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  • Literarische Entdeckungsreisen: Vorfahren—Nachfahrten—Revisionen ed. by Hansjörg Bay and Wolfgang Struck
  • Yvonne Franke
Literarische Entdeckungsreisen: Vorfahren—Nachfahrten—Revisionen. Edited by Hansjörg Bay and Wolfgang Struck. Cologne: Böhlau, 2012. Pp. 376. Paper € 49.90. ISBN 978-3412207649.

The expeditions to the North and South Poles a century ago may have ended the investigation of unknown territory. Yet, the legendary histories and stories of the heyday of European expansion still continue. In recent years, these stories have been the focus of numerous texts in German language, including literature and film. The authors who contributed to Hansjörg Bay and Wolfgang Struck's edited volume Literarische Entdeckungsreisen: Vorfahren—Nachfahrten—Revisionen investigate this reformulated interest in narratives about the past and discuss new literary and filmic adaptations from aesthetic, sociopolitical, and imaginative points of view. The volume's contributions look at the tension between fact and fiction, generic conventions, colonial appropriations, postcolonial revisions, and their consequences for poetics and literary theory.

The nineteen articles are organized in four thematic sections. The first section, "Über die letzte Grenze," focuses on cartography and the topographic figure of border drawings and crossings that are always preceded by myths and imaginings. Thus, the exploration of the allegedly "weiße Flecken" inevitably has always been a "Relektüre" and belie any claim of true discoveries. Accordingly, Bettine Menke's contribution "Grenzüberschreitungen (in) der Schrift, Exterritorialität der Pole" shows how literary journeys are strongly intertwined with physical explorations. Literary polar expeditions ("nachfahrendes Schreiben") precede actual expeditions ("Nachfahrten," 75). Because the latter have already been "vorgeschrieben" (53) through literary investigations, each text follows in the footsteps of its literary precursors, which bespeaks to the [End Page 686] "Un-/Erreichbarkeit" of both the poles and the texts (77). Wolfgang Struck's article, "Ingenjör Andrées luftfärd oder Die melancholischen Entdeckungen des Films," revisits the "Cold Case" (29) of three lost Swedish North Pole scientists from 1897. Struck demonstrates how Jan Troell's feature film Ingenjör Andrées luftfärd (1982) revisits this case by employing the "Poetologie des Scheiterns" (37) that brings forth a contradistinction from the original photographic documents and questions the alleged completeness of cartography. The articles on August Petermann's "Theorie vom eisfreien Polarmeer" and a close reading of Christoph Ransmayr's novel Der fliegende Berg and its transgression of territorial and generic borders complete this section.

Hansjörg Bay's essay "Literarische Landnahme? Um-Schreibung, Partizipation und Wiederholung in aktuellen Relektüren historischer 'Entdeckungsreisen'" opens the second section of the volume, "Vor-Schriften, Nachfahren und Relektüren." At first, Bay focuses on how the genre of travel writing contributed directly to heroism and colonialism by way of following specific conventions marked by ideological stand points. The article continues with his investigation of contemporary "Relektüren" of (hi)stories of both arctic and tropical expeditions that have been thriving since the 1990s: Sten Nadolny's Die Entdeckung der Langsamkeit, Christoph Ransmayr's Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis, Christof Hamann's Der Usambara, Ilija Trojanow's Der Weltensammler, and Thomas Stangl's Der einzige Ort. While Bay considers the North Pole texts from the 1980s as important predecessors for the current literary trend, he gives particular credit to the latter three, in which the colonial entanglements are conveyed through literature. Nevertheless, as he concludes, these recent texts participate in "eine[r] Art kolonialer Wiederholungszwang" (130), which adheres to the conventions of the genre. Bay convincingly demonstrates the usefulness of the ambiguous concept of "Relektüren" that lies at the heart of the entire anthology. The remaining articles in this part deal with nineteenth-century narrative strategies in rewritings of Le Vaillant, Christof Hamann's Usambara, Urs Widmer's Im Kongo, and Yambo Ouologuem's Le Devoir de Violence.

John Zilcosky's article "Unheimliche Begegnungen: Abenteuerliteratur, Psychoanalyse, Moderne" opens the anthology's third section on "Tropologien" that shifts the focus to tropical places and lets the geographical and rhetorical realms of the term interact with each other. Zilcosky analyzes examples of popular travel writing (Norbert Jacques' Heisses Land. Eine Reise nach Brasilien), seminal psychological and philosophical theories (Ernst Jentsch, Martin Heidegger and Sigmund Freud), and modern literature...

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