In the early nineteenth century, those inhabiting German‑speaking lands appear to have given little weight to the concept of national identity. And yet, mentions of Germany began to appear throughout literary texts between the mid-1700s and mid-1800s. What changed? In the introduction to her work attempting to answer this question, Karin Baumgartner claims that travel literature was a factor that aided the process of formation of a nascent, cohesive German identity, extending beyond the shared language and history as driving integrative forces. The volume’s ambition is to offer a rich survey of diverse travel sources framing the then-heterogenous German nation as a »Thirdspace« (Soja, 1996), a unified place infused with meaning and stories, subject to shifting representations over time, yet simultaneously located in empirically identifiable space.

The author, committed to exploring how Germany’s portrayals across travel literature contributed to the processes of knowledge formation and to the understanding of the world by German readers, employs the concept of »mental maps« (Downs and Stea, 1977; a more extensive engagement with Said, 2003 would have been welcome) and argues that travel-related sources played a seminal role in providing readers with a framework to understand their spatial environment as a national environment. Inventing the German Nation strives to make three significant contributions. First, the author claims that the shaping of the German national identity extended beyond the reality of »imagined communities« (Anderson, 2000). Second – that the Germans’ geographical awareness and cartographic knowledge were not less important to the process of nation-building than their historical knowledge. Finally, Baumgartner argues that both foreign and domestic travel literature contributed to German readers developing an idea about their country’s alleged territorial extent through descriptions of landmarks and itineraries extending across Germany.

The book has a clear structure: it opens with an introduction providing, among others, a useful synthesis of discourses about the idea of national identity developed during the time period in question (and the role language, history, and cartography played in it), and exploring the inevitable definitional challenges of travel literature as a genre (Buzard, 1993). The main body of the volume is divided into five relatively even chapters. These appear to follow one another in a logical order. The first chapter provides an overview of foreign travelogues written about Germany, followed by a chapter focused on Cotta’s Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, a German periodical geared toward the broad German public and reporting on travel and culture. The third chapter discusses domestic travelogues, while chapter four takes under scrutiny Wigand’s Das malerische und romantische Deutschland, an innovative and commercially successful, multi-volume and image-filled publication. The final chapter investigates sociability going beyond politics at the German spa.

Despite the overall clear analytical structure, the reading experience remains somewhat uneven. Based on the volume’s introductory note and its leading theses, a reader would have expected to learn primarily how foreign and domestic travelogues solidified German national identity, and how they aided armchair travellers to start identifying themselves and others as German. At first, Baumgartner successfully provides an answer to this question with her analysis of selected foreign travelogues (in this case, English and French), which were representing people encountered en route largely in ethnographic terms (as in colonial expedition reports, »unifying what might be multiple«, 5). These accounts were repetitive, and focused on few, established itineraries, thus presenting to German readers an illusion of the unified character of German lands. This provided a challenge to German travel authors to contest and correct these generalised foreign accounts. However, the picture emerging from the following chapters, albeit interesting and revealing the author’s immense erudition in both travel-related sources and literature, appears somewhat disorienting. It highlights the difficulty in employing travel literature (especially domestic) as a lens through which to see unified German national identity crystalizing, rather than highlighting this genre’s potential to consistently serve as such a lens (as a reader would have expected based on introductory arguments). Morgenblatt, chosen by the author as a case study to represent foreign travelogues’ reception in Germany and German readers’ cosmopolitan taste in travel writing, seems to actually be proving German-speaking readers’ lack of interest in their homeland, and their lack of striving for their own supraregional geographical specificity.

Another case study introduced by the author, Das malerische und romatische Deutschland, servin as an example of a domestic travel account, »ignored the lived reality of the local population, but also ignored the realm of maps and empirical space«, as Baumgartner admits (208).The account, which strived to promote the idea of Germany to its readers, presented it as a »pastoral [country] that no longer existed« and as a »museal space for an educated group of people with aesthetic and leisure needs« (209), fostering »relationship between readers and a regional [not national] homeland« (210), thus appearing to actually fail to solidify the nation-building process. Baumgartner’s compelling comparison of this text to Stein’s Reise nach den vorzüglichsten Hauptstädten von Mittel‑Europa – a work not mentioned in the chapter’s title despite the prominence this comparison flagged throughout the chapter – constitutes a welcome contribution to examining the contrast between presenting a locally diverse space, and a homogenized, mapped space that is both political and surveyed.

Baumgartner does, however, convincingly present the shared German experience of enjoying four weeks annually at a spa, which is a tradition that united the German population of various regions, as opposed to, for instance, meetings in the restricted spaces of metropolitan salons. Here, the author claims that spas established a certain social cohesion and a sense of national identity linked to a specific model of sociability (but not to territorial identity). Yet, the author also references »the separation of the spas from the towns wherein they were located«, and admits that the spas were a relatively »deterritorialized space« (245). The plethora of details that emerge from the spa-related German sources is undeniable, yet again does not seem to fully support the idea that travelogues helped shape a distinct German identity.

The contrast between the book’s conclusion and its introductory sections remains rather disorienting. In the conclusion, the author describes rural Germany juxtaposed to the metropolitan one – a motive broadly emerging from the volume – and admits that there were »two different Germanys«, and that »spa narratives (...) had the goal of forging (...) one cohesive class to the exclusion of all others« (249). While the anticipated and the final results of this work remain disjointed, Baumgartner’s work presents an engaging story of the complexity of travel narratives on Germany throughout the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. And while travel literature does not convincingly appear to have shaped a unified German identity, the author’s thoughtful overview of this corpus of travel literature and her insights into geographic knowledge among German readers (89), the growth of Germany’s infrastructure (138), German female travel writing (164), and »narrating images« (203) are certainly among the strengths of this edition. The work could have benefitted from supplementing foreign sources analysed in it with other accounts by travellers to Germany of European nationalities beyond the British and French – which would make it less Western‑centric (e.g., Drace-Francis and Bracewell, eds., 2008) – or with additional travelogues by German travellers to other countries who formed comparisons between their homeland and unfamiliar lands (e.g., Struck, 2006). This, however, should not detract from this work’ above-mentioned merits.