1Both people and things crossed geographical borders during the Victorian age in large numbers: it was an age of burgeoning trade and consumption as well as the age of an ever-growing number of travellers for pleasure who, under the guidance of travel entrepreneurs like Thomas Cook or travel handbooks like those produced by John Murray or Karl Baedeker, explored the continent and beyond (Korte 2000, 84–5). Such processes of expansion, modernisation and an increasingly facilitated crossing of geographical borders also generated an increased sensitivity to borders between old and new, real and imaginary, past and present. The rapidly expanding periodical market of the nineteenth century explored such borders and border crossings in fact and fiction that engaged with the mysterious and foreign space of the Black Forest in Germany.1 Victorian modes of engagement with the Black Forest are not unique to this area that has, so far, received little critical interest. In fact, they represent a typical instance of a tourist engagement where, though geographical borders are crossed, imaginary and conceptual borders remain intact.

2Western cultures are sky cultures: we locate our gods above, they speak from and through the sky (Harrison 1992, 6). The forest, however, hides us from the sky and thus from god or the scrutinising eye of the law, especially in a Christian context which largely regarded (pagan) forest lore with suspicion. And in the end, forests also hinder civilisation, even though they simultaneously appear as its foundation: “from the beginning [forests] appeared to our ancestors as archaic, as antecedent to the human world. […] their vast and somber wilderness was there before, like a precondition or matrix of civilization, […] forests were first” (Harrison 1992, 1). Quite in line with this, the valleys of the Black Forest presented themselves to British travellers as a fascinating descent into a nether world, “dark as Erebus, where the tall pine-trees almost shut out the view of heaven” (“A Ramble with a Knapsack through the Black Forest” 1887, 697). But like other (epic) travellers into darker regions—Odysseus, Aeneas or Dante—these travellers enjoyed the privileges of a visitor: the temporary sojourn in the forest’s darkness offered a space for reflection and a moment of respite, it did not demand the complete surrender of one’s accustomed world.

3The word forest derives from the Latin word “forīs” meaning “outside,” “out of doors” or outside walls (OED). Forests provide spaces that remain outside civilisation. Myths of origin present forests as spaces from which a people emerges when cities or nations are founded: Clearing the forest brings light and enlightenment. It also, however, brings destruction—not only of the forest, but also of a pre-modern, and perhaps ecologically sounder, form of social organisation. According to Giambattisto Vico, who influenced Romantic and Victorian thinking, human development is one of overcoming the forest: “This was the order of human institutions: first the forests, after that the huts, then the villages, next the cities, and finally the academies” (Vico [1744] 1984, §239). But this advancement also brings with it a form of decline: “Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury […]” (§241). In this constellation, forests remain as a necessary site of difference to culture; they represent, as Robert Harrison puts it, “the shadow of civilization” (1992): cruder, darker; but also more resilient. John Stoughton seems to echo Vico when he connects the Black Forest with the past in The Leisure Hour: “The past was an age of great forests”, while the present, at least for Britain “is an age of great cities […] commanding all the resources of modern civilized life” (Stoughton 1879, 327). The British, travelling to the German forest for pleasure and from a country that has all but lost its forests, could revel in their own cultural advances, but they also came perilously close to those who “grow dissolute in luxury” (Vico [1744] 1984, §241). When the forest is configured both as foundation for and as threat to civilisation, crossing into the forest means crossing an imaginary and conceptual border as well as a topographical one: it represents a venture beyond controlled cultural space. Maintaining a clear border in this situation also maintains order. As the Victorians crossed from the “bright clearing” of their own industrialised society into the darkness of the German forest, they allowed themselves to live a nostalgic longing for a less civilised past—a past that none of them really wanted to return. In the end, the temporary sojourn in the German forest shadows confirmed Victorian perceptions of their own advanced status. Such b/ordering practices provided moments of reprieve from the pressures of modernity which in the end served self-affirmation in the performance of difference and distance.2

I. Victorians, Periodicals and the Black Forest

4The periodical itself is a publication form that encourages border crossings, especially in cross-overs between different genres within one issue, as a romantic tale might be printed opposite some cookery advice, thus creating spaces that put the factual in dialogue with the fictional.3 The Black Forest proved of interest in travel tales and tourist advice as well as in romantic tales, thus figuring simultaneously as actual and as imagined space.

