Introduction

CONTEMPORARY TRAVELOGUES come in many narrative variations. What they have in common, though, is a focus on motifs “related to wandering and vagrancy, migration and exile.” Unlike the travelogues of the genre's heyday in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, recent travel narratives are “stories of disillusionment and frustration, of failing to realize dreams, [or] finding a new home,” writes Manfred Pfister. Such is the case in Sibylle Berg's Wunderbare Jahre: Als wir noch die Welt bereisten (2016; Wonderful Years: When We Were Still Traveling the World) and Rolf Niederhauser's Seltsame Schleife (2014; Strange Loop). Expressed in the nostalgia of Berg's title is a sense of loss for a time when traveling was still “possible.” Niederhauser similarly expresses misgivings about the viability of travel—the leitmotif of his novel is the Moebius strip, a strange loop that returns the traveler to the beginning of the narrative: “wenn die eine seite nahtlos in die andere überging, gab es keine andere seite” (when one side neatly turned into the other, there was no other side), implying that travel no longer leads to a destination. Both texts express the inability of contemporary travel writing to accomplish the things travelogues have traditionally done: give a nonfictional description of a journey to undiscovered or faraway places or, in the absence of undiscovered sites, give a description of the narrator's path to self-discovery, as modeled in Goethe's Italian Journey or Lord Byron's Childe Harold. In essence, the texts by Berg and Niederhauser declare an end to travel as a privileged signifier of Enlightenment values.

Both authors also point to a now obsolete paradigm in literature, where travel was traditionally linked to identity. This is particularly true for Switzerland, where both authors reside. For centuries, Swiss identity was defined by migration from the mountains to the low lands, where Swiss men found employment as soldiers, merchants, and raftsmen, and Swiss women as domestic servants.