Touristic Intents is a feature documentary film that explores the connection between mass tourism and political ideology. The film is centered on a case study: the never-completed Nazi resort of Prora, on Germany's Baltic Sea, which was built on a mammoth scale beginning in 1936 to house 20,000 vacationing working-class Germans. This 4-mile-long building was used in propaganda to forward a promise of leisure time for the masses and strengthen sympathies between the workers and the Nazi party. The film asks: Is there an obligation to remember a building's dark past?
Mat Rappaport, a filmmaker and scholar, is the Donald W. Klein Professor of the Practice in Film and Media Studies at Tufts University.
Organized by Anke Pinkert, Germanic Languages and Literatures, and co-sponsored by Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies; the School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics; the Humanities Research Institute; the European Union Center; the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center; the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures