Paper for Prof. Bo Stråth’s seminar: Rewriting History, presented by Hagen Schulz-Forberg
Agents of Authenticity -
Travellers and Travel Writing
How to Find a Historiographic Approach
I. Project Description and Historical Background
Knowledge of the city is a dilettante, often dispersed knowledge in which information and experience, observation and commitment or subjective inclinations touch each other.
(Karlheinz Stierle)
My project carries the title: 2 1/2 Metropolises: 99 Years of Travel Writing on London, Paris and Berlin, 1848-1947.
I am using travel writings of German, English and French travellers into each others capitals. My aim is to compare the perceptions of national travellers of the two other nations, this means that I am reading German and French travel books on London, German and English travel books on Paris and French and English travel writings on Berlin.
In order to be able to work with a manageable amount of source material I have decided to cut my 99 years into three time cubes for each of the three sections of sources. To reach these time cubes I have created a vast bibliography of all the travel books written in these years to find out around which years there is a cluster of more travel writings than usual. I thus tried to find a way towards choosing my sources which is not too much determined by a pre-constructed historical argument.
The reason for choosing the capitals of London, Paris and Berlin is motivated by many reasons. First, in London, Paris and Berlin, many places can be found which were supposed to represent the character of the nation; second, many encounters were made which the travellers thought of as having an explanatory value of the other, and many events experienced which seemed to tell revealing anecdotes to the foreigners; third, the cities witnessed tremendous changes throughout these hundred years. The national project was carried out in the capitals. They are places of representation, just for their being capitals.
Of course, there exist other places of national meaning such as the Rhine in Germany, the Lake District in England and Provence in France, landscapes thought of as typical and enormously important for the constitution of national identity. But the urban landscapes of the capitals are more diverse, and they are as kaleidoscopic as the interests of the travel writers. What is more, every sort of social and political change becomes visible in the capitals, be it in the form of an official monument, a commemoration day, or the development of a city quarter, such as Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg and London’s East End, or Les Halles in Paris.
Moreover, towns change rapidly, adapting to modernisation and industrialisation, they mirror in many ways the political and cultural development of the countries, and, by way of description, travel writers can explain their neighbours, who appear to be so strange. The city itself, if seen as a text which can be read, is at the same time much more than that: it is a textual image going beyond the text; it is a discourse, creating semiosis.[1] Semiosis means that there exists a dynamic creation of meaning, a constant recreation of sign networks that is reconfirmed continuously. This process is only possible when the city has already been described once. The description is necessary for the signs of the city to oscillate their meaning. Furthermore, the description pours the wild knowledge of city signs into a readable form. The description of the city then creates a certain attention which leads to the formation of an interpretative tissue. The chain of city-semiosis began in Paris, it was Sébastian Mercier who started to create the first interpretative tissue of Paris with his Tableaux de Paris (1782-1788). The experience of a city ever since then is always at least twofold: the interpreter of signs is on the one hand confronted with the physical or imaginary phenomena of the city and on the other hand bound to articulations, to perspectives dependant on description.
This insinuates that the city already has a discursive physiognomy which is revealed and isolated by description. Every experience of the city is a silent, a mute one as long as it does not align itself with these physiognomies, translating the language into a new, maybe even individual form. On a larger time scale this leads to a dynamic evolution of description and interpretation.
Furthermore, and on a more sober level, London, Paris and Berlin are the capitals of the then most important world powers. In the cities, a nexus of cultural and political phenomena emerges, manifesting itself in official monuments and events, representing the nation. Certainly, Berlin was not a major town in 1848, but as the capital of Prussia and a place of bourgeois revolution it clearly became more important as Prussia rose to power and German hopes for unity began to rest on Prussian hegemony. It was not until the 1890s, however, that Berlin became a truly metropolitan town, if a large number of industries are suffice to create a metropolis. Here lies the reason for the title's missing half: 2 _ Metropolises reflects Berlin’s provincial character in the second half of the 19th century as compared to Paris and London. It is very interesting to see how a Prussian town developed into a German one, to see how the reading and writing of and about the city changes from the sad story of wool and iron manufacturing in the middle of the 19th to the power engine of evil in the middle of the 20th century.
The time frame of the project is set as it is in order to include the many political and economic changes and developments, to include the caesuras and ruptures of the three countries’ relations and to thus be able to show how the travellers’ perception of the cities changed through time.
An interesting city to draw into the comparison would certainly be Moscow. But the inclusion of it lies beyond the scope of my project and remains to be dealt with. Moreover, New York might also have been an interesting case to draw into the comparison. However, it would lead away from the shores of Europe and again establish a Europe-New World context, and my study is designed to take a closer look at Western Europe; I will employ the tools of research produced in the annus mirabilus of work on nationalism, 1983, when Hobsbawm and Ranger, Anderson, and Gellner published their works on the imagined or invented communities.
II. Nationalism, Tourism, Travel - Inscribing Identity and Manifesting Authenticity
Tourism brings out what may prove to be a crucial feature of modern capitalist culture: a cultural consensus that creates hostility rather than community among individuals
(Jonathan Culler)
The span of ninety-nine years is in many ways decisive for my approach in particular, and for the theoretical legitimacy of the study in general. The one year short of a hundred years mark the heyday of nationalism, or as Hugh Seton-Watson has termed it, the heyday of official nationalism, the transformation of the national idea from the growing bourgeois middle strata, the liberal movements of the early 19th century, to the governmental usage of the national idea as a sort of conservative integration, a tool for governments to remain in power and to create social coherence;[2] a tool which was still in use after the First World War as well as after the Second. And even today, Seton-Watson’s conclusion still holds true „that no 'scientific definition' of the nation can be devised; yet the phenomenon has existed and exists.“[3]
From 1848 to 1947 the image of the nation in Germany, England and France, was reconstructed several times, or reinvented and re-imagined. France saw the rise of Napoleon III., the Paris commune, the Third Republic, two world wars and several struggles with Prussia and Austria, the Crimean War, Colonisation, the race for the place at the sun, etc. In Paris, Haussmann changed Paris radically, other cities followed this example, marking the advance of the planned city,[4] turning the capitals into construction sites of national identity.
