This book rediscovers the very first color "photographic" images of Germany and with them a precious period of turn-of-the-century peace and prosperity. The images, dated from between 1889 and 1911, derive from the private collection of Marc Walter and, like TASCHEN's bestselling American Odyssey, are further rare examples of the Photochrom process, the first technique to obtain lithographic prints from a black and white photo negative. Spanning the length and breadth of Germany, this collection of almost 800 pictures transports us along the Rhine, through the mystical Black Forest, to the spa town of Baden-Baden, and to the historic cities of Bonn and Cologne. We travel through Hanover and Thuringen, over the rolling Alpine landscape, up the Elbe from Sachsen, through Dresden, Leipzig, Potsdam, Berlin and Hamburg, and over to the charming seaside resorts of Ostsee and Nordsee. Along the way we take in the castles of Louis II, exquisite architecture, everyday rural life, traditional regional costumes, as well as the infrastructural advances of modernity, from mountain trains to glistening boats out at sea.The result is a remarkable testimony to pre-war Germany and a time in which beauty and hope, not hostility and hardship, defined the land.