Mapping Fame in the Tourist Circuit: Official Itineraries and Spatial Diversions

By the early twentieth century, ‘celebrity tourism’ was well established in Germany, with ordinary citizens eager to come into contact with the famous. They sought out dead heroes by visiting historic homes and monuments. They approached live celebrities in performance venues, but also in their private homes, even stalking them in restaurants and public parks if all else failed. And they memorialized their encounters by purchasing tourist souvenirs. They did so within an established tourist industry, in which the forces of order and consumerism fashioned ideal itineraries, often based on official ideologies, which tourists were meant to follow. Officials erected statues at key points in the urban landscape to signal which historical and national celebrities were meant to be honored. Guidebooks like Baedekers determined which cultural institutions, and by extension, which cultural ideals, were worthy of note. Newspapers published stories of celebrities’ lifestyles to encourage social emulation and identification. But tourists also manipulated this constructed order. In their spatial practices, they deviated from the normative parameters set out in official sources, distorting, abandoning, exaggerating and otherwise creating self-referential ambiguities within that order. Whether scratching their names onto the wooden beams of Shakespeare’s house (called “our Shakespeare” by many Germans), choosing to visit one historic house over another, or chasing the Kaiser on his vacation tours down the Nile river, tourists enunciated what they thought was culturally important and socially acceptable. Such ‘touristic speech acts’ did not always correspond to official visions of nationalist and social hierarchy. Instead, they evinced a multifaceted experience of authority, legitimacy, and resistance. This paper counterpoises official intentions in acclaiming famous individuals with actual tourist practices. It examines how official intentions were appropriated, evaded, undermined, and/or accepted as tourists moved through the celebrity circuit.