A Pedagogy of Observation: Nineteenth-Century Panoramas, German Literature, and Reading Culture by Vance Byrd (review)

Vance Byrd's monograph demonstrates how the panorama helped create a modern sense of identity for the bourgeoisie in nineteenth-century Germany. The panorama was a popular visual medium, yet most Germans experienced it not firsthand, but in printed texts. Germans could read descriptions of panoramas, purchase guides and keys to well-known panoramas, and find panorama-like perspectives and metaphors in the literature of their time. Consequently, Byrd treats the panorama as both medium and metaphor, as both physical object and as practices that advanced a "literary pedagogy of observation." Panoramas and their literary manifestations created an immersive world in which to debate the potentialities of modern life.

The first chapter of this book analyzes the invention of the panorama and highlights the ephemera and material objects that accompanied it: advertisements, guidebooks, keys, etc. These tools made a panorama readable, but also made it less immediate; they interrupted the sense of visual engagement and immersion with the panorama itself. Hence, the panoramic experience was not an unfettered gaze comprehending a unified compositional field, but entailed the reconciliation of that visual field with accumulated information, details, and facts gained through reading. Such readings helped audiences transform visual experience into experiences of the imagination. "The cognitive and intellectual process of producing and seeing a panorama, the attempt at unifying nature, history, and politics under the same gaze, illustrates the totalizing ambition of this mode of representation" (32), an ambition that endured in literature of the nineteenth century.

The second chapter details the treatment of the panorama in fashion journals, most prominently in F. J. Bertuch's Journal des Luxus und der Moden (1786–1827), and traces how the journal brought the panorama from the heterotopia of the popular fair to the bourgeois household. The journals made the panorama German (asserting its German rather than British provenance), bourgeois (linking panoramas to the bourgeois landscape garden), and domestic (panoramic images became fashionable entertainments within bourgeois households). Panoramas thus allowed Germans to envision themselves as bourgeois subjects of a potentially modern nation.

In chapter three, Byrd reads the winter garden in Achim von Arnim's 1809 novel Wintergarten as a "morally fortified space for aesthetic withdrawal" (72), a space to escape Napoleon's conquest of Berlin. The novel's reference to Alexander von Humboldt's purported panoramic view from the Chimborazo offers an alternative to Napoleon. Von Humboldt embodies ideals of freedom and travel and thus represents a call to political action. He is a national hero whose scientific undertakings valorize the panoramic ideals of total immersion and uninterrupted attention. And so, the winter garden offers a stage-like space where readers not only withdraw from war and its aftermath, but also follow an explorer as national hero.

E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1822 narrative, Des Vetters Eckfenster, is the focus of the fourth chapter, where Byrd finds both literal and metaphorical uses of the panorama. Sitting in a corner window above a marketplace, the older cousin has a panoramic-like perspective on city life, and the story is a reflection on both perception and narration. The older cousin is out of touch with how nineteenthcentury readers saw the city and consumed literature. Panoramic experience provided Hoffmann the perspective, the tools, and the language to undertake an investigation of emergent city life, the place of women in the urban space, and authorship.

In the fifth chapter, Byrd analyzes Adalbert Stifter's Wien und die Wiener in Bildern aus dem Leben (1841–44) to trace how panoramic representation eventually yielded to the visual language of photography. In Stifter's images of Vienna, Byrd finds a tension between a portrait-like, individual narrative focus and a larger overview of society and its principles. For Stifter, a panoramic perspective gave a more accurate overview of Viennese modern life than photographic-like narrative could. Yet at the same time, the panoramic perspective is that of a monarchic state...