After his childhood in East Germany, Spode fled to West Berlin where he studied philosophy, history, theology, and sociology.
He is a professor in Hanover and director of the Historical Archive on Tourism at Technische Universität Berlin.
In the 1980s Spode analysed the Nazi leisure organization Strength Through Joy as a means of social politics in the Third Reich.
In 1989 he launched the "study-group for tourism history", the first institution of its kind; in 1991 he published the worldwide first omnibus book in this field of research.
[3][4] He has also worked on the history and structures of alcohol use and misuse,[5] including the phenomenon of addiction, which he sees as a physical-biological process and at the same time as a social construction that reflects the need for self-control in modern societies, an analytic dualism comparable to the wave-particle duality of light.