Baedeker: From Field Post Letters to Travel Guides

Summertime is travel time, and even those of us who don’t long to visit faraway places are on the lookout for insider tips for special things to do close to home. For a long time, the name ‘Baedeker’ was well-nigh synonymous with travellers’ guidebooks. The Baedeker style was above all shaped by Fritz Baedeker (1844−1925), one of the sons of the firm’s founder. His flair for precise observation and his accurate descriptions of foreign parts are already apparent in the letters he sent home from the battlefields of the Seven Weeks’ War (Austro-Prussian War) in 1866. The Deutsches Historisches Museum has recently been able to acquire thirteen of these letters.