ABC of Travel

In the 21st century, travelling has become part of everyday life. It’s the subject of communication everywhere: on blogs and through photos shared online, in travel literature, documentaries and commercial media. But when and how did travel become such a central topic? To mark its 150th anniversary, in 2018 the Kunstbibliothek Berlin investigated this question in an exhibition. It set out on a voyage of discovery through its many different collections and gathered together works from all areas – architecture, book art, photography, graphic design and fashion design – to create an ABC of Travel. The panorama spans from mediaeval pilgrimages to expeditions in the age of colonialism and humanistic Grand Tours, through to the jet-setting and flashy advertising of the mass tourism of the 20th century.

Travelling was long reserved to explorers, researchers, merchants and the nobility. It was their reports which, to the masses, provided insights into foreign countries, people and customs. They shaped the conception of the world. At the same time, today’s knowledge about the history of travelling is informed by this “literary cartography”, which began in antiquity and reached a high-point in the seventeenth century. The drive to explore the world during the European Renaissance, which was also the time of the invention of the letterpress, led to a veritable explosion of travelling literature. The white spots of the real and the mental world map filled with images, and the resulting world view was undeniably Eurocentric. Travelogues of those days occupy the narrow ground between adventurous discovery and the colonial conquest of “new” continents.

Can you imagine travelling without a map? City maps and road maps help us plan our routes and find our destination. The development of cartography is closely related to travelling. Even in the Middle Ages, cosmographers made use of knowledge from expeditions. The age of sail and the “discovery of America” gave rise to modern cartography: In the sixteenth century, the first globes and atlases were developed and new maps were published in collections of travelogues.

The nature of a journey is profoundly influenced by the means of transport. Not only does it determine the efficiency and comfort of travelling on a given route but it will often define the route itself. Until around 1800, travellers going long distances relied on horses, carriages and sailing ships. In the nineteenth century, not only was industrialization revolutionary, but transportation underwent dramatic changes as well: Motorized ships allowed for sea voyages that did not rely on the wind, while steam-powered trains greatly increased both comfort and speed. The steamship and the railroad signalled the advent of mass transportation. The new transocean lines and the development of the rail network in many countries around the world led to a rapid increase in the number of travellers. Going on a journey was now affordable even for the less well-heeled, and it was losing some of its prestige. As a counter-movement to this democratization, luxury steamers such as the Imperator and luxury trains like the Orient Express took up operations. In the twentieth century, air travel gained significance for passenger transport. While the excitement surrounding the zeppelin in the 1930s did not last long, the airplane soon became the most popular mode of travel for long distances.

With the boom in travel literature, a new travel phenomenon began to spread in Europe in the late seventeenth century: the Grand Tour, also referred to as the “cavalier’s tour” or the “educational journey”. To conclude their education, sons of noble or bourgeois families were sent on long journeys to countries in central Europe and as far as the Holy Land to learn languages and get to know different cultures. The Grand Tour marked the beginning of modern cultural tourism. Above all, educational travellers sought out picturesque landscapes and cultural sites, and Italy was considered absolutely central and mandatory. Rome, with its abundance of ancient architecture, proved the strongest magnet, but Naples, Venice and Florence had many visitors as well. Older, often less well-to-do grand tourists were mostly authors, artists and intellectuals. To architects, painters, musicians and literati, travelling was a source of inspiration. Drawing on the ancients, these eighteenth-century travellers to Italy contributed significantly to the breakthrough of classicism in England and Germany.

One of the earliest forms of travelling is the pilgrimage, a religiously motivated journey, whose central aim is the salvation of the pilgrim’s soul. Jews, Christians and Muslims have been going on pilgrimages since antiquity, and in Buddhism, Shintō and Hinduism, this tradition has also been practiced for centuries. The Holy Land, which, according to the Old Testament, was promised to the People of Israel, occupied a central position on the pilgrim’s map. For around a thousand years, the temple in Jerusalem (erected in 950 B.C.) was the main destination of Jewish pilgrims from around the world who came to the city in droves for the pilgrim festivals. When the Islamic Dome of the Rock was built in the 7th century, Jerusalem became one of the most important pilgrimage destinations for Muslims apart from Mecca. Numerous Europeans came to the Holy Land as Christian crusaders captured the region in the Middle Ages. Illustrated accounts of pilgrimage, such as the famous volume by Bernhard von Breydenbach, constitute the beginnings of travel literature.

Travel stories and novels have always been among the popular bestsellers. Readers follow the narrator on an imaginary journey, through various experiences and observations. A journey in one’s imagination, that is, into an author’s fantasy, may also serve as a satirical counter-image to one’s world, as in Gulliver’s Travels. Fictional adventures, conceived in the imagination of the author, inspire illustrators to this day – whether in Gulliver’s Travels, Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days, or the quests of the Baron Munchausen. Their images in turn give wings to the readers’ imaginations, creating new destinations of longing.

