Baedeker's Universe

Baedeker’s Universe By Edward Mendelson 1 For more than a hundred years, Karl Baedeker was Europe’s become too large for any one man to attempt them. (After his ideal parent. In his “Handbooks for Travellers,” which by 1914 death, the Baedeker family maintained its preeminence largely described all of Europe and North America, and much of Asia because he had been astute enough to father three sons and Africa, he did more for his readers than guide their way to capable of continuing his work.) Earlier centuries provided no agreeable hotels, picturesque churches, and sublime vistas. He audience for the kind of’ practical guidebook Karl Baedeker also set an example of private and public virtues ranging from devised. Travelers in the era of the Grand Tour, in the thrift to patriotism, comforted the timid and encouraged the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth centuries, brought daring, taught the proper response to courtesy or cunning, with them servants able to supply must of their needs, and combined moral probity with practical wisdom, and even -while letters of introduction to those whose servants could supply warning his readers away from unseemly pleasures let slip the the rest. Travelers in the later eighteenth century, for whom knowledge of where they might be found. travel was increasingly a matter of consciousness rather than of class, pursued exotic experience as a means toward more The name Karl Baedeker designates both a man and a corpo- intense self-awareness, and the guidebooks that began to rate personality. The man was a patriotic German in the early- appear for their benefit emphasized the picturesque more than nineteenth-century mold. The corporate personality was fluent in the practical. The climate propitious for Karl Baedeker a dozen languages, and managed during the later nineteenth cen- emerged abruptly, after a twenty-year interval when pleasure- tury and early twentieth to be a patriot of three or four travel in Europe ceased. This was the interval that began in fatherlands at the same time. The man was born to a line of 1792, when revolutionary France went to war against the printers and booksellers in Essen in 1801 and died of overwork in established monarchies, and ended only with the defeat of Coblenz in 1859. The corporate personality - an adaptation by his imperial France. When the roads of Europe, which had been sons and grandsons of the personality of the man - grew in energy improved at Napoleon’s command, once again offered safe and authority from 1860 to 1914, resumed much of its strength passage, armies of travelers were quick to occupy them. The after 1918, found itself in bad company after 1933, and raised diligence, or public stagecoach, provided a new degree of itself from the rubble, chastened and subdued, in 1948. The comfort for the traveler who could not afford a carriage of his corporate personality still survives as a publisher of guidebooks, own, and the more cautious traveler could sign up for the new but with little of the style and less of the authority it enjoyed conducted tours first offered in 1815 by the publisher during its years of empire. This essay will distinguish the two Galignani from his offices in Paris. The ordinary traveler, and personalities by reserving “Karl Baedeker” for the man, not only the connoisseur, began to seek out painting and “Baedeker” for his corporate successor. sculpture in addition to mountain and gorge. The era of mass travel had begun in earnest. But for every traveler who joined a guided tour, there were others - the many thousands who combined within themselves a romantic personality and a bourgeois character - who insisted on traveling alone. For these travelers Karl Baedeker perfected his wholly new kind of guidebook. “Its principal object,” he wrote in the foreword to his guide to Germany and Austria, was “to keep the traveler at as great a distance as possible from the unpleasant, and often wholly invisible, The Founder Karl Baedeker tutelage of hired servants and guides (and in part from the aid of coachmen and hotelkeepers), to assist him in standing on Karl Baedeker’s ascendancy could have occurred at only one his own feet, to render him independent, and to place him in a moment in history. Twenty years before, Europe was too position from which he may receive his own impressions with preoccupied with other matters to have any use for his talents. clear eyes and lively heart ”Deutschland”, eighth edition, Twenty years after, the tasks he accomplished on his own had 1858). When Karl Baedeker set up shop in Coblenz in 1827, 1 Edward Mendelson is a professor of English at Columbia University. Before joining the faculty at Columbia he taught at Yale and Harvard. He earned his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University and his B.A. at the University of Rochester. His professional interests span from