From Nordic Romanticism to Nordic Modernity: Danish Tourist Brochures in Nazi Germany, 1929–39

Abstract

This article examines Danish tourist brochures and other promotional material distributed in Germany from 1929–39. Through an analysis of a number of publications, it traces how the Tourist Association of Denmark invoked tourist imaginaries related to Nordic race theory and Nordic romanticism in the material in a variety of ways throughout the decade. Ultimately, however, it is shown that a certain discourse of Nordic modernity would come to dominate towards the end of the 1930s, also in the promotional material distributed in Nazi Germany, a society otherwise highly susceptible to the visual language of Nordic romanticism and Nordic race theory. Thus, the postwar image of the social democratic Norden was powerful already in the tourist marketers' negotiations of national self-identification and belonging during the last pre-war years.