2023 (4)

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Von getrennter Weltauffassung zu Naturenkulturen. Ludwig Boltzmanns Reisebericht Reise eines deutschen Professors ins Eldorado und Franz Kafkas Der Verschollene
Weisensel, Nicolas (2023) , S. 32-67
In his America travelogue Reise eines deutschen Professors ins Eldorado (1905), the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann took a surprisingly similar route to that of the protagonist Karl Roßmann in Franz Kafka’s novel Der Verschollene. So far, however, Boltzmann’s report has not been made fruitful for interpretations of Kafka’s Der Verschollene. This is the aim of this work. In the analysis, both texts are compared against the background of the concept of entangled naturecultures (Karen Barad, Donna Haraway). Given the great similarities in the descriptions of different places and topics—this applies, e.g., to the New York harbor, country houses, theaters and landscape descriptions during train journeys through the USA—Boltzmann’s travelogue, in which, according to my thesis, a rather separated worldview is represented, serves as a contrasting foil in order to make visible a specific, intertwined worldview in the sense of naturecultures in Kafka’s Der Verschollene. Boltzmann’s travel text as a historical parallel text can thus contribute to a better understanding of Kafka’s novel.