Die Reise ans Ende der Welt: Erkundungen zur Kulturgeschichte der Literatur by Karl S. Guthke (review)

The present volume bears a title indicating a journey with the destination of the end of the earth. The promising subtitle (translated from the German) Encounters at the End of the World, is named after a film about Antarctica by Werner Herzog. Guthke gives the terminus of the earth a temporal meaning in which history, empirical travel experience, and legendary fiction are fused. In an age of globalization, the fascination with the “end of the world” is even more intensified owing to the availability of Internet programs and films. Modern literature is replete with reports on expeditions and explorations in “exotic” parts of the world worthy of scholarly attention.

Guthke announces that the current volume represents the final installment of a trilogy on the subject of a glance into alien territories, or into “the cultural history of literature.” The table of contents indicates sixteen chapters, beginning indeed with “The Journey to the End of the World” undertaken by Tristan da Cunha, a Portuguese admiral after whom the legendary South Atlantic island was named. Guthke devotes eighty-six pages to the travel reports about this “fragment of a lost world,” “utopia come true,” and “one of the last borders of the world.” These images of border zones may be considered a veritable Leitmotiv in his work. His bibliography, for instance, lists the title Globalität und Grenzen in der Kulturgeschichte der Literatur (Globality and Borders in the Cultural History of Literature, 2005). Even the “prelude” of his present work reads: “Von Grenzen geht ein Reiz aus . . .” (“Borders emit an attraction . . .”).

In the chapter “D. Johann Faust und die Kannibalen” he discusses geographic horizons of the sixteenth century. The historical Faust dissuaded Philipp von Hutten 1534 from an expedition to a region notorious for cannibalism (modern Venezuela), of which Amerigo Vespucci had reported earlier. In his striving for empirical knowledge through world travel, Faust’s exoticism at this point involves transportation by airborne coach drawn by two winged dragons, while from forty miles high observing the world below—later, by a winged horse into which Mephistopheles had metamorphosed. Its alternate work, the Wagnerbuch, far more reader-friendly, reflects forwardness as a passion for world cognition versus magic as a road to elevated vital energy of a questionable kind. The first German reference to the indigenous population (“Americans”), in Sebastian Brant’s Das Narrenschiff (1494), mentioned “Heathens” and by no means “noble savages,” while the Europeans were referred to as “Christians.” Any cannibalistic area was “the devil’s domain.” Reports by Columbus, Vespucci, Cortés had been bestsellers. The Eurocentrism evident in the Faustbuch and its geographic backwardness were being addressed.

The theme of “feeling at home in the big, wide world,” along with considerations about the role of scholars and natural scientists of the age, together with the emerging concept of “global education” accelerated the prevailing mode of looking at other lands and cultures. Johnson, Pope, Burke, Wieland made their contributions. Friedrich Schlegel’s commentary on Forster’s Reise um die Welt (A Voyage Round the World), Lichtenberg, Humboldt, Haller, and Chamisso helped advance knowledge beyond the status quo. The requisition of sponsors to arrange for expeditions, naturalists, writers, publishers, etc., and the interest in the clash of cultures lent the project exotic touches. Johann Christian Hüttner’s (a prominent German journalist in Britain) contacts with Goethe advanced assiduous translation activity and acquisitions of exotic travel books by the ducal library in Weimar. Hüttner’s special interest in the terra incognita (focus on Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand—a visit to the antipodes), a personal journey to China, and subsequent reports on Chinese panorama and society, heightened Goethe’s attention to an “opening toward the great world outside.” Hüttner’s efforts extended beyond Goethe’s circle to the broad readership of classically educated Germans.

Between 1920 and 1929 German novels and other forms of fiction about World...