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. 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