830 Literaturen germanischer Sprachen; Deutsche Literatur
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This article analyses processes of collective and individual identity formation in European travel writing from the late eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth century and argues that these processes are based not least on the national stereotypes described and performed in the texts. I explore how the genre-specific stylistic elements of multilingualism and intertextuality inform the performance of auto- and hetero-images and in doing so suggest converging travel writing studies and imagological studies. To illustrate my thesis, I analyse travelogues by Charles Dickens and Karl Philipp Moritz.
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.
This essay examines the differing contexts and modes of encounter with Islamic culture in the travel writing of two contrasting women, the Prussian Countess Ida Hahn-Hahn and the Austrian Maria Schuber: both travelled to and wrote from the Middle East in the 1830s and 1840s and published their letters as collections. The encounters both women had with Islam were conditioned, at least in part, by their respective stance on religion, issues of gender and social class, and by the obligations of patronage and the expectations of distinct readerships. Whilst both women can be seen to write about Islam as a religion and culture defined by its difference to Christianity, both can also be seen in differing ways and to differing extents to represent Islam and Muslims as simultaneously belonging to a universal and inclusive notion of humanity and human religion. Thus, without embracing high philosophical discourse of Kant or Hegel, both women can be seen to demonstrate cosmopolitan impulses towards Islam, although these jostle for ascendancy with a more Eurocentric, Christian and indeed völkisch vision of the relationship between cultures.