Bess Hayes and Professor Rob McFarland, Germanic and Slavic Languages
Before applying for this ORCA grant, I worked with Professor McFarland on a project about Johanna M. Lankau, a German author who wrote a hundred years ago about her walks throughout Dresden and the surrounding countryside. As an aspect of this research, I searched through newspaper microfiches in Berlin, July 2008, looking for stories and articles by author Johanna Lankau. I came across literature reviews of the popular German writer Theodor Fontane. His most beloved work is his encyclopedic Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (“Hikes through the Region of Brandenburg”). This caught my attention because Lankau also wrote about walking through nature and the city, even though the strict societal gender roles of her time discouraged women from walking in public. Professor McFarland and I decided that an ORCA grant would provide a unique experience for expanding this research. We wanted to know if popular work like Fontane’s inspired women writers such as Lankau to step out into the landscape and write about what they saw. To better understand the connections between Fontane’s and Lankau’s collections of walking narratives, we looked for discursive connections and at the history of walking in Germany.
Professor McFarland mentored me as I did research on and wrote a paper about Johanna Lankau as a walking women writers. In this paper, I argued that, although the existence of the writing woman walker, such as Johanna Lankau, has been called into question in academic discussions, Lankau uses techniques that bring the actions in her writing back into an appropriate realm. First, she maintains a close association with nature environments, which were thought to improve and benefit women. Secondly, her language is similar to the then-emerging popular genre of the feuilleton, in its inclusion of enthusiastic phrases, precise descriptions of the images she observes, and references to buildings and people. I presented this paper at the Utah Conference of Undergraduate Research at Westminster College in Salt Lake in February 2009. This paper was well received by my peers and members of the audience.
I next wanted to understand how Fontane’s works may have influenced authors such as Lankau. Theodor Fontane’s Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg appeared over the span of nearly three decades, from the early 1860s to late 1880s. This massive collection of walking tours through his native Brandenburg was a tremendous success with a large readership. Women’s newspapers also published his essays about his wanderings. By the turn of the century, many German women writers, including Johanna Lankau, published essays about their own wanderings.
At the time Fontane was writing and publishing, the newspaper column called the feuilleton was becoming increasingly popular. The feuilleton is an entertaining newspaper essay usually focused on city life or the arts. Feuilleton articles appeared in newspapers as short observations of the city. Fontane’s walking narratives about Brandenburg were like the feuilleton, but focused instead on the natural world outside of the city. Women did write for newspapers at this time, but it was the generally the moralizing short stories that were prolific in the German newspapers of the late 1900s devoted to a female readership. In 1894, one of these periodicals, the Deutsche Frauenzeitung (“German Women’s Newspaper”), reviewed Fontane’s book Meine Kinderjahre (“My Childhood Years”), published in that same year. While this newspaper primarily featured these moralizing short stories, occasionally essays on walks or walking narratives do appear. This newspaper also published stories and essays by women writers of the time, including Johanna Lankau, author of Dresdner Spaziergänge (“Dresden Walks”), a collection of literary walks in and around the city of Dresden that closely resembles Fontane’s essays about Brandenburg.
Because cause and effect is very difficult, if not outright impossible, to prove in literature, I started looking at general movements that were taking place in German literature.
Professor McFarland suggested I attend the International Summer Academy at the Universität Tübingen in Germany, where I could improve my German and use the library and literary resources there to conduct more research on this topic. While there, I took a course on the literature and philosophy of modernity from Dr. Klaus Müller-Richter, another recommendation from Professor McFarland. As an aspect of this course, I had to do a research project and present my findings to my class. I decided to look, not just at Fontane’s walks as an influence on Lankau and other women writers, but at the trends in philosophy and literature of modernity that would help create the tradition and popular status of walking narratives at the end of the 19th century.
What I found was that there were many more influences on Johanna Lankau than simply a single popular author. In our course readers we read Kant’s motto of the Enlightenment: “Habe Mut, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedizen!” (“Have the guts to serve yourself with your own reason and understanding”). Self-reliance is important for the Enlightenment, especially in regard to one’s mind, and takes a turn toward physical autonomy in the Romantic period. Romantic et Johann Gottfried Seume demonstrated this in 1805: “I consider the walk to be the most honorable and self-reliant aspect in a person’s life, and it is my opinion that everything would go better, if people simply walked more. Riding shows powerlessness, walking reveals strength and power” (4, translation by the author). Seume’s statement tells us the physical self-reliance demonstrated by walking is an important discourse of his time. Because Johanna Lankau uses this quote in the introduction to Dresdner Spaziergänge, we can see that it was also a discourse that was personally important to her.
While I could not find an irrefutable connection between Lankau and Fontane, I was able to place Lankau within the philosophical discourses of 19th-century German. She was a woman who, by writing contemplative narratives, was combining Kant’s Enlightenment motto to trust her own mind with its Romantic derivation to be physically self-reliant. I do not know if Fontane was an example to Lankau, but Lankau has certainly become an example to me of how to be self-reliant.