Navigating Nature’s Transitions: the Bohemian Forest and Its Temporalities in Early Tourist Literature

Abstract

The article analyses the temporalities attributed by tourism-related literature to transitions of the environment of the Bohemian Forest in the second half of the long 19th century, with a special focus on the gales and bark beetle outbreak that occurred in the 1860s and 1870s. The expansion of both individual and organised tourism in the region from the late 1870s aligned with its economic decline, which followed a period of rapid development associated with eliminating the damage caused by the outbreak, an occurrence that severely affected the health of the forest and the inhabitants of the Bohemian Forest region. The article suggests that tourism acted as a resilience strategy, enabling adaptation to socio-economic uncertainties engendered by living in a more-than-human world. In addition to nationalist motives, the perception of nature and its transitions played a key role in the establishment of tourism in the region, which was often characterised by its forests.