Romantic Rhine Travels

Exotic landscape, cultural character, national perspectives

On 21 and 22 October a workshop will be held initiating a thematic research group on the Rhine as a cultural space in romantic nationalism. The participants will discuss the testimonies of generations of travellers from different countries and from different ideological persuasions form Byron to Schlegel and from Arndt to Victor Hugo. A new multinational body of evidence will hence be given on the new investment of the Rhine with both cultural and political meanings.

In the decades around 1800, the Rhine valley became an increasingly prominent feature in travels and travel accounts. As the mode of travel itself underwent a change from the educational Grand Tour to the romantic pilgrimage-quest for emotional authenticity, the Rhine valley became more than merely a passage between the Alps and the North-Sea, or between Berlin and Paris: travellers began to find in its picturesque landscape, medieval ruins and quaint twons a lieu de mémoire. A hidden valley perpetuating a true medieval-Gothic cultural continuum and harmoniuous between settlement and landscape.

A the same time, the Rhine's geopolitical importance in the Revolutaionary and Napoleon wars and the post-Napoleonic restauration invested it with the fateful ambivalance of being seen either as Germany's borderland or Germany's artery. Access to, and control over, was claimed by all its contiguous states.

This workshop is the initial meeting of what is proposed as a thematic research group on 'The Rhine as a cultural space in romantic nationalism, see: Rhine research group