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Seeing, Traveling, and Consuming
best researched topics, but it still has not made it into the historical “canon.” 36 But
what of virtual travel and web-surfing? Such “imaginative mobilities” may
engender radical transformations in contemporaries’ understanding of the public
sphere and civil society. 37 Or television, for which systematic historical research
palls in the face of this medium’s enormous cultural impact? The study of radio
listening habits in German society, a topic full of possibility for researching
women’s identities in the early twentieth century, to say nothing of the importance
of its use for political propaganda, came under really serious scrutiny from
scholars only recently. 38 One could mention many other areas. The rejoinder here
may be predictable: that leisure practices are generally comparable across types,
and that analysis of each specific genre may be likened to carrying so many coals
to Newcastle. But the chapters here and other research makes one skeptical about
such criticism. It is the historical inassimilability of various leisure forms to larger
interpretative models, whether derived from theories of the “culture industry,”
from narratives built around the idea of the “society of the spectacle,” or even from
the work of now popular theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu, that comes through
most clearly in the preceding contributions. This sheer centrifugality is to be
welcomed, for it suggests that beneath it all there is still much room for individual
initiative, for resistant or subversive practice, or simply for a degree of pleasure
and self-satisfaction that can still not be tapped by projects of social domination –
or by an overarching conceptual framework that finally does much violence to the
historical actors and experiences it purports to illuminate. In German historiography,
the operative term in this context is Eigensinn, which Alf Lüdtke has
used to analyze the self-affirming words, gestures, pauses, pranks, or actions of
workers on the shopfloor as they choose to conform to or dissent from their lifeworld.
39
If recognition of such self-expressive variety raises the issue of what forms of
leisure still need to be studied, then a similar assessment also applies to the
historical and political location of various leisure practices. In this book readers
are presented with an impressive range of examples drawn from late Georgian to
late-twentieth-century Britain; from Imperial, Weimar, and Nazi Germany; from
Third Republic and Vichy France; and from the Austro-Hungarian empire and
post-World War II Italy. What significance does leisure have in these different
political contexts? What impact does political culture have on prevalent meanings
of pleasure or desire? Our examples suffice to demonstrate that in general we have
much more information about a practice such as leisure travel as it evolved in
relatively free, liberal societies than in fascist or Communist dictatorships. It is not
insignificant that leisure and consumption are among the least researched topics
in the history of Nazi Germany even though these twelve dramatic years have
given rise to a veritable cottage industry of popular and scholarly writing built
around the dire narratives of war and genocide. As for post-1945 socialist states
17