eJournals

Introduction KARIN BAUMGARTNER U NIVERSITY OF U TAH In 1835, Gustav Nicolai began his travel book about Italy with a rhetorical question: Ein Werk über Italien! «Hat schon wieder Jemand die Anmaßung, uns mit seiner individuellen Ansicht über das bis zum Ekel gepriesene Wunderland zu quälen? » Also hör ‘ ich von allen Seiten fragen. Ihr irrt, sehr werthe Leser; ich will Euch warnen vor dem Wunderlande! Seht nur das Titelblatt genauer an. (3) The title of his work, thus introduced, was simply Italien wie es wirklich ist, pointing to the key question about the importance of veracity and authenticity in the genre of travel writing. How could travel be described in a manner that would give those at home a true picture of what the destination was really like? In Nicolai ’ s assessment, veracity and authenticity in the travel literature of his time were severely compromised by the twin evils of entertainment and commercial viability. Nicolai concluded that authors driven by financial needs simply wrote what readers wanted to read: they replaced authentic travel with fictionalized narratives about travel in order to sell books. Yet the truth aspect of travel writing had to be important, he argued, so that readers could experience ‹ the real thing › as closely as possible. As Nicolai ’ s musings from 1835 show, from early on travel writing as a genre was predicated on the veracity of the information presented in the report. Readers expect to read about real travel in a realistic manner, preferably presented in a linear chronological fashion. Literary experimentation is thus not a hallmark of the genre, as travel writing should allow readers to recreate the journey. At the center of travel writing, then, is the dissemination of specialized knowledge, about the destination for example. Equally important, at least since the publication of Goethe ’ s Italienische Reise, are descriptions of individual development through the act of traveling. Accordingly, the journey of discovery becomes a journey to discover the self. The critical investigation of travel literature has flourished since the 1980s, with a noticeable increase in scholarship during the 1990s and the early 2000s. In this scholarship we can discern three principal approaches: first, attempts at defining the genre of travel literature (Brenner 1989, 1990; Zimmers 1995; Koshar 2000; Gebauer 2008); second, efforts at recovering and analyzing women ’ s travel texts (Ohnesorg 1996; Pelz 1993; Felden 1993; Jost 2005; Ujma 2009); and three, works tracing the history of tourism in Germany. The latter field only emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s in Germany and covers mostly the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the present (Brilli 1997; Hachtmann 2007; Gebauer 2008). While the above-mentioned investigations borrowed their theoretical framework from British Cultural Studies and tended to focus on the construction of touristed sights (e. g. the Alps) or the development of a tourist infrastructure (Mittl 2007; Seefeldt 2010; Bock 2010), the authors of this special issue of Colloquia Germanica seek to expand this theoretical scope by looking specifically at the state of scholarship on travel literature in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In contrast to earlier critical models, the articles assembled here are primarily concerned with modes of writing about travel. Today ’ s scholars are no longer content with listing, cataloguing, and describing the travel literature that exists; rather, genre considerations have moved to the fore. Questions such as how authors speak about their travel, for which purposes they write about travel, and how travel intersects with the fields of geography, tourism, and popular culture are at the center of current investigations. Both the role of the observing subject and the limits of observation and description are of paramount concern. This recent development is certainly indebted to work in the field of narratology, where scholars insist that experiences and writing about these experiences are not congruent. What is perceived by the reader as an authentic and true reconstruction of actual travel taken is in all actuality a carefully crafted, often fictional web of words governed by the laws of narration. Ansgar Nünning, for example, cautions that it is not possible to ascribe a simple aesthetics of authentic subjectivity to travel reports. Instead he calls travel writing the last refuge of the illusionary assumption that experience and text can be congruent (12). Invoking Hayden White and Paul Riccoeur, Nünning recommends that scholars of travel literature look for theoretical models in autobiography where the first-person narrator is routinely distinguished from the experiencing subject and the author (24 - 25). In a similar vein, Nünning asserts that travel reports are not accurate representations of travels taken even if they feel authentic to the reader. While readers may have the sense that they are reading an author ’ s subjective and authentic description of a landmark, Nünning insists that these encounters are principally mediated by genre and travel conventions. This means that travel modalities and travel reports are prefigured by their cultural context (i. e., the sequence of the journey), that they are configured through narrative devices (i. e., firstperson narratives, chronological structure), and that they in turn engage in reconfiguring the meaning of travel. The articles presented here give 204 Karin Baumgartner expression to Nünning ’ s cautionary words and reveal how highly mediated travel reports have been from the beginning. The articles also show that travel writers, such as Nicolai, were well aware of the genre ’ s limitations on the one hand, and its ability to manipulate the reader on the other. In «Comparative Anthropology in Travel Literature: Georg Forster ’ s ‹ O- Taheiti › (1779)» Madhuvanti Karyekar argues that Forster, the father of exploratory travel in German literature, believed that travel reports were a reflection of the observing subject ’ s individual perception and personality. Travel writing for Forster was shaped by the traveler ’ s imagination and, for precisely this reason, Forster held that multiple travel reports from the same destination could provide a more accurate understanding of travel. Karyekar shows how Forster, in his 1779 translation of a Spanish report on Tahiti, decisively departed from the encyclopedic presentation of ‹ facts › common in the early eighteenth century to arrive at a call for multivocality - multiple perspectives - in travel writing. Forster believed that all impressions penetrated the observing eye through its various membranes and that these membranes gave each traveler a unique perspective of what he observed. Already at this early point in the history of travel literature, Forster departed from the belief that travel literature could provide the ultimate truth about the foreign land; rather, travel narratives for Forster were mostly probable (wahrhaftig) rather than true (wahr), and readers were obliged to consult as many different travel reports as they could. Daniela Richter, in her essay «Inside the Oriental Spectacle,» examines the Egyptian travelogues of Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, written sixty-five years after Forster ’ s translation. Here, as in Forster ’ s understanding of travel writing, the observing subject is squarely in the center of the narrative; however, Pückler-Muskau was not at all interested in arriving at a ‹ truer › understanding of the Orient. Rather, the subject in Pückler-Muskau ’ s writing serves as the only vantage point, indeed, as the center of a panoramic gaze that controls what the reader will learn about the observed subject. Pückler- Muskau abandoned the search for knowledge and truth as the impetus for travel - the known world had expanded dramatically in the intermittent years - and the goal now was entertainment alone. Richter traces how the scandalprone aristocrat used the exciting opportunities of the panorama and diorama to stage his own oversized personality. Unmentioned by Pückler-Muskau, but looming large in the background, stands Goethe, the forebearer who so eloquently staged his own personal growth through his travels in Italy and the sites and sights he consumed. The ability to attract readers to travel writing remained important in the nineteenth century as Kit Belgum shows in her article on Karl Andrée and his 205 Introduction effort to popularize geographic knowledge about the world in the journal Globus. While much contemporary travel writing remained indebted to the observing subject, Andrée attempted to depersonalize travel narratives without, however, making these reports dry and scientific. While Georg Forster had advocated multivocality in travel writing, Andrée deliberately took out the subjective voice in the travel reports he published in Globus. Belgum shows that Globus was undergirded by a large network of borrowing and recycling in order to provide readers with reports from around the world. Like Pückler-Muskau, Andrée responded to commercial pressures in an oversaturated literary market and attracted readers with a publication filled with images and serialized content. As readers ’ geographic knowledge about the world increased, so did the need to adjust the format to readers ’ expectations of entertainment and pleasure. In «Changes in German Travel Writing about East Africa, 1884 - 1891,» Matthew Unangst demonstrates how new modalities - political, cultural, and in terms of media - changed the format of the travelogues consumed by metropolitan publics. As the newly formed German nation contemplated acquiring colonies in Africa, first-person narratives by explorers and missionaries fell out of favor, to be replaced by reports about the administrative infrastructure that kept the German colonies going. By the 1880s, the German public had become saturated with the hero-traveler as the only source of geographic knowledge. Unangst shows how news from far-flung places now reached Germany almost immediately through telegrams, which lead to travelogues losing their newsworthiness. No longer obliged to instruct, travelogues more than ever needed to entertain the readers at home. The limits of the genre of travel writing are further explored in Harry Craver ’ s and Melissa Johnson ’ s contributions. Both authors investigate artists who traveled within the parameters of mass tourism and identified at the center of each travel experience anxiety about what travel can and should mean in the twentieth century. Alfons Paquet, the subject of Craver ’ s article «The Abominable Art of Running Away,» was a famous travel writer in the early years of the twentieth century and wrote both travelogues about faraway places and essays about the meaning of travel. Like Georg Forster, Paquet doubted that the travel writer could be the source of authentic travel information. Every narrative, Paquet theorized, was subjective, and like Forster Paquet sought to infuse his travelogues with other voices against which experiences and sights could be measured. For Paquet, the travel writer needed to prepare for his trip by studying preexisting information about the lands and people he wanted to visit. The emerging travel text thus became an 206 Karin Baumgartner intertext made up of previous readings and observations. In such manner, travelogues became fluid documents always open for revision. Hannah Höch, the author at the heart of Melissa Johnson ’ s article «Italy zerwühlt,» modeled her Italienreise on Goethe ’ s Italienische Reise; however, her concerns could not be further from Goethe ’ s. Using the tools of the literary grotesque and Dada, Höch reworked both Goethe ’ s travel narrative and the information in the famous Baedeker travel guide to construct a travelogue that gave expression to the destabilization felt by a young generation after the First World War. Linearity and chronology, often the benchmark of good travel writing, were discarded, as was the task to instruct and entertain. Johnson observes that it would be impossible to travel with Höch ’ s travel report or gather any useful information from it. Höch took the genre of travel writing to its limits by giving up informational content while retaining authenticity and subjectivity. The arc of travel writing explored in this issue, then, spans from Georg Forster ’ s insistence that travelogues were subjective and all information was filtered through the observations of the seeing subject all the way to Hannah Höch ’ s use of radically subjective tools favored by Dada and the literary grotesque. Subjectivity remains a central and complicated issue in travel narratives, be it in the texts by Hermann von Pückler-Muskau who used his observations to construct the persona of the globe-trotting dandy aristocrat or those of Karl Andrée who sought to depersonalize, and thus legitimize, borrowed first-person narratives. What is at the core of travel writing is the question of how authenticity - of the journey and of the report - can be guaranteed if first-person narratives are untrustworthy and the writing is constructed after the trip has been completed. As the articles assembled here show, the subject continues to hold a Janus-like quality in travel writing; on the one hand, it guarantees the authenticity of the travel narrative, on the other, it remains deeply suspect when it comes to the veracity of the reported travel. The articles also insist on the importance of how travel reports are mediated. Narrative choices such as firstvs. third-person reports are paramount in signaling ‹ veracity › even though the first-person reports serialized in Globus were rewritten in the third person to make them appear more accurate, while they became less reliable at the same time. The same is true for the colonial reports from Africa as Unangst reveals: the reports written by explorers, with their emphasis on hardship and struggle, were replaced with more neutral administrative reports on the one hand and telegrams with scintillating newsworthy items on the other. At the same time, travel writing became an outlet of entertainment culture and ‹ veracity › 207 Introduction became subsumed under the dictate of entertaining the reader at home. This process is most apparent in Kit Belgum ’ s article on Karl Andrée and in Harry Craver ’ s work on Alfons Paquet. While Paquet sought to keep the myth of the intrepid traveler alive, travel writing no longer could be sustained by a simple first-person narrative told in a linear fashion. Thus his texts became a pastiche of observation and previous information. Hannah Höch ’ s Italienreise, finally, took the travel narrative to its logical limits: her travel narrative lost all informational quality and refused to entertain the reader. Ultimately, the overview provided in this special issue on travel writing produced between 1779 and 1921 and its engagement with the question of subjectivity shows that from the beginning the producers of travel writing, the author and the traveler, struggled with the impossibility of rendering accurately what they saw and experienced. What the reader at home could access was a highly mediated construct that gave an insufficient taste of the real thing. Yet precisely this aspect - words can never quite represent experience - engendered the genre ’ s fertility and prolific production: readers were eager to read one more travel report about an exotic destination or a beloved spot nearby in order to truly know what it was like. If the author knew how to entertain, as Pückler-Muskau did, the author ’ s commercial success was guaranteed. Works Cited Bock, Benedikt. Baedeker & Cook - Tourismus am Mittelrhein 1756 bis ca. 1914. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2010. Brenner, Peter J. Der Reisebericht in der deutschen Literatur. Ein Forschungsüberblick als Vorstudie zu einer Gattungsgeschichte. 2. Sonderheft. Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990. — ., ed. Der Reisebericht. Die Entwicklung einer Gattung in der deutschen Literatur. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp,1989. Brilli, Attilio. Als Reisen eine Kunst war. Vom Beginn des modernen Tourismus: Die «Grand Tour.» Berlin: Wagenbach, 1997. Felden, Tamara. Frauen reisen: Zur literarischen Repräsentation weiblicher Geschlechterrollenerfahrung im 19. Jahrhundert. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 1993. Gebauer, Julia. Entstehung des Tourismus. Von der Kavalierstour bis zu den Anfängen der Pauschalreise. Saarbrücken: VDM-Verl. Müller, 2008. Jost, Erdmut. Landschaftsblick und Landschaftsbild. Wahrnehmung und Ästhetik im Reisebericht 1780 - 1820. Freiburg: Rombach, 2005. Hachtmann, Rüdiger. Tourismus-Geschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007. Koshar, Rudy. German Travel Cultures. Oxford: Berg, 2000. 208 Karin Baumgartner Mittl, Katja. Baedekers Reisehandbücher. Funktionen und Bewertungen eines Reisebegleiters des 19. Jahrhunderts. Erlangen: Univ. Erlangen-Nürnberg, 2007. Nicolai, Gustav. Italien wie es wirklich ist: Bericht über eine merkwürdige Reise in den hesperischen Gefilden, als Warnungstimme für alle, welche sich dahin sehnen. 2 vols. Leipzig: O. Wigand, 1835. Nünning, Ansgar. «Zur mehrfachen Präfiguration/ Prämeditation der Wirklichkeitsdarstellung im Reisebericht: Grundzüge einer narratologischen Theorie, Typologie und Poetik der Reiseliteratur.» Points of Arrival: Travels in Time, Space, and Self/ Zielpunkte: Unterwegs in Zeit, Raum und Selbst. Ed. Marion Gymnich, Ansgar Nünning, Vera Nünning, and Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre. Tübingen: Francke, 2008. Ohnesorg, Stefanie. Mit Kompass, Kutsche und Kamel. (Rück-) Einbindung der Frau in die Geschichte des Reisens und der Reiseliteratur. St. Ingbert: Röhrig, 1996. Pelz, Annegret. Reisen durch die eigene Fremde. Reiseliteratur von Frauen als autogeographische Schriften. Cologne: Böhlau, 1993. Seefeldt, Jürgen, ed. Verleger und Verlagshaus Baedeker in Koblenz. Zum 150. Todestag von Karl Baedeker. Koblenz: Schriften des Landesbibliothekszentrums Rheinland-Pfalz, 2010. Ujma, Christina. Wege in die Moderne. Reiseliteratur von Schriftstellerinnen und Schriftstellern des Vormärz. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2009. Zimmers, Barbara. Geschichte und Entwicklung des Tourismus. Trier: Geographische Gesellschaft Trier, 1995. 209 Introduction Peter V. Zima Die Dekonstruktion Einführung und Kritik utb S 2., überarbeitete und erweiterte Au age 2016 280 Seiten €[D] 22,99 ISBN 978-3-8252-4689-1 eISBN 978-3-8385-4689-6 Erscheint: bereits erschienen Der Autor stellt die Theorien von Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman und Harold Bloom in ihrem philosophischen und ästhetischen Kontext dar. Seine Kommentare zu konkreten Textanalysen - etwa zu Derridas Kritik der Sprechakttheorie oder zu seiner Interpretation von Baudelaires „La Fausse monnaie“ - schlagen eine Brücke von der Theorie zur Praxis der Dekonstruktion. Die Kritik der Dekonstruktion aus der Sicht der Kritischen Theorie mündet weder in Ablehnung noch in Vereinnahmung, sondern in einen offenen Dialog, in dem die Dialektik von Konsens und Dissens sowohl die Verwandtschaft als auch die Heterogenität der beiden Ansätze erkennen lässt. In der vorliegenden Neuau age, in der die Subjektproblematik bei Derrida und Deleuze im zweiten Kapitel ausführlicher kommentiert wird, wird der Dialog im letzten Kapitel auf feministische Theorien ausgedehnt, von denen sich einige an der Dekonstruktion orientieren, um den Subjektbegriff in Frage zu stellen, während andere an diesem Begriff festhalten. NEUAUFLAGE + alle wichtigen Vertreter der Dekonstruktion werden behandelt und kommentiert + ergänzt um ein Kapitel zur Subjektproblematik und zur feministischen Theorie Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG \ Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 \ Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de NEU Comparative Anthropology in Travel Literature: Georg Forster ’ s «O-Taheiti» (1779) MADHUVANTI KARYEKAR T HE O HIO S TATE U NIVERSITY The German world traveler and translator, Georg Forster (1754 - 94), who has often been called the father of modern German Völkerkunde, published in 1779 a German translation of a Spanish report on the island of Tahiti. The essay must have had a special place within Forster ’ s understanding of the topic, for when he planned to publish a collection of his essays on anthropology in 1782, he assigned a place for this Tahiti essay. Consequently, he reworked the piece and published it in 1789 in the edition of his Kleine Schriften (Fiedler 686 - 87). 1 He translated «O-Taheiti» in a time when there were already various reports on the island available to German readers. Bougainville had written about it, Captain Cook ’ s narrative of the first voyage of circumnavigation had talked about it, and moreover, Forster and his father had provided further information on the island ’ s culture and lifestyle in their respective travel narratives based on their voyage with Cook into the South Seas. Yet Forster took efforts to (re)publish one more translation on the same subject and add another travel report to the already existing numerous travelogues on Tahiti. In what follows, I first concentrate on Forster ’ s interest and intention in translating this essay, and then consider the purpose this translation serves in his larger anthropological enterprise, and what it reveals to us about Forster ’ s understanding of observation and narration in travel writing. Forster translated «O-Taheiti» because he aimed to acquaint his German readers with the Spanish way of encountering and observing the foreign and writing about it. He felt such a contribution was well called for as all earlier reports on Tahiti were either from British, French, or German points of view. A report written by a Spanish captain, therefore, provided a novelty in Forster ’ s eyes, as it demonstrated a new perspective to observe the foreign, if not new information. «O-Taheiti,» like many other translations by him, represented Forster ’ s self-reflexive mode of travel writing that consciously attempted to achieve a balance between speculation and empirical observation by paying closer attention to the acts of observation and their subsequent narration. In so doing, Foster significantly diverged from seventeenthcentury empiricism in travel writing, which was a simple presentation of facts (encyclopedic), and he thus revolutionized travel literature by highlighting the role of the observing subject and his various viewpoints that become an integral part of travel narration. Around 1800, under the influence of the Copernican turn introduced by Kantian philosophy, German philosophers and literary scholars, through their own systems of thought and literature, tried to respond to three quintessential questions posed by Kant: What can I know? What can I do? And what can I be permitted to hope for? Out of the convergence of various branches of theoretical, practical, and intellectual enquiries - a practice of thought that so particularly defined the eighteenth century - there arose a fourth question that essentially subsumed all the previous three questions: What is the human being? (Wellmon 1). Many rational, empirical, moral, and philosophical responses to this question were being framed in the wake of Cartesian dualism, English empiricism, and the spirit of scientific and technical advancements of the age. Among many models of anthropology that arose simultaneously - sometimes in dialogue, sometimes in contrast to each other - Forster ’ s writings represent, I argue, a self-reflexive model of anthropology. It is self-reflexive, for Forster self-consciously integrated in his writings his understanding of the «limitations» on human knowledge - in this case the limitations on empirical observation and rational speculation - in discovering the «absolute» truth about humanity (i. e., about the difference between the races, various stages of civilization, and the development of various cultures), and accordingly supported the notion of a «relative» truth. By being so self-reflexive, Forster ’ s theory of anthropology - which took its own form mostly in critical commentary in translated travel reports, travel literature reviews, and essays - consciously worked with the tentative, probable, and open-to-testing nature of empirical knowledge. 2 Forster was a unique figure in eighteenth-century Germany in many respects; but above all due to his actual participation in Captain Cook ’ s second voyage of discovery (1772 - 75) and the original cosmopolitan attitude he developed because of his early intercultural upbringing, his writings depict the dangers of applying a stringent, one-sided mode of inquiry with novel urgency. Indeed, I argue that considering the physical, perspectival, and temporal limits on travelers who observe and narrate about their experiences, Forster reframed the fourth question from «What is the human being? » to «What does it mean to write about the human being? » In his practice of travel writing and translation, Forster emphasized that a travel narrative is not only shaped by the traveler ’ s observations (collected data), but also by the travel writer ’ s imagination - i. e., by how he relates the 212 Madhuvanti Karyekar particular observation to a universal idea, how he situates it in the cultural context and establishes «correlations» among his observations. He further showed that ethnographic and anthropological representations are essentially provisional and contingent - i. e., they are susceptible to more revisions in the light of new evidence. Forster ’ s writings on travel literature contribute to late eighteenth-century anthropology in that they do not escape the inherent dialectical nature of anthropological observations, but embrace and utilize it in combination with other narrative strategies for producing more realistic descriptions of various cultures. Consequently, this article reads Foster ’ s «O-Taheiti» translation as a commentary on the empirical and philosophical possibilities of any anthropological enquiry displayed in travel writing. It shows that by emphasizing the importance of having a variety of viewpoints on the same matter, «O- Taheiti» displays an aspect of his self-reflexive anthropology - a comparative mode of thinking, which was one of the techniques he practiced to arrive at some probable (and/ or possible) and believable truth among the apparently different and often chaotic observations provided by a variety of travel reports. It enabled Forster to discuss within the text with a concrete example how the act of observation is acculturated, and how narrated observations turn out to be mediated, which he directed towards improving his readers ’ tolerance towards a provisional, composite, and temporal truth in travel literature anthropology. Ultimately Forster did not actually tell his readers «what» the human being is by providing them either with a classificatory or historical understanding; instead he engaged (and sought to educate) his readers ’ understanding by confronting them with «how» one should go about gathering the information about human beings, «how» one should formulate it, and present it. In the summer of 1778, the director of the Royal Botanical Garden in Madrid, Don Casimir Gomez Ortega sent Forster ’ s father - Johann Reinhold Forster - a copy of a travel report on the island of Tahiti written in Spanish, which can be found today among Georg Forster ’ s posthumous documents on geography (Fiedler 686). It has been conjectured 3 that the Spanish source text on Tahiti - a report on the author ’ s one-month stay on the island - was written by a certain Captain Don Domingo Boenecha between 1773 and 1775, based on his first travel to the island in 1772. 4 Forster acquired this report from his father, and decided to translate it into German. As the date at the bottom of the translation indicates, Forster finished the translation in November 1779, and perhaps immediately sent it for publication to his scientist and writer friend, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (Fiedler 685). Forster, financially dependent on his translation work, did not attribute 213 Comparative Anthropology in Travel Literature much creative thought to his translations. Rather, in a letter to another philosopher friend, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, dated 10 December 1779, he wrote of himself as an automated «translating machine» that lacked the ability to create something original: «Ich glaube vom Göttingischen Magazin wird ein Stück auf Neujahr fertig [. . .]. Ein Fetzen von mir, jedoch nur Uebersetzung einer spanischen Handschrift über O-Tahiti, welche ich besitze. So eine Uebersetzmaschine bin ich, daß ich leider! Nichts eigenes denken kann» (Forster, Briefe 260). The translated essay, however, was more than a mere translation of the original report: it turned into a commentary on the subject of the island of Tahiti as well as on travel writing in general. Broadly speaking, one can divide Forster ’ s translation into three sections - a short introduction to the origin of Boenecha ’ s text, the actual translation of the source text, and Forster ’ s comments on the information provided in the source text. The comment section is by far the longest part of the text, even longer than the translation of the source text. As Forster highlighted in the self-review of the first part of his Kleine Schriften, the «O-Taheiti» translation supplements the Spanish source text with «einen ohngefähr dreymal so langen Commentar, welcher eine Art von Topographie jener berühmten Entdeckungen enthählt [sic]» (Fiedler 686). By adding a translator ’ s commentary to the information provided by the Spanish author, Forster established himself as the mediator, who intended to provide his reading public with the right kind of information, to «facilitate the comparison» with other reports about the island and to educate them in the act of reading travel literature as such («O-Taheiti» 38). At the same time, translating a travel report and supplementing it with extensive commentary was Forster ’ s way of intervening into the ongoing contemporaneous discussions about the study of humanity and anthropology in general. As recent scholarly research on Forster ’ s «Übersetzungsfabrik» (Roche 103 - 05) argued, Forster ’ s main intent in providing the German readership with translations of various travelogues was to keep the German readers abreast of the information about newly discovered parts of the world through the various voyages of the era (Martin, «Forsters Übersetzungen» 60 - 62). He, therefore, often questioned and rectified information in the source text by providing supplementary materials either in the body or the paratext of the target-language text (Martin, «Annotation and Authority» 200). Forster ’ s «fidelity» was not to the form or to the content of the source text as such but to the veracity of the information provided therein, for according to his understanding, the purpose of travel literature was to serve the spread of knowledge. In accordance with these objectives, it was, for instance, a common practice not to translate the entire text, and to publish 214 Madhuvanti Karyekar only a selected and abbreviated translated text - partly because the publishers of travel literature (translated or otherwise) were usually in close competition with other publishers, and partly because the translators were focused on presenting only the newly acquired, credited information, and thus avoiding repetition of the material (Martin, «Forster und die Reiseliteratur» 1635). Martin further maintains that in the spirit of providing the most useful and accurate information through their translations, the translators changed the original to such an extent that, practically, one has to consider the translation a completely different work (1635). In her article on the role of translators ’ prefaces in late eighteenth-century travelogues, Birgit Tautz purported that late eighteenth-century conventions of translating travelogues often involved «cutting portions of the original, and fabricating facts about travel, in accordance with a particular ideology or philosophy on the part of the writer, translators, and/ or editor» (155). This was due to the fact that the relationship between translation and authorship in terms of hierarchy was yet to be clearly defined. Working in the wake of Johann Christoph Gottsched ’ s «enlightened, normative poetics,» many translators felt obliged «to improve, expand or abridge» if the original text called for better (re)presentation. 5 The practice of translating travel literature also stood in close relation to the purpose of travel writing in the late eighteenth century, which was to educate the reading public about the geographically and culturally distant as well as newly discovered parts of the world as faithfully as possible (Martin, «Forster und die Reiseliteratur» 1635). Forster ’ s understanding of travel literature as an important part of the organization of knowledge was also shaped by the special conditions of eighteenth-century reading circles. The end of the eighteenth century saw a large increase in travel literature in the book markets. Travel books played an especially important role in bringing knowledge of the world beyond Europe to the educated public at a time when it was difficult to distinguish between geography and travel books, especially those concerning the non-European world (Tzoref-Ashkenazi 3). Indeed, travel books were among the most popular literary genres and were well-represented in private libraries, in the stocks of reading societies, and in commercial lending libraries. But at the same time, this proliferation meant that public opinion was forming on the way these travel accounts were written. 6 By the late eighteenth century, travel narratives were traditionally seen as falling into two groups: the instructive account and the travel narrative written purely for entertainment (Batten 7 - 8). Then there were literary fictional accounts, which were not based on actual travels, but emulated the style of the travel literatures in essence. 215 Comparative Anthropology in Travel Literature Such fictional accounts confronted their readers with the «foreign,» which made them reflect on their «own» culture, society, and social milieu in general. Montesquieu ’ s Lettres Persians (1721) and Jonathan Swift ’ s Gulliver ’ s Travels (1726) belonged to this third category, as they introduced the early conceptions of cultural relativism. Considering the popularity of these works, many authors of travel literature decided to follow the lighter fictive style, where they emphasized the elements of exotic and cultural differences. But unlike Lettres Persians or Gulliver ’ s Travels, these works often failed to reach a fruitful comparative analysis of the familiar and foreign cultures (Wolff 6 - 9). Also, following the publication of Laurence Sterne ’ s Sentimental Journey (1768), there was a tendency to overemphasize the travelers ’ sentimental (emotional) responses in the written account. Forster criticized the style of those who exaggerated the emotional as well as those who were too pedantic and talked about a new form of travel writing in his preface to A Voyage Round the World, which he described as «philosophical history of the voyage» (14). He wanted to achieve the self-implicating and thought-provoking literary style as practiced by Montesquieu and Swift, a writing technique that did not just enumerate the events of the voyage in a dry manner, but invoked an intellectual participation of the readers by presenting them with the traveler ’ s insights. He also incorporated the traveler ’ s emotional response to the surroundings in the descriptive process. At the same time, he did not want to overemphasize the role of the traveler-writer ’ s imagination. Forster ’ s approach to converging the traveler-writer ’ s imagination with the observed empirical facts toward a synthetic middle ground can be described by Moravia ’ s idea of «epistemological liberalization» (247 - 50). Moravia postulated that the mainstream of the eighteenth century distinguished itself from the seventeenth century in one major aspect: where the seventeenth century identified science substantially within physics and mathematics, favoring «categories and procedures of an abstract, systematizing, deductive, and nomological type,» the eighteenth century discovered that epistemology also needs «rehabilitation of senses,» «inductive construction of explanatory models,» and the «pluralization of cognitive strategies,» among others (248). As Zammito noted, Diderot ’ s Pensées sur l ’ Interprétation de la Nature [Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature, 1753] offered an example of how «interpretation» - a poetic or hermeneutic approach - can be extended to the natural sciences. According to Zammito, Diderot believed in the place of hypothesis in empirical science, but insisted that this hypothesis should be imaginative, in that there should be a place for «imagination, analogy, and every individual creative and inventive faculty» 216 Madhuvanti Karyekar (qtd. in Zammito 229). Accordingly, Diderot distinguished between the mere observateur, what in today ’ s language would be a positivist, and the interprete, one who would seek general principles behind the observed phenomena (229). In assimilating the perspectival and physio-temporal limits in travel narration, Forster certainly «interpreted» his (and other travelers ’ ) observations and presented them as a part of his more scientifically oriented inquiry of the phenomena. In that regard, one can find in his conception of observation and its narration an influence and development of «epistemological liberalization» in the first half of the eighteenth century as proposed by Buffon, Blumenbach, and Diderot, among others. But Forster differed from them in one important respect - he did not find himself torn «between metaphysical allegiances to dualistic spiritualism and models in empirical life science that clearly undermined such neat distinctions» (Zamitto 233). He chose to bracket the more metaphysical questions (such as whether reason and language belong to a divine, spiritual intervention), and did not decide in favor of one way or the other. He instead focused more on the question of how one should guide the anthropological inquiry that is a merger of «observation» and «interpretation,» to use Diderot ’ s distinctions. Thus, in writing a travel narrative, Forster set himself a goal of presenting his experiences not only within the context of the natural world he described, but also with special attention to the cultural, national, and temporal context of the observing subject. He reviewed and translated various travel reports with the same goal in mind - he accordingly shaped his comments on the style and content of the translated text. In justifying his act and the nobility of his intention in translating the Spanish text, Forster observed: Unsere Begriffe von Völkern, welche nur selten besucht werden, und uns Deutschen wenigstens nur vom Hörensagen bekannt geworden sind, dürften leicht eine schiefe Richtung bekommen, zumal wenn wißbegierige und wahrheitsliebende Leser nicht den Wunsch befriedigen können: in Ermangelung des eigenen Anschauens, in so viele Gesichtspunkte als möglich geführt zu werden, von wannen andere gesehen haben; und ihre Nachrichten unter einander zu vergleichen. («O-Taheiti» 35) This «we» - a cumulative term Forster used here for «Germans» - can easily form not-so-accurate notions about the non-European parts of the world and their inhabitants, especially those that are rarely visited; the danger of forming lopsided notions is even greater for the Germans, according to Forster, for they get the newer information about the recently discovered parts of the world most of the time only through second-hand information. 