At the turn of the 19th century, the island of Rügen in Swedish Pomerania, which had long remained at the margins of the Holy Roman Empire, suddenly becomes an object of interest and a travel destination for the cultured elite. Between 1797 and 1805, four travelogues centered around it are published, coinciding with Caspar David Friedrich’s first works that include its landscapes as a motive. These travelogues are at the center of our article, which studies the key role they played in establishing the island of Rügen as a place in the German imaginary. Drawing from the many contributions of local men of letters who worked throughout the 18th century to promote Rügen’s history, geography and landscapes, these travelogues made their content available to a wider public and drew attention to some specific aspects of the island, following the tastes and interests of the time period: its baths, its picturesque landscapes, its ancient ruins, its sublime cliffs. In this context, tensions arose between the travelogues of the local elite who wished to keep control of the representations of the island and the travelogues written from the perspective of outsiders whom the local elite itself had drawn here with its promotional work. Through these interactions between different perspectives, between texts and images, the island of Rügen gained a spot in German mental geography – a spot that it has kept to this day.