Exotic Islands and the Stranded Traveler in the Works of Caspar David Friedrich

Exotic Islands and the Stranded Traveler in the Works of Caspar David Friedrich JOHANN JK REUSCH For Susanne Zantop, in memoriam The world-renown advisor to the court, Böttiger ... outlined in a flowing speech to the somewhat astounded female spectators the beauty and deep meaning of a "seascape" until Friedrich, greatly annoyed, pointed out the mountains and took the picture away. Other art lovers occasionally placed one . . . upside down onto the easel and mistook the dark cloudy sky for the ocean, and so forth!1 The observation that cultured visitors to Caspar David Friedrich's (17741840 ) studio sometimes mistook his mountain scenes for seascapes or confused clouds with waves, and the sky with the ocean, was made by Carl Gustav Caras (1789-1869), a physician, pioneer of early psychology, as well as an amateur painter. Despite its humorous and anecdotal quality, this annotation was not meant as a sarcastic commentary on the lack of artistic insight of Dresden's cultural elite. Rather it reflects Cams' interest in the free associations of the unconscious as part of his own inquiry into phenomenology and the human psyche. Indeed, the fact that Friedrich's cultured and educated visitors within a landlocked city recognized the ocean rather than their own regional landscape, known for mountainous tenain such as the Elbsandstein Mountains, constitutes a curious psychological phenomenon. Cams asked himself what prompted these educated audiences to think of oceans upon seeing Friedrich's landscapes. The answer would have not only been of interest to Cams but also offers us a glimpse into the mind of contemporary viewers of Friedrich's works, and ultimately into that of the artist himself. 347 348/REUSCH Homi Bhabha cites Goethe's suggestion that the "inner nature of the whole nation as well as the individual man works... unconsciously." If the cultural life of the nation is "unconsciously" lived, Bhabha surmises, literature—or, in this case, landscape painting—constitutes "a form of cultural dissensus and alterity, where nonconsensual terms of affiliation and articulation may be established on the grounds of historical trauma."2 It can easily be argued that the period under discussion, the first decade of the nineteenth century, was marked by a series of historical traumas that directly pertained to a changing landscape, and its subsequent mode of representation. Most of the German-speaking territories were occupied by the French, and defied the unifying concept of a nation as boundaries and allegiances shifted in constant flux. Whereas many of the European super powers expanded outward into colonial ventures, the German states failed to obtain colonies and expand their tenitory, which compounded further the feeling of urbanization, industrialization, and perception of diminishing tenitory. There can be no doubt that anxiety about displacement and cultural annihilation forced the formation of communities who identify themselves and their beliefs in opposition to the prevalent dominant ideology. Such feelings of isolation, marginalization, oppression, and isolation were linked directly to both a mental and a physical landscape; its visualization was linked to conceptualizing a nation that in the case of the German states —during the period under discussion—could only be imagined. With no tangible and proximate space available to project such vision upon, the colonial fantasy became lodged into the mind of many German subjects. Recent studies in post-colonial theory agree that the concept of the nation is fabricated and imagined3, a concept of longing to belong that is ancient and nebulous,4 based on an emotive structure that is stimulated by nanatives, rituals and symbols.5 Therefore, rather than re-examining well-established nationalist symbols in Friedrich's works such as the often-cited oak tree, this essay aims to examine the invocations and evocations of public desire and imagination in the reception of his landscapes. Reception theory was discussed widely around the turn of the eighteenth century, and had not only occupied Cams but also several other prominent thinkers of the time. One of them, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) extended the investigation into the forces of the unconscious toward the reception of literary texts, and images, and contributed to Caras' interest in the subject. Schleiermacher's theory of hermeneutics, argues that the interpreter can put himself inside the author...