Dr. Hasso Spode, Professor
Technical University of Berlin and Director of the Tourism Archive
After his childhood in East Germany, Hasso Spode flew to West Berlin where he studied philosophy, history, theology, and sociology. Today he is a professor in Hanover and director of the Tourism Archive at the Technical University in Berlin The main focus of his research is on historical anthropology and cultural history, but he also works in the field of social and political history. He wrote over 200 articles, mostly in German, and wrote or edited more than a dozen books.
In the 1980s Spode analyzed the Nazi leisure time organization “Strength Through Joy” as an important means of social politics in the Third Reich. In 1989 he launched the “study-group for tourism history,” the first institution of this kind. Meanwhile, he is a noted expert in the history and theory of tourism. In this connection, he stresses the romantic character of the tourist consumption and classifies tourist travel as “time travel back” and, drawing on Reinhart Koselleck and Michel Foucault, the touristic space as “chronotopia.” Further well-known works penned by Spode are on the history and structures of alcohol use and misuse, including the phenomenon of addiction which he regards as a social construction reflecting the need for self-control in modern societies.