The Economist (20200808) by calibre

Author:calibre
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, pdf
Tags: news, The Economist
Publisher: calibre
Published: 2020-08-06T22:57:24.157000+00:00

In fact a good summer and, with luck, a strong autumn will hardly make up for a spring in which, like almost every other part of the economy, Germany’s resorts shuttered and furloughed their workers. Even now second-tier sites, like the Eifel region or the Harz mountains in central Germany, are struggling to attract enough locals to replace the lost foreign trade. One-third of the country plans to take no holiday at all. This is no small disruption for a place that takes its pleasure as seriously as Germany.

For many Italians, Spaniards, French folk and Greeks, holidaying anywhere other than in their home country seems perverse. By contrast, young Germans who choose to do so “might come across as a little bit backward,” says Sina Fabian, a historian at Humboldt University. “We can also do GERMANY!” is the slightly desperate motto adopted by one travel agency. If Germans took to foreign travel a little later than the British, they eventually did so with the zeal of the convert, aided by the mighty Deutschmark and some of Europe’s most generous holiday allowances: by 1968 half the West German population went abroad at least once a year. The ritual of the sun-soaked southern-Europe sojourn, traceable to Goethe’s romantic journeying in Italy, was later immortalised in Schlager songs like Udo Jürgens’s “Urlaub im Süden” (“Holiday in the South”). In 1993, when a politician said that Germany might as well buy Majorca for 50m marks, not everyone was sure he was joking.

Yet in truth Germans were starting to warm to the wonders of their own land even before covid-19, notes Hasso Spode at Berlin’s Technical University. They may travel abroad more than other folk, but trips in Germany far outnumber those to anywhere else: a quarter of Germans’ holidays last year were spent at home. The secret of Rügen, at least among Germans (foreigners, bar the odd Scandinavian, are as rare as hens’ teeth), is long out. Mile-long traffic jams and overcrowded beaches are features of every high season. Despite patchy infrastructure, and its distance from most of Germany’s big population centres, Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, the state through which most of Germany’s Baltic littoral runs, has been the country’s most popular holiday destination for years.

And why not? The virtues of the domestic holiday are much underrated, in Germany and other northern European destinations. True, Germany may not carry the languid allure of the Mediterranean, and even the geniuses that staff its tourist agencies can do nothing about its climate (mild sunburn testifies to Charlemagne’s luck in Rügen). Stepping off the train in Stralsund, this columnist admits his heart sank to see the same döner stands and strawberry kiosks he had left behind three hours earlier in Berlin.

But such trifles are surely outweighed by the advantages. More often than not the hunt for authenticity abroad results in difference-splitting compromise or, worse, surrender to tourist traps. At home the scams are easier to spot. For people-watchers the daily human comedy is enriched when conducted in a language one understands.

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