This book takes us on a trip back to the time when tourism was on the road from infancy, when traveling for fun was only affordable for the privileged few, to adolescence, when the rising middle class started becoming involved in the tourism trade. Its starting point is Austria-Hungary's multiethnic and multi-confessional composition—which has been carefully studied by historians for its political and cultural consequences—and how it offered its tourists a remarkable range of exotics within a relatively short radius. It took only a few hours to travel by the imperial-and-royal trains and to eventually continue on foot, horseback, or (eventually) by car into the mountains. Mental, cultural, and linguistic differences between various countries and provinces of the empire, we are reminded, were greater than the spatial distance, which was quickly shrinking due to technological progress.

However, it is the ideology attached to tourism, as represented on postcards and in the press, museums, and most remarkably, travel guides, rather than the experience of traveling itself that is under consideration in this book. Zwischen Exotik und Vertrautem suggests that Austro-Hungarian tourists typically preferred—or, more precisely, were expected to prefer—travels within the borders of their national culture and, eventually, to what they perceived as “civilized” destinations. Unsurprisingly, the book claims that people were supposed to get to know their country to understand its greatness. The majority of studies the book encompasses focus on the ways in which members of the national elites (German, Czech, Polish, Hungarian, and Croatian) encouraged their compatriots to explore their own land, its curiosities, and monuments, testifying to its beauty and glory. Exotics, it appears, were recommended in relatively small doses, preferably as mountainous folklore.

Like it or not, the majority of essays tell one story in various landscapes. The chapter by Martina Thomsen informs us that the German Baedekers praised what was supposed to be German in Prague and disregarded all that smelled of Czechs, whereas the Czech ones did the opposite, even if they were describing the same street. The essays by Hanna Kozińska-Witt, Alexander Vari, Pieter M. Judson, and Peter Jordan also suggest that Cracow, Budapest, the Adriatic, and all corners of the ex-Habsburg lands inhabited by ethnic Germans were predominantly described, and advertised, as national destinations. The study on Bukovina by Andrei Corbea-Hoisie argues that this remote province enjoyed some interest among the German-Austrian public, exactly because of the alleged influences of the German culture there, and some modern infrastructure. Christoph Mick's essay on Galicia claims that Polish guides recommended it, whereas a famous German author Karl Emil Franzos strongly discouraged any civilized person against visiting this “half-Asian” region. (It seems to me, however, that Mick's idea of comparing just two sources, belonging to different genres and epochs, deserves little credit.) One conclusion that results from such an attitude is that, perhaps paradoxically, the breakdown of Austria-Hungary and the installment of passport controls and duties on the borders of its successor states was not a major blow for tourism in the region.

Like many multiauthored collections of essays, this book stresses conceptualization and neglects factual information. What it generally lacks are testimonies of the tourists themselves or some other independent observers, so we are left wondering how they behaved and if they actually felt what they were expected to feel by the authors of the analyzed sources. Hardly any attempt has been made to estimate the numbers of tourists, the most frequently visited destinations, or the costs of transportation and accommodation. Only the last essay by Jan Štemberk on the motorized tourists of interwar Czechoslovakia provides us with data of this sort. Despite inspiring remarks by Rudolf Jaworski in the introduction, it also remains quite unclear who were the people under consideration in the book. (Dieter J. Hecht's essay on Bosnia, brilliant as it is, regarding conscripts doing their service in the region as “pioneers of tourism” does not help in this respect.) Overall, the book seems to be a chapter in the history of Central European cultural nationalism rather than of tourism as such, and it certainly demonstrates that the two were strongly interrelated. It seems to be a good starting point for readers who search for destinations not included in the Baedekers.