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. 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