217 Comparative Anthropology in Travel Literature As a result, readers form incorrect conceptions about these newly discovered peoples and parts of the world. Forster thereby implicitly commented on the need to undertake more voyages to the least-visited places on earth, and on the (un)fortunate situation of the German people, who could not participate in such voyages of exploration as they lacked an empire that could fund such voyages of discovery. Since the views of the German readers about «foreign» peoples and places were often based on second-hand information, Forster continued, they seemed to be misconstrued. Forster further argued that the danger of forming misconceptions would still remain, even if the «inquisitive» and «truth-loving» readers wished to sieve through the hearsay for more truthful information. This is so, Forster observed, because German readers usually do not get access to the range of travel reports that could provide them with various points of views on one matter. In translating yet another report on Tahiti, Forster aimed to provide his readers with an additional viewpoint on Tahiti, one that his readers could compare with that of Bougainville, Cook, J. R. Forster, or anyone else. He acknowledged that readers already might have read many reports on the same subject, and precisely for this reason, the readers can now look beyond what is represented in the report. They could compare the information from various reports and see how each of them described for example the nature of the islanders, their lifestyle, their religion, and their morality. In a way, Forster was educating his readership to look for «how» rather than «what» was (re)presented in the travel narrative. What mattered in this case was providing readers with as many perspectives as possible. The benefits of reading various reports, Forster elaborated, lay in the context of individual and national identities and viewpoints, as well as the aesthetic appeal of «full color» reportage: Ein Jeder hat Gelegenheiten zum Sehen gehabt, die ihm eigen waren, und sich keinem anderen darboten. Ein jeder [sic] hat aber auch seine eigene Art zu sehen. Nationalcharakter, Nationalpolitik, Erziehung, Klima, und was sonst nicht alles? Sind eben so viele Häutchen im Auge, deren jedes die Strahlen anders bricht, wenn schon das anatomische Messer sie nicht finden kann. Allein wenn der Spanier, der Franzose, der Engländer und der Deutsche, ein jeglicher [sic] anders sehen, und sich darauf berufen ihr humor, aqueus, vitreus und crystallinus sey so gut beym einen wie beym andern; - alsdenn mag der Philosoph berechnen, welche Farben jene unkörperlichen Brillen spielen, und aus allen den bunten Resultaten die klare lautere Wahrheit zusammenschmelzen. («O-Taheiti» 35 - 36) For Forster, the way one observes is always innate to each observer. Even when two observers are observing one and the same event, their observations are expected to be singular and unique, because each observer decides 218 Madhuvanti Karyekar differently where to look, what to look at, and how to look at it. Already in the preface to his A Voyage Round the World (1777), he had argued that two travelers seldom saw the same object in the same manner, and moreover each reported the fact invariably differently, according to individual sensibilities and peculiar modes of thinking. For example, Forster and Captain Cook both had written their accounts of the second voyage of circumnavigation, but Forster believed that the readers should read both accounts, as they were bound to be different in their emphasis on and elaboration of the same events (13 - 14). This difference had to do partially with the fact that both Captain Cook and Forster were assigned different offices and duties on the journey. Since Captain Cook had a specific geographical task, his eye could have sought only the things that furthered his task at hand, whereas Forster, as he himself stated, had a freer hand to choose what to observe. But there would still be a difference of accounts, so Forster, were both Cook and Forster assigned to the same tasks. Forster ’ s discussion showed his early awareness of the fact that the selection of what to see, and the interpretation of what one has seen, depends on the prior acculturation of information from the observer. As a temporal and dynamic human being, every observer is bound to observe in a manner that is unique to him and him alone. 7 Add to this uniqueness all the extra qualities such as «Nationalcharakter, Nationalpolitik, Erziehung, Klima, und was sonst nicht alles? » which affect the way reality is perceived. All these external factors impose on observation, according to Forster, «perspectival limits,» a phrase Barnouw used to describe Forster ’ s understanding of the «colored glass» through which every observer is bound to look (324 - 25). The perspectival limitations, this «colored glass» through which the individual viewer must look, or the «Häutchen im Auge,» enable and drive the observation, impacting what the observer sees, or rather chooses to see. His use of the term «Häutchen im Auge» is apt, for it can be understood either as the actual clear liquids (or membranes as in aqueous humor, vitreous humor, and crystalline humor) in the eyes, or metaphorical layers formed as a response to the process of acculturation - the layers which we gain as we keep growing in a certain environment, culture, society, and so on. Barnouw has observed that Forster always used the spelling «Eräugnis» for the German «Ereignis» (event) (338). In so doing, Barnouw argued, Forster emphasized the link of the object to visual perception, for «Eräugnis» stresses the etymological connection between event and the perception of the same through the eyes: Old High German (ir)ougen, «to have in front of eyes,» turned into Middle High German eröugnen, eröugen. The English «event» is also developed from Latin evenire, «to come out» (Barnouw 328). 219 Comparative Anthropology in Travel Literature In other words, in using «Eräugnis» over «Ereignis,» Forster consciously emphasized the witnessing eye (and «I») behind every observation. Forster ’ s self-reflective incorporation of the observer (his «eyes» and «I» both) in the narrated observation looks consciously at the fact that our observations become mediated through these invisible layers in our eyes. This mediation, however, is not negative or obstacle creating for Forster. On the contrary, just as the clear liquids in our eyes contribute to the optical power of the eye, the metaphorical layers or films also enhance our capacity to observe - they help us observe things with perspectives. The metaphorical (and invisible) layers in our eyes, in fact, turn our views into viewpoints, or Sichten into Ansichten. Moreover, because of this «individual manner of seeing,» no matter how strenuously one aims to provide scientifically objective facts, the ethnographic observation is bound to be less than objective. In other words, the particular observations can never guarantee universal approval that the scientific fact of the gravitational force can have. Such observations, however, can provide the readers with various «veritable» facts. Provided that, so Forster, any countryman (the Spaniard, the Frenchman, the Englishman, or the German) sees differently and uses his eyes well to grasp what reality presents before him (hence the appeal to use all three humors of the eye as well as an appeal to everybody to do it equally well), none of those facts will and can be universally true, but they should and can be relatively true. In this manner, the observer can only make a claim for Wahrscheinlichkeit rather than absolute, certain Wahrheit. The truthfulness that Forster expected to find in travel narratives is connected to his self-awareness that a traveler ’ s observations do not have claim to the ultimate truth. All he emphasized then, was that the traveler should report all he saw and how he saw it, without letting his judgment getting clouded by any racial or cultural prejudices. While contemplating another limitation of human observation and how to tackle it in travel narratives, Forster observed in «Cook der Entdecker»: In der That ist es offenbar, daß so vieler wiederholten Besuche ungeachtet, unsere Kenntniß von jener Insel noch jezt [sic] sehr unvollkommen seyn müsse, und daß es auch schlechterdings unmöglich sey, auf Entdeckungsreisen, die einen bestimmten Zweck haben, den ganzen Umfang aller Verhältnisse eines jeden neuentdeckten Landes zu erschöpfen. (259) Forster wrote this piece in 1787, almost twelve years after his first visit to Tahiti and claimed that knowledge about Tahiti was still incomplete, despite repeated visits by various travelers. He was not blaming the method of any observer in particular here. On the contrary, he was pointing out the obvious: that it was impossible to grasp things in their entirety on these voyages of discovery. First of all, such voyages were driven by specific motives. The crew 220 Madhuvanti Karyekar employed in the service of the employer went after the facts that they were supposed to look for. Secondly, these voyages were for a limited time period. Forster asked in relation to such a goal: How many of the actions and events making up the main points of a broader picture are likely to take place in the short span of a traveler ’ s stay? For example, he stated that Cook visited the Tahitian islands four times and only during his last visit did he witness a human sacrifice. Forster accepted that the observations made during a limited period will be insufficient to give «complete» knowledge about nature (flora, fauna, wild life, and human life) - every season produces its own flowers and fruits, animals and birds change their habitats, and these environmental changes affect the human life inhabiting these regions. In view of these limitations, Forster claimed, «dem Reisenden bleibt unter diesen Umständen weiter nichts übrig, als aufmerksam zu beobachten, und das gesehene [sic] treu zu erzählen» («Cook der Entdecker» 259). Forster mainly asked that the travel writers be self-conscious about and accordingly integrate these limitations of observation in the way they recounted their observations, and proposed further that it will be the task of readers to put together the «klare lautere Wahrheit» from any given travel report by comparing and contrasting the presented facts («O-Taheiti» 65). With the essay «O-Taheiti,» Forster hoped to make his readers aware of the intricacies involved in the act of observation and narration of those observations in travel writing. He accepted that the Spanish report on Tahiti Island did not provide any new information as such, nevertheless in order to be fair to the very mode of travel writing, even the confirmation of what had already been told should not be neglected by the researcher of humanity. Therefore, Forster wrote, «Es wird auch manche Beobachtung hier mitgetheilt, welche entweder den unsrigen zuwider läuft, oder gänzlich in unseren Werken fehlt, und über einige Gegenstände neues Licht verbreitet» («O-Taheiti» 36). The Spanish account was valuable in spite of and because of its distortions, contradictions, and occasional lack of information. This is the part where Forster consciously assumed the role of the traveler who was not just a person proficient in the source and the target language, but a person who was an expert on the subject matter as well. He placed himself in front of his readers as a translator who not only had been there, but had also kept abreast with new information on the subject matter. Thus Forster remarked at the beginning of the comment section: «So weit ich befugt bin, von dieser Nachricht zu urtheilen, trägt sie das Gepräge der Zuverlässigkeit» («O- Taheiti» 48). He referred directly to his authority, his «Befugt-Sein» (having power of/ capacity of) that enabled him to judge the credibility of the information provided. For example, he observed in the beginning that 221 Comparative Anthropology in Travel Literature Was die Lage der Insel, ihre äußerliche Beschaffenheit, Größe und natürlichen Produkte; die Bildung der Einwohner, und ihre Arbeiten betrifft, weicht fast gar nicht von den Berichten ab, die Wallis, Bougainville, Cook und ich davon abgelegt haben. Über das Klima, die sittliche Verfassung und die Religion liefert er interessante Bemerkungen, und wo er die Art sich zu kleiden, sowohl als die Verfertigung des Zeuges beschreibt, wird manches wie mich dünkt, noch faßlicher als zuvor gesagt. («O-Taheiti» 48) Here, Forster presented the Spanish report «in comparison» to previous travel reports and created an intertext by situating his translation in relation to other similar travel reports. He thereby highlighted that he had first-hand as well as meticulously expanded knowledge of the subject. Therefore he went on commenting that the information provided by the original author was credible, as it did not deviate from what others had said before. In some places, he even praised the original author for narrating some things more accurately than others had done before, and at other times he credited the author with providing native names of the plants and places on the island. By juxtaposing the author ’ s information with earlier information, Forster underlined his own capacity to add comments, to correct some information, and to pronounce criticism on the manner of the narration. He positioned himself so as to convince readers that he was the ultimate - and trustworthy - expert on the subject matter. He proceeded very methodically by citing what the original author had said, imbuing it every now and then with his critical remarks based on his own experiences and observations on Tahiti, and what he had read in other travel reports. For the most part, Forster was in agreement with what Captain Boenecha described. But when it came to the description of the characters of the islanders, Forster noted that, «Wer die englischen und französischen Nachrichten von ‹ O-Taheiti › ohne Vorurtheil gelesen hat, wird ebenfalls Spuren der spanischen Denkart in der Schilderung finden, die der Ungenannte hier von dem Charakter unserer Insulaner macht [. . .]» («O-Taheiti» 64). In other words, Forster emphasized that in the characterization of the islanders, the readers are not only reading factual information, but also a Spanish way of interpretation. The Spanish report described - and here we will just have to rely on Forster ’ s German translation of the source text - the Tahitians as follows: Die Insulaner sind gelehrig, sehr verständig und geschickt. Sie lieben die Bequemlichkeit und den Müssiggang; sind schlau und diebisch [. . .], gierig im Essen, und ausschweifend in der Wollust, wovon die häufigen Statuen von schändlicher Gestalt im ganzen Bezirke der Insel, ein Zeugniß gaben. Sie lassen sich von ihren Weibern gänzlich regieren [. . .]. («O-Taheiti» 44) 222 Madhuvanti Karyekar What Forster found decisively Spanish in this description was the Spanish author ’ s definitive way of describing the Tahitians - i. e., Boenecha just pronounced «das Urtheil» that the Tahitians were cunning and larcenous (64). He did not explain how these characteristics are situated in the cultural and environmental context of Tahiti. On that note, while commenting on Boenecha ’ s view of looking at the character of the islanders, Forster observed, «Ich will ihnen [den Tahitianern] hiemit keineswegs ihre natürlichen Fähigkeiten und Anlagen, weder die Verschlagenheit und das diebische Wesen, noch den Hang zur Bequemlichkeit und zur Wollust abläugnen, worüber schon so vieles anderweitig bekannt geworden ist» («O- Taheiti» 64). Forster made explicit that he was not denying the observation (i. e., the possible events on which Boenecha based his remarks). From his own experience, he knew that there was a grain of truth in what Boenecha observed. His objection, however, was to the way Boenecha recounted his observations. By presenting his observations as the ultimate facts, Boenecha, argued Forster, observed in many cases hastily («eilfertig gesehen») and pronounced his verdict even more hastily («und noch eilfertiger geurtheilt») («O-Taheiti» 67) - a folly which Forster himself tried to avoid in his own travel writing since the days of his very first travelogue. Consequently, before declaring a judgment that Tahitians are by nature thieves, Boenecha ’ s report, according to Forster, should have mentioned that their life style is quite simple and their daily needs to sustain their existence were easily fulfilled by their surroundings. Therefore when they saw something like European goods (tools, food), they got an irresistible desire to see its use for themselves. For them, the concept of «ownership» might not exist. For if they had that concept, they would not have allowed the travelers to roam their land as freely as they did. If, Forster continued, one wanted to talk about the idleness of the Tahitians, one should mention that the nature of the island provided them with enough food for their basic needs. And one should remember that hard work was only born out of need and deficiency. If one calls them greedy and voracious eaters, then one should also recall and talk about their big stature, their extraordinary strength in wrestling, and their corpulence («O-Taheiti» 64 - 65). Virtue and vice, Foster concluded, were relative concepts, which had to be judged by the standards of the culture that embodied them. «Auf diese Weise vermeiden wir den Vorwurf, daß wir fremden Völkern unsere Gedanken leihen, und uns dafür das Recht nehmen, sie nach dieser unbilligen Voraussetzung zu züchtigen oder loßzulassen» (64). By using the collective pronoun «wir,» Forster addressed, engaged, and directed his readers ’ attention to the ways one ought to describe observations and events. 223 Comparative Anthropology in Travel Literature He explained this point further by giving his readers an example, one from a European context they would understand. He maintained, while a layman would easily judge Northern Europeans to be overeaters, doctors and dissectors would know that Northern Europeans are overeaters only in relation to the eating habits of Southern Europeans. In fact, a Northern European is not an overeater at all, but eats according to the «Richtschnur» (guideline) of his bodily demands as defined by cultural standards and environmental conditions. The layman does not consult or draw together the differences in climate and their impact on the body, therefore he judges hastily. In contrast, doctors and dissectors take into account other factors that work as guidelines for his/ her behavior and only then form their judgment («O-Taheiti» 65). Clearly, Forster wanted his readers to be those «dissectors and doctors» who gather enough information about the context before pronouncing the judgment. Also, in emphasizing the individuality of observation and justifying his translation on the ground of this individuality, Forster was giving his reading public his own example of how one should practice anthropological enquiry. Foster had visited Tahiti twice during his circumnavigation with Captain Cook, he had written about the island, its inhabitants, and their way of life in English and in German. Still, he could not remain «indifferent» to the Spanish report on Tahiti. In other words, he performed the task of the philosopher that he so clearly described - «alsdenn mag der Philosoph berechnen, welche Farben jene unkörperlichen Brillen spielen, und aus allen den bunten Resultaten die klare lautere Wahrheit zusammenschmelzen» («O-Taheiti» 35 - 36). As he claimed elsewhere, the diversity of the represented viewpoints should whet the appetite of the reader for the new, the unknown, the not-yet experienced. He was convinced that the more these reports differed in detail from each other, the more entertaining they would become in allowing readers to travel in their imagination with these narrations. And the more variety of viewpoints presented in these accounts, the more satisfying the pursuit of knowledge would be for the readers in «guessing» (erraten) the true character of the inhabitants and the real nature of the land («Über die Insel Madagaskar» 625). Forster ’ s insistence on gaining access to a variety of travel reports is justified considering the time of his activity, when dissemination of gathered knowledge happened mainly through the distribution of books and periodicals. It was also the time when Europe was becoming aware of other «cultural» parts of the world - of the fact that «there were other Europes» as Raymond Schwab stated (7). Knowing as much as possible about the rest of world by comparing and contrasting the informa- 224 Madhuvanti Karyekar tion from these accounts was, according to Forster, indeed advantageous to the mind of the readers, who could at least travel vicariously. Of course, Forster clarified, travel reports could never take the place of the actual experience of having been there, having eye-witnessed the events, but such reports could at least give those among his readers who could not travel to these places an idea about the world outside of their daily life. For a chance to compare various reports about the same place meant not to confront the world «im todten Buchstaben,» but to research the world in the traveler ’ s spirit, and with his knowledge and art of perception («Über die Insel Madagaskar» 625 - 26). In that regard, «O-Taheiti» also delineated the role of the philosopher-reader, who had the task of looking at all the impressions gathered by various individuals and then summarizing the information by performing a contrastive analysis so as to arrive at the idea of truth about the facts. Forster ’ s translation was an example for his readers, and he was actually asking them to take on that task by reading as many travelogues as possible so that they might be exposed to a plethora of information. At the same time, he made his readers conscious of the fact that the truth from this comparative reading would always be composite, relational, and therefore shifting, but not, for this reason, less important a goal for his readers. Notes 1 This article follows the translation published in the «Akademie Ausgabe» of Forster ’ s collected works, which is based on the reprint from 1789. According to the editors of the volume, the differences between the two editions were limited - in the later version, Forster left out critical comments on Buffon and his school, and revised a section on religious practices in Tahiti (Fiedler 687). 2 It should be made clear here that late eighteenth-century German anthropology was not yet divided into two defined branches that separated the theory of anthropology from its practice; however, two groups of tasks - observation, description, and collection in the field; and theorizing about human nature, origins, history, lifestyles, and civilization - were usually carried out by two separate groups of people: the task in the field - the practical anthropology - was performed by travelers (including captains, scientists on the expeditions, sailors); and the task of speculation and theorizing by philosophers and professors in Europe, relying on the empirical information provided by the first group (Esleben 26). Both groups, however, aimed at providing material to build a comprehensive narrative of humanity. Forster was the first of the ethnographic observers who was also a naturalist, not only more capable of observing, but also more disposed to analyze and generalize his observations, at the same time firmly grounding them in the observer ’ s experience (Ackerknecht 85 - 86). 225 Comparative Anthropology in Travel Literature 3 The editors of volume 5 mention that when Ortega sent the report to J. R. Forster, he did not disclose details about the origin of it, so that even Georg Forster could only surmise about the author: «Er hat nicht für gut befunden, sich zu nennen, allein er ist entweder Officier oder Wundarzt, und wahrscheinlich das erstere gewesen» («O-Taheiti» 38). Another report, which was signed by Boenechea and could be found in an archive of the official documents of the General of India in Sevilla, was translated into English by B. G. Corney in 1913. The editors purport that the Spanish source text was most probably written by Boenechea, for Forster ’ s source text contains some passages similar to Corney ’ s English translation of Boenechea ’ s report (Fiedler 686). 4 As competition to the increasing number of British and French expeditions in the Pacific, the Spanish government had started to send ships from Peru to the West more frequently, so that they could retain their claim on some of the newly discovered island territories or lands of the Pacific Ocean as well as establish new missionary stations there. So it happened that Captain Don Domingo Boenechea set out from the port of Callao in 1772 with the frigate Santa Maria Magdalena, or Aguila (Adler), and reached the island of Tahiti on 19 November 1772 where he resided until December 20. He returned to Callao in April 1773 and set out again on 20 September 1774 with the Aguila and an accompanying ship carrying two Franciscan Fathers with the intention of converting the Tahitians to Christianity and acquiring the land for Spain. Boenechea died during this second stay on Tahiti, which lasted from 27 November 1774 to the end of January 1775. Very soon after, the Franciscan Fathers gave up on converting the Tahitians to Christianity and eventually returned to Callao with Captain Don Cajatano de Langara, again onboard the Aguila (Fiedler 685). 5 Tautz ultimately claims that later eighteenth-century travelogues in translation defined translators ’ roles and the logic of translation in a complex manner. Translation became more akin to writing, and translators assumed the role of a mediator «representing the foreign cultures, while simulating the community of readers, while asserting the self of a translator, who mimes, inevitably, an author» (157). Forster, with his numerous translator ’ s prefaces and translations with critical comments, embodies a translatorauthor. 6 According to Tzoref-Ashkenazi, when the book market was growing fast, travel literature expanded not only in absolute numbers but also in terms of its share of the entire market. This was not just a German phenomenon. According to one estimate, about half of the 15,000 travel books that were published in Europe during the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries appeared during the second half of the eighteenth century, while the number of travel books that were published in Germany during the eighteenth century has been estimated at 5,000 to10,000. The growing numbers reflected the strong public demand (3 - 4). 7 Forster ’ s notion of a temporal human being owes a lot to Buffon ’ s influence on him. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707 - 88), who is often commended as the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the eighteenth century, was a French naturalist and one of the prominent philosophers of the time who conceptualized nature as temporalized. He also developed further Montesquieu ’ s thought that the «environment» - milieu and climate - is important in the reconstruction of human experience. It has been argued that up to Buffon ’ s time, man had never been studied, except as an individual; Buffon was the first who studied man as belonging to a species (Zammito 228, 441). Zammito states that the same thought was further developed by Blumenbach and systematized by the Scottish Enlightenment. For 226 Madhuvanti Karyekar Forster ’ s reading of the Scottish Enlightenment and its influence on this voyage see Uhlig, «Theoretical or Conjectural History.» Works Cited Ackerknecht, Erwin H. «George Forster, Alexander von Humboldt, and Ethnology.» Isis 46.2 (1955): 83 - 95. Barnouw, Dagmar. «Eräugnis: Georg Forster on the Difficulties of Diversity.» Impure Reason: The Dialectic of Enlightenment in Germany. Ed. Robert C. Holub and Daniel W. Wilson. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1993. 322 - 43. Batten, Charles. Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth- Century Travel Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978. Esleben, Jörg. Enlightement Canvas: Cultures of Travel, Ethnographic Aesthetics, and Imperialist Discourse in Georg Forster ’ s Writings. Diss. U of Rochester, 1999. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1999. Forster, Georg. A Voyage Round the World (1777). Georg Forsters Werke. Vol. 1. Ed. Robert L. Kahn. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1968. - . Briefe bis 1783. Georg Forsters Werke. Vol. 13. Ed. Siegfried Scheibe. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1978. - . «Cook der Entdecker.» Kleine Schriften zur Völker- und Länderkunde. Georg Forsters Werke. Vol. 5. Ed. Horst Fiedler et al. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1985. 183 - 319. - . «O-Taheiti.» Kleine Schriften zur Völker- und Länderkunde. Georg Forsters Werke. Vol. 5. Ed. Horst Fiedler et al. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1985. 35 - 71. - . «Über die Insel Madagaskar [Zu: Des Abbés Rochon Reise nach Madagaskar und Ostindien].» Kleine Schriften zur Völker- und Länderkunde. Georg Forsters Werke. Vol. 5. Ed. Horst Fiedler et al. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1985. 617 - 38. Fiedler, Horst, Klaus-Georg Popp, Annerose Schneider, and Christian Suckow. «Erläuterungen: Einführung.» Kleine Schriften zur Völker- und Länderkunde. Georg Forsters Werke. Vol. 5. Ed. Horst Fiedler et al. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1985. 677 - 815. Martin, Alison E. «Annotation and Authority: Georg Forster ’ s Footnotes to the Nachrichten von den Pelew-Inseln (1789).» Translation and Literature 15.2 (2006): 177 - 201. - . «Die Rolle von Georg Forsters Übersetzungen in den intellektuellen Netzwerken seiner Zeit: Thomas Forrests Voyage to New Guinea (1779).» Georg-Forster- Studien 12 (2007): 59 - 75. - . «Übersetzung und die Entdeckung der Welt: Georg Forster (1754 - 94) und die Reiseliteratur.» Übersetzung: ein internationales Handbuch zur Übersetzungsforschung. Harald Kittel, Juliane House, and Brigitte Schultze. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007. 1634 - 41. Moravia, Sergio. «The Enlightenment and the Sciences of Man.» History of Science 18 (1980): 247 - 68. 227 Comparative Anthropology in Travel Literature Roche, Geneviève. « ‹ Völlig nach Fabrikenart › : Handwerk und Kunst der Übersetzung bei Georg Forster.» Weltbürger - Europäer - Deutscher - Franke: Georg Forster zum 200. Todestag. Ed. Rolf Reichardt and Geneviève Roche. Mainz: Universitätsbibliothek, 1994. 101 - 36. Schwab, Raymond. Oriental Renaissance: Europe ’ s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680 - 1880. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. Tautz, Birgit. «Cutting, Pasting, Fabricating: Late 18th-Century Travelogues and their German Translators between Legitimacy and Imaginary Nations.» The German Quarterly 79.2 (2006): 155 - 74. Tzoref-Ashkenazi, Chen. «The Experienced Traveller as a Professional Author: Friedrich Ludwig Langstedt, Georg Forster and Colonialism Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Germany.» History 95.317 (2010): 2 - 24. Uhlig, Ludwig. «Theoretical or Conjectural History. Georg Forsters Voyage Round the World im zeitgenössichen Kontext.» Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 53.4 (2003): 399 - 414. Wellmon, Chad. Becoming Human: Romantic Anthropology and the Embodiment of Freedom. University Park: The Pennsylvania State UP, 2010. Wolff, Larry. «Discovering Cultural Perspective: The Intellectual History of Anthropological Thought in the Age of Enlightenment.» The Anthropology of the Enlightenment. Ed. Marco Cipolloni and Larry Wolff. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007. 3 - 34. Zammito, John H. Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002. 228 Madhuvanti Karyekar Inside the Oriental Spectacle: Hermann von Pückler-Muskau ’ s Egyptian Travelogue DANIELA RICHTER C ENTRAL M ICHIGAN U NIVERSITY The Orient has been part of German culture as a repository of the imaginary, exotic, and fantastic since the Middle Ages. 1 One only needs to remember Feirefiz, the half-brother of Parzival in Wolfram von Eschenbach ’ s romance with his black and white checkered complexion to see how the Orient has inspired the imagination of German writers and poets. By the nineteenth century, texts on the Orient such as Die Märchen aus Tausendundeiner Nacht (first translated into German in 1824) and Wilhelm Hauff ’ s Märchen Almanach (1825 - 28; with tales such as «Der kleine Muck» and «Kalif Storch») employed the same fantastical tropes and elements as the texts of the Middle Ages, thus implying to readers that Oriental culture was timeless and not part of the same historical progress as the West. In the late nineteenth century, the Orient became a staple within consumer culture and was utilized in the marketing of such goods as tobacco, coffee, and tea. 2 David Ciarlo, in his analysis of German fin-de-siècle advertisement, attests to the power of the Oriental in visual imagery and claims that the Orient with its exotic allure «overshadowed the scientific, nationalistic, religious, and even mercantile missions of official German colonialism» (14). Representations of the Orient also extended to the performative. In the nineteenth century, they featured prominently in the tableaux vivants, a popular form of entertainment at social gatherings entailing live reenactments of famous paintings, sculptures, or dramatic scenes. Karin Wurst states in her analysis of the nineteenth-century tableaux that scenes depicting a harem were especially popular since they allowed for a «mingling of erotic pleasure with the enjoyment of masquerade and cultural knowledge» (216). Later in the century, the Orient became a staple in circus programs leading to the concept of Völkerschauen, which toured Germany around the time of the fin de siécle. Suzanne Marchand ascribes great relevance to these representations and states: «It is probably the case that more Central Europeans learned [. . .] about the Orient by way of theater and material culture [. . .] than even through travelogues [. . .]. But in these media, it is clear that the Orient with the greatest appeal was a decorative, picturesque, exotic and sensuous Orient, one of costumes, colors, weapons and exotic animals» («Popularizing» 180). 3 In his travelogue on Egypt entitled Aus Mehemed Alis Reich (1844), Fürst Hermann von Pückler-Muskau (1785 - 1871) showed how the elements of popular Oriental spectacle could be adapted to create a travel text that transcended the established boundaries of the travel genre in order to become part of nineteenth-century popular entertainment culture. Considering Pückler ’ s travelogue within the context of spectacle and entertainment culture provides a new and, I would argue, better context for reading his text than has been the case before. Aus Mehemed Alis Reich, besides coopting sensational and spectacular style elements for its scenic descriptions, is in itself part of entertainment culture, dramatizing and fictionalizing the writer ’ s experiences for his readers ’ enjoyment. It is moreover significant that it is an aristocratic writer who breaches the limits of a genre which by the nineteenth century had become very much associated with the middle class and its values of education, utility, and self-improvement. This analysis therefore also provides relevant information on the development of the travelogue as a literary genre. Within the general Oriental discourse, Egypt with its rich Biblical connotations had been playing a central role in German cultural production, especially in the realm of popular and entertainment culture. In the academic realm, Egypt attracted scholars with its imposing ancient monuments and challenged them with its hitherto undecipherable writing system, the key to this formidable cultural heritage. As Abbas Amin claims, Egypt is a Gedächtnisort, a place whose culture had always played a central role in Western Europe ’ s own cultural past (1). Travelling to Egypt, therefore, had always been an oscillation between familiarity and alienation, a rediscovery of a part of European history to which one did not have direct access before (Amin 15). Initially it was this vision of Egypt as the locus of European and especially religious culture that inspired travelers to make the long journey south. Prior to the nineteenth century, most European travelers to Egypt were pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land (Berman 149; Melman 108). In the early nineteenth century there was a revival of pilgrimage travels as a result of the perception of the Middle East as a virtually unchanged Biblical landscape (Melman 110). By the early nineteenth century, however, only few members of the German middle class had journeyed to Egypt. Most of the German travel writers in the Middle East were men travelling in their capacity as diplomats, scholars, or artists. Early examples are the «father» of Oriental studies, Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall, who published his trave- 230 Daniela Richter logue in 1801, as well as the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, who published the accounts of his journeys to the Middle East in the 1830s. Since German travels to Egypt and the Middle East were still a rare occasion, it was predominantly French and British works on Egypt which were read in Germany. Especially the Description de l ’ Égypte (1809 - 28), an account of Napoleon ’ s campaign in Egypt published by a commission of French scholars and scientists, provided German readers with a first impression of the Egyptian ancient landscape (Berman 157). By the middle of the nineteenth century the numbers of German travelers had increased, and we also find among them a small number of women, most prominently Ida von Hahn-Hahn, Luise Mühlbach, and Ida Pfeiffer, who traveled to the Middle East and wrote about their experiences (Berman 156). As Gert Sautermeister explains: «Gegenüber dem europäischen Süden mit seinen allzu populären Italien-Bildern hatte eine noch fast jungfräuliche Landschaft magischen Reiz gewonnen: der lichtdurchflutete Orient mit seinen uralten Tempeln und Pyramiden» (138). Overall however, travel to Egypt remained a privilege of the affluent until later in the century. 4 Fürst Hermann von Pückler-Muskau (1785 - 1871) was definitely part of those privileged few who were able to travel to Egypt solely for pleasure. At least that was how he portrayed his journey in his travelogue Aus Mehemed Alis Reich, a text which also benefited from Egypt ’ s status as a yet relatively unknown and mysterious land. Pückler himself was born in 1785 in Muskau, at today ’ s border to Poland, and grew up rather wild and independent with his parents divorced and not much invested in his upbringing. As a young man he dropped out of law school in Leipzig in order to join the prestigious Garde du Corps in Dresden (Shookman 235). Soon, however, Pückler gave up his military career in order to pursue a life of leisure and traveling. In this pursuit, he faced a major challenge: for most of his life Pückler lived well beyond his financial means. In hopes of financing his travels, he divorced his wife Lucie von Pappenheim in 1826 with the aim of making a more advantageous match in England. This plan failed and Pückler returned to his paternal estate in Muskau which he set out to transform into an English landscape park, a project which, together with his gambling, eventually bankrupted him. It was, however, in the area of landscape and park design where Pückler finally achieved lasting fame, particularly with his 1834 work Andeutungen über die Landschaftsgärtnerei, which made him an authority to this day. After selling Muskau and retiring to his mother ’ s estate in Branitz, Pückler was able to return to his life of traveling, financially supported by the sale of Muskau and the publication of his more than twenty-five travel texts. His Egyptian travelogue Aus Mehemed Alis Reich: Ägypten und der Sudan 231 Inside the Oriental Spectacle um 1840 was his ninth travel text and his fourth travelogue on North Africa and the Middle East. Due to his financial needs, he had previously published parts of the text as an ongoing column in Cotta ’ s Allgemeine Zeitung (Flake 761). As the critical reception of Pückler ’ s travel writing indicates, however, his literary fame as a travel writer did not endure into the second half of the nineteenth century (Fischer 221). Pückler had published his first travelogue, Briefe eines Verstorbenen: Ein fragmentarisches Tagebuch aus England, Wales, Irland und Frankreich, in 1828, and it had quickly made him a bestselling author. 