Primed in rhe EUDieses Werk ist urheberrechdich geschutzr.Jede Verwerrung aufSerhaib der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechrsgeserzes isr ohne Zustimmung des

Hasso Spode takes the reader on a journey through time to define luxury. He describes how this term has changed over the centuries and how, especially in the period after the world wars, the understanding of luxury has become more democratic, but even today luxury is still understood as a scarce good, although the definition of what is scarce has fundamentally changed. He says that people often do things simply because they are fun, and that there is a special quality of being in the game. In their contributions, Hannes Gurzki and David Woisetschläger talk about luxury as the extraordinary—as a contrast to the ordinary—and explore the question of human motifs and behavior, from aesthetics to self-realization. In another article, they explain the motivations and factors that trigger a consumer decision for luxury goods. It is about creating a need for the unattainable, the path to its fulfillment, and the further development of the need for the ever new. Marc Aeberhard describes to what extent fear is an important driving force for human creations. It is about overcoming existential fears such as the feeling of social isolation or failing in the economic process. Pastor Stephan Hagenow describes luxury as a foretaste of paradise and critically warns us to understand luxury as a journey to ourselves. He formulates the ten commandments of luxury tourism.

into Charlottenburg. London, by contrast, had already gone through more extensive processes of urban integration. The work would have also profited from tangible, introductory facts and figures regarding the development of each system, which are completely absent. The book fails to present a single table of figures (regarding the number of passengers, length of track, or amount of investment, for example) or a single map. Consequently, these important aspects of the public transportation systems are unilluminated. Lind’s summary of the current state of research also exhibits some shortcomings. Methodologically interesting American studies describing the history of public transportation are left unacknowledged, and only some German studies on the topic are mentioned. Whilst it is true there are not as much research in this direction, several dissertations have been written in recent years on both the foundation of public transportation firms and on municipal transportation policy, which are omitted. Furthermore, an analysis of the content and current state of the literature is absent. In this sense, it would have been important for this work to utilize Wolfgang Krabbe’s older but still relevant concept of ‘municipal socialism’ to help describe the role of the municipality as infrastructural firm. She does, however, cite Reulecke’s work on cities as entrepreneurs, but only to agree with his conclusions and without further theoretical discussion. There are in the work no comparisons to the (to some extent contemporaneous) debates over municipal water, gas and electricity works, or to the municipal slaughterhouses, and the debates pertaining to ‘municipal socialism’ encompassing municipalization, privatization, deregulation, and licensing. The citations in the work are, in parts, sloppy (for example, the title of the work’s most important and most cited study, that by Elfi Bendikat’s, is cited incompletely). Typographical errors, that distort the meaning of the text, can also be found throughout. Overall, the good structure delivers a largely unconvincing work.

So far, East German tourism research has been studied little by the history of science. Tourism science saw the light of day around 1930 in Berlin. During the Cold War, in the GDR it gained a notable quantitative extent that finally equalled the research in the ‘capitalist’ part of Germany. Initially, theoretical questions played a prominent role, but then – like in the West – tourism science became a strictly applied discipline. Part and parcel of the planned economy, its focus was on the parastatal social tourism: holiday making was seen as a means to improve the health of the ‘workers and farmers’ through ‘recreation’ and – unspoken – as a means to stabilize the political system. Thus, it became a centrepiece of consumer policy (like in Nazi times). Research successfully helped to steer and expand the ‘recreational system’. However, demand grew faster than supply and, even worse, people remained cut off from the glittering West. Despite vast subsidies and very high travel intensity, discontentment with travel opportunities reached a level that essentially contributed to the collapse of the GDR in 1989. Tourism researchers warned from that growing tide of discontentment and left no stone unturned – in vain.

Until the late-twentieth century historians paid virtually no attention to tourism in the USSR – apart from the rather apologetic overview by G.P. Dolzhenko from 1988. But in recent years a sudden ...