FORMAL ESSAY: THE WAY GOETHE TRAVELED

Educated, of high class, wealthy, and worldly, a gentlemen of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (goo-te) period was someone who knew where he was going and who had something constructive to say about his experiences. Goethe, a successful German writer and member of a rich family, was just this sort of gentleman, and in reading Goethe’s Italian Journey, a travel journal Goethe kept during his first trip to Italy from 1786 to 1788, one does not get the feeling that Goethe is traveling strictly “by book,” a phrase that James Buzard uses in his study of tourism, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to “Culture,” to denote the act of traveling by guide book, a common “tourist’s” practice. Instead, Goethe most obviously falls in with the high class type of traveler Buzard calls a “travel-writer,” one that analyzes his or her experiences and thoughts while traveling, almost in competition with the writings of travel-writers who have gone before, seeking the unique and unwritten. Buzard considers two distinct categories of travelers in relation with his examination of such “travel-writers”: the tourist and the anti-tourist. Although it is after Goethe’s first trip to Italy that these two categories come to the forefront, it is by these categories that Goethe’s journal about his travels through Italy can be examined to shed light on how Goethe traveled, or, in other words, what type of traveler he was.

Tourism is the hasty visiting of a place to claim some fraction of possession or relation to it, or, more commonly, to its idea. Somewhat like a sped up version of the late practice of "grand touring," tourism is a repeated collection of fleeting moments prewritten by travelers who came before and experienced by most visitors to the same place. Anti-tourism, which Buzard describes as “snobbish” and as “an exemplary way of regarding one’s own cultural experiences as authentic and unique, [set] against a backdrop of always assumed tourist vulgarity, repetition, and ignorance,” is a response to such common tourism. Buzard states that “(the) general project (of travel-writing) resembled the anti-tourist,” and I would agree that "anti-tourist" describes Goethe in many ways. “I was making this remarkable journey not to deceive my-self,” Goethe writes of a visit he made to San Giorgio in Verona, “but to become acquainted with myself through objects. I tell myself quite honestly that I understand little of the art and craft of painter.” A disclaimer of his ignorance, this passage from Goethe’s journal indirectly reveals his wish that readers see him as well educated and aware of himself as an intruder in a foreign culture, which coincides with anti-touristic notions. Also, throughout his journal, Goethe demonstrates his ability to look beyond mere tourism when he critiques the operas he attends, the art and architecture he views, and the Italian ways of life he comes in contact with. Furthermore, as Nicholas Halmi, professor of English literature at Oxford University, explained, Goethe had a purpose beyond sightseeing during his trip through Italy, he searched for truth in science and life; Goethe searched for the “primordial plant,” for instance, and I believe these sorts of quests influenced Goethe’s focus during his travels to include subjects beyond John Urry’s “touristic gaze” (lecture on European romanticism; Consuming Places). As a travel-writer, Goethe was an anti-tourist because he attempted both consciously and unconsciously to remove himself from the common tourist, but by looking beyond the obvious, we can actually distinguish an inner tourist through Goethe’s journal and therefore we can examine the anti-tourist’s inability or at least extreme difficulty to escape the “vulgar” identity of tourism.

Buzard connects the categories of tourist and anti-tourist when he contends that they developed in light of each other. Due to modern technologies and new ease of travel in the 19th century, Buzard says, the nature of travel itself caused tourism and anti-tourism to evolve into their own distinct categories, tourism burgeoning with the ease of travel and anti-tourism developing in response to the lack of uniqueness in the experiences of mere tourists. When we consider Urry’s “romantic gaze,” or the tourist’s unrealistic vision of a visited place, we can see that Goethe, the anti-touristic travel-writer, was a tourist in many respects. Firstly, one of his main objectives when visiting Venice, aside from a pursuit of truth, was to visit locations and memories that others had described to him. His father, for instance, influenced Goethe’s trip to Venice by giving Goethe a vision of Venice before Goethe saw it in person. “I rode through the northern part of the Grand Canal, around the island of Santa Clara in the lagoons, into the canal of the Giudecca, up toward St. Mark's square, and was now suddenly a co-sovereign of the Adriatic sea, like every Venetian when he reclines in his gondola. At this point I thought respectfully of my good father, whose greatest pleasure was to tell about these things.” In many of his descriptions, Goethe speaks of himself in Venice, and also on Lido by the sea, as having now “seen” it, which echoes the nature of tourists to gaze and be gone. This touristic nature does not only show up in Goethe’s longing to behold, though. Although Goethe strives to see Italy uniquely and fully, as we have discussed before and will see in the passage below, Goethe acts like a “tourist” even when he analyzes like an anti-tourist.

“Toward evening, again without a guide, I lost my way in the remotest quarters of the city. The bridges here are all fitted with steps, so that gondolas and probably also larger boats can pass comfortably under the arch. I tried to find my way in and out of this labyrinth without asking anyone, again only directing myself by the points of the compass' Finally one does disentangle oneself, but it is an incredible maze, and my method, which is to acquaint myself with it directly through my senses, is the best. Also, up to the last inhabited tip of land I have noted the residents' behavior, manners, customs, and nature: these are differently constituted in every quarter. Dear Lord! what a poor, good-natured beast man is!”

In this passage, Goethe is both tourist and anti-tourist. As he “makes his way without a guide” and in his analysis of Venetian behaviors, Goethe acts the anti-tourist, but at the end of the passage, when he says “what a poor, good-natured beast man is,” he seems to make a sweeping generalization that, I believe, speaks of Venetians more than anyone in a simplifying manner, and that plays into a romantic idea he holds about Italy and Italians, especially considering his belief that he will find “truth” and the “primordial plant” in Italy. If Goethe sees Italians as the putti that hold up his Italian journey, as many wealthy visitors did, then he holds a common vision of Italy that easily places him in the category of tourist. In Goethe’s journal, Goethe unconsciously demonstrates for us the way tourism and anti-tourism are related; as Goethe attempts to see Italy in a true sense, not simply as a tourist who knows nothing but glances at everything they possibly can, he still sees it through touristic eyes.

Although Goethe's journal was written more as an analytical piece than as a tourist's log, for he analyzes everything he encounters, we can read his identity as a traveler to discover both touristic and anti-touristic characteristics. As this blend demonstrates, tourism and anti-tourism can exist and may often exist together. In a way, anti-tourism and tourism are simply the extremes of a gradient scale on which tourists can be placed. When I read Goethe’s Italian Journey, I placed him nearer to the anti-tourist extreme, but, recognizing his romantic views of Italy, I placed him nearest to the center of such a scale. To his readers, Goethe was a travel-writer, first and foremost, but, looking beyond his writings, he was an anti-tourist with many touristic tendencies.

(Goethe in the Roman Campagna, painted by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein in 1786: a painting that I think displays Goethe's anti-touristic inclination by the cloak that covers his high class garb, but that reveals his touristic side by the very fact that Goethe is portrayed in front of a romantic Italian scenery void of Italians themselves.)