5 A brief look at Pückler ’ s conception of the narrative voice in this travelogue reveals the way in which he set his text apart from other travel texts of the time. 6 Pückler ’ s text offered something new. His travelogue, a mix of diary entries and personal letters, was more entertaining than educating, in parts even scandalous, as the narrator provided his readers not only with adventurous stories, but also with intimate gossip about members of the English aristocracy and high society to which he, as a prince, had access. Another unique aspect of Pückler ’ s travel writing was his creation of a cohesive literary oeuvre of travel narratives all centered on his signature narrator persona. Following the publication of his first book, Pückler ’ s travel texts henceforth identify their author as the «Verfasser der Briefe eines Verstorbenen.» His narrator is clearly meant to be a constant throughout all his travel texts, akin to a trademark. The countries featured in the different travel texts are thereby rendered less important than the flamboyant narrator himself. This referencing of the first travelogue not only aimed at creating cohesion among the various texts, but it also aimed at masking the identity of the writer himself. 7 However, given the very particular insights Pückler offered in his first texts in terms of high society gossip, his true identity only remained a secret for about two years (Fischer 182). The narrator and author in Pückler ’ s texts are generally conflated. His identity as a bon vivant and member of the German aristocracy was central to his particular style of travel writing. I would argue, however, that the narrator, while sharing most of his features with Pückler ’ s actual person and personality, remained a construct insofar as the narrator never allows his readers access to his emotions and is completely devoid of self-reflection. The fact that the narrator ’ s voice does not alter throughout the over twenty-five travel texts is further evidence of its essentially constructed nature. As the key to his success, this particular narrator enabled Pückler to create a niche for his writing among the many other travelogues. Travelogues of the nineteenth century clearly had what Fischer terms «einen aufklärerischen Nimbus» (189) and did not belong nor wanted to be 232 Daniela Richter associated with the world of the aristocracy. Sautermeister ’ s overview over the different types of travel texts in the nineteenth century demonstrates that «alles Reisen geht einher mit dem Zweck der Bildung oder auch individuellen Selbstfindung» (128). Pückler ’ s Egyptian travelogue flies in the face of these conventions. Pückler is not travelling to educate himself; on the contrary, he often demonstrates his high degree of education as superior by far to what he finds among the people in this country. He also does not undergo any kind of personal development or change, as mentioned above, and appears generally unfazed by all his experiences. Aus Mehemed Alis Reich traces Pückler ’ s journey through Egypt and the Sudan in 1837 - 38. In the course of the text, he engages with a great variety of themes, from Egypt ’ s current political situation, its diplomatic position visà-vis France and Britain, the educational reform of its ruler Mohammed Ali Pasha, its ancient monuments, to the more frivolous such as Pückler ’ s personal adventures breaking and entering into a harem garden and his purchase of a female slave. Pückler moves from topic to topic with incredible ease, sometimes offering highly nuanced and insightful information - such as in the case of Egypt ’ s current political situation - while at other times indulging in the most superficial rendition of some escapade. At all times, however, the first-person narrator remains constant while these disparate elements revolve around him. A biographical essay from 1888 further emphasizes the central role that this narrator plays in Pückler ’ s narrative: Diese Reisen verfolgen kein wissenschaftliches Ziel, suchen auch keine Erholung, und wenn der Drang, die Welt zu sehen und den Blick zu weiten oder auch die ritterliche Liebe zu Gefahren und Abenteuern, überhaupt die Unternehmungslust, als Motive mächtig wirken, so steht doch in vorderster Reihe die Sucht, das Erlebte pikant darzustellen, im Glanz der Schilderung sein eigenes Ich zu spiegeln, jedes Objekt in den leuchtenden Brennpunkt des beschauenden Subjekts zu fassen; das Interessanteste an allen Erlebnissen, in jeder Lage und Umgebung soll aber, nach der Absicht dieser Schilderer, ihre eigene Persönlichkeit sein. (Mähly 694) This paragraph not only demonstrates that travel writing as such had become an established literary genre infused with values such as the desire for education and scientific exploration, but also possessing a moral aspect, hinting at the medieval concept of the quest as indicated by the term «ritterlich.» Pückler ’ s lack of ambition in these areas had quickly made him a most controversial figure among literary critics of his time. Among the majority of them, Pückler, according to Robert Prutz, had quickly become known as the author of «Klatschliteratur» and the purveyor of «Zötchen und Anekdötchen» (43 - 45). On the other hand his writing garnered the support and admiration of such illustrious writers as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 233 Inside the Oriental Spectacle and Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, who appreciated the erudite parts of his discourse and the degree to which his education and intellectual sensibilities were divorced from any consideration of middle-class usefulness and employment. They saw in Pückler an individual who pursued and appreciated knowledge and art for its own sake (Fischer 193 - 94). The depictions of exterior spaces in particular mark his narrative as cognizant of and participating in popular treatments of the Orient. In this aspect, Pückler shows himself not to be confined by realism, but instead presents the scenery in a stylized manner, mimicking the effect of popular visual entertainment media of his time such as the panorama and diorama displays. Given the particular nature of the panorama and diorama, notions of exercising control over the foreign scenery play a significant role. Pückler consciously models his scenic depictions on these forms of entertainment because it allows his readership to integrate the new information they are receiving about the Orient in ways that are not only familiar to them, but, more importantly, entertaining. Throughout the text, the narrator ’ s gaze tends to render landscape scenery as limited and possessing a clear circumference. This tendency towards boundedness refers directly to the visual media popular in Europe at that time, particularly the panorama and, later, the diorama. These forms of entertainment offered the illusion of vast and unbounded sceneries, while at the same time framing the whole experience by the confines of the building, so that the audience was reassured that the potentially overwhelming display was aimed at their entertainment and ultimately under their control. Derek Gregory refers to this as «scripting,» a process of commodification which turns a given country and culture into a display tailored towards the expectations and pleasures of the reader, who functions «as spectator-voyeur, as consumer-collector and above all, as sovereign-subject» (146). In Pückler ’ s narrative in particular, there is no sense of wide expanses; the unforeseen or the mysterious do not threaten to overpower the individual. It is all neatly contained in the form of displays or tableaus with the narrator in a dominating position. Pückler ’ s narrative depiction of Oriental space is therefore reminiscent of Edward Said ’ s famous dictum that «the Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined [. . .]. The Orient then seems to be, not unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe» (63). Pückler ’ s visual perspective, which is based on the conflicting sensations of being at the center of any given scene while at the same time being safely detached from it, is at the heart of the early nineteenth-century forms of 234 Daniela Richter visual entertainment, especially the panorama and the diorama. According to Laurie Garrison, the nineteenth century saw a rapid development in the field of visual entertainment leading ultimately to the invention of photography and film. The popular success of these visual technologies relied both on the degree of realism with which they displayed a given scenario and on the concept of illusion, by manipulating the viewer ’ s perception of movement and perspective. The history of the panorama began in 1792 in Leicester Square, London, from where it quickly spread to other major cities in Europe. The panorama consisted of large paintings which were mounted in a circle around a raised platform so that a person standing in the middle could successively take in the entire painting by turning around. 8 According to Wurst, this «artifice allowed for the creation of virtual nature made available for the convenient consumption in the safety and comfort of an enclosed space» (332). Landscapes and famous European cityscapes were most often depicted, but historic scenes were in vogue as well. From the beginning, the Orient was a staple among panoramic displays. By 1820 the London panorama thus featured scenarios depicting Cairo and the Colossi of Memnon (Wurst 336). The diorama was the successor of the panorama and was first introduced in Paris in 1822. It trumped the panoramic display by the added illusion of movement. Technically more complex, the diorama diminished the allenveloping sensation of the panorama in favor of using a complicated setup of light sources to simulate effects, such as sunrise and sunset (Buddemeier 26). 9 Among the intelligentsia, both forms of visual spectacle were regarded as inferior forms of entertainment because they appealed first and foremost to the senses, not the mind. The fact that the panorama and diorama were commercial venues and therefore open to the general public was another reason for their disrepute. Even though paintings for the panorama as well as the diorama were rendered in a realistic manner, they still constituted a socalled ‹ superspace › with aspects considered less attractive omitted or improved upon (Wurst 332 - 33). At the heart of these visual spectacles was the desire on the part of the audience to feel transported into the midst of the individual scenarios, while at the same time feeling safe and superior in the knowledge of looking at an artificial world (Buddemeier 24). The spectator enjoyed the simultaneous awareness of artificiality and visual illusion. Spatial descriptions in Aus Mehemed Alis Reich show inherent similarities to the panoramic and dioramic forms of display. Among the key features are the positioning of the narrator and the reader within the described scenery as well as the notion of staging, which underlies most of Pückler ’ s scenic depictions. One constant feature throughout the text is the narrator ’ s lack of 235 Inside the Oriental Spectacle direct engagement with his surroundings and its people. They mostly feature as objects of his gaze. The gaze then becomes the main instrument for creating a given scenic display, spreading it out in front of the reader while at the same time neatly enclosing it within his gaze, thus exerting control over the image created. Rather than presenting realistic impressions, the narrator literally designs idealized versions of the various sites visited in the course of his travels, creating thus the ‹ superspace › referred to earlier. One example of this is Pückler ’ s description of the temple in Thebes: Zwei andere Höfe des kolossalen Palasttempels sind ganz verschüttet und nichts als die rechte Außenmauer derselben voll herrlicher Skulpturen noch sichtbar [. . .]. Der ganze Tempel ist übrigens durchgängig mit den neueren Ruinen des koptischen Fleckens durchwirkt und überdeckt, so daß eine gründliche Wegräumung des Schuttes und Niederreißung jener schändenden Anhängsel diese prachtvollen Gebäude gewiß noch an den meisten Stellen wohlerhalten zeigen und wenigstens den Totaleffekt ihrer einstigen imposanten Schönheit wiederherstellen würden. [. . .] Von der Plattform, zu der eine enge, aber sanft ansteigende Treppe führt, hat man eine umfassende Aussicht auf den weiten Raum, den das alte Theben auf beiden Seiten des Nils einnahm. In der Nähe rechts nach Süden hin erblickt man zuerst die Spuren hoher Erdaufwürfe gleich den Ufern eines großen, künstlichen Sees, vielleicht desselben, über welchen die Toten gefahren wurden. [. . .] An die Dämme schließt sich eine reiche Flur, durch die der Nil gewunden strömt, aus einem Kranz blauer Berge herkommend, hinter denen noch in so weiter unbekannter Ferne seine geheimnisvollen Quellen sich bergen (348 - 49). The narrator ’ s ascent to the top of the temple can be read as a gesture of conquest. Mary Louise Pratt refers to this as the «monarch of all I survey» perspective (202). This mode of landscape depiction aims at conveying in writing the process by which the European traveler takes possession of a given foreign landscape through the act of discovery or exploration. Even though Pückler is not a discoverer per se, he still masters the imposing temple by climbing to its rooftop. From there he surveys not only present-day Thebes, but recreates the historical grandeur of this city, a city which served as the religious hub of ancient Egypt, the gateway to the underworld for most of its pharaohs. This is what Pratt refers to as a description rich in semantics, encompassing not only the natural, but also the cultural and mythological dimensions of any given locale. Another mark of this perspective is its aesthetic quality, achieved by describing an environment as if it were a static painting (Pratt 204). Both in his climb to the top of the temple and through his panoramic description, Pückler essentially converts the foreign natural and cultural landscape into a European aesthetic discourse of conquest. In this instance the production of the idealized scenario is actually disclosed to the reader. While describing the site as is, the narrator is at 236 Daniela Richter the same time conjuring up an idealized, improved version of the temple, speculating on what it would look like without the more recent remains of settlement. Pückler, as many other Egypt travelers, seems to only value the country for the remnants of its ancient culture. It is a static and homogenous mirage that he seeks, perceives, and recreates, an image diminished by remnants of other historic periods. Remarkable in Pückler ’ s scenic depictions is the relative lack of the native population. Apart from Mohammed Ali Pasha, Egypt ’ s ruler at the time, a man whom Pückler clearly admired, he overlooks the general Egyptian population. In most instances, he simply refrains from including people in his descriptions. When he does mention them, it is often by way of ridicule, comparing them to animals, for example squirrels (105) or horses (104). The overall lack of people in Pückler ’ s narrative greatly contributes to the display-like character of these passages. 10 The description of the narrator ’ s walk through the streets of Cairo is a case in point: Viele Stunden irrte ich in den Straßen der endlosen Stadt umher, und ich kann meine Empfindungen dabei nicht besser schildern, als wenn ich sagte: Es kam mir fortwährend vor, als wenn ich in der Tausendundeinennacht [sic] läse oder vielmehr als wenn ihre bunten Szenen in lebenden Bildern jetzt vor mir aufgeführt würden. (156) His further discussion then focuses exclusively on the architecture of the inner city, the residences, plazas, fountains, etc. The lack of people and the absence of actual encounters is striking, as well as the constant referral to European Oriental imagery. As Timothy Mitchell claims, the Orient was by the nineteenth century «something one only ever rediscovered. To be grasped representationally, as the picture of something, it was inevitably to be grasped as the reoccurrence of a picture one had seen before» (30). The uniqueness of Pückler ’ s travelogue lies therefore not in providing new impressions of Egypt, but in reinforcing preexisting European imagery of the Orient. By omitting the people who actually lived and moved in Cairo ’ s streets, Pückler moreover conveys the impression of ownership over this scene. It remains, despite all the allusions to color and vibrancy, still an empty stage, waiting to be filled with the readers ’ own imagination. In some scenes, however, Pückler cannot avoid depicting people; as in his portrayal of an Egyptian bazaar and the slave market. The bazaar is a location where people by definition interact. In her article on depictions of market scenes in travel literature, Emily Haddad maintains that markets forced an interaction between the traveler as customer and the local merchant, albeit an often very uncomfortable one for the traveler unaccustomed to the language and social customs of the country he was visiting. 11 Thus depictions of market 237 Inside the Oriental Spectacle scenes present an exception to the distanced depiction of the foreign culture, because the act of purchasing and bargaining in particular constitutes an «incorporation of the European observer into the scene [which] prevents him or her from occupying the disengaged position» (76). Pückler ’ s market scene, however, maintains the narrator ’ s distance: Den reinorientalischen Beisatz zu solchen europäischen Anklängen gewährten indes bald hundert andere Gegenstände, zum Beispiel die [. . .] überwölbten Basare voll der glänzendsten Produkte Asiens und Afrikas, geschwängert mit dem Dufte aller Spezereien Arabiens; die Grandezza und Ruhe der Muselmänner mitten in einem Gewühl, dem auch der volkreichste Ort bei uns nicht gleichkommt. Und wie reich staffiert sind diese Szenen! Hier ein Haufe sich rücksichtslos zwischen Kaufbuden und auf der Straße arbeitenden Handwerkern hindurchdrängender Reiter mit ihrem goldgestickten Pferdezeug, in malerisch glänzender Kleidung; dort ein Harem, der sich ins Bad begibt, schwarz verhüllte Damen mit weißer Leinwandmaske, aus der nur die dunklen Augen herausblitzen, und die gleich Phantomen auf schnellfüßigen Eseln geräuschlos vorübergleiten; [. . .]. (157) With its richness in detail, its lack of a clear focus, and its emphasis on conventional Oriental tropes - such as the wild riders, the shimmering clothes, the mysteriously veiled harem women, the crowdedness of the scene with its abundance of products and scents - this scene is clearly marked as a panoramic spectacle. Though lacking a focal or center point, the scene is yet clearly contoured and framed by the vaulting. Thus even this chaotic scene of outdoor activity is framed and rendered as an interior scene, thereby creating a sense of security and containment. Control over this scene is maintained by the lack of depiction of the narrator ’ s active engagement in the scene itself. In this description, Pückler remains disembodied: a voice and a gaze capturing and describing what he witnesses. This distance is also maintained in Pückler ’ s depiction of the slave market, which he reports having visited twice, the second time as a customer. He narrates his first visit with great detail, obviously relishing the sexual aspects of viewing the mostly nude female slaves (194). But even in this scenario where the focus is clearly on people rather than architecture or landscape, the narrator does not engage personally but only reports the actions of his local guide who is actually engaging with the slaves, evaluating and handling them like objects: he is the one negotiating with the merchants while the narrator is depicted as a bystander. The narrator, however, later returns to the market and purchases a young female slave for himself. Interestingly enough though, narrative distance is maintained, and the narrator reports on the transaction in passing as an occurrence in the past. He admits to not having bargained, thereby avoiding 238 Daniela Richter any closer personal contact, and instead having paid the price demanded by the merchant (244). The narrator is evidently aware of the fact that his lack of bargaining constitutes a deficiency of control and mastery of this situation, and this is the reason why it does not feature dominantly in the narrative itself. Yet the purchase of another human being is in itself an act of mastery and control, and he therefore cannot resist a cursory mentioning. The narrator thus quickly glosses over this instance of his cultural impotence and proceeds to describe his interaction with the young slave girl, the «appetizing savage» as he calls her (269). In this scenario he can clearly assert his dominant position, both as a man and her master: Den Charakter dieses originellen Mädchens zu studieren, an der die Zivilisation noch nichts hatte verderben noch verbessern können, war im Verfolg der Reise eine unerschöpfliche Quelle von Vergnügen für mich, und es tat diesem Studium durchaus keinen Abbruch, daß der Gegenstand desselben zugleich an Schönheit der Formen die treueste Kopie einer Venus von Tizian war, nur in schwarzer Manier. (244) He obviously relishes portraying her in objectifying terms and claims to study her as an exotic trophy, thereby reinforcing his position of dominance and power opposite the Oriental female Other. This passage further illustrates that Pückler ’ s focus as a travel writer is on the spectacular rather than the educational. The quote above clearly alludes to the discourse of exploration with terms such as «Zivilisation» and «Studium» (244). Referring to the girl, whose name is Machbuba, as «Gegenstand» and comparing her to a painting by Titian, however, not only casts her into the role of object, but it also subjects her to European aesthetics. Taking later passages about Machbuba into consideration, there can be no doubt about the sexual nature of Pückler ’ s relationship with her and the fact that the narration of his interactions with her is aimed at entertaining the reader. Still, it is not only through the objects of his gaze that the narrator provides entertainment for his readers but also through the relative position of the narrator and the reader vis-à-vis the depicted scenarios. In most of his landscape descriptions, particularly the ones which describe wide open vistas, Pückler positions his reader right next to him, thereby creating the illusion of immediacy. And since he is always at the center of his scenarios, so is the reader, as if he were on that central platform in the middle of the panorama. When he reaches Thebes by boat, the narrator thus remarks: «Ich lade den Leser daher ein, jetzt mit mir am linken Nilufer bei den Hütten des Dorfes Gurneth unter einer Gruppe Palmen ans Land zu steigen. Eine Viertelstunde vor uns im Westen sehen wir über grün besaatete Felder hinweg» (330). Not only is Pückler addressing the reader directly, drawing 239 Inside the Oriental Spectacle him into the act of stepping ashore, but he also uses the pronoun «wir» here (as in other places) to incorporate the reader into the narrator ’ s adventurous excursions. He brings the excitement of the exotic environment into the domestic setting where his reader is situated. As the reader is explicitly invited by the narrator to walk with him, the narrator also explicitly directs the reader ’ s gaze. In the quote above, just as in a panoramic display, the narrator unfolds the vista of the landscape around Thebes. It is marked by vastness, as the mentioning of the sites visible a «Viertelstunde vor uns» implies, while at the same time conveying a sense of boundedness, as the narrator is clearly able to encompass this vastness within his gaze and thereby his control. In another part of the text, the narrator continues: «Es schien mir bei der Besichtigung Thebens sehr wesentlich, daß der Beschauer stufenweise vom Geringeren zum Höheren fortschreite, das Gegenteil würde ihm die Hälfte des Genusses rauben» (330). Here, Thebes is objectified as something neatly portioned out according to different degrees of enjoyment. The experience of visiting and touring Thebes is presented as a commodity complete with its own manual to ensure that the consumer gets the most out of this experience. Pückler ’ s preferred mode of traveling by way of the dahabiyah, the passenger sailboat which was popular among Egypt travelers until the end of the nineteenth century, represents a central aspect of his scenic descriptions. First and foremost it constitutes a middle ground, a space in which the traveler can enjoy European comfort and convenience while gliding through a threateningly different Oriental environment. Traveling by dahabiyah is, according to Pückler, akin to experiencing Egypt remotely «wo man in seiner Stube und von aller gewohnten Häuslichkeit umgeben, so gemächlich auf dem alten Nil hingleitet, daß man kaum des Schiffes Bewegung bemerkt» (98). Egypt itself is removed from reality, reduced to what he later describes as «die vorüberziehenden Bilder nur durch die Fenster betrachtend» (108). The actual landscape is turned into a display: «Oft, wenn ich mich an dieser nicht abbrechenden Reihe exotischer Bilder ergötzte und dann meinen Blick auf das hohe kühle Laubdach über mir warf, [. . .] kam es mir vor, als sei ich noch in Europa und betrachte nur aus einer Allee des Wiener Praters oder Berliner Tiergartens ein gemaltes Diorama Ägyptens» (167). The framing of the cabin window and the frame of the overhanging foliage create a barrier which is emphasized by the contrast in levels of comfort and luxury between the ship and life on the river banks. Both the position of the spectator in the cabin and the landscape outside are perceived as interior, bounded spaces, a circumstance which not only creates a safety buffer for the traveler, but also renders the surrounding landscape as a series of harmless, passive vistas. 240 Daniela Richter Looking at the parallels between Pückler ’ s scenic depictions on the one hand and visual spectacles such as the panorama and diorama on the other highlights the importance of control and dominance for European travelers and readers when confronted with the Orient and particularly with contemporary Oriental culture. Whereas today ’ s travel culture aims at immersing the traveler within the respective foreign culture, this is clearly not the case here. Experiences in the Middle East such as the ones made by the British Richard Burton and T. E. Lawrence and the German Carl Raswan who immersed themselves in Middle Eastern culture begin to appear only towards the end of the nineteenth century. The first half of that century, however, reveals an initial approach towards the region that still holds fast to established European concepts of the Orient. The simultaneous attraction and fear of the Oriental Other is conveyed through the framing of the travel experience, a framing that encloses the traveler as well as the landscape and sites he traverses into a space of their own. The traveler is cocooned inside his boat, surrounded by European comforts, allowing for a selective exposure to the Egyptian landscape, which in turn remains distant and unobtrusive at all times. In his travelogue Aus Mehemed Alis Reich, then, Pückler clearly offers his reader much more than a truthful report of his journey. In a text replete with suspense, variation, and transitions between scenic overviews and detailed illustrations he constructed his Egyptian experiences as exotic adventures. As Frederick N. Bohrer observes, «exoticism is a process. It is constituted by, and cannot be seen apart from, a system of circulation. [. . .] exoticist artifacts, whether visual or verbal, are not created in a vacuum, but rather employ terms of reference from the particular, historically specific, Western audiences they address» (11). Locating Pückler within this larger frame of reference and reading his travelogue as a verbal construction of the exotic helps us understand how he utilized and interwove popular culture aspects of the Orient, a conglomerate of visual, textual, and performative elements, with his travel experiences to create his own unique style of travel writing. Notes 1 Throughout this article I shall use the term «Orient» to refer to the region and culture of the Middle East. In the nineteenth century the term denoted a much wider cultural and geographical area, encompassing Asia and its cultures as well. 2 See Lemke for photographs of his collection of nineteenthand early twentiethcentury advertisements and postcards depicting consumer goods such as coffee and cigarettes being marketed using Oriental imagery. 241 Inside the Oriental Spectacle 3 Parallel to the Orient as a topos in popular and entertainment culture, there was also an increased scholarly engagement with the Middle East, in particular with its ancient culture. In her seminal work Orientalism in the Age of Empire, Marchand outlines in great detail the development of Orientalism as an academic field, a development which has its roots in the German Romantic movement. Orientalism was initially dedicated solely to the study of Oriental languages and later branched out into fields such as archaeology, Sinology and Egyptology. 4 Along with the development in general travels to Egypt, we see the first travel guides being published in 1830 by J. J. Rifaud (Tableau de l ’ Égypte, de la Nubie et des lieux circonvoisins) and in 1847 by Gardner Wilkinson (Handbook for Travellers in Egypt). German tourism to the region develops more slowly, and hence Baedeker published its guide on Egypt only in 1877 (Reid 71; Gregory 118). 5 Pückler ’ s other popular works include: Briefe eines Verstorbenen: Ein fragmentarisches Tagebuch aus Deutschland, Holland und England (1832); Tutti Frutti: Aus den Papieren des Verstorbenen (1834); Vorletzter Weltgang von Semilasso: Traum und Wachen. Aus den Papieren des Verstorbenen (1835); and Südöstlicher Bildersaal: Herausgegeben vom Verfasser der Briefe eines Verstorbenen (1840 - 41). 6 For a more detailed discussion of the narrator in Pückler ’ s Aus Mehemed Alis Reich see Daniela Richter «Oriental flânerie: Fürst Pückler-Muskau ’ s Aus Mehemed Alis Reich» (to be published in the 2015 winter issue of German Quarterly). 7 In fact, all of his works, with the exception of his Andeutungen über Landschaftsgärtnerei (1834), were published anonymously, showing that Pückler preferred to continue his popular streak with the subsequent publication of more entertaining travelogues. This was undoubtedly tied to the financial necessity behind Pückler ’ s writing which he admits in a letter to fellow writer Ida von Hahn-Hahn: «Ich glaube, Sie geben mir eine Ohrfeige, wenn ich die Aufrichtigkeit so weit treibe Ihnen zu gestehen, daß ich sogar ein wenig um ’ s Geld schreibe» (Fischer 184). 8 The initial inspiration for this form of visual entertainment came from English landscape gardening with its «carefully orchestrated sequence of vistas and events,» a technique of which Pückler was himself not only an admirer, but also a specialist (Wurst 332). 9 Towards the end of the century, the term «diorama» was used in connection with museum exhibitions to denote large, often life-sized, displays, featuring a panoramic background painting with artifacts, figurines, or mounted animals in the front. This kind of diorama, while not simulating movement, still allows for the illusion of depth because of the panoramic background paintings. 10 Portraying the temples and monuments in isolation from all forms of contemporary Egyptian life and culture was common in the visual arts of the time as well, as engravings and drawings of these monuments from the nineteenth century demonstrate. The 1985 edition of Pückler ’ s travelogue features engravings from Richard Lepsius ’ s Egypt expedition, which took place only a few years after Pückler ’ s own. These pictures show the temples as situated in the desert, without any human figures or traces of human settlement nearby. 11 According to Haddad, bargaining with its inherent instability of price and value was - and still is today - a source of anxiety for most northern European travelers. Not knowing the unspoken rules of bargaining and not being able to communicate with the merchants, travelers feel insecure and at the mercy of the foreign merchant (75). 242 Daniela Richter Works Cited Amin, Abbas. Ägyptomanie und Orientalismus: Ägypten in der deutschen Reiseliteratur (1175 - 1663). Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013. Berman, Nina. German Literature on the Middle East: Discourses and Practices, 1000 - 1989. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2011. Bohrer, Frederick N. Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2003. Buddemeier, Heinz. Panorama, Diorama, Photographie: Entstehung und Wirkung neuer Medien im 19. Jahrhundert. München: Wilhelm Fink, 1970. Ciarlo, David. Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2011. Fischer, Tilmann. «Literatur und Aristokratie: Zur Debatte um Fürst Hermann von Pückler-Muskau.» Jahrbuch der Charles-Sealsfield-Gesellschaft 14 (2002): 181 - 224. Flake, Otto. «Pückler-Muskau.» Aus Mehemed Alis Reich: Ägypten und der Sudan um 1840. Hermann Fürst von Pückler-Muskau. Zurich: Manesse, 1985. 749 - 68. Garrison, Laurie. «The Visual Subject, c.1810 - 1840: Trends in Romanticism and Victorianism.» Literature Compass 4.4 (2007): 1078 - 91. Gregory, Derek. «Scripting Egypt: Orientalism and the Cultures of Travel.» Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing. Ed. James Duncan and Derek Gregory. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999. 114 - 50. Haddad, Emily. «Better than the Reality: The Egyptian Market in Nineteenth- Century British Travel Writing.» Interrogating Orientalism: Contextual Approaches and Pedagogical Practices. Ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Jeffrey Cass. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006. 46 - 71. Lemke, Wolf-Dieter. Staging the Orient: Fin de Siècle Popular Visions. Beirut: Editions Dar An-Nahar, 2004. Mähly, Jacob Achilles. «Pückler-Muskau, Fürst von.» Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie. Vol. 26. Ed. Rochus Freiherr von Liliencron. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1888. 692 - 95. Marchand, Suzanne. «Popularizing the Orient in Fin de Siècle Germany.» Intellectual Historical Review 17.2 (2007): 175 - 202. Melman, Billie. «The Middle East/ Arabia: ‹ The Cradle of Islam. › » The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2002. 105 - 21. Mitchell, Timothy. Colonising Egypt. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London, UK: Routledge, 1992. Prutz, Robert. «Ueber Reisen und Reiseliteratur der Deutschen» (1874). Robert Prutz: Schriften zur Literatur und Politik. Ed. Bernd Hüppauf. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1973. 34 - 46. Pückler-Muskau, Fürst Hermann von. Aus Mehemed Alis Reich: Ägypten und der Sudan um 1840. Zurich: Manesse, 1985. 243 Inside the Oriental Spectacle Reid, Malcolm Donald. Whose Pharaos? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1979. Sautermeister, Gert. «Reiseliteratur als Ausdruck der Epoche.» Zwischen Revolution und Restauration 1815 - 1848. Ed. Gert Sautermeister and Ulrich Schmid. Munich: Carl Hanser, 1998. 116 - 50. Shookman, Ellis. «Hermann von Pückler-Muskau.» Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 133. Nineteenth-Century German Writers to 1840. Ed. James N. Hardin and Siegfried Mews. Detroit: Gale Research, 1993. 233 - 42. Wurst, Karin. Fabricating Pleasure: Fashion, Entertainment, and Cultural Consumption in Germany, 1780 - 1830. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2005. 244 Daniela Richter Popularizing the World: Karl Andree ’ s Globus KIRSTEN BELGUM U NIVERSITY OF T EXAS AT A USTIN In April 1836, a young man from Braunschweig wrote to Rudolf Vieweg, one of the major publishers of that city, to submit the first part of his translation of an American text. Knowing it might not be accepted, he concluded his letter with an invitation: «Sollten Sie einmal wieder ein ausländisches Werk übertragen lassen,» the letter writer would guarantee, «daß ich es so schnell und elegant übertragen werde, wie irgend einer in Deutschland; denn ich bin kein Neuling in solchen Arbeiten» (Andree, Letter). This offer is representative of the energy and creativity of Karl Andree (1808 - 75) who, over the next few decades, would have a notable impact on the type and amount of knowledge about the world distributed in Germany. The story of Andree and his successful periodical Globus (published from 1862 to 1910) suggests that the increase in travel itself was only one factor in the rapid expansion of travel writing in the nineteenth century. 1 The role of translators, editors, publishers, and the networks of borrowing and recycling that they created were central to the ways in which travel and travel writing spread across Europe and presented ever more perspectives on life around the globe. In recent decades excellent research has been conducted on the significant increase in the writing, publication, and consumption of texts (both factual and fictional) about far-flung places in the world in the nineteenth century. Some of the best scholarship has been dedicated to uncovering dominant European cultural and racial prejudices that lay at the base of much travel and travel writing. Mary Louise Pratt ’ s discussion of Humboldt ’ s «empty landscapes» has demonstrated perhaps only one of the more benign examples of Western blind spots. Suzanne Zantop and Russell Berman have written compellingly (albeit in different ways) about the power of colonial imagination in the German tradition, even prior to the development of an organized colonial movement in Germany. Similarly, and more recently, scholars who have drawn on articles from the nascent geographical press, including Karl Andree ’ s Globus, have focused on the presentation of idyllic and paradisiacal fantasies about Pacific islanders, on colonial discourses about Africa, and on the pan-German national ideology regarding «Auslandsdeutsche» (Dürbeck; Naranch 2005; Naranch 2011). Given Andree ’ s racialist views this scholarship makes an important contribution to the study of nineteenthcentury European cultural history. 2 As significant as these studies are, they do not tell us about the processes by which these nineteenth-century views of the world were disseminated. Travel writing deserves attention not only for the «themes» and «attitudes» it reveals, but also for how it exposes the way in which a new publishing sector emerged and presented the world to German readers. Uncovering the publishing practices of one major mediator of works about the world from this period paints a complicated picture of the various dynamics at work in the second half of the nineteenth century as travel writing came into its own. This article focuses on Andree ’ s Globus from an institutional rather than a content-based vantage point. Andree was both a product of and a novel participant in this development. As a talented and well-connected publicist who had studied geography, Andree was ideally positioned to present reports about the world to a large segment of the population. And yet, commercial pressures on the popular press also played a role in what appeared in print. The need to attract and keep a loyal readership contributed to the impulse to sensationalize. The demand for ever-more and ever-new material led to borrowing from other sources that at times resulted in composite articles, editing shortcuts, and, in some cases misleading, if not deceptive reporting. This important aspect of disseminating geographical knowledge, which can only be accessed through comparative study, is the subject of the present article. Globus distinguished itself from existing German geographical periodicals in being intended for a mainstream readership. As Andree pointed out in the foreword to the magazine ’ s first volume, Germany already had valuable scholarly geographical journals; 3 his goal was to popularize knowledge about the world. Beginning in 1862 Globus appeared in bi-monthly issues, each thirty-two pages in length. From the first volume, the periodical presented articles in non-technical, descriptive language that covered all parts of the world, from China to Brazil, from Oregon to Madagascar. Each issue began with a set of in-depth articles, from six to twelve pages long and often serialized. These were followed by shorter notes about curiosities and cultural or geographical detail. Each issue ended with notes about trade, transportation, and other statistical information, also from all corners of the globe. In order to inform a generally educated reader, Andree was convinced that his periodical should include illustrations: «[B]ildliche Darstellungen [. . .] sind geeignet, das Natur- und Völkerleben uns sinnlich nahe zu rücken, sie vermitteln eine klare Anschauung vieler Gegenstände, welche sich vermöge der Schrift nur andeutungsweise schildern lassen; der Text ergänzt die Bilder und diese ergänzen jenen» (Globus 1 (1862): iii). Illustrations would also make the publication more appealing. 