The Wanderer in 19th-Century German Literature: Intellectual History and Cultural Criticism

Interested in the diachronic history of the wanderer in various texts of the German nineteenth century, Andrew Cusack has written a book rich in information and ideas. While drawing on a wide range of works related to wandering or traveling, Cusack writes most extensively on Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Wanderjahre ("The Wanderer as the Subject of Education"); Tieck's Franz Sternbald's Wanderungen and Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen ("The Wanderer in the Romantic Imagination"); Heine's Harzreise, Büchner's Lenz, and Fontane's Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg ("The Wanderer in Political Discourse"); and Gotthelf's Jakobs des Handwerksgesellen Wanderungen durch die Schweiz, Holtei's Die Vagabunden, and Raabe's Abu Telfan oder Die Heimkehr vom Mondgebirge ("Wandering at the Margins: Journeymen and Vagabonds"). A study that includes both novels and travel narratives under the rubric "motif of the wanderer" has built-in problems, which I'll get to later, but it also has its advantages.

The insightful discussion of Wilhelm Meister begins with a close look at "the body language of autonomy" (14), at the metaphors of walking or gait in the novel. Herder's claim that through their upright gait humans became creatures of art becomes a productive way to gauge Meister's progressive education as he moves from "hinschlendern" and "schleichen" to "zweckmäßige Schritte" that resemble the "starke Schritte" of his mentor the Abbé (17). Cusack writes that "… 'wandern' as it appears here indicates a particular stance to be adopted toward the world, a posture of alertness whose iconic symbol is the figure of the wanderer, a man on the qui vive, whose upright stance indicates both a maximum receptivity to his surroundings and a readiness to reach out and grasp the material of which they are made" (34).

Freemasonic rituals as practiced by the Society of the Tower serve to structure Wilhelm's wandering education. As Cusack investigates the stages of Wilhelm's journey in the Wanderjahre, and as he argues that the reader herself acts as a wanderer in the novel, he would find good support for his ideas in my own article, "'Des Maurers Wandeln / Es gleicht dem Leben': The Freemasonic Ritual Route in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre" (Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, June 1984).

In his second chapter, Cusack turns to a pair of important romantic novels that feature journeys made by young men. Franz Sternbald's artistic wanderings driven by Sehnsucht find an interesting context in a discussion of the journey as a liminal state. Sternbald's wanderings are seen as a ritual process that tends, paradoxically, not to integration but to separation. And if the artist's development and growth are well represented by the metaphor of wandering, so too is the development and growth of the budding scientist/poet Heinrich von Ofterdingen.

Chapter three, the longest in the book, is an odd way station between discussions of the "motif of the wanderer" in the novels of the first two chapters and of the novels of the final chapter. The primary wanderers of chapter three are the authors Heinrich Heine and Theodor Fontane, and their books are not novels but travel narratives. Cusack tries to get around the awkwardness by dealing with the travel narratives as literary texts, which they are, and through some attention to the narrator, as opposed to the author. But in the end, the motif of the wanderer loses its focus in these very different forms of representation. This chapter would make more sense in a book that also examined Goethe's accounts of his Swiss and Italian journeys and Alexander von Humboldt's personal narrative of his journey to South and Central America.

Nonetheless, these are revealing discussions in their own right. Cusack artfully places Heine's work in the context of enlightenment travel literature, specifically the Wanderbericht, and finds that Heine achieves a fusion of "authenticity grounded in personal observation" and "the technique of the travel satire" (104). Further, Cusack argues that the Harzreise includes a critique of political tourism—by "unmasking the bankrupt aesthetic of nature underlying it, and by satirizing the virulent nationalism it sought to promote."

In an interlude between Heine and Fontane, Cusack presents a thoughtful essay on Büchner's Lenz: "Demolishing the Sublime." After describing Biedermeier forms of travel literature and landscape aesthetics, Cusack argues that Lenz only experiences half of the expected experience of the sublime, the threat to his own being, and that the second half, in which the power of the human mind and will is manifest, is missing. The "awareness that subjectivity is inseparable from corporeality, and hence from material conditions" (133), Cusack notes, informs both Heine's and Büchner's political philosophies.

The section on Fontane's massive Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg presents a conservative, antiquarian political text, with an especially interesting discussion of relations between Fontane's travel narrative and the then popular art form of the panorama. Here, as throughout his book, Cusack draws on a wide range of contemporary sources to develop detailed and sometimes surprising contexts.

The book's final chapter examines three somewhat obscure texts that gain profile through the previous discussions of the wanderer. Gotthelf's novel about the journeyman Jakob's travels through revolutionary Switzerland is seen as evoking the tension between a journeyman's necessary but dangerous wandering and the master's mature and productive stability through property. Holtei's Die Vagabunden emphasizes the ideology of the settled life as well. And Raabe's novel, Cusack argues, attempts to reconcile pragmatism and fantasy: we can make our own reality, but must do so in the face of political and institutional resistence.

Finally, grateful for the fuller sense I now have of wandering in the German nineteenth century, an achievement reached through painstaking attention to the wanderer in fictional and historical settings, I'm left wishing for a larger context, for the company of other wanderers in other places, the company of Rousseau ("There is something about walking that stimulates and enlivens my thoughts"), of Thoreau ("But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise"), of Wordsworth ("I love a public road"), of Robert Walser ("Ich habe einen wohligen, kleinen, appetitlichen Spaziergang gemacht"), and of Peter Handke ("Sich aufmachen [auf den Weg]: sich aufmachen"). Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Verso, 2001) and Joseph A. Amato's On Foot: A History of Walking (NYU Press, 2004) would also provide pedestrian company for Andrew Cusack's more focused work.