Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) Spring 4-23-2013 Reading, Travel, and the Pedagogy of Growing Up in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany M. Stanley Majors Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd Part of the German Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Majors, M. Stanley, "Reading, Travel, and the Pedagogy of Growing Up in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany" (2013). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 1090. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/1090 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures Dissertation Examination Committee: Lynne Tatlock, Chair Miriam Bailin Matt Erlin Lutz Koepnick Paul Michael Luetzeler William McKelvy Reading, Travel, and the Pedagogy of Growing Up in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany by Magdalen Stanley Majors A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2013 St. Louis, Missouri © 2013, Magdalen Stanley Majors TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………...………………………...………...……iii DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………………………..iv ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………….……………...…v INTRODUCTION Reading Youth in the Young Nation……………………………………………………...………1 CHAPTER ONE German Geographies of Youth: Ferdinand Hirt & Sohn and the Growth of National Readers in Global Context …………….…29 CHAPTER TWO Reading Adolescence as Journey: Foreign Settings and Domestic Narratives in the Young Adult Novel………………………..…73 CHAPTER THREE Between Childhood and Colonial Subjectivity: The Anthropology of Coming-of-Age in Brigitte Augusti and Friedrich Pajeken………….…118 CHAPTER FOUR Lost Between Campe and Cooper: Youth, Travel, and (Im)mobile Readers in the Late Works of Wilhelm Raabe……………..…153 EPILOGUE The Uses and Abuses of Youthful Reading………………………………….…………………210 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………..219 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Every project is a product of people: a rich and complex network of people and institutions sustained this project. Without the personal and structural support they provided, it would not have been possible. I am grateful for the generous financial support from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. I would especially like to thank Diane DeMell Jacobsen, with whom I enjoyed a sustaining correspondence and who generously donated funds specifically for graduate studies. An International Pre-Dissertation Research Grant allowed me to begin research at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin which I continued with a year-long fellowship from the Freie Universität Berlin. A dissertation fellowship in my final year in St. Louis brought me closer to the completion of this project and allowed me to continue my involvement in the campus community. My most heartfelt thanks go to my advisor, Lynne Tatlock. I am sure we both wondered if this project would ever come to fruition and it is because of her gracious patience, devoted attentiveness, and simple kindness that it did. I thank her for always viewing me as a full participant in our mutual project of learning. I thank Lynne, most of all, for teaching me how to read again. Over the course of this project I began to read for pleasure, slowly at first, then more and more as time passed. I read again as I did when I was a child and that is a very dear gift. My parents, Tom and Kathe Stanley, supported me without question. They always have, in my every outlandish pursuit. There are not words to thank them enough. They created a culture of education from the beginning. I thank my brother Mat and my extended family for their kindness and understanding. My husband JP Majors has been married to this project as long as he has been married to me. He has contributed to it more than he is aware. I thank him for his listening ear and his inquisitive mind. How lucky we are to know each other. I hope I can help him write his book one day. The members of the Department of German and Russian at Wake Forest University have shown me the pleasures an academic life can offer. I thank them for sharing with me the joy of collegiality in a thriving, lively department and for sustaining me in my final year of this project. I am eternally grateful to too many fellow students to name. They are some of my best of friends. There are those role models who arrived before I did, especially Suzuko Knott, Necia Chronister, and Tracy Graves, and those who came after, especially Corey Twitchell and Ervin Malakaj. Shane Peterson’s calm collected manner, impeccable professionalism, and unassuming kindness were true a comfort to me. There were colleagues who sustained me outside the world of German, especially Jen Greenfield and Nick Miller. Caroline Muegge always provided the insight and reassurance of multiple perspectives. On Avalon I had many great neighbors and housemates, especially Nico Schlösser, Sandra Dinter, and Harold Jordan. I am so grateful to have been part of the University City and St Louis community. I know they will stay a part of my academic life in ways I never imagined possible. Last but not least I am thankful for the fortitude, solidarity, support, and sustainence that came from my fellow members of the dissertation support group at Washington University in St Louis and the Healthy Habiteers team. I am greatful to Dr. Karolyn Senter who facilitated the group and Dr. Tom Brounk who recommended it. We kept each other accountable to the hourly, daily, and weekly work that research and writing require and together we celebrated each success. With them I was no longer a lone scholar, but a member of a vibrant, diverse, and meaningful community. Most importantly, I was no longer lonely! iii To the spirits young and old who haunt this project the boys Tyler and Will Scott-Simpson and James Daniel and Tyler Allen Ali, Lil’ Lawrence, and Meechie Smith and my godson Auggie Knott for sharing many hours of reading—good and bad books alike and my grandparents Mary Reiley Rice (1924-2012) and Richard Robert Rice (1923-2013) for looking approvingly askance at my late night reading—even the banned books iv ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Reading, Travel, and the Pedagogy of Growing Up in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany by Magdalen Stanley Majors Doctor of Philosophy in Germanic Languages and Literatures Washington University in St. Louis, 2013 Professor Lynne Tatlock, Chair This project brings together the domestic world of young adult reading with the foreign world of international travel that informed German experience at the end of the nineteenth century. By uniting these two ostensibly disparate realms under one interpretive frame, I offer a new perspective on the theory and practice of young-adult reading at the turn of the last century and the role this reading about travel played in the development of sense of self and sense of place within a national body. My analysis reads specific youth literature about travel (Brigitte Augusti, Friedrich Pajeken) against depictions of youth reading about the wider world in the now-canonical texts of Realism (Wilhelm Raabe). I find two simultaneously existing, yet, contradictory strands of discourse that resonate even today: On the one hand, an exuberance for newfound mobility in a now-global world and its endless possibilities; on the other, a skepticism about the potential of mobility to solve the world’s problems. I examine how these tensions interact through diverse models of pedagogy portrayed in and as texts and map reading and travel within discourses about young people’s integration into an adult world. Through historical study and literary interpretation of cultural production of the 1880s and 1890s, this project ultimately seeks broad insights into the pedagogical and psychological value of the intersections of travel and reading, and, in doing so, attempts to answer some of the enduring questions central to our mission as scholars and teachers of foreign language and culture within the humanities. v INTRODUCTION Reading Youth in the Young Nation By the arrival of the late 1880s and early 1890s the first generation of Germans born in a unified Germany was coming of age. It is hardly surprising that this first German generation should feel the pressure of its accidental birth. These young people and those to follow throughout the decade were—like all children—a product of their time: they were simultaneously inculcated with the inseparable constructs of the global and the national and subject to the influence of a flood of print materials that mirrored their own experience and mediated the experience of others who did not share their gender, race, class, culture, or national identity. Coming of age on the verge of a new century and as the first generation fully engulfed in a German national identity backed by political force gave a particular weight to the burgeoning maturity that they shared with imagined ideas of nationhood. This dissertation explores the real and imagined territory where domestic reading and international travel meet and come of age. By uniting these two ostensibly disparate realms under one interpretive frame, this project offers a new perspective on the theory and practice of young adult reading at the turn of the last century and the role this reading about travel played in the development of sense of self and sense of place within a national body. Travel and reading were central at the end of the century, when Germans were preoccupied with their role in colonial expansion, participating in continued emigration and mass tourism, and increasingly using the publishing industry as a means to explore, promote, and critique images of Germany in the wider world.