Northwards: How Norway became a destination for German car tourism, 1920s–1960s

Abstract

The article traces the beginnings of the powerful liaison between automobile technology, tourism, and the ‘Land of the Fjords’. Focusing on the German automobile club ADAC in the period 1920s to 1960s, the article examines how German motorists discovered and embraced Norwegian roads, and what idea of the ‘Norway experience’ was constructed along the way. Tourists, it is argued, were primed for car travel through the narratives of contrasting vistas and sublime nature stemming from the time Norway was experienced by cruise and cariole. During the German occupation of Norway 1940–1945, narratives and pictures of Norwegian landscapes were spread among Germans as never before; now combined with narratives of heroism, conquest, and technology. In the 1950s, when West Germany was experiencing the onset of mass tourism and mass motorization, the concept of the extraordinary car trip on Norway’s roads was ready to be widely communicated and put into praxis. Postwar ‘Grand Tours on wheels’ to Scandinavia were both continuing narratives on Northern remoteness and otherness, and ‘silencing’ historical landscapes of war. By the mid-1960s, Norway had been established as a superb car travellers’ destination, a sanctuary of nature just accessible by a car.