246 Kirsten Belgum Illustr. 1: Title page of a bi-monthly issue of Globus (1871) 247 Popularizing the World: Karl Andree ’ s Globus Andree ’ s plan worked. Within a few years, he was pleased to announce not only that his magazine was thriving, but also that it was being used in schools as an educational resource. 4 Andree ’ s model did not emerge in a vacuum, however. In fact, Globus was the product of a perfect storm. This confluence of forces included the emerging field of geographical study, the rise of the periodical press, and previous successful and transnational experiments that combined image and text. The man at the center of Globus, Karl Theodor Andree, studied geography as well as history under leading scholars of the 1820s, including Karl Ritter, considered one of the founders of scientific geography in Germany, and Alexander von Humboldt, the noted traveler and naturalist. Andree completed his dissertation by age 22 in 1830, but due to his participation in the Burschenschaft movement he was denied the opportunity to write his habilitation in Tübingen and to pursue an academic career. 5 As a result, his early publications were not scholarly works, but rather adaptations of foreign books, such as a version of a French work on Poland in 1831, and translations of works on the United States, including the letters of Achilles Murat in 1833 and Captain G. Back ’ s travels in 1836. This experience led Andree to produce a school textbook on geography, Lehrbuch der allgemeinen Erdkunde für höhere Gymnasial- und Realklassen, sowie für Hauslehrer und zum Selbstunterricht (1836). By age 28, married and in need of a profession and a steadier source of income, Andree turned to journalism. For a decade he edited daily newspapers first in Mainz, then in Karlsruhe, Cologne, and Bremen before taking over the Deutsche Reichszeitung back in Braunschweig, published by Rudolf Vieweg. Andree ’ s writing and work as editor for various papers exposed him to the growing industrial enterprise of the Ruhr region and the international trade center of Bremen, where he returned in the early 1850s to edit two periodicals: first, Das Westland, Magazin für Kunde amerikanischer Verhältnisse (1852 - 54), and then the Bremer Handelsblatt. These experiences affected his focus and expanded his network of connections around the world (R. Andree 6 - 8). These connections would serve him well in his continued work, alongside his journalistic career, as a prolific disseminator (adaptor, translator, complier, and editor) of foreign works for German readers. Andree ’ s breakthrough came in 1851 when he published Nord-Amerika in geographischen and geschichtlichen Umrissen. It appeared in serial form and included material ranging from summaries of recent excavations of mounds built by early inhabitants of the continent to demographic and business statistics from various regions of the United States. Nord-Amerika was to a great extent based on American works that a German lawyer and lay 248 Kirsten Belgum historian in New York, Hermann E. Ludewig, sent to Andree over the years. It eventually reached a length of over 800 pages and was successful enough to warrant a second edition within three years. Between 1855 and 1861 Andree edited five more works on other regions of the world: Mongolia and Tibet, China, Argentina, Mecca and Medina, and Eastern Africa. His extensive experience in compiling sources, editing, publishing, and working in the periodical press would eventually contribute to the creation of Globus, but his connections to seminal institutions in the field of geography were also central to the conceptualization and creation of that periodical. Beginning in 1853, Andree became a contributing author to and was listed, along with the major names in the field, as a co-editor of the Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Erdkunde, the main organ of the Berliner Gesellschaft für Erdkunde that had been founded by Ritter. By 1862 Andree was a corresponding member of the Imperial and Royal Geographical Society in Vienna, of the Nature Society in Wetterau, of a language and literature society in Brussels, and of the Natural History Society of Buenos Aires. He was both a consul for the Republic of Chile in the Kingdom of Saxony and an honorary member of the Royal Economic Society of Saxony in Dresden. 6 In 1863 he co-founded the Verein für Erdkunde in Dresden and served as its first chairman (R. Andree 9). He was also a corresponding member of both the Historical and the Ethnographic Societies in New York. 7 Andree ’ s ties to German publishing were even more extensive. His translations and compilations appeared in an impressive array of notable publishing houses all over Germany. In addition to his work as newspaper editor, he published works with Cotta in Stuttgart; Schumann, J. J. Weber, Lorck and Costenoble in Leipzig; Kuntze in Dresden; Schünemann in Bremen; and Vieweg and Westermann in Braunschweig. His career coincided with the move of many publishers towards giving travel writing a more prominent place in their offerings. In addition to the publishers Andree had worked with by 1860, both the Brockhaus publishing house and the Bibliographisches Institut in Leipzig had begun publishing extensive series of travel works. The highly successful encyclopedias of these (and other) German publishers also included ever larger and more numerous entries on foreign countries, cities, peoples, and cultural sites. Finally, popular periodicals that were just being launched in mid-century also were increasingly devoted to reports from the world outside of Germany. Globus had an experienced, geographically knowledgeable, and wellconnected editor in Karl Andree, but he was not the magazine ’ s only strong suit. In Herrmann J. Meyer of the Bibliographisches Institut, Globus had an innovative publisher who was dedicated to disseminating knowledge and 249 Popularizing the World: Karl Andree ’ s Globus was open to international experiments. This kind of innovation had begun with Herrmann ’ s father Joseph, the publishing firm ’ s founder. Joseph Meyer made a lasting name for himself with the successful (52-volume) Conversations-Lexicon in 1839, a comprehensive competitor to the established encyclopedias of Brockhaus in Leipzig and Pierer in Altenburg. 8 Already in 1833, Meyer had introduced a new kind of work intended to inform and educate middle-class readers. The work was immodestly entitled Meyer ’ s Universum, with the lengthy subtitle Abbildung und Beschreibung des Sehenswerthesten und Merkwürdigsten der Natur und Kunst auf der ganzen Erde. It was predicated on publishing beautiful, but affordable illustrations of significant sites from around the world in a serial format. Illustr. 2: Title page of the third volume of Meyer ’ s Universum Each issue of Meyer ’ s Universum presented readers with detailed engravings of distinctive venues famous for their history, architecture, or natural wonders. They ranged from Saint Mark ’ s Square in Venice and the Taj Mahal to the Chalk Cliffs of Dover and the Island of Madeira. Each image was accompanied by a short descriptive text. Printed in horizontal octavo format, these relatively inexpensive serials could also function as early coffee table 250 Kirsten Belgum books for middle-class families. Twenty years later, the work was still appearing in Germany in serialized installments. By the early 1860s the firm was recycling its greatest hits in book form as well, including a multi-volume deluxe edition. 9 Hoping to capitalize on his success in Germany, in the 1850s Joseph sent his son Herrmann J. Meyer to New York to produce a version of Meyer ’ s Universum for American readers. This project started with a Germanlanguage edition that could borrow directly from the original version. Even here, however, there had to be some changes to suit the different national market. For example, the first issue starts with an American icon: «Das Monument auf Bunkershill bei Boston.» The accompanying text begins with the German perspective from the original European edition: «Hierhüben ist nichts mehr zu hoffen [. . .]. Das neue Leben ist jenseits geboren [. . .]. Seht nur hin! » (18). It adds, however, an American first-person perspective - the Yankee, even if imperfect, is the inventor of liberty and a people ’ s constitution, the positive future of the world - and concludes with a description of a tour of Boston including an exclamation of American pride: «Bei uns ist Morgen! » (22). Just two years later, Herrmann J. Meyer created, in collaboration with Charles A. Dana (a journalist at the New York Tribune, who would later become co-editor of The New American Cyclopaedia), an English-language version of the same work. Like its European and North American Germanlanguage models, it introduced readers to sites from around the world. Unlike the German-language version published in the United States, however, it did not presume any knowledge of German among its readers. This new English-language work also appealed expressly to the patriotic interests of an American market, beginning with an awe-filled description of Niagara Falls. The illustration for this entry had also appeared in a German issue, but now was located prominently at the front of the English-language edition for American readers. Although this version did not last longer than two years, the idea of translating material from one national culture to another was a model that Herrmann J. Meyer would use again a decade later. Globus, which Meyer launched in 1862, was predicated on the same kind of transcultural borrowing; it, too, was an experiment in presenting middleclass readers with extensive visual documentation of the world. Both Meyer and Andree, whom Meyer recruited as editor, were aware of previous periodicals that were dedicated to familiarizing German readers with reports from around the world. One example from the late 1820s was Cotta ’ s Das Ausland, yet it had no illustrations. Not only was the Bibliographisches Institut familiar, through Meyer ’ s Universum, with the project of publishing 251 Popularizing the World: Karl Andree ’ s Globus illustrated works; illustration was also becoming more affordable for the periodical press. The Illustrirte Zeitung, founded by J. J. Weber in Leipzig in 1843, included hundreds of images in each annual volume. These were devoted to everything from royal portraits to ladies hats, and from notable German places, such as the Cologne Cathedral, to maps of contemporary battlefields. A decade later Ernst Keil ’ s family magazine, Die Gartenlaube, included several illustrations in each of its weekly issues that were frequently connected to the serialized fiction and biographical sketches. Globus, by contrast, deployed illustrations to depict places and peoples from around the world. But including images in a publication required more than just affordable printing costs. It necessitated the creation of images in the first place. Meyer ’ s coup consisted in gaining the rights to a storehouse of illustrations from a recently created French periodical devoted to travel, Le Tour du Monde (founded in 1860). But it was Andree, if we believe his statement in the foreword to the first volume of Globus, who was determined to make Globus more serious than its French predecessor. Illustr. 3: «Niagara Falls: Horseshoe Falls» - Illustration from the first volume of the American English-language edition of Meyer ’ s Universum 252 Kirsten Belgum In that foreword, Andree acknowledged that Meyer had acquired illustrations from Le Tour du Monde. What Andree did not mention was that he and Meyer in fact borrowed text from their French precursor as well. Such borrowing is not surprising, since the images in any issue of a periodical should de facto influence, if not determine, the subject of its articles. What is surprising is the effort Andree took to hide the extent of his reliance on the written contributions from the French magazine. No doubt this had to do with his insistence that his journal would be less about travel and more about geography and ethnography. Indeed, he suggests that Le Tour du Monde, whose subtitle was «nouveau journal des voyages,» was insufficiently rigorous and scientific for the German market. He had advised Herrmann J. Meyer: «Für Deutschland müssen Sie kein bloßes Journal der Land- und Seereisen herausgeben» (Globus 1 (1862): iii). An example from Andree ’ s first volume, however, illustrates not only the effort he put into obscuring his reliance on the written works that accompanied the images in the French periodical. It also demonstrates that this obfuscation led him to produce a work that was in many ways less scientific and rigorous than a «mere magazine of land and sea voyages.» The first issue of Globus begins with an illustration of a man with a long beard tied to a stake and surrounded by several seated Native Americans, all inside a tent-like structure. The title of the article to which this image belongs is «Vor zehn Jahren in Californien und Oregon.» What the article does not point out, however, and what only a detailed comparison of this issue and an issue of Le Tour du Monde from a year and a half earlier reveals, is that some of the events depicted in this article take place neither in California nor in Oregon. The event portrayed in the first illustration was based on an article from Le Tour du Monde entitled «Voyages et Aventures du Baron de Wogan» (Le Tour du Monde 2: 242 - 56). The entire French article is written in the first-person and recounts Wogan ’ s travels in the American West from his arrival in San Francisco and his time prospecting for gold in Grass Valley to his long trek eastward through Nevada and into Utah. While the article ’ s subtitle is «en Californie» and the first four of its eight illustrations depict a California settlement, miners, and redwoods, the majority of Wogan ’ s narrative and the remaining four illustrations describe the deserts and canyons of Utah and his capture and eventual release by a tribe of Paiute. Indeed, the image at the head of the Globus article as well as two more detailed engravings depict encounters that took place on the Green River in what is present-day eastern Utah (Le Tour du Monde 2: 247), and not, as the article ’ s title suggests, California and Oregon. 10 To add to the confusion, although all of the illustrations in the Globus article are from the corresponding piece in 253 Popularizing the World: Karl Andree ’ s Globus Illustr. 4: Eleventh page of article on Wogan ’ s travels from Le Tour du Monde (Le Tour du Monde 2 (1860): 252). The same image occurs on the first page of the first volume of Globus (Globus 1 (1862): 1). 254 Kirsten Belgum the French periodical, they appear in the German magazine in a considerably different order. The first image in Globus, giving the impression that a white prisoner is about to be killed by natives in California, seems to be placed at the head of the article due to its sensational content. In order to make the article seem less like the retelling of one man ’ s voyage (which Andree insisted that he wanted to avoid in his journal), Andree made other changes that not only distort his source material but mostly likely would have misled his German readers. The Globus article begins with a blending of other source materials about the travels of white men in Oregon in particular and encounters with native peoples as well as flora and fauna there. By splicing together multiple sources, Andree looses track (intentionally or unwittingly) of the origin of much of his information and description. Thus, already on page 3 of the Globus article there are direct quotes from Wogan ’ s version but not attributed to him, since he and his travels are not expressly mentioned until the very end of the article, namely on page 8 (of eleven pages), where it states: «Wir schließen diesen Schilderungen eine andere an, die neulich ein Franzose Wogan, gegeben hat» (Globus 1 (1862): 8). That is to say, Andree puts the words of Wogan into the mouth of an unrelated narrator and thus incorrectly links it to the story of travelers who are indeed bound for Oregon, which Wogan was not. This dissembling also occurs in the retitling of a portrait of Wogan for Globus; instead of being labeled «Baron Wogan» as it appeared in Le Tour du Monde, Andree captions it «Ein Jäger in Californien» (Globus 1 (1862): 9). Other problems that are more fundamentally confusing arise in the adaptation of select material from the French magazine for the first article in Globus. For instance, Andree includes an image of «Un canon ou passage de la Sierra-Wah» from Le Tour du Monde, even though the landscape it depicts is barely mentioned in the text of the Globus article. This could certainly have misled German readers who did not have access to a detailed map of the American West to think that this landscape was located in California or Oregon. In short, the result of all of these borrowings is a document that is in fact more unreliable, indeed more fictional, than the travel writing that Andree wanted to avoid, aiming as he claimed for a higher degree of scientific writing. By the 1870s Andree had plenty of sources to produce the various issues of his magazine. These included summaries and excerpts from diverse travel works, such as those that had been published in book form in Germany. In 1874 - 75 one prominent example was the recently published work of Dr. Georg Schweinfurth, a German traveler to Africa. His Im Herzen von Afrika first appeared in two volumes (of roughly 500 pages each) with Brockhaus in 255 Popularizing the World: Karl Andree ’ s Globus Leipzig in 1874. 11 Already in the second half of that same year, Andree was making use of Schweinfurth ’ s travels, interactions, and descriptions for Globus. Schweinfurth ’ s material played a prominent role in eleven Globus issues over the next year and a half. 12 Three main aspects of this particular instance of borrowing reveal Andree ’ s strategies for popularizing the world in his periodical. The first concerns narrative voice. In adapting a first-person travel narrative for recycling in a serialized periodical, Andree changed almost all of the prose to a neutral, third-person style. Although it meant that the text now sounded more removed from the personal experience of Schweinfurth, it often consisted of very similar, at times even verbatim, wording from the original work. The distance of the Globus narration from the original author ’ s travel description was increased by the occasional use of direct quotes from Schweinfurth in the first person. Yet, again, contrary to Andree ’ s explicitly stated objective of creating something «more» than a journal of land and sea travels, this rewriting of Schweinfurth ’ s own work only served to mask, and thus distort the source of Andree ’ s material, giving the impression that not all of the material stemmed from Schweinfurth ’ s own pen. This shift to third-person narration also allowed Andree (or perhaps an editorial assistant) to add commentary that was not in the original source. To be sure, some contextualization was important for the comprehension of these excerpts in their serialized publication. In addition, the more condensed version of a longer travel work within the periodical allowed Andree to emphasize or even sensationalize certain items over and against the original. Just one example of this is in regards to the practice of cannibalism. Although Schweinfurth does indeed suggest that the Niam-Niam people are «Anthropophags» or cannibals, in his book he cites others who have seen little to no cannibalism committed by the Niam-Niam and he also writes, based on his own observations, that he can name many chieftains who abhor the consumption of human flesh (235). Furthermore, he only mentions the phenomenon in one case. By contrast, one of Andree ’ s Globus entries mentions cannibalism among the Niam-Niam at least three times. Similarly, in chapter ten of his book Schweinfurth cites his own (minimal) observations of humans prepared for consumption by the Monbuttu. The summary in Globus, however, devotes more space to this (given the length of its excerpts) and returns again to discussions of other supposedly cannibalistic peoples in Africa (i. e., the Niam-Niam) in its discussion of the Monbuttu. (Schweinfurth 284 - 85; Globus 28 (1875): 274 - 75). In other words, the process of transferring material about the world into a new format, in this case a periodical, could involve intensification that negatively impacted the accu- 256 Kirsten Belgum Illustr. 5: «Dr. Georg Schweinfurth.» Globus 26 (1874): 274 257 Popularizing the World: Karl Andree ’ s Globus racy of the original material. As with the image of a white man tied to a stake in the American West, the emphasis in Globus on cannibalism played into a sensationalized view of the world. The second revealing aspect in Andree ’ s use of Schweinfurth ’ s work is the intensified role of visual material. Schweinfurth ’ s original work over the course of two volumes and 1,000 pages includes roughly 125 images total, most of which take up less than a fourth of a page, and of which only 25 are full-page plates. For the time, this is a significant number of illustrations. In adapting Schweinfurth ’ s work for Globus, however, Andree includes a much greater percentage of images per page of written text. For example, the very first in the series of excerpts from Schweinfurth ’ s work in Globus contains three pages of text and three and a half pages of images. 13 In this case none of them comes from Schweinfurth ’ s book. 14 These images, including an imposing one of the traveler himself in an heroic posture, were most likely added in order to catch the attention of and attract readers, as the prominent placement of the first image of Wogan in the United States from Globus ’ s first issue in 1862 had likely done. Some of these same images, however, distort the text considerably through sensationalized depictions that are not in the original work. Two such examples are clearly based on Schweinfurth ’ s narration, but not presented visually in his text. One shows the interior of a building in which Schweinfurth met with a prominent older woman, «die alte Schol,» of the Lao people. In this tableau Schweinfurth appears to present her with one of his many tokens, in this case a medallion that glows impressively, as does Schweinfurth himself in an almost otherworldly way. The postures of the various Lao people suggest awe and reverence for Schweinfurth in a way that is not described in his narration (Globus 26 (1874): 305 - 07). Indeed, in its original form, Schweinfurth ’ s account instead emphasizes his desire to impress this important woman: «Ich hatte alles zum festlichen Empfange hergerichtet, um auch bei ihr eine [. . .] vortheilhafte Erinnerung zu hinterlassen» (144). In addition to creating a dramatized image that misrepresents the original textual description of the encounter, Globus omits altogether Schweinfurth ’ s discussion of repeatedly visiting Schol in her own hut: «Ich besuchte sie daselbst häufig, um in die Geheimnisse ihrer Milchwirtschaft einzudringen» (144). Another image (depicting a mishap between Schweinfurth ’ s assistant Mohammed and a water buffalo) was also not in the original book version of the travels. As with the image of Schweinfurth ’ s encounter with the old Schol, it was most likely created and added to the Globus excerpts to amplify an episode that constitutes only a very minor detail of Schweinfurth ’ s story. Its 258 Kirsten Belgum Illustr. 6: «Besuch der alten Schol bei Dr. Schweinfurth» Globus 26 (1874): 306 259 Popularizing the World: Karl Andree ’ s Globus size and style result in an emphasis that is quite out of proportion to the other events and to the visual illustrations in Schweinfurth ’ s book, which consist instead of more neutral, descriptive images of livestock he observed, such as the decidedly undramatic portrayal of a domestic goat. Thus, the inclusion of additional visual material in Globus articles, and in a manner that differs considerably from the otherwise sober, scientific, and non-sensational images of Schweinfurth ’ s book, only serves to alter the mood and tenor of the original source text. In other words, more than a decade after Andree had professed to pursue a more scholarly and less entertainment-oriented focus in his German periodical, Globus was still far from being more accurate and neutral in its depiction of the world. Third and finally, the serialization of longer travel works in Globus confronted Andree (and eventually his successors) with a difficult choice: to present the excerpts in quick succession and in greater length each or to stretch out the individual contributions across a large number of issues. From the beginning, Andree chose the latter approach. In the early years in which he adapted entries from Le Tour du Monde, this often meant that the material from one or two issues of the French periodical could be rationed out to five or six issues in Globus. Of course, Andree included other material, but each of his issues was twice the length (appearing half as frequently) of those of Le Tour du Monde. With later excerpts from original travel works (such as Schweinfurth ’ s with its 1,000 pages), this would mean that Andree could keep this one tour in front of his readers across a span of up to eleven issues. More than that, he did not place these excerpts only in consecutive issues, but rather spread them over a period of one and a half years. Typically, the other works that appeared in the same issues as the material from Schweinfurth ’ s work were also serialized. 15 The result was that frequently Globus ran up to three different serialized works at one time, albeit staggered in the issues in which they started. This approach of stretching reports on various regions of the world into multiple issues, rather than providing a complete report in one or two issues, allowed Globus, like other periodicals of the time, to self-referentially recur to its reporting in earlier issues. This amounted to a form of selfadvertising, a way to entice new readers and subscribers as well as to revive or sustain the interest of its existing readership. The work and career of Karl Andree, like that of Globus ’ s first publisher, the Bibliographisches Institut, revolved around the promotion of knowledge about the world. Despite Andree ’ s own immobility in the globalized world of the mid-nineteenth century, he made an enormous contribution to disseminating information on distant places and peoples. His involvement 260 Kirsten Belgum Image 7: «Mohammed wird von einem Büffel angegriffen» Globus 26 (1874): 290 261 Popularizing the World: Karl Andree ’ s Globus in numerous translations and adaptations of other geographical material long preceded his work on Globus. This early work and his extensive connections to other publishers as well as to the periodical press in general certainly played a central role in the creation and long-term success of Andree ’ s geographical magazine. The international experiments of the Bibliographisches Institut did as well. What conclusions about the project of disseminating travel writing in the nineteenth century can we draw from the example of this one magazine? First, that in trying to make information about the world (both geographic and ethnographic) popular, a periodical like Globus had to rely on a broad network of contemporary sources. It acknowledged some of this debt, but not all of it. It reshaped some of its source material to suit its needs and dissembled it at times (in terms of adding, amplifying, and possibly even distorting) to increase its popular appeal. The use of visuals played a large role in this. The second conclusion emerges from the first. These examples from Image 8: «Goat of the Momvoo» Schweinfurth, In the Heart of Africa, vol. 2, 69 262 Kirsten Belgum Andree ’ s Globus and his «sources» suggest that we need to read nineteenthcentury travel texts comparatively: both across the boundaries of national languages (the French Le Tour du Monde) and also across the lines of various travel genres and text types (Schweinfurth ’ s travel narrative in book form). The extent of the magazine ’ s popularizing strategies, both in terms of how the texts were altered for a mainstream audience and how the visual images were deployed, would not be as apparent without such points of comparison. No one knew better than Andree how many sources, agents, travelers, writers, and media were necessary to achieve the means for popularizing the world in nineteenth-century Germany and for establishing the kind of success that Globus enjoyed for almost fifty years. But one might also conclude that no one knew better how much potential there was in the growing field of geographical and travel writing for manipulation in the service of a commercial endeavor. Part of the story of Andree ’ s Globus is the role that acknowledged and unacknowledged recycling and adaptation played in the growth of this new field of publishing. Notes 1 In 1910 Globus was absorbed by Dr. A. Petermanns Mittheilungen aus Justus Perthes geographischer Anstalt. The latter periodical existed (under slightly altered names) until 2004. 2 Although there is no space here to expand on this important topic, Andree ’ s views regarding the cultural superiority of the Germanic peoples call for further study of the role of geographical scholarship in the service of nationalism and nation-building as well as of imperialism in the nineteenth century. One quote from his 1851 book on North America might suffice here to suggest the tenor of much of Andree ’ s thought: «Wenn wir uns vergegenwärtigen, wie weit die Canadier französischer Abstammung in geistiger und materieller Entwicklung hinter der englischen Bevölkerung zurückgeblieben sind, wenn wir uns daran erinnern, daß dem französischen Volke die Begabung mangelt, blühende Colonien zu gründen und sie aus sich selber heraus in gedeihlicher und großartiger Weise zu entwicklen, so können wir es in keiner Weise bedauern, daß die neue Welt für sie verschlossen wurde» (Andree, Nord-Amerika 491). 3 These were the Zeitschrift für allgemeine Erdkunde, founded in 1853 as the journal of the Berlin Geographical Society, and Dr. A. Petermanns Mittheilungen founded by August Heinrich Petermann and published by Perthes in Gotha beginning in 1855. 4 In his forewords to volumes 2 and 3 Andree boasts that Globus is being used «auf Gymnasien sowohl wie auf Real- und höheren Bürgerschulen» (Globus 2 (1862): iii). 5 There are various biographical sketches of Karl Andree, among others one composed by his son Richard (who also became a geographer) that appeared in the significantly revised edition of Andree ’ s Geographie des Welthandels, originally from 1877. Richard Andree claims that an academic position intended for his father at the prestigious 263 Popularizing the World: Karl Andree ’ s Globus Collegium Carolinum in Braunschweig was refused him for political reasons (R. Andree 5). 6 This listing is from Andree ’ s own description of his credentials as he formulated them in the foreword, written in February 1862, to the first volume of Globus (Globus 1 (1862): iv). 7 Already by the early 1850s Andree was a member of these American societies (Andree, Nord-Amerika, title page). 8 Unlike Brockhaus ’ s early editions of his Conversations-Lexikon, Meyer ’ s Grosses Conversations-Lexicon (which ultimately reached 52 volumes) included illustrations. Two decades later his son Herrmann published a condensed (15-volume) version as the Neues Conversations-Lexikon für alle Stände (1857 - 60). 9 One example is Meyer ’ s Universum: Ein Jahrbuch für Freunde der Natur und Kunst. 10 In the French source text, Wogan leaves California for Utah on page four of a fourteenpage article. 11 I have not yet been able to determine if Andree or Vieweg had permission from Brockhaus to use Schweinfurth ’ s material; however, since the head of the Vieweg firm, Heinrich, was married to Helene, the daughter of Heinrich Eduard Brockhaus, who was the head of the Brockhaus firm at that time, I presume permission had been requested and granted (Killy 217). 12 Schweinfurth ’ s travels appeared in the followings volumes of Globus from 1874 - 75 (beginning on the listed page, but usually comprising roughly six pages of each issue): vol. 26, pp. 272, 289, 305; vol. 27, pp. 81, 97, 113; vol. 28, pp. 257, 273, 298, 308, 324. 13 In other issues, space devoted to images outweighs the written text. For example, issue 17 of volume 28 presents five illustrations, including some full-page images, in just five pages of a contribution written by Schweinfurth. 14 I have not been able to verify the source of these added images. 15 For instance, issues 17 and 18 of Globus 28 also include serialized excerpts of a trip to China by the French traveler François Garnier. Works Cited Andree, Karl. Geographie des Welthandels: Eine wirtschaftsgeographische Schilderung der Erde. Ed. Franz Heiderich and Robert Sieger. Vol. 1. Frankfurt: Heinrich Keller, 1910. - . Lehrbuch der allgemeinen Erdkunde für höhere Gymnasial- und Realklassen, sowie für Hauslehrer und zum Selbstunterricht. Leipzig: Ludwig Schumann, 1836. - . Letter to Rudolf Vieweg. 6 April 1836. Vieweg Archiv 331A. - . Nord-Amerika in geographischen und geschichtlichen Umrissen; mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Eingeborenen und der indianischen Alterthümer, der Einwanderung, der Ansiedlung, des Ackerbaus, der Gewerbe, der Schifffahrt, und des Handels. 2nd ed. Braunschweig: Georg Westermann, 1854. Andree, Richard. «Karl Andree.» Karl Andree. Geographie des Welthandels: Eine wirtschaftsgeographische Schilderung der Erde (Vollständig neu bearbeitet). Ed. Franz Heiderich and Robert Sieger. Vol. 1. Frankfurt: Heinrich Keller, 1910. 3 - 11. 264 Kirsten Belgum Berman, Russell. Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998. Charton, Édouard. Le Tour Du Monde: Nouveau Journal Des Voyages. Paris: Hachette, 1860 - 1914. Dr. A. Petermanns Mittheilungen aus Justus Perthes geographischer Anstalt. Vol. 1. Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1855. Dürbeck, Gabriele. Stereotype Paradiese: Ozeanismus in der deutschen Südseeliteratur 1815 - 1914. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2007. Globus: Illustrierte Zeitschrift für Länder und Völkerkunde. Hildburghausen: Bibliographisches Institut [later Braunschweig: Vieweg und Sohn], 1862 - 1910. Killy, Walter, ed. Dictionary of German Biography. Vol. 10. Munich: K. G. Saur, 2006. Meyer ’ s Universum: Ein Jahrbuch für Freunde der Natur und Kunst, mit Abbildungen der interessantesten Stätten der Erde und Beschreibungen. Prachtausgabe. 3 vols. Hildburghausen: Bibliographisches Institut, 1862 - 64. Meyer ’ s Universum, oder Abbildung und Beschreibung des Sehenswerthesten und Merkwürdigsten der Natur und Kunst auf der ganzen Erde. Vol. 1. Hildburghausen: Bibliographisches Institut, 1833. Meyer ’ s Universum, oder Abbildung und Beschreibung des Sehenswerthesten und Merkwürdigsten der Natur und Kunst auf der ganzen Erde. Amerikanische Ausgabe. Vol. 1. New York: Hermann J. Meyer, 1850. Meyer ’ s Universum or Views of the most Remarkable Places and Objects of all Countries. Ed. Charles A. Dana. Vol. 1. New York: Hermann J. Meyer, 1852. Naranch, Bradley. «Between Cosmopolitanism and German Colonialism: Nineteenth-Century Hanseatic Networks.» Emerging Tropical Markets in Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society, 1660 - 1914. Ed. Andreas Gestrich and Margrit Schulte Beerbühl. London: German Historical Institute, 2011. 99 - 132. - . «Inventing the Auslandsdeutsche: Emigration, Colonial Fantasy, and German National Identity, 1848 - 71.» Germany ’ s Colonial Pasts. Ed. Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2005. 21 - 40. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1991. Schweinfurth, Georg. Im Herzen von Afrika: Reisen und Entdeckungen im Centralen Aequatorial-Afrika während der Jahre 1868 bis 1871. 2nd ed. Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1878. Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. Zantop, Susanne. Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770 - 1870. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Erdkunde. Vol. 1. Berlin: D. Reimer, 1853. 265 Popularizing the World: Karl Andree ’ s Globus Changes in German Travel Writing about East Africa, 1884 - 1891 MATTHEW UNANGST T EMPLE U NIVERSITY A July 12, 1890 article in the Kolonialzeitung, Germany ’ s largest colonialist newspaper, lamented the end of an era in Germany ’ s relationship with Africa. The paper ’ s editors wrote that Carl Peters ’ s expedition to find the explorer Emin Pasha in the Egyptian province of Equatoria might be the world ’ s last real journey of exploration. 1 Peters had been feared dead, killed in a Maasai raid on his caravan, for several months earlier in the year. Even though those fears had turned out to be ungrounded, the paper concluded that further German exploration of Africa was too dangerous («Im dunkelsten Afrika» 182). The article ’ s author declared that German colonialists would have to reorient themselves away from exploration toward new ways of exerting control over Africa. 2 While travel, including exploratory travel, remained central to the German experience in East Africa after 1890, the Emin Pasha expedition marked the end of an era for how the German reading public experienced that travel. The style of travel writing about East Africa changed to fit the new needs of the colonial state and the reading demands of the metropolitan public. 3 Writing about travel took new forms when it began to support a real, rather than an imagined, empire. Bernd Wiese has argued that the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century marked the decline of traditional travelogues with their focus on scientific aspects of expeditions (Wiese 229). That transition, as far as East Africa was concerned, was at its clearest with Peters himself, six years earlier. 4 Peters and his fellow leaders of the Society for German Colonization (Gesellschaft für deutsche Kolonisation, GfdK), the founding organization of Germany's East African colony, repurposed the scientific travel narrative that had formed the entirety of their knowledge about East Africa before 1884 to further the organization's goals of building a colonial empire. It replaced the scientific or religious callings of earlier explorers with its own higher calling, the German nation, making the travelogues of its members into narratives of imperial conquest. 