Home Away at Home: Tourism Narratives of the German Village in South Korea

‘Where do you come from?’ is a question that haunts tourists.  Here, places are conceived as fixed spaces in the same way destinations are considered an end in tourism.  In the context of multi-strata mobilities, places are increasingly being reproduced through embodied relationships in a world that is never quite finished.  They are performed on unstable stages as they are being reimagined.  It becomes apparent then that spaces are emergent and need to be considered alongside the sedimentation of identities. 

Places emerge as tourist places when they are appropriated and made part of memories and narratives through the experiences of people engaged in embodied social practices.  They are not only packaged for touristic consumption, but are also constantly redefined especially in terms of spatial identities located through everyday tourist practice.  This paper focuses on the German Village on the island of Namhae in South Korea, which was built over a decade ago as a tribute to the Korean workers who lived in Germany as Gastarbeiter.  It explores the question of identities of the ‘locals’ as portrayed in the film, ‘Endstation der Sehnsüchte’ by Cho Sunghyung and juxtaposes this alongside the huge influx of ‘tourists’ indulging in photographing experience on the film set of Korean TV drama ‘Couple or Trouble’. 

As the second German Village is now in the process of being built elsewhere in Korea, we need to ask even more so, how the notion of ‘place’ is reproduced through spatialities in which embodied performances and practices are facilitated within complex infrastructure, networks and mobilities.  This paper incorporates reflexive and visual methodology to explore how identities are being configured through local narratives and practice, and questions how we identify the ‘tourist’ in this era of transformative change as exemplified by the German Village in Korea.