‘Memory Tourism’ and Commodification of Nostalgia - Tourism and Visual Culture: Theories and Concepts - page 33

which means a return home as well as the song
of returning home, and álgos , that indicates
suffering.
The fi rst sufferers hit by this new ailment
were individuals who for various reasons were
living far from home: not just soldiers and sail-
ors, but also servants working abroad, as well as
the many country folk who had abandoned the
countryside to work in cities and towns far from
home. Their nostalgia appeared to be not only
a problem of mental anguish or heartache, one
might say a problem of the soul, but also a lack
of bodily well-being, as it appeared to be the
cause of physical prostration, with symptoms
ranging from nausea to lack of appetite, visual
and auditory hallucinations or even cerebral
infl ammation. This individual sense of feeling
poorly was indeed so widespread as to be con-
sidered of near-epidemic proportions, and even
began to be seen as a public health problem.
Thus, nostalgia had already struck in many
European nations as early as the 17th century,
but only reached the USA later, around the mid-
dle of the 1800s, where it was seen mainly in
soldiers from rural areas who as civilians had
been farmers, while soldiers coming from other
professions or in any case from urban environ-
ments seemed to be more immune to it. After
having tried in vain to fi nd a medical treatment
to cure the problem and found that even sending
patients home was not suffi cient to guarantee
their complete recovery, the medical establish-
ment of the 19th century viewed nostalgia as an
incurable ailment.
Nostalgia is thus an individual sense of
anguish but of epidemic proportions and with
collective roots. And it is for this reason that I
believe it can be considered an ailment typical
of modernity, in so much as it is a result of the
irreversible sense of loss that this world pro-
duces, after which no true return home is pos-
sible. The object of modern nostalgia is in fact
not a real, physical location to which it would be
possible to return, and the sense of loss we feel
instead regards the organic ties, which bound
individuals to their community and to the land,
to which also correspond organic ties between
individual and collective lives, between individ-
ual and collective memory, between bios and
logos . This would explain why those who were
found to suffer most from a sense of nostalgia
were people from rural areas, particularly

farmers, those who still had strong ties to their
communities and to the world that modern soci-
ety was dissolving: one could say, in other words,
that those who had undergone less socialization
toward modernity suffered the most.
Thus, nostalgia arises from this crisis in
collective, prescriptive, organic, pre-modern
memory. And yet nostalgia is not simply and
not precisely an expression of that sense of loss
of the rural pre-modern community, which risks
becoming a sort of ideal, utopian moment in
modern imaginery. Nostalgia instead reveals
both individual and collective sensitivity that
can be considered a symptom of the persistence
of non-contingent memories, despite the fact
that concrete, traditional points of reference for
those memories (including ways of life, forms of
social relationships, objects and their meaning)
have now been lost.
And yet, interestingly, nostalgia can also be
a resource, in that it represents a form of wish
that can't come true - at least in its former
authentic sense. While it is true that one can
never truly 'return home', it may instead be pos-
sible to simulate the existence of a mythical
home through its invention and reconstruction.
In reality, this will be not a place of memories
but rather a place for consumption and enter-
tainment: if the mythical home has disap-
peared forever, the marketplace can therefore
continually re-invent it, creating new occasions
for consumption.

Methodology and Findings of the
Research: the Case Studies of
Heidiland and of Former East Germany

I intend to present the characteristics of this new
frontier of emotional tourism and defi ne
'memory tourism' as a modern phenomenon of
commodifi cation of nostalgia through two case
histories. The fi rst case is that of Heidiland and
Heididorf , the region and the village of Heidi,
which have been recently invented in the Swiss
Alps and can be understood as a concrete evi-
dence of exploitation of nostalgia by the tourism
industry, primarily caused by the disappearing
of pre-modern rural life and of the ancestral
contact with nature (Bartoletti, 2007, 2009).
The second case is that of former East Germany
where a 'way of life' that disappeared after the