5Across the landscape of Victorian periodicals, it was largely middle-class periodicals that showed an interest in the Black Forest, possibly because those middle-class readers might also be the travellers or tourists most likely to attempt a journey to the area. The end of the Napoleonic Wars had opened the floodgates for British tourists to the Continent.4 Napoleonic reforms in Germany had produced larger political entities and thus reduced the number of borders to be crossed and border formalities to overcome: while before the reforms there would have been 20 borders to overcome between Frankfurt and Basel, after the reform there remained only four. The Black Forest now spread across the Duchy of Baden and the kingdom of Württemberg. The larger territories were also a precondition for significant investment in road building and the expansion of the railway which was a prerequisite for tourism (Hitz 2011, 50). For the majority of these British tourists the Black Forest would not necessarily have been the fabric of their travel dreams. The most popular tour destinations were the Swiss Alps, famous towns in France or Italy, battle fields or the Rhine Valley. Thomas Cook’s first major tour of Europe in 1855 covered, among other places, Antwerp, Brussels, Waterloo, Paris, Cologne, Frankfurt, Heidelberg and Strasburg. It did include the fashionable spa Baden-Baden, thus incorporating a Black Forest town, though not the characteristic rural areas. Black Forest tourism started to expand only once the road and especially the railway systems had been improved after mid-century and the Schwarzwaldverein (Black Forest Club), founded in 1864, started to set up and maintain mountain huts, hiking paths and fingerposts (Hitz 2011, 31 and 64–6). As in Switzerland, British travellers were the trail blazers, both for summer and later also for winter tourism. So much so, that “stranger” and “Englishman” became virtual synonyms (Hitz 2011, 30) and their holiday antics remained something to marvel at for locals: “the Germans are not very great walkers, and […] an Englishman and his knapsack are always looked upon with great curiosity by the villagers (“A Ramble with a Knapsack through the Black Forest” 1887, 697).

6Given the British enthusiasm for continental travel, many periodical contributions on the Black Forest covered travel information and practical tips for those interested in hunting and fishing. Adventure or romance tales set in the Black Forest complement these factual reports. Family journals like Bentley’s Miscellany or The Leisure Hour covered historical backgrounds of the Black Forest region and gave practical travel advice at regular intervals throughout the century, starting with “A Day in the Black Forest” in Bentley’s Miscellany in 1840. Sporting magazines like Bell’s Life in London, and Sporting Chronicle discovered the pleasures offered by Black Forest fishing and shooting from the 1860s onwards. And children’s magazines like Boys of England, Little Folks or The Routledge Magazine for Boys presented the Black Forest as setting for robbery, devious aristocrats or innocent maidens in need of rescue. While the forest in the south corner of Germany was never a major focus of Victorian Wanderlust—indeed, in 1858 “the omniscient Murray [had] thought it beneath his dignity to penetrate” into the countryside beyond Baden-Baden (“Byways of the Black Forest” 1858, 307)—it was persistently present in the cultural imaginary as a place that was a little off the beaten track and, if not quite as spectacular as the Swiss Alps or as established a sports resort as Scotland, pleasantly uncrowded and miraculously cheap. There, “a hard-working lawyer might […] pleasantly and healthily spend some of his earning much more cheaply and with much greater variety than among the hotel plunderers of Scotland or the over-fished streams of Wales” (E.S.R. 1874, 6).

II. Pre-mediated Forest Experience

7Even though the Black Forest did not have the benefit that the Alps had of a Wordsworth, a Shelley or a Ruskin praising its sublime beauty, a range of ready-made attitudes to forests were nonetheless on offer for Victorians, inherited from antiquity, medieval tales of chivalry, Renaissance versions of Arcadia and romantic ideals of rural innocence and picturesque scenery. Even though the Black Forest might be a new experience to the individual tourist, it was in many ways an already interpreted space.

