Moving Scenes: The Aesthetics of German Travel Writing on England 1783-1830 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Moving Scenes: The Aesthetics of German Travel Writing on England 1783-1830 Michael Ritterson Alison E. Martin , Moving Scenes: The Aesthetics of German Travel Writing on England 1783–1830, Studies in Comparative Literature 13 (Oxford: Legenda, 2008). Pp. xi,187. $89.50. In her chapter "Sympathy and Spectacle: Visual Representation in Johanna Schopenhauer's Reise durch England und Schottland," Alison E. Martin notes: "Goethe, [the aesthetician Carl Ludwig] Fernow, and many like them had been magnetized by the form and the light of the Italian countryside in the classical arcadian visions embodied by Nicolas Poussin or Claude Lorrain. However, as the eighteenth century drew to a close, it was increasingly the landscape of Britain that caught the imagination of German travellers" (115). Much of the British Isles' appeal lay in their rugged, irregular, somber landscapes and views that charmed with nature's imperfections.more consonant with the Romantic sensibilities of the new century than the "form and light of the Italian countryside." But even before the time of Schopenhauer's travels in England and Scotland (1803–05), there had been more than captivating landscapes to stimulate German interest in and travel to Britain: the Enlightenment had brought technological breakthroughs, "new intellectual and moral values, new canons of taste, forms of sociability, and views on human nature" (7). Martin's study is not meant to be a comprehensive survey of German travelogues on England in the fifty years under consideration; rather it offers detailed analysis of six accounts from a variety of political, social, and stylistic positions within German culture of the period. She notes in her introduction that "the claim of travel writers to speak with an authentic voice was . . . closely bound up with the discourses they employed. . . . The ability to engage affectively with the subject by means of imaginative projection was . . . paramount in this creation of a new style of travel writing" (4). Her twofold aim is therefore to analyze certain rhetorical practices in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century German travel writing "to demonstrate how the traveller.the moving figure.was also moved by what he or she observed," and "to capture something of the range of impulses that travel writing gained from other aesthetic practices (not necessarily literary) for the purposes of sympathetic representation and in so doing to better understand the range of representational devices on which travel writers of this period drew" (5). The six writers thus selected are not best remembered for their travel accounts. Besides, and often obscuring, their activity as travel writers, they pursued interests and careers as educators, classicists, theologians, journalists, novelists, translators, essayists, salonnières, and theorists of music and painting. Three—Karl Philipp Moritz, Sophie von La Roche, and Johanna Schopenhauer.are still familiar names from the period; Esther Domeier (née Gad), Carl Gottlieb Horstig, and August Hermann Niemeyer are probably all but forgotten. All six seem to have shared a belief that vitality in travel writing, leaving a warm, vibrant impression on the readership, was necessary for a convincingly "truthful" account of the traveler's experience. Martin analyzes the modes these German visitors employed in presenting their observations, seeking to revivify scenes in the mind's eye of their readers rather than to lay out objective, informative, but ultimately lifeless collections of facts and descriptions. She takes these six case studies in the order of publication of their travel accounts, beginning with Karl Philipp Moritz's of 1783. Moritz, then a budding [End Page 278] novelist experimenting with character dialogue, reproduced scenes from the debates in Parliament and exchanges on the streets of London, with less concern for the content of oral discourse than for the rhetorical effect he had observed, creating a sense of immediacy and authenticity for his German readers. Sophie von La Roche, author of the quintessential German sentimental novel, Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771), exemplifies for Martin the "problem of sensibility," that is, La Roche's attempt, as the first German woman to publish an account of travel to England, to balance "female" sentimental reflection with empirical narrative, description, and the rational ordering of evidence.all generally considered the preserve of male discourse. Though she sometimes failed to achieve...