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Sent: Monday, October 19, 2009 3:10 PM To: tourism@berkeley.edu The Tourism Studies Working Group is pleased to announce FROM SOCIALISM TO SHENGEN: East Bloc Tourism, 1972-1989 MARK KECK-SZAJBEL Ph.D. Candidate, UC Berkeley Friday, October 23, 4:00 PM Room 101, Archaeological Research Facility 2251 College Avenue University of California, Berkeley ABSTRACT: According to conventional wisdom concerning the ‘Iron-Curtain,’ peoples trapped behind barbed wire and concrete walls were prevented the freedom to travel. In this discussion about East bloc tourism in Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Hungary, Mark will first explore early attempts to liberalize travel. Even before Khrushchev’s ironically famous ‘Secret Speech’ in 1956, the government in Hungary was looking at increasing the amount of convertible currency by encouraging travelers to come to their socialist capital and soothing spas. This was followed by other ambitious projects, like the legal hitchhiking program starting 1958 in Poland, and finally, in 1972, the most ambitious project in state socialism: the ‘Borders of Friendship.’ The program allowed individual citizens of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany to travel to each respective country without a passport and without a visa. Although regulations would be revised, the basic philosophy of the open border project remained until 1989, and the statistical popularity of the program is hard to deny: there were many millions of visits, for example, from East Germany (pop. 16 million) to Poland in any given year in the 1970s. SPEAKER BIO: Mark Keck-Szajbel is a PhD candidate in late modern European history at the University of California, Berkeley. Keck-Szajbel received his BA in history and Germanic languages at the University of Oregon, and his MA at Eberhard-Karls Universität Tübingen in East European history and West Slavic Philology. A current Hertelendy Fellow for the study of Hungarian and Hungarian culture at the Institute of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, Keck-Szajbel has been a visiting researcher and/or scholar at numerous universities, most recently at the Europa-Universität Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder (Germany), and at the Uniwersytet Adama Mickiewicza in Poznañ (Poland). Author of several articles on German, Polish, and Czechoslovak history, Keck-Szajbel is currently writing his dissertation about the transnational history of East bloc travel and tourism in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. As usual, following the colloquium the Working Group will host a dinner with the speaker for graduate students and faculty who are conducting research on allied issues. If you would like to participate in the dinner, please RSVP by email as soon as possible at tourism@berkeley.edu. Spaces are limited. For more information about this event or about our ongoing colloquium series, write to tourism@berkeley.edu or visit us at www.tourismstudies.org.
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
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