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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

Theodor Fontane, Johanna M. Lankau, Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg, German writer

College

Humanities

Department

German and Russian

Abstract

Before applying for this ORCA grant, I worked with Professor McFarland on a project about Johanna M. Lankau, a German author who wrote a hundred years ago about her walks throughout Dresden and the surrounding countryside. As an aspect of this research, I searched through newspaper microfiches in Berlin, July 2008, looking for stories and articles by author Johanna Lankau. I came across literature reviews of the popular German writer Theodor Fontane. His most beloved work is his encyclopedic Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (“Hikes through the Region of Brandenburg”). This caught my attention because Lankau also wrote about walking through nature and the city, even though the strict societal gender roles of her time discouraged women from walking in public. Professor McFarland and I decided that an ORCA grant would provide a unique experience for expanding this research. We wanted to know if popular work like Fontane’s inspired women writers such as Lankau to step out into the landscape and write about what they saw. To better understand the connections between Fontane’s and Lankau’s collections of walking narratives, we looked for discursive connections and at the history of walking in Germany.

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