Clio by the Danube: Sites of Memory and Historical Images in Postcard Size

Abstract Photographically illustrated picture postcards were a leading visual mass medium around and after 1900 that had considerable influence on the formation of tourist attractions, as well as sites of memory and historical images. The postcard industry popularized “worth seeing” landscapes, cities and towns and made them accessible to a wide audience in visual form. As mobile images, some of which traveled great distances, picture postcards established a dense network of communicative visual traces that not onlytraced tourist routes but also bundled and staged images of history. The article examines historical postcards picturing sites along the Danube as source material for an archaeology of tourist and historicalperception in the 20th century. Using selected sites of remembrance, it shows how historically marked places, buildings, and monuments are depicted in the popular iconography of postcards, and it analyzes the ways in which narratives of history found their way into these stagings. It also discusses the larger cultural and political narratives in which the pictorial mass medium of the postcard was embedded. In essence, the question is how the sequence of images of visually staged sites of memory shaped and formed the image of the Danube as a European river and how, conversely, the popular narratives of the river made and continue to make use of historical borrowings and images. Viewed from this historical perspective, the Danube is a projection and narrative space that offers much room for historical digression. However, it is not only a neutral foil that is “played on” by means of historical references, but also a genuine generator of historical narratives.