Looking back on my interest in the history of travel and tourism, I recall my first presentation, “Travel, History and the Researcher at Mills,” presented at a Mills Family Weekend in 1985. I had previously written on collaboration between the French and Germans during World War II and had never thought of linking this to tourism. To my surprise, however, while researching other subjects during the mid-1990s, among old periodicals in the French National Library Annex, long since closed, at Versailles, I found a German-language bi-weekly magazine, titled Der deutsche Wegleiter für Paris: Wohin in Paris? [The German Guide to Paris: Where in Paris?] published in Paris during the Second World War Occupation. Because I had originally specialized in Central European history with a Fulbright year at the University of Vienna, I was fluent in German and could easily read the Wegleiter.
The Wegleiter listed restaurants, films, and tourist sites for the German soldiers as if in peacetime. I soon discovered that the German military authorities had organized tours in Paris and elsewhere in occupied France for tens of thousands of their military and civilian personnel stationed there. Virtually nothing had been written about this kind of war tourism in France. In a totally unexpected way, this discovery enabled me to combine my newer interest in tourism studies with the work I had done previously on Second World War France.
Consulting the old magazines in the BN annex required that I take the suburban train (the RER) from central Paris, where I was staying, to the Château de Versailles, the last stop on one of its lines. Even in winter the trains were invariably crowded with people going to see the famous château, the home of so many famous French kings and queens. The train would empty out at the last station. We would all walk together one block toward the main road, the Avenue de Paris, at which point they would turn left to walk to the château and I, alone, would turn right to walk a few blocks to the National Library annex.
The results of my research would eventually include my book War Tourism: Second World War France from Defeat and Occupation to the Creation of Heritage (Cornell University Press, 2018) and another, more general, Tourism and War: Their Links through History, to be published by Routledge Press.
Bertram Gordon is professor emeritus of history at Mills College. He is also an OLLI member, faculty member and volunteer. He can be reached at bmgordon@berkeley.edu.