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

This impressive anthology provides nuanced insights into as well as an overview of current trends in German-language travel writing. Travel narratives have always transcended genre categories, which is evident in the different textual and graphic forms represented here; they include novels, free verse, graphic novels, atlases, and films. Travel writing is, moreover, an integral part of the critical discourse on important contemporary issues, including climate change, the challenges of increasing globalization, and the preservation of endangered cultures through commodification. One of the central themes in travel writing is identity, both its construction and performance. Anke Biendarra reads both Julya Rabinowich’s Die Erdfresserin (2012; The earth eater) and Terézia Mora’s Das Ungeheuer (2013; The monster) as expressions of gender conflict where the female characters contest but ultimately succumb to social marginalization, economic hardship, and exploitation. Women’s negotiation of female gender roles, and especially the notion of women’s agency, is one of the central themes of almost all essays in this collection.

Travel can move an individual to engage with the issue of personal identity, as in Carola Daffner’s analysis of Josef Winkler’s Mutter und der Bleistift (2013; Mother and the pencil). Here, travel leads the narrator on a meditative path allowing him to work through his childhood experiences. In contrast, Heather Merle Benbow’s analysis of Turkish German popular novels and Karin Baumgartner’s chapter on Sibylle Berg’s Wunderbare Jahre (2016; Wonderful years) and Rolf Niederhauser’s Seltsame Schleife (2014; Strange loop) reveal the failure of travel as a project of self-discovery and identity formation.

Another key issue is the search for authenticity, which Monika Shafi’s essay on Christoph Ransmayr’s Atlas eines ängstlichen Mannes (2012; Atlas of an Anxious Man, 2016) and Nicole Coleman’s analysis of Juli Zeh’s Die Stille ist ein Geräusch (2002; Even silence is a sound) investigate. Central to both texts is the narrator’s conscious distancing from mass tourism and the attempt to establish a personal and authentic connection to the local people, an endeavor that ultimately fails.

Travel as the exotic goal of dreams and desires is a theme in Andrew Wright Hurley’s analysis of Felicitas Hoppe’s novel Hoppe (2012) and Gundela Hachmann’s investigation of Ilija Trojanow’s Der Weltensammler (2006; The Collector of Worlds, 2008), which both cast a nostalgic glance back into the great age of exploration, when travel was perceived as a successful quest. This is no longer true for travel, as Sunka Simon demonstrates in her analysis of Ulrich Seidl’s film Paradies: Liebe (2012; Paradise: Love). Seidl deconstructs not only the exotic travel destination but also the home, which is shown to be a place of isolation and social alienation.

Magda Tarnawska Senel’s essay on Navid Kermani’s Einbruch der Wirklichkeit: Auf dem Flüchtlingstreck durch Europa (2016; Upheaval: The Refugee Trek through Europe, 2017) and Nicole Grewling’s chapter on Christoph Ransmayr’s Der fliegende Berg (2006; The Flying Mountain, 2018) both focus on travel experiences as such. Kermani contrasts his own privileged travel experience with the challenging journey undertaken by the refugees trying to reach Europe, and Ransmayr juxtaposes the contrasting personal attitudes and motivations of two brothers attempting to climb in the Himalayas.

A great strength of this collection is its openness to different forms of travel narratives. Christina Gerhardt explores Judith Schalansky’s Atlas der abgelegenen Inseln (2009; Atlas of Remote Islands, 2010), a creative compilation of topographical island maps combined with fictionalized texts about their culture and history, which is intended to facilitate armchair traveling—a mode of travel that Schalansky advocates as truly sustainable. Graphic novels are at the center of Christina Kraenzle’s essay on works by Ulli Lust, Reinhard Kleist, and Sascha Hommer, which reveals the great potential of this genre for depicting difficult personal experiences such as sexual trauma. John Blair and Muriel Cormican...