The ninety-nine years also mark the institutionalisation of tourism. The leisure cruise established itself firmly in the middle of the 19th century.[5] Reference books for tourists, the guide books of John Murray and Karl Baedeker, began to root themselves in the travel discourse and, indeed, shaped it to quite an extent, in the late 1820’s and 1830’s.[6] Murray’s guidebook was so successful that already in 1855 one reviewer wrote that „since Napoleon no man’s empire has been so wide“.[7] Baedeker could boast a similar success,[8] as could Thomas Cook.
For example, already in 1838, the Rhine was frequented by tourists, and had a tourist industry which was well developed and which rendered the actual travel almost superfluous, as Karl Simrock observed:
Travel books, postcards, panoramas, painted and plastic representations of single places as well as longer routes, collections of legends in verse and prose, and thousands of other travel facilities are available in every art- and bookshop in such large numbers, that between Mayence and Cologne, hardly any house, hardly any tree can be found that has not set a pen or an engraving tool in motion. The region has been described, pictured and painted in such variant ways that in the end you could save money and, with the same indulgence, travel within your own four walls.[9]
Other guides existed as well: guides for Paris and London, among them for example Galignani’s New Paris Guide of 1839 - the reference book of its time for the French capital. Furthermore, E. Kolloff’s two-volume Parisian guide from 1849 could be read to tour the real or imaginary places of the one-year-old Revolution.[10] Group travel, organized by a travel agent, began with the activities of Thomas Cook who set up the first tourist tour in 1845, checking places beforehand, renting hotel rooms and printing leaflets about how to enjoy the foreign parts in the most appropriate way.[11]
At the other end of my time frame, in the middle of the 20th century, travelling was still not a mass event. The beginning of mass tourism has caused some scholars to argue that this event charged the nature of travel writing to such a degree that it is no longer even recognisable or valuable as a source as such. This argument is frequently employed, it appears to be common knowledge today to think that after the second world war, travel writing lost quality and impact. And, this time, I follow the argument. It is one of the reasons for the end of my time frame. But, to my mind, this is the case because of the introduction of different media. Radio and television took over as reporters of news. Beginnings of the slow fading of travel writing can surely be detected in the inter-war period. But even though the birth of mass tourism was visible in the 1920s, the leisure industry had not taken hold of all of Europe. For the Weimar Republic, Christine Keitz has shown the origins of workers’ tours and the advent of mass tourism in general;[12] French and English travellers could be met in large numbers, for example, on the Rhine,[13] when in 1928 as many as 2,649 million tourists travelled up and down the „river of the fatherland“.[14]
In Italy, the Ente Nazionale per le Industrie Turistiche was founded in 1919, and the first statistical study on tourism appeared in 1933. However, the economic crisis and the Second World War limited access of the tourist industry to the lower strata of society. Even though since the 1910s the leisure industry had begun to include workers on a larger scale than Thomas Cook’s workers’ excursions to the Great Exhibition of 1851, because, e.g. in Germany, some employers had granted their employees a single paid holiday a year, a holiday of six days.[15] Yet the lack of time and money for travelling hindered the lower strata from travelling widely and massively. But, on the other hand, it fostered the existence of short, planned, tourist trips.
There is no set definition of a time frame which could accurately represent the beginning and end of travel writing, or tourism without 'mass' as a prefix. This definition seems - and this is hardly surprising - to depend on each historian’s individual settings. James Buzard, for example, argues that in 1918 the period of 19th century travel ended, precisely because of the establishment of Italy’s tourist board in 1919.[16] Buzard assumes a homogenous discourse in what he calls the inter-war period between the Napoleonic Wars and the Great War, thereby denying the importance of the Crimean War, the Prussian Wars from 1864 to 1871, the events of national unity in Italy and Germany, the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, etc.. The 19th century was in many ways the century of warfare until 1871. Only between the foundation of the German Empire and the Great War of 1914 were there no major clashes, largely because the imperialistic nations had transferred their quarrels to the colonies.
This slight flaw in Buzard’s otherwise brilliant study may have been caused by his overzealous attempt to develop a homogenous time frame. For me, these disruptions and the political and cultural changes are my actual point of departure for a study of how these changes root themselves in the cultural perceptions expressed in travel writing and how they shaped the discourse of the national imaginary.[17]
From the late 1830s until the 1950s the usual way of going to another culture would be the train and the ship, industrialising the travellers’ space and time.[18] „Mass“ tourism had not yet taken its hold on the continent. Rather, together with the emergence of tourism and the immediate stigmatisation of those wretched tourists, the phenomenon of anti-tourism is born.[19] This phenomenon includes the argument that both the figure of the tourist - as a commodity and a mindless good of the leisure industry - and that of the traveller - the individualistic hero finding his or her way in foreign and adventurous parts of the world- are culturally constructed. The romantic notion of the traveller belongs to tourism and is connected to the notion of anti-tourism, which is also incorporated in tourism, since most travellers, I refer to people taking a journey, are attracted to originality and authenticity, to places which are not overcrowded.