ABSTRACT
The fog of pessimism during and after the First War is no doubt one of the explanations of the vogue of literature which describes far-away climes: it represents a flight from reality. Exotic literature, of course, goes back to the end of the eighteenth century 1 (Georg Forster’s A Voyage towards the South Vole and round the World, 1777, and J. G. Seume’s verse tale Der Wilde 2 ) and continues with Chamisso’s Reise um die Welt in den Jahren 1815-18 and Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos (1845-58). Exotic fiction shapes itself on such writers as Fennimore Cooper in the American and Wild West novels (‘Wildwest-Romantik’) of Charles Sealsfield (1793-1864) and Friedrich Gerstäcker (1816-72). There is still an English undertone in the exotic writings of Paul Lindau’s brother RUDOLF LINDAU(1829-1910: Erzählungen eines Effendi, 1896): he was a far-travelled diplomat, as much international as German (his first work, on Japan, was in French, and as Swiss consul at Yokohama he founded the Japan Times, the best English newspaper in Japan). The new exotic style blooms with tropic splendour in the impressionistic prose (Gedankengut aus meinen Wanderjahren, 2 vols., 1913; Erlebnisse auf Java, 1924) of Max Dauthendey (pp. 245 ff.), and he has a good second in the Luxemburger NORBERT JACQUES(1880- ). We get the Far East in Jacques’s novel Der Kaufherr von Schanghai (1925), in his Reisetagebuch, in his travel descriptions Die heissen Städte (1911, 1921) and Auf dem chinesischen Fluss; and in Max Brod’s Abenteuer in Japan (1938). WILLY SEIDEL (1887-1934) gets to Egypt with his frivolous humour in Der Sang der Sakije (1914), to the Bedouin desert with Der Garten des Schuchan (1912) and to Samoa with Der Buschhahn (1921). Waldemar Bonsels as a theosophist wanders about India (p. 320). Dauthendey’s successor as impressionist globe-trotter is ALFONS PAQUET(1881-1944), who began as a good lyric poet: Lieder und Gesänge (1902); Auf Erden (1906); Held Namenlos (1912), and captured his public with brilliant books of travel: Li oder im neuen Osten (1912), Erzählungen an Bord (1914). His expressionistic style makes even Paris exotic in his novel Kamerad Fleming (1912); in his Utopia of the new humanity, Die Prophezeiungen (1922), he takes us to Siberia. Africa is the scene of Ernst Jünger’s Afrika-nische Spiele; and, of course, Jakob Wassermann’s Bula Matari, with its symbolic illumination of the fermenting African jungle, is exotic literature in the extreme sense. French colonial life gives interest to Friedrich Schnack’s travel pictures Auf ferner Insel: Glückliche Zeit in Madagaskar (1931). Asia comes (with Turkey) into the work of Armin T. Wegner (Im Hause der Glückseligkeit, 1920; Der Knabe Hussein, 1917), while Kasimir Edschmid finds scope for his pictorial extravagances in South America and the Wild West (Der Lazo in Die sechs Mündungen). The more sensational phase of exotic literature is represented by Hanns Heinz Ewers in his travel books (Indien und ich, 1911; Mit meinen Augen, 1914) and in his Novellen, and by Eduard Stucken’s Die weissen Götter (p. 273) with the Mexican matter that follows it: Gerhart Hauptmann’s two Aztec plays, Klabund’s ballad Montezuma (1919), Jakob Wassermann’s Das Gold von Caxamalka (in Der Geist des Pilgers, 1923), and Bruno Brehm’s Die schrecklichen Pferde (1934).
