The project is based on the thesis that certain (not all) landscapes can serve as projection surfaces for social ideas of order and the future: as a design surface for social utopias or as a place of remembrance of one's own national past; they can represent counter-designs to modern civilisation or almost naturalise a desired social or political order. These landscapes are perceived in different ways, namely in the form of specific projections, and then often structurally designed in order to materially realise the projections. The project will therefore not attempt to free supposedly "authentic" landscape images from "distorting" perceptions, but will analyse projections in terms of their socio-political effects.

Sub-project 1 (author: Thomas Etzemüller) examines three landscapes of the 19th and 20th centuries: the German Middle Rhine Valley, Dalarna in Sweden and southern/northern England. In all cases, these are landscapes that were developed for tourism at an early stage and incorporated into historicising master narratives of the respective nation. Imaginations of "freedom" or "romantic", patriotic landscapes were projected onto three regions, which were medialised in travel guides, works of art, etc. The development for tourism then made it possible to reproduce this medialisation through travel experiences. The project will therefore also highlight the importance of tourism as a medium that combined imaginations and landscape design or popularised the imaginations realised in the construction of a landscape. In all three cases, it can be shown how landscape perception, projections and tourism functioned as part of internal nation building.

Sub-project 2 (project leader: Dirk Thomaschke) looks at motorways, parkways and national long-distance hiking trails as modern ways of experiencing national space in Germany and the USA. The connection between inner nation building, social order and landscape perception highlighted in SP 1 cannot be separated from contemporary forms of movement. In the 19th and 20th centuries, there was intensive discussion about how one should move through a landscape in order to experience it appropriately, both ideally and physically. The "correct" form of movement was seen as having the task of creating inner cohesion; the design of the landscapes in turn prefigured forms of movement. Without travellers there would be no landscapes, but the "right" travellers had to find the "right" landscape in the "right" way.

Duration: 2010-2024, funded by the DFG 2015-2024.

Publications:

• Etzemüller, Thomas: Romantic Rhine - Iron Rhine. A river as an imaginary landscape of modernity, in: Historische Zeitschrift 295, 2012, pp. 390-424
  
• Etzemüller, Thomas: Landscape, Tourism and Nation. Imaginary Landscapes as Media of Inner Nation Building in Modernity, in: History and Society 45, 2019, pp. 275-296
  
• Etzemüller, Thomas: Landscape and nation. Rhine - Dalarna - England. Bielefeld 2022
  
• Etzemüller, Thomas: Landscape, Nation, Tourism in the Modern Age. A conceptual sketch, in: Kühne, Olaf et al. (eds.): Landscape and Tourism, Wiesbaden 2023, pp. 141-153
  
• Etzemüller, Thomas: Landscape and nation, in: Kühne, Olaf et al. (eds.): Handbuch Landschaft, Wiesbaden ²2024, pp. 437-445
  
• Thomaschke, Dirk: Soft Seats and Blisters. On the history of parkways, panoramic roads, trails and hiking paths in high modernism, Göttingen 2025