4 - The Political Tourist in Juli Zeh’s Die Stille ist ein Geräusch

Summary

IN JULI ZEH's 2002 TRAVEL NARRATIVE Die Stille ist ein Geräusch: Eine Fahrt durch Bosnien (Even Silence is a Sound: Travels through Bosnia), her narrator visits Bosnia to see “ob es zusammen mit der Kriegsberichterstattung vom Erdboden verschwunden ist” (whether it has disappeared together with the reporting about the war). Journeys to post-conflict countries come with the expectation that visitors will engage in research or reporting rather than tourism. Such an approach is exemplified by the travel agent who tells Zeh's narrator: “Dieses Land eignet sich nicht fur touristische Reisen” (Stille, 9; This country is not suitable for tourist travel). Zeh's narrator, however, distances herself from any investigative purposes and presents herself as a tourist throughout the narrative.

If post-conflict countries appear unsuited for tourism, the term “dark tourism,” coined by John Lennon and Malcolm Foley (2006) to describe journeys to places with a history of violence, contests this assumption. Indeed, tourists visit concentration camps and sites of slavery or travel to places of recent wars and atrocities such as Bosnia. Dark tourism, however, challenges key aspects of tourism. Debbie Lisle maintains that all “travelogues express political commitments;” this is even more true of narratives that engage in acts of dark tourism. Although these political commitments need not be conscious or overtly explicit in the text, the sites as such politicize the visitor-writer. One reason for this political commitment is that “sightseeing” in a war-torn country does not mean to visit “tourist attractions” but rather to see destruction and traces of war. This challenges the visitor to take, at least subconsciously, a stand. Dark tourism thus raises important ethical questions: How should a site of dark tourism be approached? How should the visitor behave in such a place? And, most important for a narrative, how should these sites “be represented in writing?” Zeh's text, I suggest, gives a twofold answer to these questions.

Zeh addresses the ethical problems of writing a travel account about a post-conflict country by creating what I will call a “political tourist.”