Bess Hayes and Dr. Robert McFarland, Germanic and Slavic Languages
In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany, it was ideologically inappropriate for women to walk unaccompanied through the city. Because of these gendered strictures, women’s narratives of city walks are extremely rare. Johanna M. Lankau’s Dresdner Spaziergänge (“Dresden Walks”) is one of these rare exceptions. Though recent scholarship is divided about the historical reality of writing women walkers, her book shows that there were indeed women walkers who wrote about the city. In her 1912 book, Lankau writes:
As I happily wander, my delighted gaze takes in things both near and far. Whether it is the city in which you meander aimlessly, or peaks and cliffs, forests and fields that surround the city—wherever you go, you find the welcome feelings of home. (Lankau v)
This passionate endorsement of walking is remarkable because of its female author. For our 2008 ORCA mentored research grant, Professor Rob McFarland and I investigated how an author like Lankau was able to overcome many preventive gendered role-prescriptions by maintaining circumstances and using popular rhetorical devices to create an enjoyable and protected sojourn into a constructed natural world.
In order to familiarize me with the discussion regarding female walking writers, Professor McFarland introduced me to texts that are significant to this investigation. During this part of our research, we searched the BYU library and its resources. We found that, while traditional scholarship about German urban literature has either ignored women’s travel and walking narratives, or made them seem like freakish aberrations, a recent literary historical movement has revealed that walking women writers did write about the city, albeit within certain restrictive codes of decency. Because the number of city descriptions and walking books by women is so small, every new work that is found has a profound influence on the academic discourse. This is why Lankau’s Dresdner Spaziergänge calls into question several current theories of female authorship and urban ideologies of gender that we found during our research.
After getting a firm grounding in the theories surrounding Lankau’s book, Professor McFarland and I began to analyze the text itself in light of our research. Through a close reading of her text, we found that, while Lankau was indeed a solitary woman walking around the city, she followed certain codes of conduct that brought her actions into an acceptable sphere of behavior. She maintained a close adherence to construced natural areas, as well as the literary style of the emerging genre of the newspaper feuilleton.
In her written walks, Johanna Lankau keeps to controlled natural areas within cities, which acted to mediate her contact with the city and bring it into acceptable behavior. German historian Bernd Warneken has demonstrated that natural landscapes were considered potentially helpful for developing the natural beauty and naïve grace that women were supposed to possess (McFarland 149). In her descriptions of Dresden, Johanna Lankau views the city from the safe space of the city’s parks and green promenades, thus minimizing the deviant nature of her walks in the city. Lankau demonstrates her adherence to her society’s gender roles by writing about natural areas in a careful and descriptive way. Lankaus’s close association to nature areas is shown in the many essays focusing on natural areas or gardens, and because Lankau writes embellished, careful observations of the nature she experiences.
These careful observations were typical of the newspaper feuilleton, which was becoming increasingly popular in Lankau’s time. So while Lankau did attend to natural areas, her walks and essays about them were further enabled by their similarity to the popular genre of the feuilleton. Lankau’s keen observations are revealed in her careful, comprehensive details. Precision was valued and expected in the feuilleton; and for Lankau, exactness is emphasized in her assured and absolute narrative. The style of the feuilleton was similarly convincing. By using devises such as unanswered questions, interrogatives and imperatives, the feuilletonist emphasizes his devotion to specifics, detail, and accuracy. Lankau uses these techniques as well to effect an impression that she is the embodiment of the walking Dresden public. In this safely generic position, she is able to walk and write without causing disruption of social codes.
After our literature survey and close textual reading, Professor McFarland and I compiled our research into a substantial conference paper. In December 2007, we had submitted an abstract of our then-unwritten paper to the March 2008 conference of the Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery. Our paper was accepted, and it was for this conference that we worked to prepare this paper. We also assembled a panel of other students from BYU to discuss women’s travel narratives, of which our Lankau paper would be a part. At the conference held in Colorado Springs in March, Professor McFarland mediated the panel and I presented our paper, which was well received by the academic community.
In April, Professor McFarland and I discussed strategies and techniques for researching in and using archives and libraries in Germany. In May I travelled to Berlin, where I learned to navigate the intricacies of the library system. I conducted archival research of newspapers and other materials, searching for any other works by Johanna Lankau. I found a couple books, and happened upon some newspaper articles she had written. I was able to get copies of these, and since returning to BYU have reviewed these archival materials with Professor McFarland. In addition to contributing to further research we are interested in doing on Lankau, we have also made these artifacts available to Sophie: A Digital Library of Writing by German-Speaking Women. By doing so we hope to encourage a wider readership of this almost completely forgotten writer, one whose works helped to expand the realm of acceptable topics for female writers. Johanna Lankau was a pioneering author, and her walking narratives are an important element of literary history.
References
- Lankau, Johanna M. Dresdner Spaziergänge. Dresden: Holze & Pahl, 1912.
- McFarland, Robert B. “‘Füße im Steigvers mit weiblichem Ausgang’: Anna Louise Karsch’s Poem Cycle Die Spaziergänge von Berlin and the Pre-History of the Flaneuse.” Lessing Yearbook/Jahrbuch 36 (2004/2005): 135-160.