The cover of Revisiting Austria shows a 1956 advertisement for the Austrian post bus. It features a beaming, winking, rosy-cheeked young mailman with a daisy behind his ear, holding up his mail bag, which has the image of a yellow bus sneaking through an Alpine landscape imposed on it. The scene is benign, even kitschy. This 1950s Heimatkultur of folklore and landscape was instrumental in creating both an Austrian tourist industry and an Austrian national identity separate to the German identity. By the 1980s, writers such as Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, and Elfriede Jelinek began criticizing the “touristy” image of mountains and meadows as a “Potemkin façade,” a shiny veneer hiding the country's complicity in Nazi crimes. Gundolf Graml acknowledges the criticism's role in correcting the skewed notion of Austria as Hitler's “first victim,” but he argues that it has led to a neglect of tourism's “potential role as a discursive arena for both the formation and analysis of (post)modern identity processes” (2). He discusses these processes based on eight very varied case studies: the state's tourism policies in the late 1940s and early 1950s, two influential Heimat films from the 1950s, the culture of remembrance realized as part of Linz's status as European Capital of Culture in 2009 (“Linz09”), Jelinek's novel The Children of the Dead, Christoph Ransmayr's novel The Dog King, the 1998 film Suzie Washington, and the Salzburg tourist industry based on the 1965 Hollywood film The Sound of Music.

Graml's book is wide-ranging, interdisciplinary, and often thought-provoking—but also frustrating. The first, most historiographical chapter on state building and tourism in the early postwar period sets the scene well. It shows how practices and representations of tourism allowed a new, purportedly anti-Nazi Austrian reality, while affirming many racist tropes—such as the discursive division of foreigners into good tourists and bad displaced persons. The final, almost anthropological chapter on the Sound of Music tourist industry in Salzburg demonstrates how supposedly inauthentic and lowbrow practices and narratives, a frequent characterization of both tourism in general and the Sound of Music in particular, create authentic experiences of belonging and identity for both visitors and locals. Graml's argument that this tourism is a new incarnation of the supposedly highbrow and cultured Mozart tourism in Salzburg is convincing.

However, readers expecting an analytic and chronological discussion of the history of tourism in postwar Austria will be disappointed. Graml states that he did not want to write a history of Austrian tourism or a comprehensive survey of cultural texts about the topic. Rather, his aim is to discuss tourism's role in the processes of creating postwar Austrian identities. Nonetheless, at least a cursory overview of the history of Austrian tourism after 1945 to provide context for the chronologically and thematically very diverse case studies is sorely lacking. More significantly, it remains unclear what Graml means exactly when he talks about tourism. The book's middle part, which comprises the chapters on Linz09 and the novels by Jelinek and Ransmayr, is an often insightful discussion of the cultures of remembering the Holocaust in Austria beginning in the 1990s. But it is hardly about tourism. To be sure, many tourists visited Linz when it was Capital of Culture, and both novels are primarily set in hotels in the Austrian Alps. But this is tangential to Graml's discussion. It is emblematic that his definition of the “discourse of tourism” is more than vague: “a broad range of cultural texts that engage with the connection between tourism and Austrian-ness in one form or another” (11).

This also means that the book does not come together as a monograph but remains a series of loosely linked essays. Graml's choice to place a separate bibliography at the end of every chapter suggests that this is probably intentional. But given that the framework of tourism is understood so loosely, there is little to hold the narrative together. Even the few arguments used to connect across chapters do not always hold up. Graml repeatedly argues that fiction can be more powerful than documentary narratives to convey affective remembrance. He illustrates this point by blaming the exaggeration of Holocaust victim numbers in Linz09 installations on a misguided attempt at creating affect. Given that he provides no evidence that this was the reason for what were clearly factual errors, this is not a convincing causation. He surely cannot (and does not) allege that academic historians are inherently prone to cheap sensationalism.

Despite its weaknesses, Revisiting Austria is an important contribution to the body of work on postwar memory. Readers interested in tourism per se will find it much less relevant than its title suggests. Tourism—in the form of the rosy-cheeked mailman of the book's cover—once again becomes a façade for something rather different.