8Notions of the German forests in Victorian Britain were largely pre-mediated by classical sources, fairy tales or the gothic. These sources presented the German forests as radically anti-modern spaces. Tacitus, in Germania, for instance, describes the tribe living in the Hercynian Forest (i.e. the Black Forest) as of formidable build, great courage and—for Germans—impressive reason and dexterity in battle: “Duriora genti corpora, stricti artus, minax vultus et maior animi vigor. Multum – ut inter Germanos – rationis ac sollertiae” (Tacitus 1942, §30). For Tacitus, the Germans are “desirably and deplorably primitive” (Schama 1995, 83). And we find that this is an attitude the Victorians, usually well-schooled in the classics, carried into the Black Forest, together with their romantically trained readiness to admire sublime landscape and to expect “the demon-robber and other notabilities of penny literature” ([Wraxall] 1851, 523) in a forest that was after all “situated in that portion of the world which Mrs Radcliffe and her followers thought proper to brand as the resort of banditti and midnight murderers” (“Byways of the Black Forest” 1858, 307). The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, first translated into English in 1823 (not in fact set in the Black Forest) further contributed to an association of German forests with supernatural occurrences, with enchantment or with transgression into forbidden territory. It is when Little Red Riding Hood strays from the path to gather flowers, that she falls into conversation with the wolf. At the end of the story, she tells herself: “Never again will you stray from the path by yourself and go into the forest when your mother has forbidden it” (quoted in Harrison 1992, 169). Similarly, when little Gretchen, in a story printed in Little Folks, strays from the path, “strolled awhile farther into the forest, gathered flowers, and forgot for the time being all about home and everything else”, she also pays a high price for this transgression and is kidnapped by “gipsies.” When the village doctor finally rescues her, like Little Red Riding Hood, she has learnt her lesson and tells her doll: “do as you’re told always; […] Be warned in time, by my example, Dolly dear—that’s my advice” (“Captured by Gipsies,” 1883, 212).

9Like fiction, factual travel reports drew on established ways of seeing: sublime scenery is described as a scene out of Weber’s Freischütz ([Wraxall] 1851, 529),5 a correspondent named “Freischutz” describes the forest guards as “built in the ‘leather stockings’ style” (1872, 7), and when a roebuck is shot and falls at the hunter’s feet this becomes “a picture for Landseer! The beautiful animal lay bleeding upon the snow, still graceful even in death […]” (Thwaites 1840, 188). Landscape descriptions in fact and fiction showed clear overlap, both drawing on gothic conventions and the vocabulary of the sublime. Thus, the medieval tale “The Terror of the Black Forest” in Boys of England opens with a description of the Black Forest where the “mists still linger on the crests of the distant mountains, enveloping them in a grey silvery veil, through which their craggy peaks, fringed with the hardy pine, peered occasionally, giving a weird fantastic character to the scene” (1884, 345). The traveller leaving Freiburg for the Höllental also encounters a landscape of sublime appeal: “a large mass of rock, cleft, as the country legend says, by diabolical interposition, […] tufted foliage of the masses of trees on either side, out of which large masses of rock project, while a rapid stream […] glides along between them ([Wraxall] 1851, 525). The adventure tale predictably relishes gothic setting and describes, for instance, a dungeon scene where the servant of an enemy noble is taken to “a cheerless-looking vault […] built entirely of stone—its walls damp with the dews of ages” (“The Terror of the Black Forest,” 1884, 378). But the historian and tourist guide also encouraged his readers “to picture to himself what it has been” as he explores the “curious subterranean passages and dungeons” and the “rack-chamber, with iron rings on the walls suggestive of instruments of torture” at the castle in Baden (Stoughton 1879, 330).

10On the other hand, preconceptions that became the measure for the new experience, at times also lead to disappointments. Thus the “Peasant girls, with deep blue eyes, / And hands that offer early flowers” promised by Lord Byron (in Childe Harold) turn out to be an excess of poetic licence: “[T]o a matter-of-fact personage like myself the deep-blue eyes of those peasant girls bore a striking resemblance to those of a dead fish […] their appearance betokening severe labour and scanty rations” (Thwaite 1840, 187). The pre-scripted readings of Black Forest spaces rendered the experiences beyond one’s own cultural borders less alienating. At the same time, falling back on established cultural forms provided the articulations that gave the travel experience its value and made it recognisable to those one wanted to impress at home.6

