"Semilasso": Pückler-Muskaus Reise nach Afrika. Europamüdigkeit und Anti-Konformismus im 19. Jahrhundert

This recognition in the work "Semilasso" initially focuses on the aesthetic-literary meaning of the concept of "Europamüdigkeit" in the light of the international political scenario of the first half of the 19th century. Secondly, he associates this state of mind with the author's assessment of a persistent violation of human rights and his tendency to ideally take refuge in what remains of a romantic world by now exhausted. Pückler-Muskau's Semilasso in Africa can be seen in the context of his numerous other literary works as an oeuvre with a stronger socio-political character. The text is to be placed after the "Letters of a deceased" (4 vols., 1830-31) and "Tutti Frutti" (5 vols., 1834) and before "Mehmed Ali‘s Reich" (3 vols.,1844). Despite his aristocratic status, Pückler-Muskau shared with Heine and other well-known liberal democratic thinkers the widespread unease towards the conservative politics that manifested itself in the Congress of Vienna and that was reflected in numerous reprisals, especially censorship, of which the representatives of Young Germany in particular were affected. In "Semilasso in Africa", Pückler-Muskau chronologically describes a journey that leads from Europe to Algiers, Bougie and Bone, then to Biserta and Tunis, then to Sauwan, Keruan, Sfax, Susa and finally to the “Land of the Bedouins”. The text consists of a pastiche of various literary genres. It is no coincidence that the work "Semilasso in Africa" is one of the works least studied by Germanists and biographers due to its sometimes confused approaches to various experiences. Although it is difficult to name a thematic focus, the criticism of the legal, bureaucratic-administrative and military system that reigned in Europe, especially in Prussia, is striking. Pückler-Muskau is an extravagant, ingenious outsider of his time.