The Bells in Their Silence

[Dave Monroe]

Gorra, Michael.  The Bells in Their Silence:
   Travels through Germany.  Princeton, NJ:
   Princeton UP, 2004.

Nobody writes travelogues about Germany. The country
spurs many anxious volumes of investigative
reporting--books that worry away at the "German
problem," World War II, the legacy of the Holocaust,
the Wall, reunification, and the connections between
them. But not travel books, not the free-ranging and
impressionistic works of literary nonfiction we
associate with V. S. Naipaul and Bruce Chatwin. What
is it about Germany and the travel book that puts them
seemingly at odds? With one foot in the library and
one on the street, Michael Gorra offers both an answer
to this question and his own traveler's tale of
Germany.

Gorra uses Goethe's account of his Italian journey as
a model for testing the traveler's response to Germany
today, and he subjects the shopping arcades of
contemporary German cities to the terms of Benjamin's
Arcades project. He reads post-Wende Berlin through
the novels of Theodor Fontane, examines the role of
figurative language, and enlists W. G. Sebald as a
guide to the place of fragments and digressions in
travel writing.

Replete with the flaneur's chance discoveries--and
rich in the delights of the enduring and the
ephemeral, of architecture and flood--The Bells in
Their Silence offers that rare traveler's tale of
Germany while testing the very limits of the travel
narrative as a literary form.

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/7718.html

Ch. 1, "Cultural Capital"

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/s7718.html

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/s7718.pdf



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