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Full Description
The Grand Spas of Central Europe leads readers on an irresistible tour through the grand spa towns of Central Europe—fabled places like Baden-Baden, Bad Ems, Bad Gastein, Karlsbad, and Marienbad. Noted historian David Clay Large follows the grand spa story from Greco-Roman antiquity to the present, focusing especially on the years between the French Revolution and World War II, a period in which the major Central European Kurorte ("cure-towns") reached their peak of influence and then slipped into decline.
Written with verve and affection, the book explores the grand spa towns, which in their prime were an equivalent of today's major medical centers, rehab retreats, golf resorts, conference complexes, fashion shows, music festivals, and sexual hideaways—all rolled into one. Conventional medicine being quite primitive through most of this era, people went to the spas in hopes of curing everything from cancer to gout. But often as not "curists" also went to play, to be entertained, and to socialize. In their heyday the grand spas were hotbeds of cultural creativity, true meccas of the arts. High-level politics was another grand spa specialty, with statesmen descending on the Kurorte to negotiate treaties, craft alliances, and plan wars.
This military scheming was just one aspect of a darker side to the grand spa story, one rife with nationalistic rivalries, ethnic hatred, and racial prejudice. The grand spas, it turns out, were microcosms of changing sociopolitical realities—not at all the "timeless" oases of harmony they often claimed to be. The Grand Spas of Central Europe holds up a gilt-framed but clear-eyed mirror to the ever-changing face of European society—dimples, warts, and all.
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Spas and Spa Culture from the Greco-Roman World to the Grand Tour
The Ancient West
Decline and Resurrection
The Grand Tour
Chapter 2: Baden-Baden: The "Summer Capital of Europe"
Becoming Baden-Baden
Faites Votre Jeu: The Age of Bénazet
August Granville's Baden-Baden
The "Jewish Question"
Getting There
The Revolutions of 1848-1849
Chapter 3: Muses in the Water
Two Titans at the Fountains: Goethe and Beethoven
Scribble, Squander, Soak: Romantic-Era Writers in Baden-Baden
The Sound of Music
Chapter 4: Roulettenburg: Russian Writers at the Grand German Spas
Troubled in Soul (and Bowels): Nikolai Gogol in Baden-Baden
Ivan Turgenev's Path to the West
Turgenev versus Tolstoy
Ménage à Trois on the Oos
Fedor Dostoevsky in German Spa Land
Showdown in Baden-Baden
Do Svidaniya to Deutschland
Chapter 5: Politics on the Promenade
A Line in the Water
The German Question(s)
Five Balls over the Waters: Bismarck's Alliance System
Vicky, Willy, Nicky, Bertie, and Franz Josef
Chapter 6: Modernization and Its Discontents
Innovations
Medicalization: "It's Not Just about the Waters Anymore!"
A Jewish Space
Taking the Waters with Marx/Twain
Chapter 7: Trouble in Paradise: Spa-Town Life from World War I to the Triumph of Hitler
The Grand Spas at War
German Spa Towns and the Weimar Republic
Rump Austria
Slouching toward Berlin: Karlsbad and Marienbad in the Twenties and Thirties
Chapter 8: Brown Waters: Grand Spas under the Third Reich
Nazis and Spas
"Germany's Visiting Card"
"Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer"
A Coda: Badenheim 1939
Wartime
Chapter 9: A New Beginning
Postwar
Recovery
Epilogue: The Grand Spas Today
Acknowledgments
Principal Sources and Suggestions for Further Reading
Index
About the Author