5 Travelogues were particularly important in German East Africa as compared to Germany ’ s other colonies because the GfdK began its acquisition of territory without the support of existing networks in the region and contrary to the Bismarck regime ’ s wishes (Smith 32). It planned to force Bismarck and the Kaiser to support German colonialism by presenting them with an already-acquired colony. Its members knew about the area they arrogated from travelogues they had read rather than from expeditions. After the German government granted the GfdK a Schutzbrief for its territories in 1885, the genre changed significantly, and it began to resemble travel writing about parts of Europe more closely due to changing German aims in East Africa. Travel writing about East Africa is also valuable to see changes in the genre because Germans continued to write about travel in the region after formal colonization began. Travel and political domination were closely intertwined in the German colonial project in East Africa. As Michael Pesek has asserted, German colonial rule in East Africa had depended on travel. Pesek argues that accounts of exploratory expeditions influenced the colonial state ’ s approaches to governance in parts of East Africa through the entirety of German rule there. Colonization began with expeditions of exploration by German scientists, and continued with the constant movement of German officials and officers around the colony, a necessity given the small staff responsible for covering an area nearly twice as large as Germany's European territory (Pesek 12 - 13). Following the German government ’ s takeover of German East Africa in 1891, travel writing changed again. The colonial state ’ s needs were different from those of the GfdK and neither pre-colonial travelogues nor those in the GfdK style fit its needs. As the colonial state took control of East African spaces and travel in them, travelers became part of the apparatus of imperial rule rather than lone representatives of diffuse imperial agendas. They no longer traversed «Africa,» but «German Africa,» a space with fewer rhetorical possibilities. Long travelogues of exploration in the nineteenth-century style disappeared: First, the expectation that pre-colonial travelers were the only authentic sources of information about faraway, mysterious places no longer existed. Second, the colonial state was more concerned with understanding how to govern and make economic use of lands traversed, not magical descriptions so common in earlier travelogues. And third, metropolitan audiences had other sources of information about East Africa. This article will trace the outlines of that decline in order to explore the ways in which German colonial fantasies changed with the creation of a formal colonial empire to a point where exploratory travelogues could no longer fuel them. By «travel writing» and «travelogues» I mean here the expeditionary reports and descriptions in the style that formed the primary corpus of 267 Changes in German Travel Writing about East Africa European writing about Africa in the pre-colonial period. The anthropologist Johannes Fabian has identified the common topos of such travelogues: «That of the encounter between a European explorer, the intrepid leader of an expeditionary caravan and emissary of science, and the African chief, a local ruler (real or presumed) cast in the role of a representative of his society and culture and invariably identified as either a political friend or foe of European penetration.» 6 Mary Louise Pratt has labeled European travel writers within a colonial paradigm as agents of the «anti-conquest,» by which she means the non-violent processes of asserting European hegemony while representing Europeans as innocent observers (Pratt 7). They were the heroic protagonists of their travelogues, civilizing a static non-European world. Travel writing in that style played an important role in the development of German colonialism. Scholars of pre-colonial Germany have drawn attention to the importance of travel literature in shaping the German world imaginary. Susanne Zantop argued for the influence of what she called «colonial fantasies» in shaping German ideas about empire before formal colonization began. These colonial fantasies «formed a cultural residue of myths about self and other(s) that could be stirred up for particular political purposes - progressive as well as reactionary ones - whenever the need arose» (Zantop 3, 168). Germans were among the most active explorers of East Africa in the decades before colonization. They were more involved in the exploration of East Africa than perhaps anywhere else on the globe, meaning German travelogues about the region were more prominent internationally than those about other parts of the world. In the 1880s, exploration had dominated the German colonial experience in East Africa. German East Africa ’ s founder, the Gesellschaft für deutsche Kolonisation (GfdK), and its successor, the Deutsche Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft (DOAG), dedicated most of their resources to journeys of exploration and conquest from the middle of the 1880s onwards. 7 Precolonial travel literature, particularly book-length travelogues, served as a means of establishing tropes about the spaces Germans entered and on which German colonialists could build political claims, as the GfdK had done in its expedition to found the East African colony in 1884. The GfdK began the German colonization of East Africa with an expedition to acquire land in October 1884. The expedition was led by the Society ’ s founders, Carl Peters and Joachim Graf von Pfeil. Accompanying Peters and Pfeil were Karl Jühlke, an old school friend of Peters and a member of the GfdK, and August Otto, a young businessman traveling at his own expense to explore trade opportunities in the area. Travel in the region was so common that the expedition ’ s members attempted to pass it off 268 Matthew Unangst variously as an International African Association exploratory expedition, a hunting trip, a scientific expedition, or an English trading expedition (Wagner 28). 8 In East Africa, the four men operated secretly to sign a series of extremely dubious treaties with various local leaders, headmen, and other figures that promised the Society sovereign rights over thousands of square miles. Those treaties later served as the basis of German claims to what was to become the German East African colony and the justification for government protection of the GfdK. Before beginning the expedition, members of the GfdK, and the European public more generally, knew about East Africa almost entirely through explorers ’ travelogues. Those travelogues were almost all the product of the second half of the nineteenth century. East Africa had been left out of the first wave of European exploration, when European explorers and geographers focused their attention on the Americas. In 1851, Henry Venn, secretary of the British Church Missionary Society, had declared that any further exploration in Africa must proceed from the East Coast (Richards and Place 1). The first to take up that call was Johann Ludwig Krapf, a German missionary working for the British Church Missionary Society. British, German, and Belgian explorers followed Krapf and explored Eastern Africa under the auspices of scientific and missionary societies over the next three decades. As the biographer of the explorer Carl Claus von der Decken put it in 1869, these explorers were the «pioneers of culture» in East Africa and connected metropolitan audiences in Germany with the region (Kersten, Baron Carl Claus von der Decken ’ s Reisen 386). Their accounts, one author claimed, represented Africa as truthfully as photography could (Pless 233). Explorers ’ travelogues about East Africa, particularly the fantastical descriptions of empty landscapes, provided material around which readers could construct their visions for the future of East Africa. Travelogues were part of a «cultural residue» that Germans could use to create national myths and ideas about the Other. Travelers marked territory with meaning for European audiences. Travel writing domesticated the exotic for European consumption and engaged European publics with imperial projects (Pratt 4). Beginning with Alexander von Humboldt, German travel writers had used the genre of the travelogue to place non-European spaces within European totalizing frameworks. Travelogues produced tropes and topoi about Africa that German colonialists could call upon to create Africa for metropolitan audiences. Travelogues created a discourse of «colonial fantasies» around East Africa before Europeans attempted to take possession of the territory. The pervasiveness of travelogues and their intertwinement with German identity before the Reichsgründung meant Germans had already colonized 269 Changes in German Travel Writing about East Africa the world in their minds before Germany had any colonies (Friedrichsmeyer, Lennox, and Zantop 19). Scientific accounts of East African travel by German explorers and missionaries were prominent in Germany in the early 1880s, despite Germany's lack of a formal overseas empire. German explorers worked for the British government and the International Africa Association (IAA). The Hamburg Geographical Society sent the doctor Gustav Fischer to explore farther west to Lake Victoria. Mittheilungen der afrikanischen Gesellschaft carried reports from the German branch of the IAA in which German explorers presented information about East and Central Africa. Petermanns geographische Mitteilungen carried the latest in geographic research and reports of German travelers to exotic locations, including East Africa. Both presented travelogues of the territories traversed to German mass audiences, popularizing exploration in Africa. The aforementioned Krapf had served a British missionary society and wrote about East African travel for both British and German audiences. Pfeil and Peters, the two most prominent figures in the GfdK, both dated their interest in empire back to childhood experiences reading German travel writing about the region (Peters, Gesammelte Schriften 1: 31; Pfeil, Zur Erwerbung von Deutsch-Ostafrika 11). Peters ’ s father was a friend of von der Decken ’ s, a prominent explorer of East Africa during Peters ’ s childhood. The older Peters had told young Carl of David Livingstone ’ s travels and, pointing to East Africa on a map, had told him «here lies the future of Africa» (Gesammelte Schriften 1: 20). Peters made up his mind to make that future a German one. Pfeil had been inspired to go to Africa by an indirect connection to Gerhard Rohlfs, a German explorer of Abyssinia in the 1860s and 1870s. One of Rohlfs ’ relatives was a teacher at Pfeil ’ s Gymnasium. The teacher exposed Pfeil to travelogues by Andersen, Baldwin, the Forsters, Cook, and Humboldt (Zur Erwerbung 22 - 23). 9 When Pfeil heard the news of Henry Morton Stanley ’ s travels in «deepest Africa,» the Rohlfs travelogues from his youth ran back through his mind and «powerfully enflamed in me the need for mental activity» (Zur Erwerbung 23). Peters, too, had read and been inspired by Stanley ’ s travels in East and Central Africa (Falkenhorst 8). Although Pfeil claimed the 1884 expedition had been the product of «spontaneous acts» (BArch N 2225/ 7, pag. 9), the genesis for the GfdK ’ s 1884 expedition came out of Peters ’ s and Pfeil ’ s readings of travelogues, particularly Stanley ’ s. As Peters became part of the burgeoning colonialist movement in the early 1880s, he hoped that he could find «wide stretches in which German agriculturalists can progress» with a vague conception that such stretches could be found somewhere in Africa (BArch R 8023/ 265, pag. 270 Matthew Unangst 61). He founded the GfdK for this task, but its members had little or no experience in Africa. They therefore drew on the travelogues they had read, and, over the Society ’ s first few months of existence, they suggested possible places to find such wide stretches. Their lack of knowledge of Africa was apparent in their proposals: Joseph Freiherr Molitor von Mühlfeld called for greater emigration to Argentina, Major Friedrich Wilhelm Alexander von Mechow suggested colonizing on the Kwango River, and Alexander Merensky recommended what is today southern Angola. Peters took up the Merensky plan, but the rest of the organization vetoed it because it was clear the German government would not support such a plan as Portugal had already claimed the area. While laid up with an illness in Lorenzo Marques (now Maputo, the capital of Mozambique), Pfeil thought back over Stanley ’ s travelogues. They inspired him to dream up a plan to acquire land in East Africa. Great riches, he believed, were to be made on Lake Malawi. He suggested the region of Usagara, which according to Stanley held great hope for colonial development (Zur Erwerbung 56). The GfdK approved Usagara by unanimous vote on 16 September 1884 (Kurtze 3 - 4). The society made no explicit plans for the colonization of Usagara following the expedition. It would acquire territory through treaties with local rulers, then simply declare the land German, and encourage German settlers to go there (BArch N 2225/ 6, pag. 5). The 1884 expedition ’ s members followed the pre-colonial travelers' methods and published travelogues about their exploration and conquest. 10 Like earlier travelers, Peters and Pfeil went on lecture tours and presented their travels to metropolitan audiences. 11 Petermanns geographische Mitteilungen, one of Germany ’ s leading journals for geographic research, praised the company ’ s openness. Whereas the International Africa Association had been secretive about its explorations in order to keep its findings to itself and prevent others from taking advantage of them, the DOAG ’ s members published freely («Geographischer Monatsbericht. Afrika. Ostafrika» 281). The GfdK ’ s published openly because the Society ’ s travelogues served to announce conquest, not science, and therefore dispensed with many of the topoi of earlier travelogues. The GfdK travelogues mirrored earlier travel writing in many ways, placing the Society's conquests within European frameworks of knowledge about East Africa. Like Peters and Pfeil, pre-colonial explorers had often attributed their decisions to explore East Africa to a childhood passion for geography and exploration. Carl von der Decken ’ s editor, for example, noted the explorer ’ s love of history and geography as a child. Decken had traveled around Europe, but it soon held no more interest for him. He thought about 271 Changes in German Travel Writing about East Africa joining the British imperial service, but chose to express his patriotism for the unifying German nation instead (Kersten, «Dem Andenken» 385). Ludwig Krapf told readers that he had developed his passion for East Africa in his first year of school. He read many travel accounts as a boy and wanted to see the world beyond Europe. He became a missionary, giving thus a higher purpose to his travel, as a compromise between his own ambition to see the world and his father ’ s ambition for him to become a minister (Claus 5 - 6). Explorers frequently suggested that their travels served a higher calling that would advance the progress of humanity. A calling beyond the self explained the explorer ’ s willingness to brave danger and made him a hero to those who believed in the same calling. To promote their own bravery and skill in the eyes of European audiences, explorers had to convince them that the dangers they faced were beyond anything one could experience in Europe. Explorers traversed unknown places posing a great deal of personal danger and had to depend on aid networks of which they had little knowledge. The higher calling that gave them the necessary strength to brave danger was in many cases religious, as it was for Krapf and for many other missionaries (Baur and Le Roy 184 - 87, Krapf 16). In other cases, the higher calling was scientific, to broaden the European base of knowledge by exploring the unknown (Kennedy 60). Precolonial travelogues constructed the East African wilderness as a place to experience that calling ’ s sublime glory and get lost in quiet contemplation of home, or the future, as «the present disappears» (Pless 231). Stanley wrote of the «sublime hour» in which his dreams would be realized (104). Joseph Thomson described Lake Nyasa/ Malawi as «a perfect Arcadia, about which idyllic poets have sung, though few have seen it realized» (189). At Lake Tanganyika, he «felt as if we had passed from a purgatory to a paradise» (192). Charles New wrote that nothing could be more «sublime» than to see God ’ s work. Mount Kilimanjaro exhibited «unparalleled grandeur, sublimity, majesty, and glory» (56). John Hanning Speke described a «fairy-like, wild, and romantic» landscape that was more fantastic than anything he had seen outside a theater (149); he thought it obvious the «untutored savage» would see magic in the existence of Mount Kenya (62). East Africa was thus envisioned as the setting for an explorer to come closer to the absolute truth and knowledge his calling promised. In order to assert their mastery of knowledge over East Africa, explorers frequently denied the people they encountered in the East African interior a history outside of natural processes and fell back on European history or literature to explain East African people and history (Kennedy 14). Speke wrote that the Wanyamwezi had no history until travelers from India had 272 Matthew Unangst started to write about them (Speke 138). Travelers drew comparisons between African societies and ones more familiar to European audiences. Decken described the Sultanate of Witu ’ s history as one that put the Ghibelline-Guelph feud of medieval Europe to shame (Kersten, «Dem Andenken» 370). Charles New, a British CMS missionary, described the Galla as the «Ishmaelites» of Africa, barbarous and ferocious perpetrators of deeds too horrible to describe (39). Thomson drew on Shakespeare, comparing himself to Caliban, and the cicadas around him to Titania (124 - 25). The French missionaries Étienne Baur and Alexandre Le Roy compared a local ruler to the medieval French king, Charlemagne, Louis the Fair, and Henri IV (203). Duff MacDonald thought the Great Lakes region resembled what Britain had looked like centuries before Christianity (145 - 46). The use of European history to explain Africa placed the continent within a European framework for understanding the world that allowed no space for indigenous knowledge. Peters ’ s and Pfeil ’ s travelogues fit many of the topoi of earlier travelogues about East Africa, but they sought to fix their travels as permanent markers on the East African landscape, to make German colonialism real in East Africa through writing. The first element of the GfdK ’ s colonial project was repurposing travel writing from Pratt's «anti-conquest» of control through observation to describing an explicit physical arrogation of land for a German overseas empire. The expedition was not in Africa to explore, but to conquer. The expedition ’ s accounts of its actions, therefore, needed only those elements of pre-colonial travel literature that would support conquest. They did not need the religious or scientific motivations of earlier travelers and were meant for a broader audience. Peters and Pfeil stripped out the religious and scientific issues earlier travelers had emphasized in their focus on land. The GfdK dropped all pretensions to science that earlier expeditions had made. Thus Peters ’ s descriptions of new, unexplored areas were perfunctory. His focus was rather on preparations for the expedition, his grand goals, and the expedition ’ s results, the set of treaties by which the GfdK claimed thousands of square miles of land. More important to Peters than the narrative of his expedition were the treaties he included in full text. The narrative served to illustrate and explain the primary text of his travelogue, which were the series of treaties on which the GfdK based its political claims. As legal documents, the treaties attempted to fix time and place in order to create political reality out of the GfdK expedition. Peters ’ s travels and travelogues also served a higher calling - the glory of Germany. Colonialism offered a possible unifying force for the young German nation in the midst of Otto von Bismarck's Kulturkampf against the 273 Changes in German Travel Writing about East Africa Catholics. The Franco-Prussian War had turned the then 13-year-old Peters into a German nationalist (Gesammelte Schriften 1: 31). While living with his uncle in London, Peters developed his ambitions of empire. He saw the British as more economically independent and free from state control to acquire territory anywhere in the world, all because of Britain ’ s colonial empire (Gesammelte Schriften 1: 56). Peters noted that critics had called him and his compatriots adventurers. But he took delight in the term, claiming that the British Empire too was started by the adventurers Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh. Adventure and colonial conquest could be one and the same (Die Gründung von Deutsch-Ostafrika 53). Peters believed that German Protestants and Catholics could work together to civilize East Africa, bringing both sides of the religious divide together into one national mission. He made it his mission to acquire a colonial empire for Germany in order to create opportunities for the post-unification generation of young Bildungsbürger like those available for young British middle-class men because of the British Empire. Like earlier travelers, Peters cited European history to make his argument, but he used a specifically German history in a way that inscribed German cultural achievements onto the East African landscape. Besides a brief mention of Cortes ’ s conquest of Mexico, Peters ’ s historical references were all German, and served to inscribe the German presence on the East African landscape («Die Usagara-Expedition» 288). He compared the landscape to the fruit trees of Mother Hulda («Die Usagara Expedition» 301). He passed the time by reading Lessing ’ s critique of Voltaire ’ s Semiramis («Die Usagara Expedition» 304). In all of his accounts of East African travel, Peters resorted frequently to quoting poetry to demonstrate his Germanness or a European spirit of exploration. His historical references were not meant merely to make landscapes more familiar to domestic audiences, but served to make them specifically German. Peters and Pfeil attempted to cast themselves as the German nationalist version of the lone European hero traversing the wilderness, bringing Germany to Africa in their own persons. Their travelogues constructed their expedition as an encounter between German civilization and African wilderness. For example, Peters got lost hunting and feared being stuck alone for the night. At one point, he dreamed he was not really in Africa, and chalked up his survival to strength of will and cold-bloodedness («Die Usagara Expedition» 308 - 09). He thought he would die and told Jühlke to rush on to the coast to get the treaties to Germany. At the same time, Peters dreamed of home. He thought of a tavern near his hometown, the Einnahme of Ilsfeld, and drinking German beer to relieve his thirst («Die Usagara 274 Matthew Unangst Expedition» 297). He and Jühlke spent their afternoons discussing the Heimat («Die Usagara Expedition» 298). After the expedition ’ s return, Peters claimed the whole experience lay behind him like a «wonderful grotesque dream» («Die Usagara Expedition» 313). It was as if he had never been in Africa at all; the experience had not shaped him, merely demonstrated the character he already had. It had demonstrated Germany ’ s potential as a colonial power. If a few men could accomplish so much, certainly the German nation could accomplish much more. Encounters with «civilization» gave the expedition ’ s members strength, and the loss of civilization weakened them. An encounter with an English missionary and his wife going west gave Pfeil «new strength» (Zur Erwerbung von Deutsch-Ostafrika 88 - 89). Pfeil and Kurt von Toeppen, who later brought a caravan to resupply him, sat around singing German songs in what they imagined was a silence which had never before been disturbed (Zur Erwerbung 108). Being in Africa did not weaken Peters ’ s and Pfeil ’ s Germanness; it only strengthened it through the crucible of dangerous travel. Pfeil demonstrated a greater understanding than did Peters of the purposes and form of pre-colonial travelogues and attempted to straddle the divide between science and conquest in other publications. He wrote several articles for scientific audiences immediately after the expedition. These articles reported his studies on the geology of the Rubeho Mountains and the breadth of the Ulanga River, and attempted to explain the flora of East African swamps. Pfeil translated the GfdK ’ s «primeval forest» [Urwald] into the scientific «rain forest» [Regenwald] for his scientific audience («Die Erforschung des Ulanga-Gebietes» 357 - 58, 363). He apologized to his readers for the inexactness of his maps, as he had been unable to take measurements by the stars due to bad weather. In contrast, the GfdK ’ s treaties had paid little attention to exact borders («Beobachtungen während meiner letzten Reise in Ostafrika» 1). Pfeil thus demonstrated an understanding of the scientific expectations and claims of earlier explorers and attempted to establish a reputation as a scientific explorer at the same time he was establishing himself as a German imperialist (Kennedy 42). Pfeil proposed that writing about East Africa ought to change to fit the needs of German colonialism, a sentiment Peters shared. The time for tales of «adventures of travel» was over. The colonial project's success depended on physical labor, the shipment of goods, and cultivation of fields (BArch N 2225/ 5, pag. 1). Writing about East Africa needed to be about teaching or forcing Africans to provide that physical labor. In Pfeil ’ s immediate account of his time in East Africa, from 1886, he disclaimed the importance of continued travel writing about the region between the coast and the DOAG ’ s 275 Changes in German Travel Writing about East Africa first station, at Sima. He thought the area was «already known to my reader, as it has been detailed and described uncountable times» and needed no more exploratory travel description (BArch N 2225/ 21, pag. 3). Although Peters called for more research expeditions to East Africa, his focus was on controlling more land, promoting settlement, and studying agricultural conditions («Konsolidierung der deutschen Kolonialbewegung» 352). Yet scientific accounts of East African exploration did not disappear overnight. The DOAG, which formed out of the GfdK after the success of its expedition, and much of the rest of the colonial movement, continued to base its arguments on travel writing and used older travelogues to promote the value of the new colony. Carl Grimm published a book in 1886 that consisted entirely of excerpts from travelers ’ accounts to praise the value of East Africa. The Kolonialzeitung relied on the explorer Paul Reichard to write about East Africa. Reichard offered a position of authority as a pre-colonial, scientific explorer of the region. He had paid his own way to join an expedition sent by the German branch of the International African Association to East Africa from 1880 to 1886. Reichard claimed an expertise about East Africa derived from his lone survival through the «thousands of dangers and difficulties» East Africa offered the European traveler as well as the scientific surveys he conducted there (58). Through the 1880s, then, scientific travelogues remained one of the primary means through which the German public learned about East Africa. New forms of media played an important part in enabling further changes to the form of travel writing about East Africa in the 1880s. The assumption of formal colonial control provided the impetus for an expansion of publication outlets available to travel writers. No longer were they limited to scientific publications such as Petermanns geographische Mitteilungen or Mittheilungen der afrikanischen Gesellschaft but travel reports now appeared in colonialist publications such as the Kolonialzeitung and even in major newspapers. Furthermore, the technologies of colonial rule enabled quicker reporting. News from Africa now arrived months, or even years earlier, through newspaper reports sourced from telegrams. The creation of regular lines of communication between Zanzibar and the East African mainland and the installation of a telegraph line running from Zanzibar enabled the quick reporting of travel back to the urban centers in Germany. But quicker reporting also changed the modes in which travelers wrote. Travel writing about East Africa no longer meant only travelogues constructed in the metropole after the journey was completed; it included reports written in Africa before the traveler could create a narrative for the entire expedition. 276 Matthew Unangst Much of the travel literature on East Africa published in the late 1880s dropped the scientific reports included in earlier travelogues altogether, and much of it dropped the heroic framings of earlier accounts. Although many of the earlier tropes remained, travelers no longer presented themselves as quite the lone heroes they had previously been. Nor did they necessarily attribute a higher purpose to their travels. The editors of Nachrichten aus der ostafrikanischen Mission, the periodical of the Berlin III Mission Society established specifically for East Africa, complained in 1888 that the narratives of earlier travel literature had filled children ’ s heads with ideas of adventure, not the hard work necessary to make colonies function (Rev. of Deutsch- Afrika und seine Nachbaren im schwarzen Erdtheil 78). The goal of the mission publication was now to show the hard labor of travel and the rewards of mission work. It thus heeded Pfeil ’ s call to change the form of travel writing. Its editor wrote that one would have to increasingly read reports of Africa travelers critically. The paper's editor wrote that the traveler could no longer appear as the lone European hero, master of all he surveyed, as one report might contradict or make appear foolish actions or thoughts from a predecessor. The focus shifted away from narrative and scientific description to interesting anecdotes or extended, in-depth ethnographic or geographic descriptions. Enthusiasm for colonialism led to new publications meant for new audiences, particularly for people interested in overseas trade or mission work. The aforementioned Kolonialzeitung provided thus a forum in which regular, non-scientific expedition accounts could be published. By the end of the 1880s, metropolitan audiences consumed reports of East African travel, but no longer primarily scientific travelogues. A particularly illustrative example of the changes is Rudolf Hellgrewe ’ s Aus Deutsch-Ost-Afrika, published in 1888. Although Hellgrewe included an introduction reminiscent of earlier writing about travel to East Africa - he wrote about the journey from Germany to the Orient and down to Zanzibar, then across to the mainland in a typical manner - he was no longer entering the unknown. In contrast, Hellgrewe traveled between outposts of civilization, the DOAG stations. He thought it unnecessary to include extensive written description, as East African landscapes and people were already «quite well-known» by German readers from other travelogues (36). Hellgrewe ’ s book was given over largely to his paintings of that forest and the nearby savanna, pictures of the empty landscapes he sought in East Africa. This is not to say that Hellgrewe invented the genre of travelogues based around pictures. 12 Hellgrewe ’ s pictures served not so much as illustrations of the text, but as a substitute for it. Travel for Hellgrewe was a series of short vignettes as he moved between stations of German 277 Changes in German Travel Writing about East Africa Kultur in the East African wilderness; travel was not the long journey away from civilization. Hellgrewe ’ s book makes clear that the change in form could not be attributed solely to the lack of new areas to explore. Hellgrewe still searched for the fetishized African wilderness that had motivated pre-colonial German travelers to East Africa and provided the majority of the material for their accounts. As he neared the station at Petershöhe, Hellgrewe grew excited, «Finally a piece of primeval forest [Urwald] [. . .]. It surprised me so much that I did not know in that moment where I should begin to paint» (n. p.). The whole day felt like «a dream» (n. p.). Such moments still existed, though they could no longer frame an entire narrative. Like earlier travelers, many of Hellgrewe ’ s landscapes were empty, bereft of any human presence even when clearly touched by humans. Hellgrewe was still the lone European hero in a wild landscape - the cover of the book was a painting of Hellgrewe painting with his African assistant seated at his feet - but his editorial decision to present himself as such a hero was made clearer in his paintings than in textonly travelogues. Africans appeared in his paintings as featureless aspects of the expedition, indistinguishable from one another. In other paintings, particularly one of a «water carrier,» they appear as ethnographic objects to fascinate the German reader. Such was the state of travel writing as planning began for the German expedition to rescue Emin Pasha in 1888. Inspiration for the expedition had come largely from a travel narrative in the pre-colonial style, Wilhelm Junker ’ s Reisen in Afrika. Junker had traveled in East Central Africa from 1875 through 1886. Near the end of his travels, he had become trapped in Equatoria when the Mahdi attacked Khartoum and cut him off from Egypt. Emin had served as Junker ’ s host there until he could find another route out. Junker wrote a glowing account of Emin ’ s rule in Equatoria and of his knowledge of African politics and society. Equatoria was far enough away from European settlement to still appear exotic and available for colonization to European audiences. Public campaigns for an expedition to find Emin and bring him out of Africa were mounted in Germany and the United Kingdom. The campaign in the United Kingdom led to an expedition under the command of Henry Morton Stanley. Peters designed his expedition to outrace Stanley and win the glory of saving Emin for Germany. Public reporting around the Peters expedition demonstrates how much things had changed since 1884. Peters was unable to get letters to the Indian Ocean Coast while marching west through Maasai territory and metropolitan newspapers, now accustomed to regular reports from East African expeditions, seized control of the narrative of the expedition and used it to 278 Matthew Unangst argue for or against further government support for the East African colony. The Kolonialzeitung published a retrospective series on Peters, including his letters from the expedition. The Berliner Tageblatt referred to the «martyr ’ s death» suffered by Peters to argue for further government investment in East Africa (BArch R 1001/ 252, pag. 13). 13 The Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, in contrast, celebrated Peters ’ s death, as it would open the path for friendlier relations with the United Kingdom (BArch R 1001/ 252, pag. 15). Pre-colonial travelers had been able to establish their own myths through their expeditionary narrative, but Peters was not afforded the chance in the wake of his failed expedition. 14 Metropolitan Germans had been able to closely follow the progress of the expedition, and form their own conclusions, months and years before Peters could publish his account. Peters begged the expedition ’ s organizers to allow him to establish the «truthful» narrative of the expedition, attempting to recapture control over its meaning. He wrote that «extravagant rumors» had distorted what had really happened («Dr. Peters» 199). He published an account in 1891 as Die deutsche Emin Pascha Expedition. His assistant Adolf von Tiedemann did the same, in perhaps the last true example of the genre, a day-by-day recounting of events and observations with no pictures (Tana-Baringo-Nil). But neither was successful at recapturing the expedition's meaning; Peters became a secondary figure in the development of German East Africa, the lessons from his expedition already gleaned. Nostalgia for the old travel writing crept in almost immediately. To drive its point home that this was the end of an era of travel writing, the Kolonialzeitung fell back on older travel writing about East Africa to fill its pages. In subsequent issues, the newspaper reprised Carl Claus von der Decken ’ s travels for younger readers who might never have heard of the explorer. The paper ’ s editors seemed to yearn for the days when travel literature had the power to inspire great national feats, not just lead to confusion and failed expeditions (Kersten, «Dem Andenken» 245). Travelogues no longer carried the hope that had inspired the GfdK ’ s initial move to East Africa. Other forms of travel writing replaced the travelogue of African exploration prevalent earlier in the century. Expeditionary reports certainly remained central to German colonization in East Africa after 1891. As noted earlier, German administrators spent much of their time traveling, as did missionaries in the colony. Missionaries and officials both wrote regular reports of their travels, but they were no longer intended for the kind of book-length travelogue popular before the German overseas empire. They 279 Changes in German Travel Writing about East Africa were now designed for bureaucratic purposes or a specific metropolitan audience such as people interested in mission work. The creation of a telegraph service on the East African mainland made immediate reports back home possible, and decreased the demand from both government and the public for longer-form narratives. The changes in travel writing are particularly explicit in the publication of Adolf von Tiedemann ’ s Aus Busch und Steppe in 1907 with illustrations by Rudolf Hellgrewe. Tiedemann published the book in the wake of the Maji Maji War, with metropolitan interest in East Africa at its height. He admitted much of the book was a simple reprisal of his earlier travelogue on the expedition, but gone was the day-by-day recounting of events from the first publication. Tiedemann provided only sensational stories and images detached from any anchoring chronology. The book offered nostalgia for the days when German colonialists could imagine themselves as pioneers in Africa, before imperial rule had changed the German reading public ’ s experience of East Africa. Notes 1 Emin Pasha, born Eduard Schnitzer in Prussian Silesia in 1857, was a linguist and doctor working in the Egyptian service in the Sudan. He had been appointed governor of the province of Equatoria, in today ’ s South Sudan and Uganda, at the accession of Charles Gordon to Governor-General of the Sudan in 1874. When Muhammad Ahmad, better known as the Mahdi, captured Khartoum in 1884, Emin was cut off from travel to the sea. He became something of a cause célèbre in Europe over the next few years, inspiring public calls for expeditions to rescue him. The Peters expedition was one of several that attempted to find Emin and bring him out of Equatoria. 2 The idea that the Emin Pasha exploration marked the end of an era of European travel in Africa remains prevalent, as seen even in the title of Daniel Liebowitz's and Charles Pearson's The Last Expedition: Stanley ’ s Mad Journey through the Congo, though the authors write about a rival British expedition to find Emin that both left before Peters did and returned before he did. 3 By «metropolitan,» I mean here the German public that consumed travelogues in Germany itself as opposed to Germans in East Africa. 4 Peters ’ s role in shaping the German colonial movement and German nationalism in the 1880s has been much discussed. For the best overview, see Perras. 5 Peters compared himself to early modern Spanish conquistadors, a comparison that demonstrates his own conception of his actions as «conquest.» He and Pfeil imagined that their force of will was the explanation for their acquisition of territory. They believed that they were taking territory by force, if not military force. 6 Fabian 3. Fabian defines topos as «Rather than a topic for exposition and perhaps argument, a topos is a space without place: it is everywhere and nowhere; it goes without saying and may therefore be (almost) without specifiable content» (Fabian 3). 280 Matthew Unangst 7 The company sent eighteen expeditions to East Africa for the purpose of exploration and the acquisition of territory between 1884 and 1886, almost bringing about its bankruptcy (Kurtze 54 - 56). 8 According to Ernst Vohsen (BArch R 8023/ 265, pag. 102). 9 Pfeil did not name specific books in his memoir. Hans Christian Andersen, Johann Reinhold, Georg Forster, James Cook, and Alexander von Humboldt were among the most renowned travel writers of 18 th and 19 th -century Europe. 10 Except Otto, who died on the expedition. 11 Pfeil ’ s lectures were described in the Kolonialzeitung («Deutscher Kolonialverein» 745). 12 As Bernd Wiese has argued in WeltAnsichten, pictures were prominent in German travelogues from the 18 th century forward. 13 As noted earlier, Peters did not die on the expedition, but the German public believed for several months that he had. When Peters ’ s reports on his progress did not make it to the German coast, rumors of his death spread through the German press. Both proponents and opponents of his style of colonialism used his presumed death to argue their position, attributing fantastic glory or cruelty to Peters in making their arguments. After he returned to Germany in 1891, the rumors of cruelty persisted (because they were true) and dogged Peters until his eventual disgrace in the early twentieth century. 