Oriental Flânerie: Fürst Pückler‐Muskau's Aus Mehemed Alis Reich

"Grandseigneur, Journalist, Parkgestalter, Weltreisender, Frauenfreund"- these are the words Otto Flake uses in his biographical essay to outline the colorful personaofHermannFurst vonPuckler-Muskau (750).Puckler was indeeda kind of enfant terrible in his time and considered an oddity among writers of literature. Today, Puckler is known primarily as an expert on park design, especially the English landscape garden, a topic on which he wrote his famous Andeutungen uber Landschaftsgartnerei (1834), the only work that was published under his name. To this day, the parks he designed at his Muskau and Branitz estates are testaments to his talent in the field of landscape gardening.During his lifetime, Puckler was considered a popular writer, whose twentynine works were sold widely. His first publication, Briefe eines Verstorbenen: Ein fragmentarisches Tagebuch aus England, Wales, Irland und Frankreich (1828), made him a bestselling author, and with this cross between diary and travelogue, he set the paradigm for the works to come. All of these works, with the exception of the aforementioned work on landscape design, were published anonymously.1 As a young man, he dropped out of law school in Leipzig in order to join the prestigious Garde du Corps in Dresden. Soon thereafter, Puckler gave up his military career in order to pursue a life of leisure and traveling. In this pursuit, he faced a major challenge: for most of his life, Puckler lived beyond his financial means. In hope of financing his various trips throughout Europe, he divorced his wife Lucie von Pappenheim in 1826 with the aim of making a more financially advantageous match in England. This plan failed, and Puckler returned to his paternal estate in Muskau, which he hoped to transform into an English landscape park, a project that, together with his gambling, eventually bankrupted him. After selling Muskau and retiring to his mother's estate in Branitz, Puckler returned to his life of traveling and writing. Perhaps as a reflection of his many journeys, Puckler designed his own tomb in Branitz in the shape of a pyramid.Puckler consciously utilized his character as an aristocratic bon vivant in his travel writing, thereby creating a niche for his writing among other travelogues, a genre that had begun to grow in popularity since the late eighteenth century. Increased interest in the economic exploitation and scientific exploration of the Middle East, the Americas, as well as Australia and the South Pacific had an impact on this type of literature. Explorers such as Georg Forster and Alexander von Humboldt rose to fame in and beyond the academic realm. Their travel writing also became popular among a general readership eager for a glimpse of these exoticlocales.Furst Puckler-Muskau's book, Aus Mehemed Alis Reich, appeared in 1844, after parts of it had been previously published as a nongoing column in Cotta's Allgemeine Zeitung (Flake 761). It is a narrative of his journey through Egypt and the Sudan in 1837/38, in which Puckler mentions a great variety of issues without ever really focusing on any one of them at great length. In his travelogue, he offers a favorable commentary on the political reforms of Egypt's ruler, Mohammed Ali Pasha; introduces readers to ancient Egyptian monuments and sites; tells riveting adventure stories of camel rides through the desert; and titillates bourgeois sensibilities with tales of the slave market. Despite this cornucopia of topics and narratives, Puckler moves effortlessly from one to the other. This is mostly due to the central role of the unnamed first-person narrator,around whom thesedisparate elements revolve.The actual person, Furst Hermann von Puckler-Muskau, and the narrator are, in fact, intricately connected. Puckler's subjectivity and, above all, his status as a nobleman shape the narrative to the point where every encounter with the foreign culture serves to showcase his own personarather than the foreign culture around him. …