Travel Reports in Early Modern Germany

Summary

Genre

Travel Reports (Reiseberichte) are Rarely Treated as literary texts. Until recently the primary scholarly focus has been on scientific data: geographical, zoological, ethnological, or botanical. Only an analysis of issues pertaining to genre and the poetics of the travel report can contribute to a fuller understanding of this highly significant early modern genre. There are several reasons that literary research has failed to examine travel reports as literature. For one, the travel report, along with other scientific and factual literature (Sachliteratur), to which it belonged, had no place in the poetics of the early modern period; until the novel began to command attention in the late seventeenth century, poetics was concerned exclusively with versified forms. For contemporary theory, one must turn to rhetorics and theories of science, not to poetics. For another, the subgenres to which the travel report belonged have typically been regarded by literary research as of lesser significance. A third is that the travel report had no independent status as a genre. Texts identifiable as travel reports were written from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries in various forms and usually in combination with other genres: as parts of family books, autobiographies, diaries, or letters. A fourth reason is that reports in the form of letters from abroad not only circulated for private use but sometimes found their way into print under the title Neue Zeitungen (New Tidings). These included reports by the explorers Columbus and Vespucci. Actual publication was ultimately the decision not of the writers themselves of these “new tidings” but of territorial lords, scholarly experts, offspring of the original authors, or commissioning agents or publishers.

The genre history of the early modern travel report is thus in part a marketing history: the book market dictated what was likely to be of interest to a larger readership. The travel report’s specific form, however — letter, diary, and so on — was the choice of the individual author, based on a sense of which form would be the optimal medium of communication, and therefore preceded the marketing decision. However, the writer who wished to provide his ruler with a travel report in the form of a letter, and the writer who intended to give his descendants a moral lesson in the form of a family album, had altogether different goals in mind.