Thesis-Abstract for Professor Bo Stråth’s Seminar Writing History,
29. October 2001
by
Hagen Schulz-Forberg
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2 ½ Metropolises
English, French and German Travel Writing on
London, Paris and Berlin,
1851 to 1939
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter I : Conditions
a) Nationalism, Tourism, Travel
b) Travel Writing - Genre Aspects
c) Methodology
Chapter II : 2 ½ Metropolises
a) London
b) Paris
c) Berlin
Chapter IV : Sound & Vision
a) Inter-Sensuality, Inter-Mediality and the
Magic of the Moment
b) Dissolving Views
c) Live Recordings
Chapter V : Lasting Ideas
a) Locations of Liberty in London
b) Civilization, Art and Europe
Conclusions
Chapter III : Encounters
a) National Encounters
English
French
German
b) Female/Male Encounters
c) Stereotypical Encounters
Class
Minorities
Cast of Characters
Biographical Notes on Travel Writers
Bibliography
The title of my dissertation refers to the metropolises-status of the three cities under study.
Since, during my period, Berlin is only on the way of becoming a metropolis, it constitutes the
½ of the title.
My sources are published travel writings, that is: books intentionally written to describe and
explain the foreign capital. I compare English and German travel writings to Paris, German
and French travel writings to London, and French and English travel writing to Berlin. At the
beginning I structured my thesis among national divides and chronologically. After reading
the travel books intensively I found that they constitute a European genre, indeed, an almost
universal genre when reading travel writings from the Arab world to Europe, for example, and
finding the same anthropological curiosity; all travel writers have the same set of questions
and the same interest. The answers to these questions are different because of the
physiognomy of the city and the supposed national characters, which is scrutinized in an
anthropological way by the authors.
The comparative element of the study is not lost, rather, through describing the foreign nation,
travel writers have to state something on their own nation as well, there is thus in every
interpretation done by the travel writers an inherent comparison without which there could be
no interpretation at all; Michel de Certeau has pointed this out.
The time frame is 1851 to 1939 because these two dates mark great divides. In the 1850s, after
the bourgeois revolutions, a communicational revolution took place as well: train and steam
engine brought people and information closer together. On top of it, as Roland Barthes
claimed, all ‘classical’ pieces of literature are disintegrating. Furthermore, the modern urban
discourse, the mythology of the metropolis is beginning to root itself firmly at that time with
Hugo, Baudelaire and Dickens as some of the representatives. In 1939, travel was hindered
through the Second World War and after it the old narratives began to erode.
Additionally, my period is the high period of nationalism, official nationalism, that is. It is the
period of industrialization, in which all great cities experienced a fungus-like growth,
providing a colourful background for the traveller’s investigations. In the big cities everything
which characterizes a nation was focused. And travellers could go there and interpret it.
Furthermore, all problems of the modern society are found in the cities as well: crime,
prostitution, social problems, workers, female rights movements, construction work,
monuments representing the nation, the state of art, civilization and culture was under
scrutiny, nothing less.
The period between 1851 and 1939 is also a period of coherency within the genre of travel
writing in Europe. Throughout the first half of the 19th century writers such as Gerard de
Nerval, Charles Dickens and Heinrich Heine helped the genre to gain a literary quality and to
be able to adapt to modern urban times, actually becoming a great amplifier of the urban
mythologies by adapting to them through a newly employed feuilleton-like style of writing.
After 1939, the narrative structures changed as well as the whole set-up of Europe. Travel
writing was only reborn as a genre in the 1970s, this time in a post-modern form though it ahs
always been very self-reflexive.
Chapter I : Conditions
In the first chapter I elaborate on the points raised above in detail, discussing:
• the genre of travel writing
• the phenomenon of tourism and nationalism
• the urban discourse
Furthermore, I show how alike travel writing and historiography are, exploring
• historiographical theory
• modes of interpretation
• formal aspects of both travel writing and historiography
• proposing of a methodology which finds itself from within the sources in reference to the
interest of the historian, I call ‘dialogical hermeneutics’
Chapter II : 2½ Metropolises
This chapter is dedicated to the three cities. I explore the description and interpretation of the
metropolises and follow the travellers’ route both through the physical reality of the cities as
well as through the interpretative picture they draw. I will show how the points of reference
which characterize the cities and their people change through time and present a sometimes
different picture on the whole. I conceive of this like of a children’s game in which you have
to connect numbers and through the line drawn between the numbers an image becomes
visible.