11While romantic art or gothic tales pre-determined perceptions and facilitated prescribed aesthetic experiences, the tourist’s need for precise sight-seeing information also leaked into adventure tales. These pause every so often to pass on tourist information as does the medieval adventure tale “The Terror of the Black Forest”: “The castle, with its machicolated towers, sinking floors, secret passages, mysterious prisons and dungeons, still exists in a fair state of preservation” (1884, 346). Thus, in genre cross-overs travel facts infiltrate fiction and fiction shapes travel facts. Though the travel reports stressed that the Black Forest was rather less dangerous than Mrs Radcliffe had led one to expect, the adventure stories told in various periodicals continued to fuel notions of “mystery and danger” (Bardsley and Jameson 1897, 13). The double perspective that was afforded by such expected, and happily contained, peril fulfils the standard requirements of tourism: it allows the temporary escape into a different life, imagining oneself in a world that is more romantic, more exciting and more individualised than one’s every-day existence at home, while at the same time providing the comforts and protection of modern civilisation. The less crowded destinations in the Black Forest lent themselves particularly to a standard tourism discourse that celebrated the departure from the beaten track and scoffed at well-frequented sites:

I […] was compelled to bend my steps towards the well-beaten track of tourists. […] The hotel and grounds and abbey gardens swarmed with people. I confess to having little love for my fellow-man when he congregates in large numbers, and makes a lovely spot the scene of, and excuse for, ‘a happy day.’ The happiness seems to find a vent in an abnormal quantity of drinking and shouting. (“A Ramble with a Knapsack through the Black Forest” 1887, 699)

12The basic paradox of tourism, as Hans Magnus Enzensberger has remarked, is that the effort to escape from an industrial world has become an industry itself (1958). Victorians travelling in the Black Forest could imagine themselves in gothic adventures or brave primitive custom, while a developing tourist infrastructure ensured that they did not have to stray too far from their comfort zone. Having sampled the “old-world scenes” of the Black Forest spa Wildbad, and in particular the “primitive arrangements” of the dressing room which afforded a lady only a “wooden partition” and a “stuff curtain […] waving in every breeze” by way of privacy, the female traveller reporting on Black Forest baths in The Leisure Hour, is relieved to return to the safety of familiar fare: “Nor were we sorry, after so long a morning, to find ourselves seated in our pleasant apartments at the Bellevue, enjoying an English breakfast in the heart of the Black Forest” (“The Baths of the Black Forest” 1856, 557–8).

III. Border Crossings

13The various dramas that unfold in these scripted forest spaces evolve around porous or precarious borders: the stuff curtain waving in the breeze, the cottage door, the castle gate, the move from the forest home to a town. Borders demand rituals and thus moments of delay in the unfolding of the plot: a knock at the door, a formal greeting at the castle gate, or negotiations before one starts the journey to town. The stories linger on such moments of hesitation before a border is crossed. A brief discussion of “Lilla; or, The Ruby Cross: A Story of the Black Forest” serialised in the children’s magazine Little Folks in 1874, will illustrate this.

14“Lilla” tells the story of a little girl who is found, on a stormy night, outside the cottage door of an embittered old man who lives in the Black Forest after having been dismissed unjustly by his employer, the Count of Eberhausen. Unable to find out where the child belongs, the old man takes her in and raises her as his granddaughter. His neighbour, Dame Kinkel, who is dissatisfied with her life in the forest, steals a ruby cross the child is wearing and shows it off as her own in the nearby town, Freiburg. On her death-bed, nursed by Lilla, who by now has grown into a beautiful young girl, Dame Kinkel confesses the theft and returns the jewel to Lilla. When her grandfather falls ill, Lilla takes the cross into Freiburg to raise money for a doctor. The cross identifies Lilla as the lost daughter of the Count of Eberhausen. She was kidnapped by a dishonest servant and abandoned in the forest. Lilla returns to her inheritance and her adoptive grandfather’s honour and health are restored. The story contains a number of border moments, both topographical and conceptual: the child crying outside the cottage door, Dame Kinkel’s theft of the jewel, the two journeys from the forest to Freiburg, and Dame Kinkel’s return of the cross when she finds herself on the threshold between life and death. These border encounters, and the border crossings that follow, initiate change. The little child that the embittered recluse picks up at his door brings happiness to his life. Dame Kinkel, hesitating whether to appropriate the cross, slips it into her pocket at the moment the old man’s “shadow darkened the doorway” (154). Lilla’s trip to Freiburg reveals her aristocratic identity. In the straightforward moral world of the story, border moments mark choices between good and evil. The old man chooses to take pity on the helpless child, Dame Kinkel becomes a thief to satisfy her greed, Lilla bravely leaves for town to sacrifice her only possession in order to help her grandfather. Choices for good are rewarded (at least in the long run) and choices for evil are (eventually) punished. The story dwells on border moments to focus on these moments of moral choice. Borders also emphasise contrast: the forest space becomes a space of retreat, innocence and strength but only for those who follow the correct moral code. The town and its culture of gaudy display, selfishness and injustice corrupts the judgement of the count, who dismisses the wrong servant, and it corrupts Dame Kinkel who longs for its gaieties and neglects her (forest) duties. The story’s emphasis on borders thus helps to order social practices and ascribe specific moral values.

