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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the role of time in early nature-based tourism, focusing on the transnational region of the Bavarian and Bohemian Forest before World War II, and how it influenced tourist practices and tourist-forest relationships.

Paper long abstract:

“Among all mountains of Europe, the Bohemian Forest is distinguished by the greatness and magnificence of its forests,” begins the preface of a German tourist guide to the transnational region of the Bohemian and Bavarian Forest from 1888. The forest seems to be the distinctive factor of the region. Most of the Czech and German guidebooks, other tourism-related literature as well as Heimatkunde publications from the end of the 19th century emphasize its woods and forests as the main character feature.

Being the key touristic appeal of the region, the forest was imagined, observed, experienced, and altered by the tourists, their clubs and their activities, who were thus confronted with its transformations of different temporalities – those perceived as cyclical such as seasonal changes; those perceived as one-of-a-kind events such as the bark beetle outbreak in the 1870s; and those perceived as not being transitions at all, confirming the desirable “ancient” status of the forest (Hořejší 2017).

The proposed paper will investigate, what role time played in tourism in the Bohemian and Bavarian Forest in the late 19th and early 20th century, how it influenced tourist practices, and most importantly, what impact it had on relating of the tourists to the forest. That allows to review the current nationalism-focused literature on the topic of tourism in the region (Heller 1995, Maur 2006, Judson 2006) and to shift towards the broadly understood environmental history of tourism, inspired by the environmental anthropology of the forest (Blavascunas 2020, Mathews 2022).