Of Sentimentalists, Rebels, and the Musically Attuned: Nineteenth-Century German Travel Writing on Ireland

Abstract

Of Sentimentalists, Rebels, and the Musically Attuned:Nineteenth-Century German Travel Writing on Ireland Felix Morgenstern (bio) There I want to see for myself the songs of a truly vital people, to witness everything they produce and do, to see the very places themselves that come to life throughout the songs, to study the rest of customs in this ancient world! … How I look forward to embarking on this plan! johann gottfried herder, über ossian und die lieder aLter völker in the enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, German philosopher and theologian Johann Gottfried Herder articulated his romantic infatuation with the Gaelic bard Ossian and coined the very term Volkslied ("folk song") to encapsulate the ways in which the folk gives voice to its cultural distinctiveness in song.1 Herder's enormously influential theories not only provided Romantic intellectuals in the German-speaking lands and in colonial Ireland with the critical pre-modern cultural foundations for sounding two modern European nation-states into being.2 It turns out, this particular iteration of literary Ossianism, [End Page 99] as it swept across Europe from the late Enlightenment onward, was also instrumental in sending several nineteenth-century German intellectuals on leisured travels to Ireland.3 Many of these agents, including nobleman Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau (1785–1871), the liberal-nationalist publicist Jakob Venedey (1805–1871), and Baroness Magdalena (Helene) von Dobeneck (1808–1891), recognized that they had to physically visit Ireland to truly experience the emotional dimension they discursively attributed to literary Celticism, and to sense how it was connected to nature and became most forcefully expressed in musical form.4 A critical appraisal of translated excerpts from these selected nineteenth-century German travel writings has much to offer Irish Studies, and the argument is twofold. First, these Ossian-inflected German travelogues contributed significantly to fashioning and distributing among the bourgeois European intelligentsia a remarkably persistent web of German imaginaries of Ireland—as a proximal, yet alternative, site of European culture, as a mythical repository of the sensuous and the sublime in folk music, and as a canvas for the projection of political longings for a unified German statehood upon Ireland's colonial situation.5 Second, I make a claim for the crucial work that nostalgic longing has accomplished in sustaining and refracting these (often stereotypical) discursive imaginaries in complex ways, throughout the historical longue durée. As a suitable conceptual scaffold for theorizing the ramifications of nineteenth-century German travel writers' romantic gazes upon Ireland and its traditional music, I adapt Svetlana Boym's model of "sideways nostalgia." Following Boym, sideways nostalgia is not necessarily directed to the past but toward the experiences of [End Page 100] social actors situated in other places and times. This yearning, she writes, thrives on the non-native nostalgist's remoteness from the object of desire, involves mediation between the local and the displaced, and constitutes a longing in which distance creates affinity dynamics and "the vantage point of a stranger informs the native idyll."6 In a truly Ossianic fashion, several upper- and middle-class Germans, most of whom traveled to Ireland for educational purposes in the Romantic period, remark how they become attuned to the senses and to nature. Indeed, their accounts are interspersed with detailed descriptions of dramatic, windswept cliffs, misty mountain ranges, and the ruins of ancient castles. Nobleman Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau's widely read correspondence from his travels in Ireland in 1828 and Baroness Magdalena von Dobeneck's Irish travelogue arguably represent some of the most prominent indicators of this fascination.7 Because of the manner in which Pückler's and Dobeneck's Ossian-inflected writings provide specific commentary on Irish traditional music, an expressive medium in which the authors claim to recognize refractions of a purported Ossianic sublime, their work occupies a central position in this article.8 However, it is equally important to highlight other nineteenth-century German travelers to Ireland, such as the middle-class, liberal-nationalist publicist Jakob Venedey, who, for personal aesthetic reasons, offers much less favorable commentary on musical affairs. At the same time, Venedey expresses strong sympathies for the Irish Catholic underclass, whose fight, under Daniel...