Karin Baumgartner – författare

The first book to offer a cutting-edge discussion of contemporary travel writing in German, Anxious Journeys looks both at classical tropes of travel writing and its connection to current debates.The rich contemporary literature of travel has been the focus of numerous recent publications in English that seek to understand how travel narratives, with their distinctive representations of identities, places, and cultures, respond to today's globalized, high-speed world characterized by the dual mass movements of tourism and migration. Yet a corresponding cutting-edge discussion of twenty-first-century travel writing in German has until now been missing.The fourteen essays in Anxious Journeys redress this situation. They analyze texts by leading authors such as Felicitas Hoppe, Christoph Ransmayr, Julie Zeh, Navid Kermani, Judith Schalansky, Ilija Trojanow, and others, as well as topics such as Turkish-German travelogues and the relationship of comics to travel writing. The volume examines how writers engage with classic tropes of travel writing and how they react to the current sense of crisis and belatedness. It also links travel to ongoing debates about the role of the nation, mass migration, and the European project, as well as to Germany's place in the larger world order.Contributors: Karin Baumgartner, Heather Merle Benbow, Anke S. Biendarra, John Blair and Muriel Cormican, Nicole Coleman, Carola Daffner, Christina Gerhardt, Nicole Grewling, Gundela Hachmann, Andrew Wright Hurley, Christina Kraenzle, Magda Tarnawaska Senel, Monika Shafi, Sunka Simon.Karin Baumgartner is Professor of German at the University of Utah. Monika Shafi is Elias Ahuja Professor of German at the University of Delaware.

Argues that German national identity was fostered, and even invented, in and through travelogues and other travel writing.Far into the nineteenth century, Germany remained a collection of separate principalities. Scholars have long debated the causes and implications of this "belatedness" relative to other European nations like England and France. This book offers a fresh perspective by arguing that travel literature helped shape a distinct and cohesive German identity well before political unification in 1871. Beginning in the eighteenth century, foreign travelers' accounts depicted "Germany" as a distinct place despite its political divisions, thus allowing German readers to imagine their fragmented nation as a conceptual whole. Ethnographic descriptions from distant places further aided this process as Germans learned to view themselves through this particular lens. Around 1800, Germans, too, began to explore their homeland and describe their experiences, creating travelogues that solidified the nascent sense of national identity.Drawing on a vast collection of German, British, and French travelogues, travel handbooks, and popular geographic texts, Karin Baumgartner examines how travel writing reflects shifts in geographic paradigms and national identity in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany. Incorporating discourses of nationalism and geography, including Edward Soja's influential concept of Thirdspace, Baumgartner illuminates how these texts encapsulated evolving perceptions of space that forged a specific German national identity.