ABSTRACT
This chapter examines monthly reports produced in the 1970s by Travel Agency–German Democratic Republic tour guides, who recorded comments that visitors from capitalist countries made during their bus tours of East Berlin. Based on an analysis of their reports, it shows how in divided Berlin mass tourism spanned the ideological and geographic divide between the two states and societies. State and party authorities in the East German capital, and state and market leaders in West Berlin, turned to tourism campaigns and the cultivation of tourism as an extension of propaganda and source of political legitimacy among their own citizens and among an international audience. Comments made by capitalist visitors to East Berlin suggest that tourism – as an experience, something perceived emotionally and felt viscerally, not something merely produced or consumed as a disembodied discourse of symbols and images – impacted mutual perceptions during the Cold War. Citizens of capitalist countries who visited East Berlin on officially guided bus tours in the 1970s left strengthened in their conviction that despite its flaws capitalist modernity was nonetheless superior to its socialist counterpart.
