Rhine River View toward Oberwesel, Germany, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Rhine River View toward Oberwesel, Germany, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Rhine River View toward Oberwesel, Germany, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-54AD75

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Sometime in the 1950s, a tourist on a Rhine cruise boat looked across the water at Oberwesel and took a snapshot that accidentally captured everything the postwar European travel industry was selling: a medieval walled town, a Gothic church spire, terraced vineyards climbing toward a ruined hilltop castle, and the Rhine doing what it had been doing since before anyone thought to build anything beside it. The Schönburg castle ruins presiding over the town from the ridge above had been a romantic wreck for centuries before the German tourist board discovered that romantic wrecks were an export product. Postwar Americans and British visitors were making Rhine cruises in significant numbers by the mid-1950s, having concluded that Europe's ruins were now the picturesque kind rather than the worrying kind. The small ferry working the near bank is the only thing moving in a scene that otherwise looks engineered to sell package tours, which is essentially what it became.

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