ABSTRACT
When Heine in his Harz Journey (1824) caricatures the allegedly excessive size of the feet of Göttingen ladies, he satirically exaggerates the style of the eighteenth-century ‘learned travel reports’ popular in his time: with their mania for facts and statistics, these apodemics mirror the encyclopedic zest of the Enlightenment period. However, around 1800, these kinds of publications were starting to lose their appeal and the priority was now to round off the traveler's own emotional Bildungsweg. In tune with the developments in art and literature of the late eighteenth century, travel descriptions now paid more attention to the emotions associated with the subject itself. The Enlightenment's challenge of ‘discovering the world’ became a voyage of self-discovery. This prioritization of the individual and physical experience now meant that the importance of a location was dependent on its effect on the traveler and thus on their bodies. Consequently, the focus of travel gradually shifted from objective facts to subjective physicality and thereby mirrored the anatomical zeal of an age that had set out to re-discover the human body in the arts as well as in science. Sonja Klein's chapter follows this ‘physical’ transition, arguing that this anthropological shift is reflected in the works of Goethe.
