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Most Germans went first to Great Britain to witness and describe what in comparison to the conditions in the German petty principalities was very progressive in its industrial advancement, free trade, extraordinary wealth-creation, very advanced civil rights and parliamentary democracy and to hold it up as a model to the Germans. Some then added on a trip to Ireland, which after all was a part of the political entity "The United Kingdom", to see, as they thought, more of the same. Instead they came face to face with the most abject poverty any of them had ever experienced, including the professional ethnographer Johann Georg Kohl, who had been all over Europe and as far as Siberia. For the Vormärz authors this raised questions as to why "John Bull's other island", as George Bernhard Shaw would much later call Ireland, was so utterly neglected
This essay focuses on Malwida von Meysenbug's (1816-1903) rebellious 'travel diary' entitled "Eine Reise nach Ostende" (1849) and her 'extravagant' travels to the Belgian seaside resort, which she undertook together with her girlfriends Anna Koppe and Elisabeth Althaus during June and July 1849. This text, which was written during the late summer and early autumn of 1949 and published posthumously in 1905 by Gabriel Monod, is both a very personal, almost intimate representation of the failing revolution and a performance of transgression by an unmarried 33-year old female member of the lower ranks of aristocracy.