Urlaubs(t)räume des Sozialismus

The transformation of tourism into a mass movement is a phenomenon of the 20th century that came to full expression after the Second World War. In the GDR, which established the legal right to vacation for working people when it founded the state in 1949, vacation was recognized from the outset as a factor that stabilized and legitimized the system and was controlled by the state. As an elementary component of the socialist lifeworld, it was not to be understood as an escape at all – in clear distinction from Western interpretations – but, on the contrary, as a complement to everyday life and the working world of GDR society.
The author explores the question of how the socialist state, for which the educational function of architecture and urban planning was always of central importance, constructed and shaped the spatial, architectural, and cultural experience of the state-controlled vacation.