Bookshop Tours of Britain

Abstract

depicts himself during the act of drawing with bystanders commenting on the quality of his work. Despite all the exciting ways in which the pieces of twenty-first-century travel writing in German presented in this collection offer new perspectives onmobility and writing in the postmodern world, some problems remain. The essays in this volume criticise the fact that mostly sensitive descriptions of foreign places and cultures notwithstanding, travel writers often struggle to avoid a colonial perspective, which seems to be the lingering heritage of the age of Enlightenment. This is the case when the white western privilege of the author-traveller is not thematised, as Shafi notes of Ransmayer’s Atlas eines ängstlichen Mannes (70) and Hachmann observes in Ilja Trojanow’s Zu den heiligen Quellen des Islam (153), among others. Also, Coleman argues that, while well-intended, Zeh’s practice of equating herself with the locals in Die Stille ist ein Geräusch creates a universalist perspective that does not acknowledge cultural difference adequately (76). While Wright Hurley denounces the absence of indigenous voices in Hoppe (135), this unfortunately also holds true for the essays in the collection, although this absence may well lie within the source material. Of course, there is no easy way of representing appropriately the difference between travellers and the people living in the places they visit. One can criticise inequality, instability and aim to narrate the history, culture and customs of these places as accurately and sensitively as possible. Most of the discussions and primary texts analysed in Anxious Journeys manage to successfully navigate this difficult territory and the volume thus constitutes the first comprehensive collection to analyse twenty-first-century travel writing in German in a compelling and relevant way.