14 Beyond the rumors of Peters ’ s death, Henry Morton Stanley's rival expedition found Emin Pasha before Peters made his way to Equatoria. The Peters expedition thus failed to achieve its goal. Works Cited BArch N 2225/ 5 Nachlass Joachim Graf von Pfeil. Schwierigkeiten bei der Zusammenstellung einer Expedition. BArch N 2225/ 6 Nachlass Joachim Graf von Pfeil. Gesellschaft für deutsche Kolonisation, August 1884; April 1886. BArch N 2225/ 7. Nachlass Joachim Graf von Pfeil. Allgemeiner Deutscher Kongress zur Förderung überseeischer Interessen, August - September 1886. BArch N 2225/ 21. Nachlass Joachim Graf von Pfeil. «Wanderungen in Afrika.» BArch R 1001/ 252. Die deutsche Expedition zur Befreiung Emin Pascha ’ s, vom 6 November 1889 bis 5 July 1890. BArch R 8023/ 265. Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft, Berlin, April 1885 - May 1901. Baur, Étienne and Alexandre Le Roy. À Travers le Zanguebar. Voyage dans l ’ Oudoé, l ’ Ouzigua, l ’ Oukwèré, l ’ Oukami et l ’ Ousaraga. Tours: Alfred Mame et Fils, 1886. Claus, W. Dr. Ludwig Krapf, weil. Missionar in Ostafrika. Basel: C. F. Spittler, 1882. «Deutscher Kolonialverein.» Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 3.22 (1886): 745 - 46. «Dr. Peters.» Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 9 August 1890. 199. Fabian, Johannes. Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. 281 Changes in German Travel Writing about East Africa Falkenhorst, C. Deutsch-Ostafrika: Geschichte der Gründung einer deutschen Kolonie. Stuttgart: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1890. Friedrichsmeyer, Sara, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop, eds. The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1998. «Geographischer Monatsbericht. Afrika. Ostafrika.» Petermanns geographische Mitteilungen 1886: 281 - 82. Grimm, Carl. Der wirthschaftliche Werth von Deutsch-Ostafrika. Berlin: Walther & Apolant, 1886. Hellgrewe, Rudolf. Aus Deutsch-Ost-Afrika. Berlin: J. Zenker, 1888. «Im dunkelsten Afrika.» Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 12 July 1890: 182. Junker, Wilhelm. Dr. Wilhelm Junkers Reisen in Afrika, 1875 - 1886. Nach seinen Tagebüchern bearbeitet und herausgegeben von dem Reisenden. Vienna: Hölzel, 1889 - 1891. Kennedy, Dane. The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013, Kersten, Otto. «Dem Andenken Carl Claus von der Deckens.» Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 4 October 1890: 245. - , ed., Baron Carl Claus von der Decken ’ s Reisen in Ost-Afrika in den Jahren 1862 bis 1865. Vol. 2. Leipzig and Heidelberg: C. F. Winter, 1869. Krapf, Johann Ludwig. Travels, Researches and Missionary Labours. East African Explorers. Ed. Charles Richards and James Place. London: Oxford UP, 1960. 1 - 37. Kurtze, Bruno. Die Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft: Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Schutzbriefgesellschaften und zur Geschichte Deutsch-Ostafrikas. Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1913. MacDonald, Duff. Africana; or, the Heart of Heathen Africa. Vol. 2: Mission Life. London: Simpkin Marshall, 1882. Mittheilungen der afrikanischen Gesellschaft in Deutschland. 1879 - 1886. New, Charles. Life, Wanderings, and Labours in Eastern Africa. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1874. Perras, Arne. Carl Peters and German Imperialism 1856 - 1918. Oxford: Clarendon, 2004. Pesek, Michael. Koloniale Herrschaft in Deutsch-Ostafrika: Expeditionen, Militär und Verwaltung seit 1880. Frankfurt/ Main: Campus, 2005. Petermanns geographische Mitteilungen. 1880 - 1891. Peters, Carl. Die deutsche Emin Pascha Expedition. Berlin: Hillger, 1909. - . Die Gründung von Deutsch-Ostafrika. Berlin: C. A. Schwetschke und Sohn, 1906. - , ed. Gesammelte Schriften. Munich and Berlin: C. H. Beck, 1943. - . «Konsolidierung der deutschen Kolonialbewegung.» Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 1. Ed. Carl Peters. Munich and Berlin: C. H. Beck, 1943. 351 - 54. - . «Die Usagara-Expedition.» Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 1. Ed. Carl Peters. Munich and Berlin: C. H. Beck, 1943. 287 - 318. Pfeil, Joachim Graf. «Beobachtungen während meiner letzten Reise in Ostafrika.» Petermanns geographische Mitteilungen 1888: 1 - 6. 282 Matthew Unangst - . «Die Erforschung des Ulanga-Gebietes.» Petermanns geographische Mitteilungen 1886: 353 - 63. - . Zur Erwerbung von Deutsch-Ostafrika. Berlin: Karl Curtius, 1907. Pless, Adelheid von. Baron Carl Claus von der Decken ’ s Reisen in Ost-Afrika in den Jahren 1859 bis 1865. Vol. 1. Leipzig and Heidelberg: Winter, 1869. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Reichard, Paul. «Land und Leute in Ostafrika.» Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 3.2 (1886): 57 - 64. Rev. of Deutsch-Afrika und seine Nachbaren im schwarzen Erdtheil, by J. Baumgarten. Nachrichten aus der ostafrikanischen Mission May 1888: 78. Richards, Charles and James Place, eds. East African Explorers. London: Oxford UP, 1960. Smith, Woodruff D. The German Colonial Empire. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1978. Speke, John Hanning. Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile. London and Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1863. Stanley, Henry M. How I Found Livingstone. London: Sampson Lowe, 1872. Thomson, Joseph. Through Masai-Land: A Journey of Exploration among the Snowclad Volcanic Mountains and Strange Tribes of Eastern Equatorial Africa. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin: 1885. Tiedemann, Adolf von. Aus Busch und Steppe. Berlin: Winckelmann & Söhne, 1905. - . Tana - Baringo - Nil. Berlin: C. A. Schwetschke, 1907. Wagner, J. Deutsch-Ostafrika: Geschichte der Gesellschaft für deutsche Kolonisation und der Deutsch-Ostafrikanischen Gesellschaft nach den amtlichen Quellen. Berlin: Verlag der Engelhardt ’ schen Landkartenhandlung, 1886. Wiese, Bernd. WeltAnsichten: Illustrationen von Forschungsreisen deutscher Geographen im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert. Cologne: Schriften der Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek Köln, 2011. Zantop, Susanne. Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Pre-Colonial Germany, 1770 - 1870. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. 283 Changes in German Travel Writing about East Africa The Abominable Art of Running Away: Alfons Paquet and Concepts of Travel Writing in Germany, 1900 - 1933 HARRY T. CRAVER U NIVERSITY OF N ORTH C AROLINA By the time of his death in 1944, during an air raid on Frankfurt am Main, the writer Alfons Paquet had become known in Germany for his work in many genres, having published poetry, plays, novels, essays and travel writing. The latter was of particular importance for Paquet, as travel was a key experience in his emergence as a writer. He could be counted among those who, as Michael Butor suggests, «travel in order to write» (Butor 53). On the basis of his experiences abroad, Paquet had gained a reputation by the 1920s as an authority on many of the places he had visited, including Russia, China, Japan and the United States. Events such as the Russo-Japanese War, the revolutions in China and later in Russia allowed Paquet to deploy his expertise in newspapers such as the Frankfurter Zeitung (FZ) where he became a valued interpreter of foreign politics and societies. Yet his authoritative position as a decoder of foreign lands is at odds with his ideas concerning the nature and functions of travel writing, ideas which he sketched out in a number of shorter essays devoted to travel literature and its place in his own work. According to Paquet, travel was «scheußlich» and a «Kunst, auszureißen» («Autobiographisches Zwischenspiel» 21). The resulting dissonance between this position and his conviction that travel writing could lead to genuine knowledge is the subject of this essay. For the assumed interpretive authority that emerges in Paquet ’ s travel writing should be viewed against his more reflexive and autobiographical essays that question or at least diminish this authority. Moreover, by weakening the travel writer ’ s authoritative position, Paquet allows for a greater degree of «multivocality» to emerge in his texts. As George Steinmetz has demonstrated in his study of German colonialism, even those texts originating within the bounds of German imperialism could possess a multivocal dimension, allowing them, even when clearly written from within a colonial framework, to point «beyond colonialism» (Steinmetz 497). Some of Paquet ’ s earliest travel writings, such as Südsibirien und die Nordwestmongolei (1909), Asiatische Reibungen (1909), and Li, oder im neuen Osten (1912), demonstrate this capacity for multivocality, especially once read in light of his attempts to define travel writing. Paquet is, as one scholar of his work argues, both «untypisch und doch repräsentativ» of certain cultural-political trends in late Imperial and Weimar Germany (Koenen 97). He was a devoted observer of the changes associated with modernity - the growth of cosmopolitan cities, the impact of industrialization, experimentation in mass politics, the expansion of media, and the possibility to travel. In his attempts to define what he saw as genuine travel writing, he offers further material for a critical reading of his own travel books and how he saw these texts as contributions to an understanding of contemporary politics and social change. In what follows, I will begin with a discussion of Paquet ’ s theory of travel writing, before situating him among some of his contemporaries, including his fellow travel writer Arthur Holitscher and the graphic artist Emil Orlik. All of these figures traveled extensively, and they all saw themselves as cultural mediators, imparting alleged insights gained from their experiences in Asia and elsewhere. They all, moreover, imbibed colonial frames of reference, but nonetheless, their work often depicted their travel encounters in ways that suggested the untenable nature of colonial rule. However, the issue of authenticity in travel experience, the choosing of what constitutes such experience and how it should be represented, is approached by them in different ways. Comparing Paquet to these contemporaries illuminates the degree to which his travel writing was influenced by social science traditions, and also by his repudiation of an independent and cohesive self. Indeed, having questioned the concept of the autonomous individual, Paquet strikes a position that is in conflict with the model of the intrepid scholar/ explorer that nonetheless emerges in his writing. For Paquet, travel was a kind of rupture: «Reisen kommt natürlich von Reißen» («Autobiographisches Zwischenspiel» 21). So he wrote in an autobiographical essay from 1940 where he discusses the role of such dislocations in his life and how these ruptures influenced his conception of travel writing. I want to stress three aspects of his critique: one, that travel is potentially suspect; two, that travel as a form of observation rests on dislocation and a self-declared outsider status; and finally, his emphasis on a de-centered or fragmented subjectivity. Rupture and dislocation were an early preoccupation for Paquet. Born in 1881 in Wiesbaden, he was the son of a glove-maker, and his parents intended that he should follow his father ’ s footsteps into the family business. 1 According to his autobiographical statements, when Paquet began to show too much interest in books, his parents broke off his education 285 The Abominable Art of Running Away and sent him abroad to London where he was apprenticed to an uncle in the fabric trade. The maneuver backfired, however, since the libraries of London were now at his disposal, and when not at work he was able to submerge himself in reading literature and philosophy, while also exploring the pleasures and distractions of the city. Thus, his removal to England facilitated a deeper engagement with German literature and philosophy, and he later claimed that the idea of becoming a writer first emerged during this stay in London (during a chance visit to a phrenologist). However, his time abroad was limited, and he was expected to return home to take up a sales position («Skizze zu einem Selbstbildnis» 12). He was sent abroad neither to further his education nor to acquire worldly experience, but rather to discourage such ambitions and to prepare him for life as a Geschäftsmann. Upon his return, however, he claims that he was so obviously altered by his experiences that his mother wept upon seeing him («Skizze zu einem Selbstbildnis» 13). Still, he continued to work in sales in Mainz, and only after he had won a literary prize did he choose to pursue a career in writing and move to Berlin. In the city, he made important contacts, among them Wilhelm Schäfer, and began to work as an editor. He also financed his own university education, studying philosophy, geography and national economy (Volkswirtschaft). This latter subject appears to have had some significance to his approach to travel writing as he was often attentive to socio-economic and demographic shifts in the lands he visited. His education was interrupted a second time in 1903 when he took the train to Siberia and Japan. 2 Inspired by the recent completion of a further leg of the Trans-Siberian railway, he was determined to be among the first to travel the route. He wrote of his experiences and by the time he undertook his second Siberian journey, this time also visiting China and Mongolia, his reportage had made it to the front page of the FZ, and his career as a writer was on solid ground. The details of Paquet ’ s biography draw attention to some significant themes relating to his concept of travel and travel writing. One, the dislocation caused by travel was experienced as an ambiguous sense of freedom. This was true of his time in London, and later he claimed that often he «fand scheinbar mehr Halt draußen, auf meinen in der Luft schwebenden Reisen, als in Deutschland» («Autobiographische Skizze» 36). Later, he claimed to have discovered what freedom meant only on his journey to northwest Mongolia, though he did not elucidate what he meant by this («Skizze zu einem Selbstbildnis» 17). For Paquet, the desire to travel then derives from the experience of a lack - in this case, a lack of personal autonomy that he became more aware of during his time in England. Such motives suggest what Paquet meant when he described travel as an «Kunst, 286 Harry T. Craver auszureißen,» an art that was also connected to a range of causes such as «Geschäfte, Erholung, Wißbegier, schwacher Charakter, Überdruß» («Autobiographisches Zwischenspiel» 21). When recounting his own motivations to visit places such as Peking, he describes them as childish and «unklar» (Li 186). Such motives are not altogether consistent with his ideal model of the traveler (such as Sven Hedin), and they add an ambiguous dimension to the otherwise detached and confident narrative voice that often distinguishes Paquet ’ s travel narratives («Die Welt des Reisens» 16 - 17). Accompanying this voice that seems so assured in its judgments of foreign lands, is a suspicion that travel is not altogether a justifiable occupation. As one of his foreign informants told him in China, travel was the occupation of slaves since «nur Kulis reisen» and «Sie begegnen selbstverständlich unterwegs nur andere Kulis» («Autobiographisches Zwischenspiel» 21). The task for the travel writer then, was to turn these dubious motives to good account. A second point to emphasize in Paquet ’ s biography is that his travel writing often began as a journalistic piece appearing in the feuilleton section of the FZ. Thus, his work was adapted to a venue that was part of what one scholar of travel literature has called the growing Feuilletonisierung of public discourse (Brenner, «Schwierige Reisen» 136). According to Paul Fussell, moreover, the 1920s and 30s were also a period when travel writing itself was beginning to take on a more essayistic form (Fussell 204 - 06). Thus, as a journalist for the FZ, Paquet had to reckon with the exigencies of writing for the newspaper and had to shape his writing to the essayistic character of the feuilleton. Brevity and a public profile were constraining conditions of course, but the FZ feuilleton also encouraged a degree of experimentation. Though this was more pronounced during the Weimar Republic, even prior to 1914 the FZ feuilleton was known for the high quality of its writing. It gave room to the so-called «kleine Form» essay which occupied the border between entertainment and information, objective reporting and subjective musing. Its best practitioners tried to avoid allowing it to become a forum for subjectivity run amok (Schorske 9). Moreover, the feuilleton, many argued, had a particular affinity for urban subjects, which would accord well with Paquet who saw cities as the prime mover of Reiselust (Polgar, «Small Form» 279 - 280; Paquet, Städte, Landschaften 7). Thus, for Paquet, the newspaper was an outlet that allowed him to publish, while giving him considerable latitude as he attempted to turn personal travel experiences into a literature that claimed to contribute to the knowledge of foreign lands. Some measure of what the FZ editors expected of travel literature can be gained from a consideration of a special travel page which appeared in June of 287 The Abominable Art of Running Away 1931, and to which Paquet also contributed. An article by the writer and photographer Ernst Fuhrmann, who had written on a wide array of subjects including Chinese, South American and African cultures, set the tone for the supplement. Fuhrmann lamented what he saw as the impoverishment of German travel writing. Too often such literature became a vehicle for irrelevant reflections. «Romantisches Bedauern, gedankenloses Verherrlichen, nationalistisches Kritisieren, das Sich-selbst-in-ein-anderes-Landverschleppen,» so he stated, «das alles sind Dinge, die mit Reiseliteratur nichts zu tun haben» (3). Most German travel writers, so Fuhrmann continued, failed to escape themselves, to turn away from their homes and approach the foreign with a «Bereitschaft unbedingt, anzusehen» (3). In order to be good observers then, they must shed those frameworks that influenced their perceptions at home. Most of them, Fuhrmann argues, were unable or unwilling to do so: Unsere Jugend geht auf Fahrt und schlägt sich halb bettelnd damit durch, fremden Gesichtern gegenüber imposant, mutig oder bedürftig zu erscheinen. Reiche Leute fahren vom besten Hotel zum besseren. Gesandte verkehren in einem Kreis internationaler Gesellschaft, die überall landfremd ist, - Dichter gehen auf Reisen, um sich anerkennen zu lassen, - an echter Reiseliteratur haben wir fast nichts. (3) To remedy this, Fuhrmann proposed a «genuine» travel writing that was part literature and part Wissenschaft. His exemplar was the work of Alexander von Humboldt, the hallowed model of the writer as explorer and natural scientist. Fuhrmann thus placed the ideal of travel as research side by side with the idea that travelers needed to divest themselves of their pre-existing views and judgments - a requirement that seems difficult to meet if the traveler worked within the values of already existing research traditions. As Joan Pau Rubiès remarks, once travel writers were expected to return with more than just a combination of random information and anecdotes, they had to leave Europe knowing «of the existence of debates to which they could contribute» (Rubiès 257). For Fuhrmann, the influence of such pre-existing debates was crucial, but they represent a potential source of conflict with his warning to cast aside those judgments and views that might prejudice observation. How these rival claims were to be handled, however, was not made explicit in his article. Both of the claims on travel writing discussed by Fuhrmann found expression in Paquet ’ s travel narratives and theoretical writings. He understood his work as part of a literary tradition that was in a state of change. In a 1930 article for the FZ ’ s travel pages, he described what he saw as some of the recent changes in the genre and how they reflected social and economic conditions («Von den Wandlungen» 1). The greater ease of travel and the rise 288 Harry T. Craver of a mass travel industry correlated, so he argued, with a rise in the number of travel books. Though modern travel could degenerate «zur Touristik» and the literature that such trips yielded most often amounted to a simple «Aneinanderreihen von Fahrplanabschnitten» (1), there was also a new potential. Travel writing, he claimed, had adopted the means of «Psychologie, den Sinn für das Typische, den soziologischen Blick [. . .], die befreiende Erweiterung des Spezialistentums» (1). Thus, for Paquet individual experience and a variety of research disciplines had come together in a more essayistic approach to the travel genre (Fussell 202 - 06). Moreover, whatever the impact of mechanized and more comfortable travel might be, Paquet did not think that this would inevitably lead to decline. For the altered condition of travel «vernichtet niemals völlig die Möglichkeiten der Erziehung großer Seele»; even amid the numerous trips undertaken for sport or «Protzerei» there was still potential for authentic experiences («Von den Wandlungen» 1). 3 Though Paquet subscribes to the dichotomy of «authentic» travel as opposed to frivolous tourism, for him the more fundamental divide is between travel «mit oder ohne Horizont,» and as long as there were travelers seeking «die Horizont ihres Alltags zu durchbrechen,» there existed the possibility of genuine travel experiences (1). From this point of view, Paquet argued that at root modern travelers shared the same basic impulses that had guided the great travelers of the past whose works were among the classics of travel writing. Thus, even though he lionized the adventurous travelers of past and present - Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Sven Hedin - travel was about more than the triumph over adversity. The pains of travel, the overcoming of physical difficulty may contribute to a sense of adventure, and Paquet seems to have thrived on the rougher conditions of his Mongolian travels (where he presented himself romantically as «Odysseus in den Sandwüsten»), but travel was, more importantly, about cultivating certain kinds of experience («Skizze zu einem Selbstbildnis» 17). This meant that he did not devalue mechanized travel, and indeed on his first major trips he availed himself of such methods. The Trans-Siberian journey by rail often constrained Paquet to the «view from the window» that critics of mass tourism condemned (Buzard 35 - 36), and indeed the Trans- Siberian was more of a «solitary arrow through the landscape» rather than a means of touring through it (Osterhammel 716). Mechanized travel, then, did not preclude what Paquet sees as the «Verbindung von Erleben und Wissen» that was characteristic of the state of being «Unterwegs» («Von den Wandlungen» 1). The most important factors are the vocation to travel, the above mentioned readiness to rip oneself from the familiarity of home, and what he referred to as Besitznahme - a 289 The Abominable Art of Running Away taking possession or annexing of the travel experience («Welt des Reisens» 12 - 14). According to Paquet, this is a process by which the traveler outlines what he or she brought to the encounter with other lands and peoples, and, at least in theory, it means that experience could upset pre-existing judgments. It was a further means of ascertaining the horizon that might then be broken through. His model was Goethe whose journeys, so Paquet argues, always began in the study, at the moment that the idea of a journey took shape, and the traveler began to direct his or her thoughts towards this experience («Welt des Reisens» 13). This was a process of collecting information and of registering which ideas, opinions and judgments one already has of the place to be visited, a process of research that Paquet wants to defend against charges of pedantry: In diesen Akten nun ist Gelegenheit, das augenblickliche Urteil über einen Gegenstand der künftigen Reise zu notieren, wird es sich wesentlich ändern? Eine Absicht, ein Hinweis, ein Name wird an den Rand geschrieben. So bildet sich schon das Gefäß, das die Reise füllen soll. Noch in der Gefangenschaft der gewohnten Dinge winken Freiheit und neue Sammlung [. . .]. Die wirkliche Reise wird dann beides sein, Begegnung und Besitznahme. Besitznahme durch Methode und durch Einfall. Zuweilen wird der Einfall die Methode, die Methode den Einfall verdrängen, eines wird das andere ergänzen, eines mit dem anderen streiten. Und genau auf der Schneide zwischen beiden wird die Linie der Freiheit verlaufen [. . .]. («Welt des Reisens» 13 - 14) Einfall, as Paquet uses it here, takes on multiple meanings - a foray, an accident, something that comes to mind suddenly, or by chance - all of which contribute to the kind of relationship he wants to establish between method and the open-ended quality of travel experiences. Insisting upon this openendedness was a means of creating a critical relationship towards what one experienced, but also to the observing traveler as well. Moreover, in this relationship Paquet fleshes out the idea of freedom and travel that he only alludes to in his biographical essay mentioned above, and it is closely related to the capacity to either confirm or give up past judgments in light of new experiences. Given Paquet ’ s suggestion that one must construct a Gefäß to give shape to one ’ s travel experiences, there is some justification for the claim that Paquet only saw and noticed in foreign lands what he was «trained to see» (Rhiel 170). Yet for Paquet such structures were seen as necessary in order to complete and potentially correct subjective experiences. The perspective of the traveler was limited and inclined to various uncertain motives; thus, he or she required a means of measuring their own position. As Paquet argues in the opening pages of his book on South Siberia and Northwest Mongolia, the 290 Harry T. Craver traveler «dringt in dieser Landschaften ein,» yet then «verläßt sie [. . .] auf Nimmerwiedersehen»; only by situating such experiences in the «große Netz des Erforschten und Erkennten» can one draw «ein Faden [. . .] durch das Labyrinth» (Südsiberien 2). Recourse to the larger grid created by Wissenschaft was, however, not the only means available to the travel writer and Paquet does outline his indebtedness to less precise methods. In an article on travel writing from 1939, he compares the predicament of the travel writer to an artist trying to capture the lines of his own face as reflected in a window pane in a train cabin. His image is superimposed on the landscape as it rolls by and, when the train passes under some trees, the reflected image deepens to reveal the interior of the cabin and fellow passengers. This further superimposition of images, blending the observer with the observed, is only visible for a second before it vanishes. For the travel writer who seeks to reconstruct such images - and by extension a more reflexive vision of the travel writer ’ s relationship to his or her subject - only the «unsichtbaren Wellen der Phantasie» will suffice («Die Welt des Reisens» 7). Both Paquet ’ s artistic and research methods thus give emphasis to the limits of subjective experience; this combination had a programmatic dimension in his work. The effacement of the subject was clearly expressed in the manifesto-like introduction to an anthology of his travel narratives entitled Städte, Landschaften, und ewige Bewegung which appeared in 1927. «Der einzelne Mensch,» he argues, «ist nirgends mehr Mittelpunkt,» rather the true protagonist of modernity is the city (Städte, Landschaften 8). With its heterogeneous mix of class, ethnicity and languages, the city is the exemplar of modernity. Hence, he subtitled this work a «Roman ohne Helden» to emphasize that it was no longer the individual self that could give a measure of the modern world. An earlier autobiographical sketch also argues the greater significance of cities: Sind nicht heute die Städte allein noch die Träger des großen, künstlichen, planmäßig geschaffenen Glanzes, die über den dunkeln Gewölben bedrückter Existenzen und unheilbaren Elends mutig das ganze Dasein der Menschenmasse in den Wind des Schicksals, in die Entscheidungen einer noch unausgetragenen Krisis drängen? («Skizze zu einem Selbstbildnis» 10) Paquet expresses a somewhat romanticized vision of the social and political fermentation that he perceives in cities. Here is a mass phenomena in which individual autonomy is lost to view. Indeed, the city also becomes for Paquet a model of the interior: «Ich selbst komme mir manchmal vor wie eine Stadt» («Skizze zu einem Selbstbildnisse» 11). Here he suggests that the self was rapidly becoming a distillate of all those influences that flowed into the urban 291 The Abominable Art of Running Away metropols; in the city the stable self as observer turns into a free-floating subjectivity (Brenner, Cepl-Kaufmann and Thöne 127 - 40; Rhiel 168). Thus, the complex and conflict-ridden metropolis finds its reflection in the self in a fashion akin to the Benjaminian flâneur who cultivates a form of fragmented subjectivity that is appropriate to the shocks and disjunctions of the modern city (Benjamin, «The Paris of the Second Empire» 66 - 98; Gleber, «Art of Taking a Walk» 43 - 60). A full comparison of Paquet with Benjamin in terms of their conceptions of the flâneur and the city would exceed the bounds of this essay, but a few points of divergence should be mentioned here. Paquet ’ s flâneur is just as often found sitting in a train coach as strolling through the urban streets, thus, the relationship to the surrounding space is mediated by mechanized travel. The spaces he discusses are also more expansive and Paquet is alert to the impact of the cities on the surrounding countryside as he travels. More significantly, Paquet is more embedded within the disciplines of social science and ethnography, both because he depends on this literature (often not speaking the languages of many of the lands he visits) and because he sees his own work as contributions to these areas. In his travel books on Asia, Asiatische Reibungen and Li, his training in geography and national economy manifests itself in pages of economic description or commentaries on great power politics. His works are intended to contribute to these discussions, and the goals of German imperialism are often implicit in his observations. The critical potential of flanerie, as explored by Benjamin, does not have much presence in Paquet ’ s work, even if both writers shared a view of cities as the «Schauplatz» of the modern and of the Other as Anke Gleber has pointed out («Die Erfahrung der Moderne» 462, 482). Paquet remains enthralled by the model of the heroic traveler or the itinerant scholar who was part of a traveling community that was linked to imperial politics. Not all travelers, of course, need to undertake arduous journeys such as those of Hedin; Paquet also pays tribute to the seasoned diplomat and the traveling statesman with time on his hands («Von den Wandlungen» 1). According to an account he gives in Li, it was from such individuals that he appears to have gleaned much of his own information: Im Vorsaal des Hotels, bei der Unterhaltung mit Europäern, die im Smoking von einem Diner wiederkehren; beim Lesen der in der Hauptstadt erscheinenden Zeitungen, an deren Spitze die täglichen kaiserlichen Edikte stehen in ihrem bunten Wechsel von Ernennungen und von Neuheiten der Verwaltung und von Maßnahmen, die eine chinesische Verfassung nach ausländischem Muster vorbereiten; in den Nachrichten aus Tibet oder aus der Mandschurei, aus den Verhandlungen mit 292 Harry T. Craver Japan oder Indien oder Rußland [. . .] aus den privaten Berichten, Klubgesprächen, umherflatternden Anekdoten zieht man die Summe. . . (Li 194 - 95) His sources appear to be drawn primarily from a traveling pool of European men, and presumably such individuals also would be the primary audience for his books. Thus, it is not surprising to find more intersections between Paquet ’ s flâneur and imperialist discourse. To be sure, after the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1904, Paquet felt that the limits of imperialism had been reached, but he still felt that the modernizing process in Asia could be given a decisive «German accent» (Steinmetz 430; Koenen 85 - 86). Prior to the war of 1914 and the Russian Revolution, Paquet believed that Germany should have a leading role in the world, though he seemed to prefer the projection of cultural influence rather than the imposition of force (Asiatische Reibungen v - vi). Still, from this point of view, his travel writing was not a neutral occupation, nor was intended as such. As he puts it, «das Kupee der Eisenbahn, die Kabine des Dampfers» are the authentic «Klosterzelle» of modernity, through which the «wandernden Schülern» (such as the sinologist Richard Wilhelm) would penetrate the world with their distinctive German natures (qtd. in Koenen 86). However, Paquet ’ s travel narratives should be understood as something more than just the production of knowledge for the sake of German imperialism, and this, I would argue, is because his approach to travel preserved a multivocality that allowed for points of view that either were opposed to or inconsistent with imperialism. Since authentic travel experience depended on what he saw as its «dialektischen Boden» or interrogative relationship between experience and knowledge, he could be attentive to these incongruences and opposing voices (qtd. in Brenner, Cepl-Kaufmann and Thöne 130). These left traces in his texts, but they are obscured by the generally confident narration that distinguishes books such as Li or Asiatische Reibungen. Moreover, his conviction that the individual is not the focal point of modernity often translates into a perspective that views individuals from a distance. His conversations with others, for instance, are rarely described in any detail, and for this reason their voices are not readily heard. To some degree, this reflects his stated interests in the macroscopic views that he found in works of cultural geography such as he would have encountered during his studies. Reviewing one such work that used aerial photography to illuminate cultural patterns, Paquet notes with enthusiasm that such works offer a usefully corrective point of view in that it «stellt [. . .] die Arbeit der Menschen der Arbeit von Ameisenvölkern, von Bienen unheimlich gleich. Der Einzelmensch ist ja von oben gar nicht mehr zu sehen» («Kultur und Land- 293 The Abominable Art of Running Away schaft» 1). Such perspectives have an obvious attraction for Paquet as they were more consistent with his premise that cities rather than individuals were the protagonists of modernity. All of these elements taken together help explain Paquet ’ s occasional reluctance to situate himself fully in his early narratives such as Li and Südsibirien und die Nordwestmongolei. He appears as a roving eye (Rhiel 165), or a point in space, but not often as a person who moves in his environment and speaks with others. Yet it would be mistaken to conclude that his gaze simply reduces populations to parts of the landscape, for his texts are sometimes informed indirectly by voices that emerged from the lands where he traveled. One of the few encounters preserved in Li is with the Chinese intellectual Gu Hongming (290 - 92). After his return to Germany, Paquet helped publicize Gu ’ s views on Chinese politics, writing an introduction to a letter from Gu concerning the revolution of 1911 («Chinesische Kulturpolitiker»). He also collaborated with the sinologist Richard Wilhelm and the Eugen Diederichs publishing house in order to bring out a German translation of Gu ’ s essays entitled, Chinas Verteidigung gegen europäische Ideen. 4 As Steinmetz points out, coming barely ten years after the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion and Kaiser Wilhelm ’ s notorious «Hun» speech, this was a surprising venture. In 1900, the Boxers had opposed European influence in China and violently threatened the concessions of the Great Powers. When a military force was sent from Germany to assist in the suppression of the rebellion, the Kaiser urged his troops to be ruthless when dealing with the Boxers. Yet in these essays Gu clearly evinced his respect for the movement and its goals of limiting European influence (Steinmetz 496 - 97). Moreover, in his foreword, Paquet warned against some of the common perspectives of the east that appear to be on display even in his own work - for instance, the conventional focus on exoticism and poverty. These were there if the traveler was disposed to see them, but such perceptions, he argues, often confuse surface for substance. And since the European traveler often remains blind to the privileged conditions that generate their own «Rausch der Herrschaft,» they were predisposed to such perceptions («Vorwort» iv). The traveling subject, so his foreword suggests, has to be aware of the factors which shape their vision. Thus, the encounter with Gu clearly left a deep impression on Paquet, yet his account of their meeting is remarkable for its reticence - the subjects they discussed are only briefly mentioned, and there is little attempt to reconstruct their dialogue. Paquet ’ s reluctance to include dialogue can be usefully compared with the approach of one of his contemporaries, Arthur Holitscher, in whose work dialogue offers points of dissonance between himself and his subjects. Both 294 Harry T. Craver Paquet and Holitscher traveled extensively between the 1900s and the 1930s, and both became known as travel writers, primarily through books that describe their journeys to America, Russia (and later the USSR), and parts of Asia. Both writers also styled themselves as outsiders who were distant from their own culture - what Paquet saw as a requisite quality in a traveler. For Holitscher, born to a Jewish family, and speaking German while living in Hungary, it is not surprising that cultural identification was a fraught affair. He later claimed that his exposure to numerous other cultures during his travels led him to recognize that he belonged to no particular culture (Knox 11). 