nineteenth and twentieth century literature to formal and social aspects of poetry and narrative. This article was originally published in the Yale Review of Books. Printed with the permission of the Author © Edward Mendelson, 1985 2 after studying at Heidelberg and working in the book trade at guished guide ever published”), and he repaid it by sending Berlin, he had no intention whatever of providing this or any regular consignments of new information from his travels. But other kind of guidebook. The first of his travel books, which he he also pointed out, in later years, that while he borrowed the published more or less by accident, was written by someone else. outer form of Murray’s handbooks, he used different A bankrupt publishing house that he bought out in 1832 had principles In choosing what to put inside. Most guidebooks, recently issued a scholarly survey of the history, scenery, and art he observed, suffered from one of two opposing defects. of the Rhineland, Professor Johann August Klein’s Rheinreise Either they offered bare lists of landmarks without any von Mainz bis Köln. Around three years later, when the stock practical advice or historical instruction, or they provided such of the German edition ran out, he decided to revise the book detailed and evocative accounts of anything worth seeing, and himself. He kept Klein’s name on the title page, but he simplified of the emotions to be felt on seeing it, that the traveler was Klein’s prose, added practical information on transport and effectively spared the trouble of going to see it for himself. accommodation, enlarged the range of the book so that it Karl Baedeker chose a middle way. In his descriptions of a extended from Strasbourg to Rotterdam, and described place worth visiting, he gave his readers precisely the excursions down tributary rivers and to other cities in Holland. information they needed to find their way cheaply and The Baedeker empire stirred, and began to grow. conveniently, and precisely the Information they needed in order to appreciate what they saw. He trusted them to provide A rival empire began stirring at about the same time. In 1829, their aesthetic and emotional responses for themselves. John Murray (son of the publisher whom Byron regarded, not always affectionately, as “My Murray”) began organizing the notes What his readers could not provide on their own - hints on he had taken on his travels through Europe. Murray’s “A Hand foreign customs, cures for local ailments, caveats on clothing Book for Travellers in Holland, Belgium, and along the Rhine, and diet - Karl Baedeker provided in plenty. His tone was and throughout Northern Germany” (subtitled “The Continent”) reassuringly steadfast and proverbial. He warned walkers in - appeared in 1836. It enjoyed an immediate success, and was Switzerland that, “As everyone knows, it is harmful to bring an followed by a handbook for southern Germany, Austria, and overheated horse to its stall, and it is no better for men.” He Hungary in 1837, and by another for Switzerland in 1838. Among also warned them that “A warm bath weakens the entire body the most appreciative readers of these books was Karl Baedeker, for the following day.” A natural philosopher of the time, who also became one of the most appreciative friends of their using the new vocabulary of the time, might have noted that a author. In 1839 when Karl Baedeker published two new traveler with a Karl Baedeker guidebook in hand constituted a guidebooks of his own, one for Holland and one for Belgium, he system. To the traveler himself, the relationship he enjoyed borrowed Murray’s must important innovation, the arrangement with Karl Baedeker seemed more like a personal intimacy. And of descriptive and practical information along numbered “routes” like all worthwhile intimacies, it both nurtured and liberated. that extended from one large town to another. Karl Baedeker also In his earliest guidebooks Karl Baedeker identified himself adopted Murray’s word handbook (and in doing so reclaimed for only as publisher, not as author. He abandoned this the German language a word Murray had borrowed from it). He transparent pretense of anonymity in 1849 with the sixth subtitled each of his new guides “Handbüchlein für Reisende.” edition of the Rheinreise, on the title page of which “K. When Karl Baedeker issued his guide to Germany and the Baedeker” first named himself as author and editor. (He Austrian Empire in 1842, he styled it as a full-fledged Buch rather claimed to have been reluctant to put himself forward. In the than a modest Büchlein, a Handbuch f für Reisende durch prefaces to some later volumes, he wrote: “There are certain Deutschland und den oesterreichischen Kaiserstaat. Karl Baedeker’s peculiar persons who take an anonymous book in hand with guide to Switzerland followed two years later.

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