Throughout my period the numbers, or the points of reference, the sights, which are connected
change and thus create a different final picture, even though sometimes only slightly so. In the
case of Berlin and the Germany it represents these changes are most obvious. Yet London and
Paris change as well.
Chapter III : Encounters
This chapter reflects the ‘standard’ approach to travel literature, taking heed of the encounters
with the foreign nation. How do German and French travellers perceive the English and vice
versa. The chapter is grouped thematically, beginning with the general features associated
with the different nations and their changes, and continuing with female/male encounters,
with special female and male characters as well as general gender characteristics; finishing
with an analysis of stereotypical encounters of class, minorities and individual characters.
Chapter IV : Lasting Ideas
This chapter deals with two conglomerates of ideas: liberty and Europe. Both play a vital role
in the discussion of the other societies. Liberty is followed through the writings on London
and Paris, reflecting on the English and French position as well and thus combining all three
different versions of liberty in the two capitals of liberty, of individual and of egalitarian
liberty, as they were regarded by most writers. Berlin is described implicitly in the German
accounts.
The factor of Europe unites all travel writers throughout the period since Europe, or European,
is a sign of quality. Opera houses, theatres, architecture, science, everything supposedly
cultural or ‘civilizational’ or artistic is put into a competitive context of which the arbiter is
‘Europe’. The concepts of Art, Civilization and Europe are thus an entrance for me to the
understanding of cultural achievements as well as to social standards since social systems
were also put into a comparative and competitive context.
Chapter V : Sound & Vision
This chapter is about the inter-sensual meaning making process in travel writing, taking into
account sounds, smells, and images, and will be applied to all three cities.
I will work on the following points.
• theory of inter-mediality and inter-sensuality
• visual perception and perception theory, based on Merleau-Ponty and Gombrich as well as
modern media theories and historical works on the subject.
• show how different media interact to create the uniqueness of each city. London smells
different from Berlin and this is a vital point in the meaning making process.
In travel writing, meaning collapses into an (imagined) immediacy of experience through
which the writer is able to disentangle the threads that make up the labyrinth of the foreign
nation; it is as well the technique of the genre to achieving credibility. This chapter is thus
vital for the understanding of travel writings and the meaning making process in general even
though focusing on the three capitals. It is designed on the one hand to present a new theory
and on the other hand to bring together all the narrative threads of the first four chapters.
Conclusions
The results of my work lead to insights on the quality of travel writing within the network of
public communication and will also show that existed a network of relation, a discursive as
well as a personal one, which changed from within, slowly but continuously, because of,
besides other things, the market place, which demanded novelties and new insights on the
foreign nation, creating a phenomenon which can be termed ‚forced subjectivity‘. Sometimes
old insights were gained through new sings as well.
Furthermore, narrative structures of the metropolis become visible, enscribed in its physical
reality by each culture, society and nation and the perception of these features. That these
phenomena are indeed narratives becomes obvious after the First World War, when almost all
pre-war narratives, thought to be and retold as lasting truths, as facts, turned out to be not apt
anymore and the stories of the big city had to change slightly, had to find new characters. The
Second World War dealt a deadly blow also to most of the surviving narratives and left the
metropolises as a sort of tabula rasa. Surely, some tales still haunted the big cities, but to a
large degree they had to be re-invented. This shows how important, in the end, is the physical
reality of the cities in providing access to the invisible world of cultural or national meaning.
In one sign, at a certain point in time and at a certain place, a whole society can be
concentrated and thus accessed. And it is exactly these signs that are sought for and
necessarily found by travel writers. Details, which either represent a characteristic feature or
render the
whole foreign nation accessible in a concentrated way.
My approach, which is a cultural historical approach of interpretation and does not understand
itself in a necessary opposition to social or economic history, but rather as a tool for
understanding historical sources and discourses, enables me to gain insights into travel
literature, national identities, European self-understanding, political and social conditions as
well as projections into the past and future, into phenomena, which are all found in the big
cities. These metropolises are thus turned into a sort of time-machine, which can take you into
the past, the present and the future alike. In the sign labyrinth of big cities, the diachronic
quality of the synchronic experience can be perceived at every corner.