Semmens draws upon a range of documentary records including those of various tourism organisations for Berlin, Bavaria, Weimar and the Black Forest, publications for tourists such as brochures and guidebooks, and eclectic items ranging from souvenirs to travel journals. There are seven illustrations, and a lengthy bibliography and index. The introduction and conclusion provide helpful summaries of the arguments, and the sub-conclusions to each chapter are also reader-friendly, rendering this a text which could easily be drawn upon for suggested readings in course design. The author's style is very readable, exhibiting a love of alliteration, although some of the German translations need revision: private quarters do not 'stand' at your disposal in English, for example (p.

These two contrasting approaches are explored in Seeing Hitler's Germany through eight chapters which cover Gleichschaltung Nazi tourist culture, 'normal' (non-Nazi) tourist culture commercial tourism (including Kraft durch Freude (KdF), the Strength through Joy organisation) international tourism and tourism at war. Tourism in the Third Reich was thus imbued with Nazi content, but appeared also to offer a holiday from it. ( 1 ) Continuities with pre-Nazi tourist culture were hence not only countenanced but even promoted by a regime eager to present the semblance of a society both permeated but also untouched by Nazification. In her article 'Travel in Merry Germany', the author also argued that 'an overtly Nazified tourist culture explicitly proclaimed the Nazis' racist, nationalist and imperialist aims, while, at the same time, a seemingly 'normal' tourist culture effectively masked them'. The German tourist industry had a similarly paradoxical character, on the one hand permeated by Nazi ideology, on the other, deliberately apparently devoid of it.

The author shows that the strength of the regime lay partly in its willingness to countenance such paradoxes, coupled with its sensitivity to the development and expectations of modern consumer culture. Semmens defends her area of research as providing a 'prism into the regime' and its combination of compulsion and conciliation, coercion and compromise. Yet such a justification is hardly necessary when it is the coexistence of the speakable with the unspeakable which constitutes both one of the fascinations and one of the foundations of the Third Reich. Does the study of normality require justification when the latter coexists with atrocity? Semmens's study of tourism in the Third Reich begins on a defensive note, assuring the reader of the author's sensitivity to 'the enduring dissonance between holidays and horror, vacations and violence, tourism and terror' (p.

Travellers to the third reich