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(1819 - 1898)
The German author Theodor Fontane
was very fond of Scottish history. Of course, as common in his time, his
perspective is rather romantic. He wrote travel diary "Jenseit des
Tweed" (Beyond the Tweed, publ. 1860) when he visited Scotland in 1858,
deeply influenced by the novels of Sir Walter Scott and the romantic
view of Scotland. The book combines his own experiences with historical
information, place descriptions and anecdotes, seasoned with German
translations of some poems, mostly by the celebrated Burns. Edinburgh is
honoured by several chapters. Other places visited are: Linlithgow,
Stirling, Loch Lomond and Loch Katrine, Flodden Field, Perth, Inverness,
Culloden, Staffa and Iona, Lochleven Castle, Abbotsford, and Melrose
Abbey. (There is an English translation of the book, titled "Across the
Tweed" by B. Battershaw, 1965.)
Theodor Storm
(1817 - 1888)
He too was a poet and a novel-writer (and a lawyer). He lived most of
the time in a town by the shore of the North Sea called Husum and many
of his poems describe this landscape (the coast being not rocky but flat
and sandy with a large area left free by low tide - the so-called Watt
-, the land partly covered with heather and fir-woods) and give the
atmosphere of a land deeply influenced by the sea. The poems I will
present describe the land and the town of Husum. From 1852-1863 Storm
had to live in exile in Berlin because he said the wrong things about
the Danish occupation of the county of Schleswig-Holstein. In Berlin he
met Fontane and became member in the same literary circle "Der Tunnel
über der Spree".
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