Anxious Journeys: Twenty-First-Century Travel Writing in German ed. by Karin Baumgartner and Monica Shafi (review)

In our dizzyingly globalizing world, border crossings and their attendant transnational, multilingual, and cross-cultural encounters are as quotidian as they are central. Recent scholarship on experiences of travel, migration, and exile within the German-speaking context has developed new theoretical approaches to advance this field in increasingly intersectional and interdisciplinary directions. The fourteen chapters in this volume analyze a cross-section of contemporary travelogues from around German-speaking Europe. It joins other volumes, including Travel Writing in Dutch and German, 1790–1930: Modernity, Regionality, Mobility, edited by Alison E. Martin, Lut Missinne, and Beatrix van Dam (2017), and Passagen des Exils/Passages of Exile, edited by Burcu Dogramaci and Elisabeth Otto (2018), that consider how the physical, intellectual, and psychological experience of leaving one's home and venturing into the great unknown can be aesthetically rendered and what these representations say about the relationship between self and society.

Baumgartner and Shafi wisely opt for a broad generic definition of travel writing that includes both fiction and nonfiction produced in a variety of media, though the majority of contributions examine autobiographical novels and short story collections based on their authors' own experiences. Despite its breadth, the volume feels cohesive due to the contributors' shared commitment to a number of issues. These center on the tension between yearning for authenticity, edification, and fulfillment, long held to be essential justifications for travel, and the emergence of their postmodern counterparts—commercialization, fear, and ennui—in a genre where subjectivity and representation are insidiously defined by political, historic, social, and economic factors. Whereas many earlier, canonical works by (white, predominantly male) authors portray the violent intrusion into foreign spaces in order to attain self-discovery through enacting colonial desire, in the contemporary variant, travel and its representation instead routinely lead, as Nicole Grewling argues, to the "disintegration of the subject" (181). The editors note in their introduction that contemporary practitioners of the genre "address the tension between their privileged mobility in the neoliberal world order and the tainted and belated nature of travel," thus "explor[ing] present and past locations with their entangled histories, thereby giving readers the opportunity to reflect on their own place and that of others in the world" (3, 8). As several of the contributors assert, however, these shifts in ideology and positionality do not mean that the texts are unproblematic in their own right, or that their authors can adequately unpack their own complicity in the conditions of inequity that have allowed them to be travelers while others may be variously forced from their homes due to war or catastrophe, or immobile due to lack of disposable income or the "right" passport. To name two examples, Shafi identifies Christoph Ransmayr's "narrative strategies of camouflage and self-effacement" as an attempt to avoid examining his privilege (70), while Nicole Coleman critiques Juli Zeh's method of humanizing through universalization in postconflict Bosnia and Herzegovina because "human rights [thus become] the rights of those perceived to be the same yet by chance living elsewhere, rather than the rights of all human beings despite their differences" (85).

Although many volumes focus on Germany with a token FL-A-CH perspective, a significant number of chapters here consider works by Austrians; a few Swiss authors are also featured, while Christina Gerhardt's essay on Judith Schalansky offers a take on the oft-excluded German Democratic Republic. In each case, the particularities of these contexts are outlined for the nonexpert. The subsection on visual and sonic media includes Christina Kraenzle's analysis of the hybrid travel comic genre and Sunka Simon's analysis of Ulrich Seidl's 2012 film Paradies: Liebe. Both essays consider the ethics of representation amid the power differential between the white German and Austrian cultural producers and the nonwhite and postcolonial objects of their white protagonists' gazes.

The volume's expansive definition of...