5 As with Paquet, life in a large foreign metropolis was a decisive influence on his intellectual life, having gone to Paris in 1896 in order to become a writer. His first work was published that year, and he became affiliated with the Samuel Fischer Verlag. His book of 1912 Amerika Heute und Morgen: Reiseerlebnisse was his first large success, and it paved the way for further travels with support from his publisher, having made the Fischer Verlag aware of the potential market in travel writing (Mendelssohn 576). However, the strategies of representation in Paquet ’ s and Holitscher ’ s travel narratives are quite different, and they indicate different ideas about what constitutes «authenticity» in travel writing, as can be seen if one compares Holitscher ’ s Das unruhige Asien to Paquet ’ s Li . Holitscher has, with some justice, been criticized for constructing his narratives to fit the requirements of a spiritual or intellectual quest story that is then shaped in light of his ideological convictions (Knox 12 - 13; Herzog 32 - 34). For this reason, close descriptions of his experiences sometimes give way to generalizations and abstractions, to rhapsodies, for instance, over the inscrutable Orient (Das unruhige Asien 82). To be sure, Paquet too was convinced that Asia held a potential key to European problems, but his gaze was most often directed towards concrete sociological descriptions and the enumerating of economic circumstances («Skizze zu einem Selbstbildnis» 20). Rather than trying to find and describe eternal essences, Paquet is much more interested in tracking signs of change as China deals with the external pressures from Europe and from the internal pressures of movements for reform. He sees a blend of modern and traditional,which results in a much more complicated and ambiguous attitude towards the importation of European ideas and technology. Holitscher, in contrast and as a result of his ideological sympathies, sees a China that is oriented towards the western socialist ideals, with the Soviet Union playing the role of a guiding star. At the end of his book this leads him to conclude that everything that he has seen in China that is vital and real is oriented towards Moscow, towards the symbol of socialism - the embalmed corpse of Lenin (Das unruhige Asien 345 - 46). For 295 The Abominable Art of Running Away this reason, according to Andreas Herzog, his journeys were scarcely necessary, for he had only come to the same place from where he started (35). Holitscher confirms this when he concludes his description of a communist political rally in Canton with the statement: «Ich habe gesehen, was ich zu sehen erwartet habe» (Das unruhige Asien 212). However, despite the contention that Holitscher was inclined to see his experiences through an ideological lens and then force them into a quest narrative, he could still be more concrete in his descriptions of personal encounters, and he does - in contrast to Paquet - try to integrate the voices of those he encountered. This difference between the two writers can be understood in reference to the question of authenticity. On the one hand, including these voices does add a more complex dimension to Holitscher ’ s narrative, but on the other hand, it also allows him to use his position as a witness to authenticate his own political judgments. Nonetheless, using his authorial status in this fashion cuts two ways. To be sure, his encounters with figures such as Gandhi - a central scene in the book - and Borodin, the Soviet adviser in Canton, allow him to validate his text (Das unruhige Asien 216 - 23 and 152 - 68). Even his attempt to befriend one of his rickshaw drivers can be understood as a means of furthering his arguments concerning the Chinese revolution (277 - 82). However, having used these figures to valorize his role as witness, he cannot then reduce their authority in those moments where they clearly disagree with him, or appear to understand their relationship with him very differently than he does. To his credit, some of these moments survive in the text. His rickshaw driver, while welcoming his patronage, appears disturbed when Holitscher insists on visiting him in his home. Holitscher appears not to have read the dynamics of this relationship correctly, and he too readily assumes that his intentions to have a social exchange with his driver can trump the colonial contexts of this encounter. Similarly, in his conversation with Borodin, the Soviet adviser, the latter stresses to him that, for the moment, communism in China means something very different than what it does in Moscow or in Europe - a point that appears to not interfere with Holitscher ’ s triumphalist view of the Soviet idea in Asia (218 - 19). Holitscher ’ s meeting with Gandhi follows this pattern. For Holitscher, speaking with Gandhi is one of the critical moments in his text and he makes clear that he sees the leader of the Indian independence movement as a globally significant figure. He carefully attempts to recreate their dialogue, even allowing the text to run aground at one moment as he claims that he was missing parts of his notes (163). Thus, he takes some pains to present this scene as an authentic record of their discussion, and to show that its accuracy 296 Harry T. Craver matters. Even though Holitscher reserves the last word for himself, his disagreements with Gandhi over issues such as non-violence are readily apparent. In some respects, the conversation reads more as if they both were reciting prepared statements; there is no real exchange of ideas, nor is there the potential for a synthesis of any kind (Herzog 34 - 35). Yet, that the dialogue does register dissonance is more significant since the authority Holitscher can claim as a witness to Gandhi ’ s words is also undermined. As was the case with Borodin and the rickshaw driver, the limitations of Holitscher ’ s preconceptions are manifest. When the interview is over and he is about to depart, Holitscher asks Gandhi to sign a photograph of him that Holitscher possesses. The latter looks at the photograph - an image of himself as an ascetic - and then grumbles that such photos are «Karikaturen» (164 - 65). Gandhi then selects a different photo from his own papers, one in which he smiles and shows some missing front teeth. He signs both photos and gives them to Holitscher who then departs. Even though he does sign the first photo, it seems clear that Gandhi did not wish to rubberstamp the image of himself with which Holitscher arrived. Dialogue thus becomes a potential for friction in Das unruhige Asien, and it might seem that Paquet, by avoiding the reconstruction of dialogue, tries to establish the primacy of the author, who does not allow any such problematic disputes. However, as discussed above, for Paquet travel was also a textual experience that began before the actual journey. In the subsequent encounter between the world as read and the world as experienced, both sides were to be interrogated and both were to be open to modification. Thus dialogue for Paquet was a phenomenon that already occurred when a fluid subjectivity exposed itself to the different experiences occasioned by travel and placed them in a critical relationship to one another. From this perspective, his limiting of dialogue needs to be understood as part of a methodical approach to experience, that seeks to turn travel into a form of genuine research, one that tried to incorporate the decentered «I» into the methods of the natural and social sciences - hence. Hence, the disjunction between his ideas on the role of the individual and the dispassionate, but self-assured narrative voice in works such as Li. The dialogue to be explored in Paquet ’ s work is that which occurs between texts in his work, and what we can reconstruct of his encounters while he traveled. He appears to have read a wide array of material in preparing for the journeys that constituted Li - not only ethnographic and historical literature, but also Chinese poetry and contemporary political thought. Reconstructing these encounters would uncover some of the multivocality existing within imperial discourse. For instance, Paquet ’ s criticism of Chinese guild systems, 297 The Abominable Art of Running Away as well as traditional burial practices, when read against his knowledge of reformist debates in China, appears to owe just as much to knowledge of these debates as to western beliefs that Chinese society was supposedly stagnant (Rhiel 164). Mary Rhiel has argued that Li in fact charts Paquet ’ s passage from national chauvinism to a more cosmopolitan outlook that opened «onto a different relationship and definition of the Chinese other» (Rhiel 163 - 70). But where and when did this shift occur precisely, what kinds of experiences provoked it, and how did these experiences relate to the horizons he established before traveling? This question is significant for what it suggests about the limits of multivocality in Paquet ’ s work. Paquet presents two sides in this regard: on the one hand, there is his recognition of China ’ s legitimate claims against its European antagonists, but, on the other, there is also a persistent sympathy with Germany ’ s cultural imperialism. 6 Paquet suggests in his autobiographical and theoretical writings that the desire to travel (and to write about travel) has complex and varied origins, and as a result of these origins the travel writer could not become an unquestioned source of authenticity. Other voices enter into the narrative, and through these voices the cosmopolitan modernity that Paquet hoped for appears awkwardly alongside the effects of colonial rule. The conflicts and contradictions that reside in his cosmopolitan vision might be further explored in two ways. One, the multivocality of his texts would be further illuminated by mining some of the voices embedded in his narrative: his dialogue with Gu Hongming, his reading of the sinologists von Richthofen and Richard Wilhelm as well as of Chinese poets and political reformers such as Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei. Another approach comes from investigating Li and his other texts as a kind of apprenticeship of the eye - one undertaken under imperial auspices, but also against them. Rather than reconstructing voices, his text reconstructs visuals with a conviction that the book of the world will then become visible, not just as spectacle but as Erkenntnis (Brenner, Cepl-Kaufmann and Thönen 131 - 33). As discussed above, Paquet was concerned with how the traveler observes and represents - both in his tentative critique of the European gaze, as well as in his comparison of the travel writer to a painter in a train car. Here he should be compared to the artist Emil Orlik, a fellow traveler in regards to his interests in China and Japan and an artist whose work appears in Paquet ’ s 1914 anthology Der Sendling. Orlik was also concerned with the techniques of seeing; he travelled to Japan in 1901 to study its artistic traditions. During his travels, he apprenticed himself to Japanese artists, learned the language, and participated in local exhibits. Though he confessed a degree of wanderlust as a motive for his travels, he also wanted to learn Japanese techniques of color-woodcut 298 Harry T. Craver printing. As he noted, there were numerous books available in Europe that contained detailed descriptions of this technique, but he felt that the only way to learn was from a genuine practitioner (Orlik 22 - 27). When he returned to Europe, his «Japanese» work was, on the one hand, felt by some critics to reflect a measure of authenticity that was not to be found among those artists who pursued a simplistic «Japanismus,» while on the other, some saw him purely as an imitator (Osborn 7 - 10; Matthias 16 - 22). 7 His intentions were recognizable to both sides of this issue, but they differed on the artistic value of its result. Ultimately, his reputation gained little from his increased technical knowledge, for the high tide of interest in Japanese art was receding, and woodcut had other points of origin that could be explored. But perhaps mere imitation is, in this instance, not something negligible, but rather part of an attempt to re-educate the eye, by linking vision to a learned practice of visual representation. Orlik ’ s work then gives evidence of a path for which Paquet and Holitscher have left only conflicted traces - that of a traveler attempting not only to find different things to see, but also another way of seeing and representing what they see. By thinking of texts such as Li as a means of re-tooling vision in this fashion, some of its more conflicting dimensions may emerge. Notes 1 Paquet wrote a number of autobiographical sketches for different journals («Skizze zu einem Selbstbildnis,» «Autobiographische Skizze,» and «Autobiographisches Zwischenspiel»). For biographical accounts see Brenner, Cepl-Kaufmann and Thöne, and Baumgart (16 - 27). 2 He completed his studies later in 1907, having written what he referred to as a «ziegelsteinformigen» tome on the Ausstellungsproblem in national economy («Autobiographisches Skizze» 36). 3 This conclusion would be put to a greater test in his article «Die Welt des Reisens» from January, 1939. In this article, Paquet imported sentences from the «Wandlungen des Reisens und Beschreibens» and sometimes repeated whole sections verbatim. However, the context of these earlier statements was considerably altered by some of the positive remarks he made concerning travelers in the Kraft durch Freude program. The 1939 article concluded with a verbatim repetition of a passage that can be read as a more ambivalent assessment of the KdF: «Tadelt darum den kleinen, unerfarhenen Reisenden nicht, der zum ersten Male seinen Fuß auf ein Schiff setzt und vor dem Brüllen des Nebelhorns erschrickt. Er hat ganz sicher schon Reisebücher gelesen, und er trägt die Absicht in sich, mutig bis zu jenen Grenzen vorzudringen, wo er einsehen lernt, daß es eine Flucht nicht gibt («Welt des Reisens» 20). 4 The book was translated from the English original and published under a Germanized version of his name - Ku Hung-Ming. Gu had studied in Edinburgh and later in 299 The Abominable Art of Running Away Germany. Born in Malaysia, he was not fluent in Chinese from birth, but learned the language later. He was a cultural conservative and a supporter of the Empress Dowager, primarily as a means of opposing Western influence (Liu, Clash of Empires 168 - 80). 5 Biographical details can be found in Knox (11 - 48) and in Holitscher (Mein Leben). 6 He did on at least one occasion present his work to the German Colonial Society (Paquet-Archiv 103). At some point in his career he probably considered a more active role in politics. For instance, in 1917, as an unofficial attaché to Kurt Riezler, he attended the peace negotiations with Soviet Russia at Brest-Litovsk, during which time he also engaged in some clandestine politics at the behest of Alexander Helphand, who funded him for these purposes (Baumgart 16 - 27). 7 On his years in Japan see Kuwabara and Matthias. During his first visit, Orlik studied under Kanô Tomonobu (1843 - 1912), an artist known for his traditionalist approach to method. Works Cited Baumgart, Winfried. «Vorwort.» Von Brest-Litovsk zur deutschen Novemberrevolution: Aus den Aufzeichnungen von Alfons Paquet, Wilhelm Groener, Albert Hopman. Ed. Winfried Baumgart. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971. 1 - 27. Benjamin, Walter. «The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire.» The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Ed. Michael Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006. 46 - 133. Brenner, Sabine, Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann, and Martina Thöne. Ich liebe nichts so sehr wie die Städte. . .: Alfons Paquet als Schriftsteller, Europäer, Weltreisender. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2001. Brenner, Peter. «Schwierige Reisen: Wandlungen des Reiseberichts in Deutschland 1918 - 1945.» Reisekultur in Deutschland: Von der Weimarer Republik zum «Dritten Reich.» Ed. Peter Brenner. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1997. 127 - 76. Butor, Michael. «Travel and Writing.» Temperamental Journeys: Essays on the Modern Literature of Travel. Ed. Michael Kowalewski. Athens and London: U of Georgia P, 1992. Buzard, Paul. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to «Culture» 1800 - 1918. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Fuhrmann, Ernst. «Wenn einer ein [sic] Reise tun. . .» Frankfurter Zeitung 7 June 1931. Reiseblatt: 3. Fussell, Paul. «Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars.» New York: Oxford UP, 1980. Gleber, Anke. «Die Erfahrung der Moderne in der Stadt. Reiseliteratur der Weimarer Republik.» Der Reisebericht: Die Entwicklung einer Gattung in der deutschen Literatur. Ed. Peter J. Brenner. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989. 463 - 89. - . The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie. Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. 300 Harry T. Craver Herzog, Andreas. « ‹ Writing Culture › - Poetik und Politik: Arthur Holitschers Das unruhige Asien.» Kulturpoetik 6.1 (2006): 20 - 36. Holitscher, Arthur. Lebensgeschichte eines Rebellen: Meine Erinnerungen. Berlin: Fischer, 1924. - . Das unruhige Asien: Reise durch Indien - China - Japan. Berlin: Fischer, 1926. - . Mein Leben in dieser Zeit: Der «Lebengeschichte eines Rebellen.» Vol. 2. Potsdam: Kiepenheuer, 1928. Knox, R. Seth C. Weimar Germany between Two Worlds: The American and Russian Travels of Kisch, Toller, Holitscher, Goldschmidt and Rundt. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Koenen, Gerd. «Ein ‹ Indien im Nebel › : Alfons Paquet and das revolutionäre Rußland.» Osteuropa 55.3 (March 2005): 80 - 100. Kuwabara, Setsuko. Orlik und Japan. Frankfurt am Main: Haag & Herchen, 1987. Liu, Lydia. Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World-Making. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. Matthias, Agnes. Zwischen Japan und Amerika. Emil Orlik: ein Künstler der Jahrtausendwende. Bielefeld: Kerber, 2013. Mendelssohn, Peter de. S. Fischer und sein Verlag. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1970. Orlik, Emil. «Kleine Aufsätze.» Berlin: Propyläen, 1924. Osborn, Max. Emil Orlik. Berlin: Verlag Neue Kunsthandlung, 1920. Osterhammel, Jürgen. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2014. Paquet, Alfons. Asiatische Reibungen: Politsiche Studien. Munich and Leipzig: Verlagsgesellschaft, 1909. - . «Autobiographische Skizze.» Das literarische Echo 15 (1912 - 1913): 35 - 37. - . «Autobiographisches Zwischenspiel.» Gesammelte Werke. Ed. Hanns Martin Elster. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1970. 3: 21 - 25. - . «Chinesische Kulturpolitiker.» Süddeutsche Monatshefte 9 (1912): 414 - 19. - . «Kultur und Landschaft.» Frankfurter Zeitung 7 June 1931. Reiseblatt: 1. - . Li, oder im neuen Osten. Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening, 1912. - . «Skizze zu einem Selbstbildnis.» Bibliographie Alfons Paquet. Ed. Paquet Archiv. Frankfurt am Main: Lothar Woeller, 1958. 9 - 20. - . Städte, Landschaften und ewige Bewegung: Ein Roman ohne Helden. Hamburg: Deutsche-Dichter-Gedächtnis-Stiftung, 1927. - . Südsibirien und die Nordwestmongolei: Politisch-geographische Studie und Reisebericht für die Geographische Gesellschaft zu Jena. Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1909. - . «Von den Wandlungen des Reisens und Beschreibens.» Frankfurter Zeitung 1 June 1930. Literaturblatt: 1. - . «Vorwort.» Chinas Verteidigung gegen europäische Ideen: Kritische Aufsätze. By Ku Hung-Ming. Trans. Richard Wilhelm. Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1921. i - xiv. - . «Die Welt des Reisens: Wandlungen, Helden, Kunstwerke.» Gesammelte Werke. Ed. Hanns Martin Elster. 3 vols. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1970. 3: 7 - 20. Paquet-Archiv, ed. Bibliographie Alfons Paquet. Frankfurt am Main: Lothar Woeller, 1958. 301 The Abominable Art of Running Away Polgar, Alfred. «The Small Form.» Vienna Coffeehouse Wits, 1890 - 1938. Trans. and ed. Harold Segel. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1993. 279 - 81. Rhiel, Mary. «Traveling through Imperialism: Representational Crisis and Resolution in Elisabeth von Heyking ’ s and Alfons Paquet ’ s Travel Writing on China.» Imagining Germany, Imagining Asia: Essays in Asian-German Studies. Ed. Veronika Fuechtner and Mary Rhiel. Rochester: Camden House, 2013. 155 - 72. Rubiès, Joan Pau. «Travel Writing and Ethnography.» The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Young. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 242 - 60. Schorske, Carl. Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. New York: Vintage, 1981. Steinmetz, George. The Devil ’ s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007. 302 Harry T. Craver Italy zerwühlt: Hannah Höch ’ s Dadaist Italienreise. MELISSA JOHNSON I LLINOIS S TATE U NIVERSITY On February 8, 1921 Hannah Höch, Salomo Friedlaender (aka Mynona), and Raoul Hausmann gathered in the rooms of the Berliner Secession for a reading of Dadaist literary grotesques. Höch read her Italienreise. 1 A reviewer in the 8-Uhr Abendblatt wrote that of all the readings that evening, «am besten gefiel mir Frl. Höchs ‹ Italienreise. › Sie hat den Witz Heinrich Heines und die Vielgewandheit eines Pückler-Muskau in gut gespielter Preziosität verbunden» (LC II 1: 29). This was high praise. Placing Höch ’ s travel report in the context of Heine and Prince Hermann von Pückler- Muskau situated Höch in a tradition that fit with Berlin Dada ’ s outrageous antics and aims of overturning traditional bourgeois conceptions of art and life. Höch ’ s travel report was published later that spring in the first and only issue of the Novembergruppe ’ s journal NG. 2 Höch wrote her Dadaist travel report in response to a six-week trip she had made to Italy from early October to mid-November 1920. Her three-page account offers a bitingly sarcastic parody of the political, social, and cultural post-World War I relations between Germany and Italy. . Höch portrays Germans as isolationist: clinging strongly to their own traditions, not wanting to participate in those of other cultures, and, in the case of those in the northern Tyrolean region, certainly not willing to assimilate to a culture they were forced to adopt as the result of a lost war. Given the critical ways in which the German Dadaists spoke of their own culture, one might expect Höch to view Italians with higher regard than Germans, but this is not articulated in her report. While she praises Italian food and architecture over that of German, for example, the Italians she describes are subject to criticisms similar to those she levies at the Germans. Interestingly the reviewer of the Groteskenlesen does not mention Goethe ’ s Italienische Reise, but Höch certainly wrote her Italienreise with Goethe in mind. In addition to Goethe ’ s travel account, Höch also references contemporary genres of travel writing, specifically the popular Baedeker guides. However, unlike many travel writers, Höch does not try to bring order to a world she characterizes as «zerwühlt» (LCII 2: 60). Instead Höch used Dadaist writing and collage and the genre of the literary grotesque as a subversive framework to structure her travel report. She juxtaposed nonsensical phrases against seemingly objective and factual observations in order to demonstrate the effects of World War I on the landscape and people of both Italy and Germany. As I will show, it is not simply a matter of what Höch wrote about, but how she wrote: her tone of nonsensical Dadaist belligerence and critique, as well as abrupt and bewildering changes of subject, all function to disorient and destabilize any sense of linear narrative or perspectival coherence on the part of the listener and reader. This sensation of destabilization or of being zerwühlt is inherent to modernity in general and the post-World War I, Dadaist world in which Höch lived in particular. The Dadaists, by way of their performances, journals, photo-collages, manifestos and other writings, responded to a world in constant flux. Their creations, most of which were comprised of appropriated text, imagery, found objects, and ideas from popular and high culture, could not «simply coexist with commonsense bourgeois reality and accepted public codes» (Sheppard 42). The Dadaists rejected traditional forms of art, especially if it was contemporaneous; they also rejected traditional ways of responding to historical art. This did not necessarily diminish the significance of art, but it was their belief that art could, or should, no longer provide the kind of experience it had previously. Höch and her Dada colleagues were not interested in the reproduction of life frozen on canvas or captured in sculptural form. Their interest was in the collision of art and life, not the separation of art from life. What is more, their movement was a reaction against World War I: its «Materialschlacht» and the events, ideas, and culture dating back to the Enlightenment that brought about the war (Dickerman 3). One way to explain Dada is to say that the Dadaists created nonsense in order to combat the nonsense of the world. Another is to say that the Dadaists revealed «the symptoms of modernity» (Dickerman 9) by using the tactics of the «traumatic mime,» who «assumes the dire conditions of his time [. . .] and inflates them through hyperbole» (Foster 169). Leah Dickerman, drawing upon Foster ’ s notion of the mime, observes how Dada, as it made visible the symptoms of modernity, did so «often a decade or so before [these symptoms] became common topics within written cultural commentary» (Dickerman 9). Walter Benjamin ’ s observations are apt here. The Dadaists actively worked against the idea of art as a vehicle for contemplation; instead Dadaist works were comprised of «word-salad» - verbal and visual refuse that «jolted the viewer» and destroyed any sense of aura traditional to a work of art. Dadaist work was «branded as a reproduction through the very means of its reproduction» and, Benjamin noted, the only requirement of Dada was to «outrage the public» (Benjamin 39). Outrage and, along with it, subversion 304 Melissa Johnson were enacted by «breaking down language, working against various modern economies, willfully transgressing boundaries, mixing idioms, [and] celebrating the grotesque body as that which resists discipline and control» (Dickerman 11). With this in mind, I suggest that Höch ’ s travel report reflects the Dadaist belief in the impossibility of life continuing as it previously had after World War I. Thus, Goethe and his writings could no longer have the same meaning, and likewise, travel to Italy could no longer signify the same, nor be experienced in the same way. For Goethe, travel to Italy was a way to restore in himself a sense of perceptual and intellectual balance, and he articulates this desire again and again in his Italienische Reise. In her Italienreise, Höch demonstrates what it meant to be a German Dadaist traveling in Italy after World War I: one ’ s experience of the world was now grotesque; it was Dada. Höch «wrote back» (Hilger 2009) to and rewrote Goethe, and at the same time, was also rewriting the Baedeker guidebook that she carried with her. Most importantly, whereas Goethe stressed a feeling of continuity between himself and the classical past, Höch, by insistently referencing the war, emphasized a sense of discontinuity, thus reflecting the chaos of the world back upon itself. Everything she wrote was seemingly interrupted by a Dadaist voice. Höch clearly intended the listener and reader of her travel report to make the connection with Goethe ’ s account. The title Höch gave her report - Italienreise - almost, but not quite, duplicates Goethe ’ s - Italienische Reise - and in her second paragraph Höch references the many «lyrischen Hampelmännern» and «literarischen Farbklexer» who, throughout history, have traveled to Italy. She also invokes Tischbein ’ s portrait of Goethe in the Campania (1787): «Aber sie meinen das Bild ‹ Goethe in der Campania › sei doch sehr ergreifend; gewiss, wie er so das Dichterbein hineinstreckt - parallel der Via Appia - es ist um das Fieber zu kriegen ergreifend» (LCII 2: 59). It is not Goethe the man, but Goethe as representation that Höch invokes, and so she firmly establishes a link between her report and Goethe ’ s Italienische Reise. She makes this connection even stronger with her use of the word Fieber, which must be a reference to the idea of «Reisefieber»: one need only look at Tischbein ’ s portrait of Goethe, Höch insists, and the fever for travel sets in. These are the only instances in which Höch refers directly to Goethe; but she wrote about many of the same subjects that Goethe did, and like many travel writers Höch consistently compared what she knew (Germany) with what she saw in Italy. Subjects in common include: the ruins of classical antiquity, landscape, tourist sites, architecture, public monuments, food, handicrafts, people (their clothing, hairstyles, and char- 305 Italy zerwühlt: Hannah Höch ’ s Dadaist Italienreise acteristics), and national identity. But Höch set her travel account apart from Goethe ’ s in two important respects: her references to the war and her refusal to talk about art. While Höch recorded visits to museums in her travel diary, art is absent from her published travel account. She explained why in a postscript written to be appended to her essay in NG: Aber, wo bleibt die Kunst, fragen Sie, novembergrupplerisch angehauchter Leser, die hat doch in Italien die Hauptrolle zu spielen. Das hat doch der Deutsche mit dem Engländer gemein, dass er soviele Bilder Gallerien ‹ geniesst › bis er etwas angedummt zurückkommt. Ja, die Kunst ist noch immer vorhanden - und auch mir liefen die Michel-Angelos, die Botticellis die Signorellis die Tizians und viele, viele andere über den Weg, aber, das Leben meine Herrschaften, das Leben ist die Hauptsache so wichtig. Ein Maler hat doch der Filter zu sein, durch den seine eigene Zeit läuft und sein Werk wird das Stück Leben zeigen, dass er filterte. Interessant ist eine Reproduction des Lebens zu sehen - wichtiger aber ist mir das Stück Leben Geschehen selbst - durch dass ich tappe. Es lebe [die Novembergruppe]. H. H. (LCII 2: 63) 3 While Höch ’ s postscript was not published in the Novembergruppe ’ s journal, it articulates her desire to represent her experience of Italy not through its art - specifically painting and sculpture - which only acts as a filter, but rather through firsthand experiences. While Goethe wrote extensively about art in his travel account, Höch makes clear that she did not want to; she wanted to experience life. The difference between Goethe and Höch may be explained thus: Goethe, who had seen reproductions of art in the form of prints and read about art in books, did not seem to think twice about duplicating the reproduction of experience in his own writing. He discusses the art he sees in museums and chapels at great length, and throughout his travels compares the art he is seeing for the first time with what he has seen in reproductions and read about in books (Italienische Reise 25). He notes the location of the art and freely offers his opinion. However, while Goethe wished to find order in the world through contemplation of art and the Italian landscape, for example, the Berlin Dadaists wished to reflect the chaos of the world back onto itself. As noted, they viewed art as bourgeois, and they dismissed it as a mode of expression almost entirely because it represented the tastes of the bourgeoisie. Höch never entirely gave up her interest in aesthetics, but the anti-aesthetic of Dada comes through clearly in her postscript and her travel report. In what follows I examine Höch ’ s travel report for how she directly addressed World War I and its effects, specifically as the subject of war intersects with the topics of 306 Melissa Johnson landscape, architecture and public monuments, food, and national identity. Comparing how Höch wrote about these topics with Goethe ’ s ideas demonstrates how zerwühlt the world had become. First, however, I offer a brief account of the actual travels Höch and Goethe undertook, their reasons for traveling, and an overview of the genre of travel writing in order to better situate Höch ’ s account. Höch began to plan her trip to Italy in late 1919 when her sister Grete wrote to invite Hannah and the Swiss poet Regina Ullmann to accompany her (LC I, 1: 609). The trip was a much-needed break for Höch from her difficult relationship with Hausmann, as well as a break from the Dada group in general. Dada was certainly very important to Höch, but her relationship with her Dadaist colleagues was not easy. Despite participating in the Groteskenlesen and having the support of both Hausmann and Friedländer, several of the male Berlin Dadaists marginalized Höch ’ s membership in the group, referring to the 30-year old woman as the «good girl» of Dada (Lanchner 129). This understandably frustrated Höch. Thus, like Goethe, Höch ’ s travels offered a time for escape and personal reflection. While Höch traveled for only one month - a short time compared to Goethe ’ s two years - and went to fewer places than Goethe, all of the sites she visited overlapped with Goethe ’ s itinerary, and like Goethe her final destination was Rome. Höch set out from Berlin on October 7, traveling to Munich and then Mariabrunn, a town north of Munich where Grete lived. The two sisters met up with Ullmann, who lived in Munich, and spent ten days in southern Germany visiting friends. On October 17, 1920, armed with, among other things, a Baedeker and a Meyer Sprachführer, Höch and the two women took a train to Innsbruck, Austria, and then to Brennero, from where they traveled south into Italy. 4 They hiked to Trento, took a steamship down Lake Garda to Maderno, and then walked east to Peschiera where they took a train to Verona. From Verona the three traveled to Venice, remained there a few days, and then continued on to Bologna. Once in Bologna, Grete returned to Germany, and Ullmann and Höch continued on, each by herself. Höch went to Florence for three days, and finally spent nine days in Rome. Höch ’ s trip to Italy was the first of many travels she made during the Weimar era as she mentions in her Lebensüberblick of 1956 (Lavin 213). Höch ’ s trip helped her begin to establish a sense of artistic and personal independence. She sought out a number of artists and intellectuals while in Italy, thus establishing herself firmly in the European avant-garde community. Goethe had long wished to travel to Rome. His father had traveled to Italy in 1740, and the son had grown up with his father ’ s souvenirs and stories. 307 Italy zerwühlt: Hannah Höch ’ s Dadaist Italienreise Goethe finally realized his desire in 1786 when, wearied by his courtly duties, in a crisis over his relationship with Charlotte von Stein, and experiencing a sense of creative frustration (Cusack 29), he slipped out of Weimar in the middle of the night, traveling on his own by post carriage. Rome was his destination and he traveled purposefully to reach the city. Upon his arrival Goethe noted how he had «flown over the Tyrolean mountains» and, while he came to know some places well - Verona, Vicenza, Padua and Venice, for example - he spent very little time elsewhere; only three hours in Florence (Italienische Reise 125 — 26). Once in Rome Goethe felt calm, ready to absorb all that he could. By making this journey Goethe hoped to bring his senses of perception and intellect into balance through a gathering of anthropological knowledge obtained by moving through the world, what Andrew Cusack describes as a «Menschenkentniss» (28). Goethe ’ s journey may be described as a Bildungsreise: an education gained through travel for the emerging middle class. This new form of travel involved a way of learning that stood in direct contrast to the kind of knowledge gained by aristocrats traveling on the Grand Tour: namely, the study of collections of objects gathered from around the world and brought to one place (20). Rome felt familiar to Goethe, but only as «parts» gained through secondhand knowledge. Now he was seeing the whole in situ, rather than mediated by textual and visual reproductions of the landscape, classical antiquity, and works of art (Italienische Reise 126). This sense of wholeness was important for Goethe, and Cusack remarks that Goethe wished for his sense of a whole self «either to be developed or restored» (30). Goethe would codify this new way of learning in his Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795 — 96). Goethe ’ s Wilhelm, observes Cusack, would learn from Werner how to view the world in terms of «dynamic» rather than «static» processes, and in his search for «useful empirical data» Wilhelm himself was «set in motion» (20). This knowledge could be obtained only through the kind of meandering journey that Goethe ’ s fictional character makes and which Goethe conceived in Italy and then articulated in his Italienische Reise as «einen Erziehungsroman über sich» (30). The genre of travel writing exists in many forms: narrative travel accounts, correspondences, diaries, poems, and novels, as well as travel guidebooks and journalistic travel writing. While some writings reflect upon actual travels and may function as a guide for future travelers or as a source of information for those who stay at home, the actual trip and the written narrative, though perhaps close, never match. The written text is always a construction based upon the writer ’ s perception of the culture he or she experiences, the historical context of the travel, as well as the experiences of the reader (Brenner qtd. in Hochmeister 5). Nevertheless, travel writing, in a traditional 308 Melissa Johnson sense, does several things: it helps the writer make sense of her travel experience; it provides, through the techniques of writing, a «credibility» and «rhetorical authenticity» (Schulz-Forberg 25); and «it orders a multifarious experience into a manageable document» (Roberson 61). Travel accounts are texts that aim «at the construction of knowledge» through a gathering of empirical information (Mondada 65). They place the reader/ observer «in a certain position at a certain point,» notes Mondada, by relying upon techniques of vision and visual inscriptions made from that vision (64). Maps are one example, but other visual illustrations, such as drawings or prints, may be included with a published text, while paintings, often in the form of watercolors, might be included in a diary or sketchbook. All of these kinds of travel writing rely upon the assumption that the travel account is trustworthy (or at least pretends to be), and will be of practical use for a later traveler (67). Susan Roberson invokes Goethe when she remarks upon a «kinship between travel and writing» that is «most evident in the Romantic era, notably in Germany and France» (69). However, Goethe was neither the first German to travel to Italy and to write about it, nor was he the last. Italy has had a privileged position in the German imagination, and Goethe and his Italienische Reise have been especially important for Germans, travel, and travel writing. Gretchen Hochmeister argues that in no other place has the «literary representation» of a country been «so bound to one individual ’ s experience as is the German ’ s to Goethe» (2). Eichendorff, Platen, and Heine responded to Goethe in their own writings within a relatively short period of time (1825 — 1831), and numerous other Germans continued «to visit, flee to, and write about Italy,» thus «participa[ting] in and engag[ing] with a long tradition of writers before them» (Hochmeister 3). 