The north-Bohemian town of Doksy together with its hamlet called Staré Splavy and the adjacent Velký Rybník [Big Pond] – Lake Mácha today – changed into an important tourist region at the turn of the 20th century. In order to invite as many visitors as possible, promotional materials were issued in large quantities, whose authors constructed, through texts and pictures, a very attractive image of the town of Doksy. The focus of the study is to find out what the nature of the motifs that created this image was, and in what respect it distinguished from the everyday reality of the town. Based on an analysis of advertisements, guidebooks, leaflets, and postcards, it is possible to say that from the early 20th century until the 1940s, Doksy was promoted as a picturesque spa town, situated amidst clean nature with healing effects. According to data in chronicles and unpublished archival sources, however, the visitors to Doksy had to face numerous problems, such as high prices, noise, untidiness, non-functioning spa facilities, and low quality of offered services. The data and pictures from the former promotional materials are still uncritically used in memory and popular-educational texts even today. The media image from the first half of the 20th century continues to have a considerable influence on how the pre-war and interwar Doksy is perceived.
At the end of the 19th century Hirschberg (now Doksy), a small town in the north of Bohemia, started to benefit from the increasing tourism. To attract more tourists many institutions, organisations and individuals in and outside of Hirschberg constructed an idealistic image of the town defining it as a spa in the centre of a beautiful countryside. In this paper we focus on how the new image of Hirschberg was formed, what it was like and how it differed from the reality. We also try to analyse the influence of this image on the memory of the Germans who had to leave Czechoslovakia after the Second World War. In their commemorative literature many parts of the erstwhile advertising material often reappear. Published in this new context they seem to have created from Hirschberg and its surroundings a local memory space that symbolizes the beauty and harmony of the lost home land.
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