle between German and Slavic civilizations.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The Saxon government began making the case to the Reich government and the German public that Saxony was an endangered borderland.Footnote ¹¹⁷ And promoters transformed tourism from an economic resource to a necessity, urging tourists to consider Saxony's economic troubles and increasingly peripheral status in the Reich as a reason to visit its southern territories. As the Neue Leipziger Zeitung declared in 1935, “Saxony is a borderland, and now more than ever deserves to be valued for what it really is … On behalf of the German Volk [tourism] must awaken and deepen the unity of the German people.” While in 1936, the Dresdner Nachrichten asserted, “It is a joy to see that the Erzgebirge, the Vogtland, and the Saxon Switzerland are more in demand as travel destinations today than ever before. Nevertheless, it is still necessary to redouble our efforts to promote Saxony as a beautiful borderland throughout Germany.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

Nazi ideology and institutions reinforced Saxon borderland rhetoric and local efforts to promote tourism, but shifted control of tourism promotion out of the hands of regional actors. Nazi ideology bolstered earlier efforts at shaping the landscape for tourism,Footnote ¹¹⁹ and the Nazi state began to deliver tourists to Saxony by the trainload. In 1934, the Nazis introduced the Strength through Joy movement, which gave working-class Germans a chance to vacation on state-subsidized trips. At first, such trips were within Germany. Rather than teaching local populations to value the German nation and state through their home regions, Strength through Joy asserted that Germans everywhere should be interested in the various regions and Volksstämme (branches of the Volk). Part of preserving German culture, writers argued, was to get to know it in all its variants. One article asserted, “Whosoever wishes to live a full life must travel … But one need not think of foreign lands … the wonderland of the Heimat is so diverse that it would be a sin to neglect it in favor of foreign lands. Doesn't Germany have gorgeous forests, picturesque cities, … romantic palaces, and castles enough?”Footnote ¹²⁰

Strength through Joy made the Saxon borderlands a destination for its trips from the beginning. Strength through Joy trips often visited “endangered” borderland areas with the idea of enlisting broad national support to protect those regions.Footnote ¹²¹ Germans from elsewhere got to see the southern Saxon landscape firsthand, to appreciate its beauties, and to ponder its significance to the Reich. Strength through Joy also furthered a trend in tourism that had begun in the Weimar period—the growth of working-class as well as middle-class participation. The Erzgebirgsverein and other established Saxon tourism organizations began coordinating their efforts with the national Strength through Joy organization. The Zittauer Morgenzeitung observed that even with central government support it remained difficult to convince Germans to visit unfamiliar areas. But the paper concluded, “Those who came were impressed by the beauty of our landscape.”Footnote ¹²² The Adorfer Grenzbote struck a similarly mixed note of optimism and caution when it was announced that Strength through Joy trips were going to begin visiting the area. The paper told its readers that the program would bring lots of visitors, but that they should not expect dramatic improvements at first.Footnote ¹²³ After more than twenty years of wooing tourists for economic reasons, at least some Saxons had become wary of tourism's promise as a cure-all.

Perhaps this skepticism, born of long experience, led tourism promoters to pursue as many possible kinds of tourists as they could think of. Under the Nazis, Saxon tourism promoters, in a variation of their nineteenth-century strategies, began trying to lure fellow Saxons who had moved to other regions or countries back to the Heimat as visitors. After years of new mobility had sent Germans to all corners of the Reich and the world, in 1935, Saxon organizers tried to encourage Saxon emigrants to return to their homeland as visitors. They declared that “all Saxons who now live abroad, far from their Heimat … should visit Saxony in the summer of 1935 and spend weeks of relaxation in the beautiful Saxon landscape.” Such visitors would both benefit from contact with the Heimat and contribute to its economic well-being through their visits.Footnote ¹²⁴ The Dresden branch of the Organization of Germans Abroad used Heimat newsletters to keep emigrants around the world, but especially those in the United States, Mexico, and South America, in touch with Saxon regional identities as well as the ideas of Nazi Germany.Footnote ¹²⁵ Thus Heimat and the Saxon landscape itself became tools for building German national and political consciousness around the world as well as for maintaining regional affinities among Germans at home and abroad.