200 Jahre Rhein-Panoramen:

Soon after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Romantic movement of the Rhine attracted a rapidly growing number of pleasure-seekers to the European river. For the burgeoning world of mass tourism, the financially struggling bookseller and publisher Friedrich Wilmans in Frankfurt commissioned an impoverished artist from Bielefeld, Friedrich Wilhelm Delkeskamp, ​​to develop a novel Rhine travel guide in a hybrid form of illustration and map. His bird's-eye view panorama, unfolded into a highly portable leporello, immediately became a bestseller, and since 1825, some ninety publishers from Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Great Britain, and even Denmark have produced a multitude of imaginative variations. These panoramas are also cultural and historical documents: they reflect the democratization of tourism, the rapid progress in transportation and printing technology, the bustling construction activity, and urban development along the Rhine. They also illustrate anti-French sentiment in 19th-century Germany, the times of the First World War and National Socialism, the new beginnings of the Weimar Republic, and the reconstruction after the Second World War. This book tells the stories of artists, publishers, and pirates, as well as the woman (whose watercolor is featured on the cover) who inspired the first panorama, showcases the most beautiful panoramas, and, with over 600 illustrations, makes a new contribution to the study of Rhine Romanticism and the history of tourism.