Identity, Celtomania and the Narrative of Wales in Travel Writing in German from 1850 to 1905

Abstract

The focus of travelogues shifts from the industrial to the cultural, while the advance of Celtic Studies on the Continent leads to a far deeper engagement with the indigenous culture. Many such engaged writers viewed the development of tourism, of which they were of course a symptom, as a palpable threat to the survival of Welsh culture. This reflects concerns about the situation closer to home as the German states moved towards unification in 1871 and the realisation of a political underpinning to the long-held sense of a common ‘national’ German identity. The image of Wales which emerges by the end of the century is a distillation of cultural elements, - bards, princes, legends, - which can to some extent be seen as an attempt to preserve the cultural alterity deemed to be under threat. This century of Germanophone writing about Wales sees the consolidation of a Welsh narrative which, while sharing numerous themes with Francophone writers, nevertheless addresses over time a number of key German concerns around national identity, the advance of modernity and the place of ancient cultures in the modern world.