15Such border moments are of course not unique to the Black Forest, but to the British tourist, they become a source of fascination in the particular density of borders between France and Germany or between Baden and Württemberg. The young Englishman who describes his wanderings in Southern Germany in The Boys Own Paper is taken by surprise when he runs into a policeman who demands his passport: “[B]eing a free-born Briton I had not thought it necessary to provide myself with one” (“A Ramble with a Knapsack through the Black Forest,” 1887, 697). In this particular case, the stranger escapes more serious trouble because he is able to show his watch which has his father’s name engraved upon it and which the locals, being watchmakers themselves, eventually accept as credentials. More painful is the experience of a young apprentice who accompanies some English hikers and who is stranded between two borders as he does not have the right papers to enter one country nor sufficient funds, required as proof of financial independence, to re-enter the one he has just left. He is forced to wander the bridge “like a perturbed spirit between the two frontiers” until he can persuade a “mild-hearted” border guard to administer a beating “as a punishment for transgressing the laws made and provided” and is then allowed to re-enter the country he has just left ([Wraxall] 1851, 526).

16Equally fascinating from the tourist’s point of view are moments of border transgression. Wild pigs, for instance, showed a shocking disrespect for border regulations between Germany and France after being disturbed by the noise of battle during the Franco-Prussian War (Freischutz 1874, 3). Poachers, forever the transgressors of forest law, are potentially helped by the many borders of the area, which allows them to slip into safety across borders. A forest keeper tells the tale of how he single-handedly captured a stag off three poachers: “It being slow work getting the stag over the rough ground […] the poachers lost heart, and bolted, abandoning their prize […] 200 yards more and the poachers would have had him over the Würtemberg [sic] frontier, where they could not have been pursued” (Freischutz 1872, 7). Contrary to its task of regulating communities, the border in this example facilitates disorder. Sometimes, tourists not only witnessed border transgressions but experienced their effects directly. A frequent source of discomfort is the Black Forest habit of sharing their living quarters with their animals. Thus one correspondent is forced to spend his night in a Black Forest farmhouse “in deadly strife with the live stock of the place” (Freischutz 1872, 9).7

17In fictional renderings, the forest space was conceptualised as discouraging the order disruptions entailed in border transgressions. As in Grimms’ fairy tales, any straying off the prescribed path (literal or figurative) is punished by natural or supernatural forces. When Hans and Lottchen go exploring in the forest, Lottchen nearly falls into the mill stream and the children are caught in a terrifying storm (Ker 1886, 88). When Vetty aspires to become a lady and refuses to be useful around the house, the forest goblin carries her off and threatens to turn her into a toad (Muddock 1874, 300).

18The most prevalent kinds of border crossings in these tales and reports of the Black Forest are the departure from or entry into the forest. As in “Lilla; or, The Ruby Cross,” the forest usually signifies a space of Arcadian harmony and is contrasted to urban spaces made corrupt by greed, selfishness or fashion. Thus, in a story printed in Bentley’s Miscellany in 1853, the gifted young wood carver Herman lives contentedly in the forest with his mother until a travelling Frenchman comes to his door (in another border moment) and tempts him with tales of fame and fortune which he can find in Paris, awakening “all the bad passions which had so long lain dormant in him” (“The Sculptor of the Black Forest,” 1853, 283) Herman’s mother classifies the influence of the foreign intruder as a fall from edenic innocence: “[These strangers] have come here just as the serpent entered the terrestrial paradise, to tempt you to eat of the tree of knowledge” (283). The knowledge which Herman gathers in Paris is that no-one is interested in true artistic perfection, but that the fame of artists is treated as a fashion item, waxing and waning unpredictably. After many humiliations:

he quitted Paris by the same barrier through which he had passed four years before, when he was eagerly pressing on towards the great city. But alas! All the hopes which he then entertained had vanished: then he was happy, young, and full of strength, now he was despairing. (289)