5 Goethe ’ s account is also significant in that it marks the beginning of the Bildungsreise, or educational travel, for the bourgeoisie (Cusack 20, Koshar 22). While the bourgeoisie could and did look to Goethe ’ s account for instruction on how to understand Italy, by the mid-nineteenth century new technologies like the train made it possible for the middle class to travel, and popular guidebooks like Baedeker ’ s offered a new primer that told people what to see and how to see it. While the Baedeker guides had the effect of standardizing travel (it was possible to structure a journey entirely according to what the Baedeker guide directed one to see and do), they also may be understood as a kind of «complex ‹ intertext › marked by traces of the travelogue, atlas, geographical survey, art-history guide, restaurant and hotel guide, tourist brochure, address book, and civic primer» (Koshar 16). And so, despite the possibility for standardized travel, Koshar argues for the 309 Italy zerwühlt: Hannah Höch ’ s Dadaist Italienreise Baedeker guidebook to be seen as «a space for significant individual practice» on the part of the tourist (2). Rudy Koshar describes this tourist as gendered, as «the citizen of a national political community» with whom he or she has «experiences in common with travelers from other nations,» and, calling upon Michel de Certeau, as «a reader - and a potentially very autonomous cultural ‹ producer › » (9). Thus, not only was the Baedeker guidebook a hybrid text, but the travel taken by its readers/ consumers also had the capacity to be marked as hybrid, especially when the sensation of displacement - an inherent aspect of travel, but also modernity - is taken into account (9). Koshar, of course, is responding to the long-standing discussion regarding the tourist versus the traveler. With the emergence of the Bildungsreise, this distinction between traveler and tourist - one made by Goethe himself - became pronounced, and by the Weimar era was firmly established. German cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer, in fact, made a clear distinction between Goethe (a «real» traveler who «traveled with his soul») and the «modern traveler» (who traveled not to reach a destination but only for the novelty of being in a foreign place) in his 1925 essay «Travel and Dance» (65). This «modern traveler» is understood as the tourist. By offering Goethe as model for his «real» traveler, Kracauer seemed to imply the impossibility for an individual living in the 1920s to travel as a «real» person, for, as he believed, the modern individual had lost his or her soul. Yet this proves not to be the case. Later in his essay, Kracauer describes the «real» person in more detail. This «real» person exists in space but, unlike the modern traveler, does not define himor herself according to an activity of specific duration - a vacation or a dance, for example. Instead, Kracauer explains, the «real» person «is committed to eternity,» leading «a ‹ double existence › in the Here and the Beyond» (69). Travel may have meaning in the modern era, he suggests, but if a «real» person were to travel in 1925 he or she would not undertake travel as a substitution for reality (70), traveling only for the sake of speed and travel itself (66). The «real» person would travel and reflect on what he or she saw with reference to something other than him or herself. This traveler would see where he or she was, understand what was seen, and articulate ideas about travel in some meaningful form: through travel accounts, written diaries and correspondence, and in visual works of art. Höch ’ s Italienreise clearly does not offer an equivalent experience of Kracauer ’ s «real» traveler, but instead seems to suggest, avant la lettre, that the kind of travel Kracauer desired was not possible in the years just after World War I. What was possible was a traveler able to reflect critically upon the travel she undertook. Both Höch and Goethe carried guidebooks with them. Goethe had his Volkmann and he referenced it often in his travel account: he referred to it as 310 Melissa Johnson an authoritative source of historical facts, he used it in Bologna as a checklist of things to see (Italienische Reise 103), but he also utilized it as a source to question and debunk. Höch had her Baedeker, but referred to it only once when writing about Lake Garda. Like Goethe and the Baedeker, she remarks on the lemon trees growing upon the shore, and after some commentary on the usefulness of lemons for the treatment of colds and sore throats, she offers a description of the lake that resonates closely with that of Baedeker ’ s: «Dass der Lago di Garda mit den deutschen Seen nur die Nässe gemein hat möchte ich noch erwähnen, im übrigen steht im Baedecker - azurblau» (LC II, 2: 60). Most likely Höch carried the 1908 edition of Baedekers Italien von den Alpen bis Neapal; it was the last published before World War I. This edition directs the traveler, as she rides in the train, to «L. Blick auf den tiefblauen Gardasee» (Baedeker 53). On the next page Baedeker describes the lake in more detail and proclaims: «Das Wasser erscheint meist azurblau» (54). In her account, Höch spoofs the Baedeker. Instead of remarking, as Baedeker does, on the wind that disturbs the surface of the water, she comments on the great difference between German and Italian lakes: they only have wetness in common. Goethe also describes Lake Garda, but it is the picturesque view from his room that he presents, and then referring to his Volkmann, he notes the lake ’ s former name - Benacus - and cites Virgil ’ s mention of it, noting that this is the first ancient text that has become real to him (Italienische Reise 29). In doing so Goethe stresses the sense of continuity between the landscape he sees with that of ancient Rome. Höch also describes the landscape that she sees along the shores of Lake Garda. However, in contrast to Goethe, Höch remarks on the changes wrought in the landscape by battles fought during the war, and thus stresses a sense of radical discontinuity with history, rather than the continuity stressed by Goethe. Aber dann kommt Trient und das Kriegsgebiet, bis zum Gardasee. Ja, ja die Kultur ist eine schöne Sache und wenn man die Granateinschläge mitten hinein in die Dolomiten sieht, so denkt man an diese Filigranstadt Venedig und dass die Menschheit doch sehr zivilisiert ist, da sie zufällig nicht hineingefunkt hat - und also der Markusplatz bis auf weiteres von Scharen von Hochzeitsreisenden aller fünf Erdteile heimgesucht werden kann. Dagegen legt Riva am Gardasee beredtes Zeugnis von der Kulturarbeit dieser herrlichsten Erfindung ‹ Mörser › ab. (LC II, 2: 60) The area of the Dolomite Mountains, which includes Lake Garda, was the arena where the Italians successfully fought the Austrians and Germans during World War I, and Höch stresses the transformation of this landscape. While she refers to the same location that Goethe describes and refers to 311 Italy zerwühlt: Hannah Höch ’ s Dadaist Italienreise similar aspects (the lemon trees, the beauty of the lake and the mountains), her discussion becomes Dadaist because of the rupture brought about by the war. She mimics Goethe in order to reveal the effects of the war. The mortar holes that now riddle the mountains remind her of Venice, with its lacy filigree of architectural ornamentation, or, taking Höch ’ s expertise in needlework and handicraft into consideration, perhaps she is making a reference to Venetian lace. It could be either. Regardless, Höch ’ s spoof of both Goethe and Baedeker transgresses the boundaries of traditional travel writing. Höch ’ s Italienreise could not have functioned as a guidebook for someone traveling through Italy in 1920 or 1921 for it would not have been of any practical use. Yet Höch seems to be rewriting the Baedeker and «writing back» to Goethe as Stephanie Hilger (2009) asserts when Höch makes allusions to both accounts, and utilizes the places mentioned and the accompanying landscape, people, food, architecture, and cultural landmarks to construct a Dadaist literary grotesque that, while it responds to Goethe also attacks the cultural position many Germans assigned to the author in the early twentieth century. As one of the most important figures for German cultural history, Goethe had an enormous impact on many German modernist and avant-garde artists and writers of the late nineteenthand early twentieth-centuries, including the Dadaists, many of whom were members of, or were born into, the middle classes. As such, they were educated in the classical canon of German cultural heritage, the «custodians» of which included «the holy trinity of Goethe, Schiller and Lessing,» as well as Kant and Herder (qtd. in Sheppard 19). Dada, Richard Sheppard notes, «trod a very fine line between subverting and reinscribing what it attacked» and could not completely escape «at least some of the attitudes and values that they had inherited either from the project of modernity before it went dramatically wrong or from even older sources» (26). Thus, in their writings and other Dadaist creations, Höch, Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hausmann, and Kurt Schwitters all invoked Goethe and his contemporaries as a way to respond both with and against modernity. 6 That Goethe had significance for Höch beyond her travel report is demonstrated clearly in her 1922 collage Meine Haussprüche. 7 In this piece Höch drew upon the Wilhelmine feminine tradition of embroidering towels with house-sayings that instructed one how to live a good life (Reagin 73). Nancy Reagin has noted that some of these towels had lines from treatises by Schiller, Goethe, and Campe urging «order, cleanliness and thrift» as virtues of the housewife (73). Rather than copy the traditional sayings, Höch populated her collage with quotes by her Dadaist colleagues as well as a quote from Goethe and Friedrich Nietzsche each. Höch transcribed some lines 312 Melissa Johnson from a letter Goethe wrote to his wife Christiane in May, 1810. The lines from Höch ’ s collage read: «Wer sich nährt [sic], den stosst nicht zurück [sic], und wer sich entfernt [sic], den haltet nicht zurück, und wer wieder kommt, den nehmt auf, als aber nicht weg-gewesen wäre.» 8 The «proverbs» are written across the surface of colored papers and images that Höch pasted down: a crucifix, a ball-bearing, a clock, an astronomical map, a landscape, a reference to the Malik Verlag run by brothers Wieland Herzfelde and John Heartfield, beetles, lace and embroidery patterns, what appear to be children ’ s drawings, a photograph of a baby, and illustrations of a needlework stitch. Höch placed her photographic self-portrait between the quotes by Goethe and Nietzsche perhaps indicating the importance of their ideas for her and her Dadaist colleagues. Here again, Höch draws upon the Dadaist tactic of mimicry discussed earlier, a tactic that is related to general ideas about modernism. Sheppard, paraphrasing Frederic Jameson ’ s observations that modernism must be approached dialectically, writes that «modernist works are not just reflexes, transcriptions, or symptoms of a profound cultural upheaval, but, simultaneously, responses through which the authors of those works try to pictorialize, conceptualize, and make sense of that upheaval»(Sheppard 23). Höch works through the upheaval of World War I by referring to the texts, attitudes, and values of modernity, here represented by the various housesayings «embroidered» upon the surface of the Dadaist collage. The reference to embroidery is solidified by the illustration of the stitching, which has been identified as the «Zopfstitch,» a variation on the cross-stitch that Höch used as a metaphor for Dada (Schaschke 122). For Höch and her Dadaist colleagues, the tactic of mimicry is an important part of their strategic response and, I want to suggest, a connection between mimicry and the literary grotesque. Höch ’ s choice to write in the genre of the literary grotesque is not surprising. Her photo collages depended on elements of the grotesque for their formal and conceptual structure. The literary grotesque was pervasive in the early twentieth century; Paul Scheerbart, Else Lasker-Schüler, Franz Kafka, Klabund (Alfred Henschke), Christian Morgenstern, and Salomo Friedländer, who organized the Grotesklesen in Berlin, all wrote in the genre, and Höch owned many of their books as Hans Bolliger (1980) shows. Höch ’ s familiarity with this literary form would continue through the 1920s: Hausmann, Thomas Ring, Kurt Schwitters, and Til Brugman all authored grotesques, and Höch illustrated some of Brugman ’ s. Höch ’ s Italienreise is similar to her friends ’ grotesques, which were «[g]enerally three to ten pages in length,» and made «use of the bizarre, the ridiculous, and the excessive in their allusions to contemporary events» (Makela, «Grotesque» 206). The 313 Italy zerwühlt: Hannah Höch ’ s Dadaist Italienreise literary grotesque is associated with strange, bizarre, and fantastic forms; humor, suddenness and surprise are three of its essential elements. The strangeness of the grotesque has to do with our world - or our perceptions of the world - ceasing to be both reliable and a place in which we can live. Wolfgang Kayser notes that «the various forms of the grotesque are the most obvious and pronounced contradictions of any kind of rationalism and any systematic use of thought» (Kayser 185). The grotesque is, explains Philip Thomson, an «unresolved clash of incompatibles in work and response,» and he notes further that the grotesque «tends to be prevalent in societies and eras marked by strife, radical changes or disorientation» (Thomson 27, 11). Thomas O. Haakenson, in his essay on Salomo Friedländer ’ s grotesques, writes that the genre «should be understood in dialectical opposition to prevailing aesthetic standards» (145) and that humor was especially important for how it provoked «an embodied, individual response [. . .] that speaks directly to and against sensory standardization» (141). Furthermore, within that response lies the possibility of a «moment of critical reflection» (144) that would encourage an individual «to question judgments not only of aesthetics but also logic and reason» (Haakenson 145). In other words, the grotesque can be seen to function as a Dadaist tactic in that, through strategies of juxtaposition, parody and satire, it seeks to shift the habits of sense perception that had become acculturated in society to reflect a world become absurd and bizarre. Thus, because the grotesque has the capacity to provoke critical reflection, I suggest that the grotesque literary form, intertwined with these Dadaist tactics, allowed Höch ’ s travel report to reflect the experiences of Kracauer ’ s «real» traveler, albeit five years before Kracauer ’ s essay was published. It would be impossible for anyone to live in the chaotic world Höch constructs in her Italienreise. Höch had just lived through World War I and had served with the Red Cross. The war ’ s effects were evident in and on the landscape and its inhabitants in both Germany and Italy, and Höch brought the war into her travel report again and again unlike Goethe, who traveled during a time of peace. As noted, Goethe ’ s focus was on the idealized landscape of antiquity. He had no interest in the Italy of his time, except for what it could show him of continued traditions. The war is so central to Höch ’ s account that she brings it into her very first sentence: Mit wem es irgend ein Gott gut meint, den lässt er auf die Höhe der sogenannten Alpen gelangen - auch bei den ungünstigsten deutschen Valutaverhältnissen - un [sic] dann, von der heutigen Station Brennero, bis vor sehr kurzem noch österreichisch [sic] Brenner, diese schneezipfliche, sich mordsüberheblich benehmende Völkerscheide Alpen, von der sich auch so überheblich benehmenden 314 Melissa Johnson Kreatur Mensch genannt, abwärts laufen, direkt in dieses gottgesagnete [sic] Land Italia hinein. (LC II, 2: 59) By opening her travel report this way Höch references the actual route that she and countless other travelers used to reach Italy from Germany. She transports her listeners over the Brenner Pass into territory that, before the war, had been Austrian but was now Italian. This shift in national identity established a new language border, and Höch refers clearly to this change when she notes that the present-day station of Brennero used to be called the Brenner. She seems to make the Alps responsible for this: they are «so-called» and «population-splitting.» In the next sentences Höch refers to Tischbein ’ s portrait and the German poets and painters, but then, she censors herself; she seems to consider what she has written so far as dangerous and turns to the topic of food instead, writing: «Ich aber will sehr harmlose Dinge erzählen - von der Rosteria in der es in Oel gesottenen Blumenkohl für sehr geringes Geld gibt [. . .]» (LC II, 2: 59). Food, however, is not as «harmless» as Höch had hoped and her discussion veers back to the political context of the war: «und so - während doch ein deutscher Magen hauptsächlich voll Kartoffeln gestopft wird - und dabei soll dann mein armes Vater- und Mutterland nicht schwermütig und -blutig werden und - Kriege verlieren» (LC II, 2: 59). The grammar and syntax of this sentence does not make sense; it is as if Höch loses track of what she is saying and stutters her way through to the end of the sentence. She picks up her thread on the consequences of the war in her next paragraph: Aber zunächst da kommt man nach Bozen und erlebte in all den vormalig südtiroler Tälern die grössten Konflikte mit, die dieses biedre [sic] Tirolervolk jetzt zerwühlt, weil der Geldbeutel nach Italien schreit, das Herz aber tendiert nach Norden - und mit vierzig Jahren soll man noch italienisch lernen - das is zu viel - und doch - die deutsche Valuta — italieno, wenn sich der Weltmarkt wieder etwas ausgeglichen hat, dann schlägt das Herz unter dem buntgestickten Hosenträger wieder deutsch, die da oben vergessen dann gar bald die Annehmlichkeiten deines diplomatischen Bestechungsverfahrens - aber was gehts mich an. (LC II, 2: 60) Again Höch references the shift in national borders that effects «worthy Tyrolean folk» who, before the war were Austrian but now are Italian and find themselves having to learn a new language and trade in a new currency. Their lives are «zerwühlt,» turned upside down by the war. As with the shift from Brenner to Brennero, Höch writes about Bolzano, but instead of calling the town by its new Italian name, she elects to use its former German name: Bozen. She notes sarcastically, however, that when the economy balances out the world will revert to its former state. 315 Italy zerwühlt: Hannah Höch ’ s Dadaist Italienreise While Höch refuses to write about art in her account she does refer to architecture and public monuments throughout her report, perhaps because they both are situated in the space of the everyday rather than the autonomous realm of art. In her section on Venice she makes clear connections to the recently ended war. Und die Adria spielt hier eine Rolle, und mit mehr Berechtigung als Bethmann- Hollweg einst eine spielte - denn Venedig wäre nicht Venedig, wenn die Adria nicht wäre. Diese Lagunenstadt mit dem Kanal Grande in der kein einziger Wagen rollt, die so tot ist wie es der Militarismus in Deutschland leider nicht ist, und schön, dass der neue Campanile immer zart errötet steht, er kann aber nichts dazu, denn alles ist alt, - er aber ist sooo neu. Drüben aber, Sancta Maria Salute hat so keusche Linien wie - nun sagen wir mal - Rosa Valetti; San Marco aber, innen, Kaiser Wilhelm hätte all die goldenen Mosaiksteinchen für bare Münze ausgegeben und noch drei Jahre Krieg damit gespielt. Auch die vier römischen Pferde wären unter seinen Händen wie die deutschen Kirchenglocken zerflossen: Kugeln sind wichtiger als antike Kunst - ausserdem macht man neues. Zu was leben sonst diese Schinkels; Und für die Colleoni steht Friedrich der Grosse auf dem Pferde und macht sich ebenso schön. (LC II, 2: 61) After discussing the integral relationship Venice has with the Adriatic Sea and making a nonsensical connection to the former Chancellor of the German Empire, Theobald Bethmann-Holweg and the ongoing militarism in Germany, Höch writes about the new Campanile that «blushes» at the beauty of the city and she ironically describes the Baroque church of Sancta Maria Salute as being as «chaste» as Rosa Valetti (1869 — 1937). Höch ’ s statement is tongue-in-cheek for Valetti, a cabaret singer and actress, was known for numbers featuring social criticism and political satire: the songs she performed at the Café Grössenwahn in Berlin were about issues of class, sex, and politics (Jelavich 136). Höch also compares St. Mark ’ s Square with Berlin ’ s Unter den Linden in order to criticize Kaiser Wilhelm for having melted down German church bells during the war to make cannon balls, charging that if he had been in Venice he would have melted down the four horses of San Marco for the same purpose. Sarcastically, she notes that new buildings and sculptures can be built to replace those destroyed. Berlin, in fact, already has its new neoclassical buildings by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, including the Neue Wache along Unter den Linden, situated not far from the equestrian statue of Frederick the Great, which Höch compares to that of Colleoni in Venice. Germany, and Berlin in particular, can try to make itself as great or as interesting as Italy, but it falls short in its architecture and monuments, and in the attitudes of Germans towards the preservation of both. Goethe had high praise for the buildings of classical antiquity and disparaged any newer architecture, especially that found in northern Europe. 316 Melissa Johnson In his entry of October 27 he remarks on the grandeur of the Roman aqueduct at Spoleto that had stood for centuries (Goethe, Italienische Reise 121). The grandeur of the ancient architecture Goethe sees in Italy prompts him to exclaim how correct he had been to despise all «Willkürlichkeiten,» and he constrasts the acqueduct to the Winterkasten on the Wilhelmshöhe near Kassel which he describes as «ein Nichts um Nichts, ein ungeheurer Konfektaufsatz» (122). Goethe ’ s characterization echoes Höch ’ s comment on the new kitschy monument to Vittorio Emanuele in Rome, «welches hier gar arg stört - aber Berlin komplett machen würde; weshalb ich es für eine Aufgabe der Dadaisten halte, es nach dort zu überführen» (LC II, 2: 62). Goethe and Höch both had high praise for the amphitheater in Verona. It is the first important monument of classical antiquity that Goethe sees. He knows that he is seeing something great, but feels that he is seeing nothing; it should have been full of people and Goethe imagines what that would have been like (Goethe, Italienische Reise 40). Höch praises the arena for its «organisch geschichteten Steinmassen» which, in contrast, make her think of the «armselige Gebausel fabriziert» in Berlin and the entire world, except for the skyscrapers in New York, «wie stolz man auf sie ist» (LC II, 2: 60). The Dadaist nature of Höch ’ s report is especially clear in those places where her writing takes on the characteristics of what Walter Benjamin described as «word salad,» «tactile,» and «missile»-like (Benjamin 39). Much like the manifestos of her Dadaist colleagues, Höch ’ s language throughout her report works to destabilize any sense of coherence on the part of both the reader/ listener. Scholars, like Mondada, examining the genre of travel writing for what it is supposed to do, note that the goal is to provide knowledge and certainty (Mondada 65). This coherent self, falsely reinforced by the tradition of Renaissance perspective, could no longer hold true for the Dadaists and Höch made this very clear when she described the experience of being in the Italian landscape, specifically in Bozen. Und Bozen hat die Virglbahn und da schaut man hinunter - und Berlin hat nichts, von wo man hinunterschauen kann, es sei denn die Untergrundbahn; und ein Rosengarten ist auch hier, aber nicht König Laurin seiner, sondern Kaiserin Augusta Viktoria herrscht da und hat ein Korsett an. (LC II, 2: 60) In this passage we find the one instance in her report where Höch refers directly to her actual travels. Höch noted in her travel diary that she, Grete, and Ullmann rode up the Bozener Virglbahn, a funicular railway built in 1907 to provide access to a view of the Dolomite mountain range, specifically of King Laurin ’ s Garden - the chain of mountains that glow red at sunset (LC I, 2: 700). Legend has it that the dwarf King Laurin, in order to hide from his enemies, put a spell on the rose garden that covered his mountains, thus 317 Italy zerwühlt: Hannah Höch ’ s Dadaist Italienreise turning the garden to rock. In one sentence Höch incorporates the Virglbahn into her Italienreise in order to compare Italy to Germany, or more specifically here, Bolzano to Berlin, and the result feels like a ping-pong match between the two cities. Travel writers often make comparisons between their homeland and the places visited as a way to make sense of what they saw and, in the process, make the strange familiar. However, Höch ’ s account defamiliarizes both Italy and Germany when she moves from one location to the other and her writing style shifts from a relatively straightforward voice - «Und Bozen hat die Virglbahn und da schaut man hinunter [. . .]» - to a destabilizing Dadaist voice - «und Berlin hat nichts, von wo man hinunterschauen kann, es sei denn die Untergrundbahn.» The remainder of the sentence is entirely Dadaist: there is a rose garden in Berlin, but it isn ’ t King Laurin ’ s. Instead of King Laurin, the Empress Augusta Viktoria reigns in Berlin, and she wears a corset. What to make of these statements? What does Höch mean? While there may have been many rose gardens in Berlin, perhaps Höch refers to the Arbor of Roses growing in the Berlin Botanical Gardens? Augusta Viktoria was the last German Empress and Queen of Prussia, partner to Kaiser Wilhelm, but why does Höch say that she reigns, and not the Kaiser? Neither was in Berlin in 1921; they had moved to the Netherlands and the only Viktoria in Berlin was the Siegesäule in the Tiergarten. Berliners refer to it as the Viktoria, and the angel on the column wears a corset. The Dadaist collage-like structure of Höch ’ s writing is especially strong in this sentence as Höch veers from one subject to another using the landscape and a sense of place as denotation, but destroying any sense of a possible journey. She begins this section in her paragraph on Bozen with the phrase «die da oben» to reference those in power who, once things return to normal, will revert back to their former ways. When she shifts from the topic of politics to the Bozener Virglbahn, she radically shifts direction, turning north to Berlin. In this up and down movement, from Italy to Germany, and back again, Höch confusingly shifts from «hier» to «da.» At one instant we are at the top of the Virglbahn, and then down in the Berlin subway; «hier» in a Berlin rose garden, and «da» at the Siegessäule. Höch ’ s language, like the «biedre [sic] Tirolervolk» is zerwühlt; she seemingly can ’ t tell «hier» from «da.» But of course Höch ’ s churning up of language is a conscious manipulation of language to express her own experiences of travel and of the post-war world by manipulating and subverting the experience of her listeners and readers so that they recognize how their own sense of the world has been destabilized, and as a result, they become Dada. This destabilized Dadaist self contrasts greatly with the coherent self created through Goethe ’ s description of the Italian landscape. Goethe, well- 318 Melissa Johnson versed in the genre of landscape painting and drawing, understood the meaning of landscape as «the subordination of topographic and cultural features to a single, coherent, dominating gaze» (Beebee 330). Goethe utilized his descriptions of the landscape, on the one hand, to understand how Italians viewed their country, and on the other, to compare the Italian and German landscapes. Again, it is Goethe ’ s intention to find continuity with the world of classical antiquity and to bring his senses into balance. Höch works against any sense of balance and order, even disallowing the use of maps as a means of orienting people through the landscape. For example, in her section on Verona she remarks: «In Verona hat man sich Hinaufschauen abgewöhnt, weil es auf dem Perthes ’ chen Atlas in der Lombardischen Tiefbene liegt» (LC II, 2: 60). In post-war Italy it seems that even the logic of map-reading has been affected by the war. Verona also offers Höch the opportunity to praise the food she discovers in Italy, especially on the Piazza Erbe where one can buy stewed pears, chestnuts, persimmons, puff pastry, fish cooked in oil, baked goods, and, Höch exclaims with delight, «grosse, süsse, o freue dich deutsches Gemüt, Kartoffeln, aber süsse, und nur mal so, zum Pläsier - nicht von wegen - einziges Volksnahrungsmittel» (LC II, 2: 60 - 1). Furthermore, she observes it is possible to shop at midnight on Sundays, «preussische Polizeiordnung hat hier nicht zu gebieten. Jeder kocht und brät für wen und wann es ihm Spas macht - man sagt im Völkerbund sei ’ s ebenso» (LC II, 2: 61). Höch takes aim here at the blandness of German food, implying that Germans eat only for nutrition. The German police aren ’ t there to enforce shop hours and the League of Nations, formed at the end of World War I, has decreed freedom for all where cooking and eating is concerned. Germany, however, will not join the League of Nations until 1926, and, of course, leaves the organization in 1933 when Hitler comes to power. Food, then, is presented as important to national identity, as is eating the right kinds of food. Höch addresses food, politics, and national identity again in the last five sentences of her Italienreise. Höch ’ s paragraph on Rome is the last of her Italienreise, and her final sentences demonstrate just how zerwühlt the experience of travel was for a German Dadaist in postwar Italy. Rome was Höch ’ s final destination and, after she describes aspects of the city and comments on Italian women and men ’ s fashions, she compares the laziness of the Italian man to the Soviet government. This absurd juxtaposition marks the beginning of a final Dadaist crescendo: Denn wenn auch der Italiener ein sehr beweglicher Mann ist, so bringt er doch meistens vor lauter Beweglichkeit nichts zustande es geht ihm ähnlich, wie der 319 Italy zerwühlt: Hannah Höch ’ s Dadaist Italienreise russischen Sowjetregierung, die, wenn sie auch bestrebt ist, das Beste wollend zu probieren, um der Menschheit helfend, mit humanistischem Wollen verbessernd unter die Arme zu greifen bestrebend sich bemüht, doch noch nicht imstande war, die Zigarettenstummel aus den Katakomben zu entfernen, die mich so sehr an das deutsche Vaterland erinnern, weil sie ebenso abgebrannt sind wie dieses. Zur Porta Pia aber kommen herein blaurote Karren, mit köstlichen Aepfeln aber ein echter Alldeutscher isst ja alle Südfrüchte nicht, weil es unpatriotisch ist, und wenn man für Rassereinheit eintritt, so gibt es auch kein Fremdwort und da Italien aus lauter Fremdworten besteht, so ist es im Prinzip abzulehenen. Ich aber sage: Die Welt ist rund. Und so lange nicht die Eskimos in Toskana hausen wird es Chianti geben - weshalb ich meinen Bericht unvermutet schliesse (LC II, 2: 62) What does Höch mean by this comparison between the lazy Italian man and the Soviet government? Are or were there catacombs in the newly-formed Soviet Union, or were Soviets in Rome? And why do cigarette butts, in particular, cause Höch to think of the burnt-out landscape of post-war Germany. Clearly Höch is pitting nonsense against nonsense. Absurdity escalates further when she abruptly turns back to Rome, and remarks upon the «köstlichen» apples to be found in the Porta Pia, but warns «real» Germans against eating them because it would be unpatriotic. She makes clear how ridiculous this is by linking her warning to issues of racial purity and foreignness, and somehow, according to this logic, rejects Italy because Italian is a language foreign to Germans. As should be clear by now, looking for absolute logic or reason in these last sentences would be a mistake. Höch demonstrated throughout her account that logic could no longer guide an individual in understanding his or her place in the world, and so, she leaves her reader/ listener with a description of a world become absurd. At the same time, however, her description is accurately aimed. The «real» German Höch speaks of here is a member of the Alldeutscher Verband, an anti-Semitic, nationalist right-wing group founded in 1891 that was concerned with issues of racial purity, and Italian was being experienced as a foreign language by the «biedre [sic] Tirolervolk» who yearned to be German again. Looking back from our vantage point, Höch ’ s comments are seemingly prescient. Yet there is no way that she could have known how events would unfold over the next few decades. In 1921 Höch was responding to the recent past - the catastrophe of World War I - and she did so by penning a Dadaist grotesque travel account that took as its source Goethe ’ s Italienische Reise. Höch is one of many writers and artists who looked back to Goethe, to the idea of Goethe, his trip, and his account, and then wrote an account of her own travel. Firmly situated in the context of post-World War I Germany and Italy, the Dadaist avant-garde, and contemporary travel writing such as the Baedeker travel guides, Höch wrote an essay that, while indebted to 320 Melissa Johnson Goethe ’ s, was written against its grain. Goethe ’ s Italienische Reise demonstrates how travel and travel writing can establish for both writer and reader a sense of continuity with the past. It can also be used as a means to restore order and harmony to one ’ s sense of the world. Knowledge - perceived as empirical, objective, and unmediated - is obtained through travel such as Goethe ’ s, and conveyed via written travel accounts. Travel writing in its traditional form helps put the world in perspective by providing a logical framework. Höch, by utilizing the tactics of Dada and the genre of the literary grotesque, juxtaposed nonsensical phrases against seemingly objective observations, and wrote an Italienreise that transgresses and subverts the genre of travel writing at a very particular moment in time. In this she was absolutely prescient: World War I marked a moment of rupture; travel could no longer be experienced in the same way. And so Goethe and the genre of travel writing could no longer have the same meaning. For Höch, the world had become zerwühlt. Notes 1 Höch ’ s manuscript is housed in her archival collection at the Berlinische Galerie. A transcript of Hannah Höch ’ s Italienreise is included in Lebenscollage, volume 2, part 2: 59 - 62. The travel report is 1685 words in length, or approximately 3-pages singlespaced. Lebenscollage will be abbreviated as LC, the volumes as I or II, and the parts as 1 or 2. 2 Höch also designed the cover for this issue of NG. For an illustration see LC II, 1: 74. 3 The strikethroughs are original to Höch ’ s text. The last phrase, «die Novembergruppe,» has been erased but is still visible; the archivists at the Berlinische Galerie noted after this phrase «ausradiert. H. H.» 4 Höch, Reisetagebuch 1920 Italien - München. 7. Oktober bis 20. November. Höch Nachlaß, 13.51: 4 - 5. Höch noted her purchase of the Baedeker and Mayer Sprachführer on pages 4 and 5 respectively. This information is not transcribed in the published edition of Höch ’ s Nachlaß. 5 Joseph von Eichendorff, Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (1826), August von Platen, Sonette aus Venedig (1825), and Heinrich Heine, Reisebilder (1829,1830, 1831). 6 For these references see the following: Hugo Ball, «Dada Manifesto,» (1916), in Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary by Hugo Ball, 221; Richard Huelsenbeck, En avant Dada: a history of Dadaism (1920) in Robert Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets, an Anthology, 23, 28, and 43; Raoul Hausmann, «Vom neuen, freien Deutschen Reich» (LCI, 13.74, pp. 731 - 34, p. 732), and «Puffke propagiert Proletkult (Die Kunst ist heiter, mein Sohn)» (LC, 13.73, 7. 8. 1920/ 3. 1. 1921, pp. 726 - 31, 8 pp. ms, p.727). Kurt Schwitters, «I and my goals,» (description of Schwitters Merzbau and the «Goethe Grotto») translated in John Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters. London, 1985, 161. 7 For an image and interpretations of Meine Haussprüche see: Nentwig (2007), Schaske (2007), and Schulz (1989). 321 Italy zerwühlt: Hannah Höch ’ s Dadaist Italienreise 8 The lines that Goethe wrote to Christiane are slightly different, and read: «Wer sich nährt, den stosst nicht zurück, und wer sich entfernt, den haltet nicht fest, und wer wiederkommt, den nehmt auf, als wenn er nicht weg gewesen wäre.» (Goethe, Briefwechsel 123) Works Cited Baedeker, Karl. Italien von den Alpen bis Neapel. Kurzes Reisehandbuch von Karl Baedeker. 6 th ed. Leipzig: Verlag, 1908. Ball, Hugo. «Dada Manifesto, Zurich, July 14, 1916.» Flight Out of Time. Ed. John Elderfield. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. Beebee, Thomas O. «Ways of Seeing Italy: Landscapes of Nation in Goethe ’ s ‹ Italienische Reise › and Its Counter-Narratives.» Monatshefte 94.3 (Fall 2002): 322 - 45. Benjamin, Walter. «The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version.» The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008. 19 - 55. Bolliger, Hans, ed. «Hannah Höch. Bücher und Dokumente aus der Bibliothek der Berliner Malerin.» Katalog 7. Zürich: Hans Bolliger Bücher & Grafik, 1980. Cusack, Andrew. The Wanderer in Nineteenth-century [sic] German Literature: Intellectual History and Cultural Criticism. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008. Dickerman, Leah. «Introduction.» Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris. Washington D. C.: National Gallery of Art in Association with Distributed Art Publishers, New York, 2005. 1 - 15. Elderfield, John. Kurt Schwitters. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1985. Foster, Hal. «Dada Mime.» October 105 (Summer 2003). 167 - 76. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Briefwechsel mit seiner Frau. Vol. 2, 1807 - 1816. Ed. Hans Gerhard Graf. Frankfurt a. M.: Rutten & Loening, 1916. - . Italienische Reise. Vol. 11. Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 vols. Ed. Erich Trunz. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1989. Haakenson, Thomas. « ‹ The Merely Illusory Paradise of Habits › : Salomo Friedländer, Walter Benjamin, and the Grotesque.» New German Critique 106, 36.1 (Winter 2009): 119 - 47. Hausmann, Raoul. «Puffke propagiert Proletkult (Die Kunst ist heiter, mein Sohn).» Hannah Höch: Eine Lebenscollage. Archive Edition. Vol. 1: 1889 - 1920 (2 parts). Ed. Cornelia Thater-Schulz. Berlin: Berlinische Galerie and Argon, 1989. 726 - 31. - . «Vom neuen, freien Deutschen Reich. Hannah Höch: Eine Lebenscollage. Archive Edition. Vol. 1: 1889 - 1920 (2 parts). Ed. Cornelia Thater-Schulz. Berlin: Berlinische Galerie and Argon, 1989. 731 - 34. Hilger, Stephanie. Women Write Back: Strategies of Response and the Dynamics of European Literary Culture, 1790 - 1805. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. 322 Melissa Johnson Hochmeister, Gretchen, Italy in the German Literary Imagination: Goethe ’ s «Italian Journey» and Its Reception by Eichendorff, Platen, and Heine. Rochester: Camden House, 2002. Hannah Höch: Eine Lebenscollage. Archive Edition. Vol. 1: 1889 - 1920 (2 parts). Ed. Cornelia Thater-Schulz. Berlin: Berlinische Galerie and Argon, 1989. Hannah Höch: Eine Lebenscollage. Archive Edition. Vol. 2: 1921 - 1945 (2 parts). Ed. Ralf Burmeister and Eckhard Fürlus. Berlin: Berlinische Galerie and Hatje Cantz, 1995. Huelsenbeck, Richard. «En avant Dada: a history of Dadaism» (1920). The Dada Painters and Poets: an Anthology. Ed. Robert Motherwell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Jelavich, Peter. Berlin Cabaret. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Kallos, Kay Klein. A Woman ’ s Revolution: The Relationship Between Design and the Avant-Garde in the Work of Hannah Höch, 1912 - 1922. Dissertation. 1994. Kayser, Wolfgang. The Grotesque in Art and Literature. Bloomington: Indiana UP. 1963. Koshar, Rudy. German Travel Cultures. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Kracauer, Siegfried. «Travel and Dance.» The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. 65 - 73. Lanchner, Carolyn. «The Later Adventures of Dada ’ s ‹ Good Girl › : The Photomontages of Höch after 1933.» The Photomontages of Hannah Höch. Ed. Peter Boswell and Maria Makela. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1996. 129 - 51. Lavin, Maud. Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993. Makela, Maria. «By Design: The Early Work of Hannah Höch in Context.» The Photomontages of Hannah Höch. Ed. Peter Boswell and Maria Makela. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1996. 49 - 79. - . «Grotesque Bodies: Weimar-era Medicine and the Photomontages of Hannah Höch.» Modern Art and the Grotesque. Ed. Frances S. Connelly. New York: Cambridge UP, 2003. 193 - 219. Mondada, Lorenza. «Seeing as a Condition of Saying: On the Discursive Construction of Knowledge in Travel Accounts. Unravelling Civilisation: European Travel and Travel Writing. Ed. Hagen Schulz-Forberg. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2005. 63 - 85. Nentwig, Janina. «Meine Haussprüche.» Hannah Höch: Aller Anfang ist DADA! Ed. Ralf Baumeister. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2007. 50. Reagin, Nancy. «The Imagined Hausfrau: National Identity, Domesticity, and Colonialism in Imperial Germany.» The Journal of Modern History 73 (March 2001): 54 - 86. Roberson, Susan L. «Introduction.» Defining Travel: Diverse Visions. Ed. Susan L. Roberson. Jackson: UP of Mississippi. xi - xxvi. Schaschke, Bettina. «Schnittmuster der Kunst: Zu Hannah Höchs Prinzipien der Gestaltung.» Hannah Höch: Aller Anfang ist DADA! Ed. Ralf Baumeister. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2007. 118 - 35. 323 Italy zerwühlt: Hannah Höch ’ s Dadaist Italienreise Schulz, Armin. «Bild- und Vokabelmischungen sind Weltanschauungen. Zu Hannah Höchs Collage, Meine Haussprüche.» Hannah Höch 1889 - 1978. Ihr Werk - Ihr Leben - Ihre Freunde. Exhibition Cat. Berlin: Berlinische Galerie. 1989. 133 - 45. Schulz-Forberg, Hagen. «Introduction: European Travel and Travel Writing. Cultural Practice and the Idea of Europe. Unravelling Civilisation: European Travel and Travel Writing. Ed. Hagen Schulz-Forberg. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2005. 13 - 40. Sheppard, Richard. Modernism - Dada - Postmodernism. Evanston: Northwestern UP. 2000 Thomson, Philip J. The Grotesque. London: Methuen. 1972. 324 Melissa Johnson