You need to be well equipped to travel well, and so the question of what clothing and luggage to bring along is as old as travelling itself. How do practical considerations and fashion go together? How much style can a suitcase hold, and how can you stay elegant while en route? Where does “needs must” end and extravagance and luxury begin? The motto when it comes to luggage is “Travel light, or pack it tight”. In clothing, special cuts and materials help optimize wearing comfort and a non-creased appearance in even the most adverse travelling conditions.

The expeditions undertaken during the Renaissance were born of curiosity, not only about unknown lands but also about their inhabitants. Studying foreign people, what they looked like and how they lived, became a science unto itself. From this emerged a new book genre in sixteenth-century Europe: the costume book. Sometimes described as “galleries of nations”, these volumes complemented topographical knowledge with pictures of types of people. Costume books served as sources of inspiration and pattern book for artists and designers. They established a classification of the world that still has an influence today in spite of the fact that it is largely no longer relevant, drawing on stereotypes or even caricature.

Relaxation and exoticism: these are the two characteristics that define the stereotypical dream journey. It is symbolized by the “oasis”, a romantically transfigured place of longing with sunshine, palm trees, sand and a blue sea. There is hardly an image that is put to use more in the tourism industry than this one. But why in our imagination does the oasis of regenerative peace always exist in an exotic land far away? A NASA poster from 2016 questions this with a tongue-in-cheek allusion to early tourism ads: An astronaut couple, taking in the view of a lush green mountain landscape, enjoys the Earth as an oasis in space.

The costs associated with travelling have always played an important role in planning for a trip. Early expedition leaders, for example, had to draw up a budget, and young travelling students had to report to their rich fathers about all expenditures. And those travelling privately also needed to keep an eye on their finances – whether luxuriously endowed or with limited resources. Here, things that could be planned for often met with the unexpected. It was not unusual for a nobleman’s Grand Tour to end in financial distress after he had an accident, was attacked or fell ill and aborted his journey. In the early twentieth century, travel insurance was invented, which protected against damage due to lost luggage or medical conditions. Trying to prepare for all foreseeable situations has always been an essential part of financial planning in the lead-up to a trip.

Derived from the French word for “remember”, the souvenir is an object that helps us not to forget. With it, travellers take home something that they found especially impressive on their journey: a testament of a place or event, an artefact typical of a country, something that documents their experience. Among the most popular souvenirs are photographs. When cameras were not widely available, photographers sold souvenir images. Their postcards, album photos, sets of photographic miniatures and other mass products were marketed as collective recollections of journeys. And international large-scale events (such as world exhibitions) and luxury programmes (such as cruises) were – and still are today – accompanied by a copious production of souvenirs.

When the term “tourism” was first coined in the nineteenth century, it was already connected to an image of crowds. The new network of railroads allowed even working-class people to travel for pleasure and relaxation, which resulted in crowds, especially at seaside resorts and in mountainous regions. In response to the great demand, people like Thomas Cook in England and Albert Ballin in Hamburg founded travel companies which offered package holidays and luxury boat tours, marking the dawn of modern tourism. With the development of air travel later in the twentieth century, more and more destinations could be reached and the volume of travel saw a continual increase. In Germany, where people spoke of “foreign traffic” well into the 1960s, mass tourism was encouraged from 1933 on: The National Socialist “Strength through Joy” programme made use of organized travel to spread propaganda. In the post-war years, the right to a holiday was an important political issue. 

As you make your bed, so you will travel: This could be the traveller’s version of the saying. But people’s standards vary widely when it comes to accommodation: While the camper only needs a tent and the backpacker only a dormitory, the cosmopolitan globetrotter has a penchant for the luxury hotel. With the nineteenth-century travel boom, the hotel became a building type of its own everywhere in the world. Still today, hotel buildings often shape the architectural appearance of a place, be it a city’s five-star hotel or a spa hotel at the seaside. Hotels are also symbols of being on the road: They are places of transit, of encounters with strangers, of things happening by chance. Names like the Ritz, the Astoria and the Kempinski are the stuff of legends, and it is with good reason that countless films are set in hotels.

We live in a time in which the sky is more or less the limit when it comes to our travel planning. The gates to far-off lands have opened to more and more people and if a traveller’s wallet is sufficiently padded, almost any destination can be reached. And as going to nearby destinations no longer cures the travel bug for many people, it is no wonder that the long-distance travel industry is booming. Considering the abundance of possibilities, which destinations do we still dream of? With Earth thoroughly explored, now its orbit is becoming the field for expeditions. At the beginning of the new millennium, approximately forty years since the first manned moon landing in 1969, the first space tourists left the Earth’s atmosphere. The demand for private trips into space is on the rise and the construction of space tourism infrastructure is well underway. The universe is the limit …