19The story of the sculptor repeats the standard romantic trope of the true artist inspired by nature. In the context of the periodical, the trope is generalised by a sonnet that follows the story and contrasts unchanging nature with “Man’s Degeneracy”: “’Tis not that Nature changes, nor the clime / Its vigorous influence loses […] But ’tis the men degenerate” (E.G. 1853, 289).8 While there is no direct connection between the sonnet and the story that precedes it, the poem’s positive assessment of the sublime forces of nature resonates with the story’s celebration of the edenic forest space. More explicitly than the story, the sonnet locates the beneficial influence of sublime nature on man in the past (“foster’d once a haught and hardy race”, my emphasis) and diagnoses a loss of this influence for the present. The story represents this contrast on a spatial rather than a temporal scale: the secluded forest represents moral and (in consequence) artistic strength, while the city space is degenerate.

20In typical representations of the Black Forest in Victorian periodicals “real” forest spaces are specifically those that have been sheltered from the ravages of modernity: “if you really want to enjoy the scenery […] keep away from [the railway] […]. Shun it as you would the Evil One” advises The Boy’s Own Paper (“A Ramble with a Knapsack through the Black Forest” 1887, 710). And The Girl’s Own Paper praises the contentment of Black Forest girls who have been unspoiled by modern luxury: “[…] here in the Black Forest the girls who have none of our amusements or excitements, and none of our leisure, are happier, more restful, and more amiable than many a girl among us who has every luxury and nothing to do” (“Girl-Life in the Black Forest,” 1885, 744). This attitude is maintained even in the face of evidence that only the incursions of modernity made the journey to and in the Black Forest in moderate comfort possible at all. Thus, The Leisure Hour’s advice on “Cycling in the Black Forest” does not tire of praising the “well engineered” roads, the advantages of convenient railway connections and the fact that “the tourist need be under no apprehension as regards finding accommodation for the night”. At the same time the article complains of the modernisation of “commercial cities” like Strasburg (Quinton 1901, 809, 810 and 815).

21Not everyone approved of the alleged backwardness of the forest. In some cases, for instance, Germans appeared to possess distressingly little knowledge of decent sporting behaviour:

[a German gentleman] told me that […] the best sport of all was to explode a dynamite cartridge at the bottom of the water, which killed the fish for many hundreds of feet either way, when, said he, you can go in a boat and pick up as many as you please. In spite of my remonstrances, he actually walked over to the nearest village to get permission from the mayor to repeat this outrage […] (Sans Souci 1898, 845).

22With a large Catholic influence, Black Foresters also presented themselves as backward in religious matters: “The Catholic element is stronger in this portion of the Black Forest than in any other, and, as a natural consequence, the inhabitants are the most bigoted and narrow-minded the traveller will yet have come across.” The railway, in this case, is celebrated as the saviour from such religious backwardness: “The railway […] will dissipate this, and industry and prosperity will speedily make their appearance […] (“Byways of the Black Forest” 1858, 314). While forest life might be quaint, it would appear that in the end it was after all preferable to have modern amenities for both body and soul.

23It was not necessarily only the locals that were deficient in cultural accomplishment, but other tourists as well. A young American evokes the derision of the correspondent for Bell’s Life when during a battue he talks so loudly about money “that the hares curiously enough declined to run anywhere near his side of the beat”. The American looks ridiculous when he shows “advanced ideas by firing at a roebuck when he was two hundred yards off, and declaring that he had killed him he was sure, although the roe was running out of sight as hard as he could go” (“A German Battue” 1871, 6). Such emphasis on British superiority—over locals as well as tourists from other countries—re-enacts another stereotypical tourist attitude. While travel served to open the mind and increase one’s cultural accomplishments, it typically also served to clarify one’s self-perception and strengthen patriotism (Buzard 1993, 99ff). In fact, some of the attitudes on display in the travel reports are reminiscent of colonial attitudes; there is amusement at primitive customs, shock at local superstition, and a wish to educate, even if only in the art of jam making: “An English boy will hardly believe me when I say that [jam making] was quite a new idea to [my landlady]. […] I made some excellent raspberry and whortleberry jam […] When you go there I hope you will find the good lady still flourishing, and an adept jam-maker” (“A Ramble with a Knapsack through the Black Forest” 1887, 710). Amidst all the enthusiastic explorations of foreign spaces, “Britain found security in its remove from the continental landmass, seeking to assert its ideological separation through a reiteration of distance, border, and the insularity of the island nation” (Mathieson 2015, 92).

