The Cold War, Modernity, and Mass Tourism: The Drive to “Meet World Standards” at East Germany’s Tourism Information Center

This paper draws on the archival records of Berlin-Information, the department in charge of tourism promotion and infrastructure in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) capital, East Berlin, to examine the techniques of design and display in East Berlin's main tourist information center. Using East Berlin's former T.V. Tower Information Center as a case study, this paper will explore the historical foundations of the technologies of display and design at the tourist information centers, which increasingly appeared at tourist destinations in the capitalist and socialist states of Europe after the Second World War. The center's arrangement and choice of display materials reflected the GDR's preoccupation with appearing modern by meeting what they refer to as “world standards” of tourism informational technology. According to the GDR's Information Center planners, “world standards” meant incorporating electronic and acoustic devices, illumination, film and large format photography, a stress on self-service and on making efficient, rational use of the visitor's time. By the 1970s, I suggest, tourism information centers throughout Europe consciously employed remarkably similar forms of display and self-promotion, which drew on several nineteenth-century European institutions of exhibition (the “traditional” museum, the department store and world fairs) and increasingly postwar American innovations (especially the “new” museum). I conclude that the Cold War competition between the socialist and capitalist spheres of influence encouraged East German tourism leaders to conform to an increasingly standardized, and ultimately Americanized, vision of tourist industry practices. This, in turn, made it difficult for the GDR to convince visitors from Western Europe and North America that the GDR offered a uniquely socialist form of tourism and not merely a poor imitation of capitalist tourist practices.