IV. Looking Out of the Forest

24For the British, travel into Germany represented not just crossing a spatial but also a temporal border into an environment that retained both the charming as well as the savage attributes of a pre-civilised nation (Klette 2017). In a sense, all of Germany was considered as somehow “stuck in a forest” and the Black Forest becomes emblematic for the nation as a whole, producing an anachronistic space that is located simultaneously in the present and in the past. In the polyphonous environment of the periodical, this view of the German other becomes more complex as these periodicals offer not only border crossings from Britain to Germany but also in the opposite direction: translations of German stories complement the view presented by the British tourist looking at a German other with views of Germans looking at themselves and at the foreign others that invade their space. One notable example is “The Cold Heart”, Wilhelm Hauff’s 1827 tale of the charcoal-burner who exchanges his heart for a stone in order to get rich with the help of Dutch Michael. This story appeared in an abbreviated translation in The Boys Own Magazine in 1861. “The Cold Heart” presents a community that is disrupted by foreign influence, as Dutch Michael teaches them to neglect their neighbours and only look out for their own profit and sell their wood to the highest bidder in Amsterdam:

About a hundred years ago, no people on earth were more honest than the inhabitants of the Black Forest. At the present time, when there is so much money in the place, the men have grown wicked, and are ever thinking of nought but wealth; the young people dance and sing on the Sunday and often swear. […] the cause of all our wickedness is Dutch Michael. (Hauff 1861, 145–6)

25The forest Arcadia seen through German eyes is already lost and the story hints at the dislocating social transformations that took place in the Black Forest as individual companies grew rich through the wood trade with the Dutch during the eighteenth century. Social pressures and profit orientation led to such a ruthless depletion of the forest that by the end of the eighteenth century 30% of the Black Forest had disappeared (Laschewski 2001a, 93). When Baden joined the Deutsche Zollverein in 1834, a severe agricultural crisis followed, as it closed off France as the most profitable market for the meat farmers of the Black Forest. Improved transport routes from other areas in Germany also made wheat farming less profitable. Many farms were in heavy debt and forced sales of farms to foreign wood traders led to further irresponsible clearings of forest land (Mohr and Schröder 1997, 37). De-forestation might be the reason why one British tourist in 1851 searched in vain for trees when he reached Himmelreich, just outside Freiburg: “I looked round with delight, as the thought struck me that I was now in the Black Forest, but in vain, for no forest did I see, nor even trees, except a few jagged pines” ([Wraxall] 1851, 524). It was only through careful re-forestation programmes throughout the nineteenth century that the forest was saved. But re-forestation led to problematic monocultures and the systematic devastation of farms as farmland was turned back into forest (Mohr and Schröder 1997, 37). Far from representing a landscape untouched by civilisation, by the nineteenth century the Black Forest was a product of human intervention.

26Victorian travel reports show little awareness of such developments triggered by economic pressures, though there was a marked interest in Black Forest industry from glass making to straw plaiting and of course the manufacture of cuckoo clocks, all of which is described with enthusiastic praise for the industriousness of the locals.9 Some reports even managed to bridge the basic contradiction of commending the innocence of a people removed from modernity on the one hand and at the same time admiring a distinctly Victorian-looking industriousness, by stressing that Black Foresters are hardworking but that they shun machines: “The Schwarzwälder prefers trusting to his own hands than to machinery” (“Byways of the Black Forest” 1858, 311). To the Victorian tourist it seemed that the Black Foresters saved their uncorrupted connection to the land and still somehow managed to enter an age of industry without representing a serious threat to those enlightened machine users, the British.

27As the Victorians travelled beyond the borders of their own enlightened modernity into the German Black Forest, they encountered their own longings and a nostalgic sense of a lost, more harmonious past. At the same time, these sojourns into foreign space and, as it seemed, into another time, remained very clearly a tourist experience. This is no Thoreau-like confrontation with an essential self. The b/ordering practice of asserting difference while enjoying the refreshing experience of seemingly adventurous and pre-civilised forest spaces, bolstered a self-assured view of Britishness and reconciled the tourists to their return home. Even though borders were crossed physically, the performance of conceptual borders in the end left the tourist disconnected from these foreign spaces; the experience across the border becomes an aesthetic one.