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Three weeks into the First World War, a list of German casualties in the London Times included this improbable notice: "It is reported that Herr Karl Baedeker, the publisher of the famous guide-books, has been killed in action."1 The most famous Karl Baedeker (1801-59) had started publishing in Coblenz in 1827. By 1914, the family business had passed to his youngest son, Friedrich (Fritz). The man killed in 1914 was Fritz's son, also named Karl, while the guidebooks still appeared under their founder's name.2 Evidently the Times had confused one Karl with another. Yet this report, however erroneous with regard to the youngest Baedeker, metonymically foretold a more widespread trauma - for the books themselves would become war casualties. In January 1916, Findlay Muirhead (co-editor of Baedeker's English-language volumes with his brother James F. Muirhead) announced a new series of guidebooks to replace the German ones, "which, after the war," it was supposed, were "not likely to be popular in the countries of the Allies."3 Indeed, by 1918 Baedekers drew denunciation in Britain and America for having been instrumental to the German war effort.The relation between nationalism and the trajectory of the Baedekers' popularity outside Germany has yet to receive sustained attention (notwithstanding the considerable scholarship already carried out on these guidebooks). In light of this relation, I will articulate the foremost reasons for the precipitous decline of the Baedeker empire in the early twentieth century. Critics have partially addressed the first of these reasons: that conditions on the Western Front undermined foundational concepts of landscape description, thereby (I would add) implicating Baedekers as a representational method that had come to be seen as limited and inaccurate. Other scholars have focused on how the guidebooks emblematized a lost pre-war style of international journey within a contested cultural field of travel narratives. However, evidence in neglected archival and fictional sources qualifies our understanding of changes to travel style and the relation between those changes and the use of Baedekers. In what follows, I revisit and reconcile these assessments by linking them to a still more pressing, unexamined consideration: namely, that the events of 1914-18 also recast the Baedekers' mediation of international access as a form of nationalist expansionism, and hence a suspect project.Much of the Baedeker story has become familiar thanks to the seminal work of Paul Fussell, continuing through that of James Buzard, Edward Mendelson, and Rudy Koshar, among others. As they have observed, Baedekers were in their heyday before the war, providing highly popular guidance during an age of burgeoning travel. According to Mendelson, Karl Baedeker had seen how guidebooks of the early 1800s typically offered either simple lists of tourist destinations without any context, or overly elaborate discussions of what to see and how to feel when seeing it. "Karl Baedeker chose a middle way," Mendelson explains; "he gave his readers precisely the information they needed to find their way cheaply and conveniently, and precisely the information they needed in order to appreciate what they saw. He trusted them to provide their aesthetic and emotional responses for themselves."4 Furthermore, Baedekers stood in for human guides, giving a wealth of details on transportation and money matters. For example, the 1913 edition of Northern Germany begins with twenty-seven pages on languages; currency; passports and customs; railways; motoring and cycling; sample itineraries; hotels; mail, telegraph, and telephone services; and a nineteen-page essay on North German architecture and painting from Romanesque to rococo.5Baedekers owed their phenomenal popularity, however, to more than the scope of their information. Early evaluations attributed their success to an empirically based, objective narrative framework. Karl Baedeker personally verified the accuracy of his books, researching the first volumes himself. …

Three weeks into the Great War, a list of German casualties in the London Times included this improbable notice: “It is reported that Herr Karl Baedeker, the publisher of the famous guide-books, has been killed in action” (“German News” 5). The most famous Karl Baedeker (1801–1859) had started publishing in Coblenz in 1827. By 1914, the family business had passed to his youngest son, Friedrich (Fritz). The man killed in 1914 was Fritz’s son, also named Karl, while the guidebooks still appeared under their founder’s name (Mendelson 394–95, 401). Evidently the Times had confused one Karl with another. Yet this report, however erroneous with regard to the youngest Baedeker, metonymically foretold a more widespread trauma—for the books themselves would become war casualties. In January 1916, Findlay Muirhead (coeditor of Baedeker’s English-language volumes with his brother James F. Muirhead) announced a new series of guidebooks to replace the German ones, which, it was supposed, would have no postwar readership in Allied countries (“British Baedekers” 3).

The Western Front in the First World War was, at its time, by far the most thoroughly and efficiently mapped battleground in history. The war came during a golden age of cartographic technology, when industrial-age techniques of material production combined with Victorian standards of analytical rigor to create or improve such advances as trigonometric surveying techniques, land-based and aerial photography, stereographic projection, multicolor lithography, and mobile printing presses. The high level of cartographic accuracy and utility that resulted from these advances proved especially valuable given certain tactical exigencies that had developed in the progress of military technology, such as the need to aim indirect artillery fire against entrenched defenders from a distance of several miles. Using refined systems of contour lines and grid references based on Cartesian spatial coordinate structures, army cartographers sought to depict the shape of the terrain and the location of enemy positions on it as precisely as possible, thereby achieving an unprecedented rationalization and ordering of space over thousands of square miles of ground (see figure 1.1).

If there was any part of the world that might have seemed by its nature immune from the topographical depredations of industrialized warfare, it was the sea. A vast expanse whose featureless surface bore no trace of the epic battles fought upon it, the sea could easily have represented to the artistic imagination of 1914–1918 a space outside war. Rosalind E. Krauss, in her account of painterly modernism in The Optical Unconscious (1993), reaches such a conclusion when describing the abstract seascapes of Piet Mondrian’s “Plus and Minus” paintings (1914–1917): “It’s sea and sky, or dunes, sea, and sky, that have been segmented off from the rest of the world, from everything political, or economic, or historic, and themselves made into an abstraction of that world. In 1916, after all, the Great War was being fought not too far away from that very sea and sky” (12). The sea was “a special kind of medium for [painterly] modernism,” she argues, “because of its perfect isolation, its detachment from the social, its sense of self-enclosure, and, above all, its opening into a visual plenitude that is somehow heightened and pure, both a limitless expanse and a sameness, flattening it into nothing, into the no-space of sensory deprivation” (2). This is the sea as void: a Cartesian res extensa pushed to its asymptotic maximums, at which even objects and events, sensations and awareness—to say nothing of such grim material actualities as those that accompany life in the trenches—approach the vanishing point.

When Lieutenant Bernard Adams of the Royal Welch Fusiliers was killed at the Somme in early 1917, he left behind a memoir in which he attempted to articulate the experience and meaning of the war. In the first lines of his book, Nothing of Importance (1917), a friend asks, “ ‘I want to know the truth; what is it like?’ “ Adams writes, “There was a long silence,” confessing that nothing can adequately explain what he has seen (xv). Nevertheless, the rest of the memoir consists of a minutely detailed effort to answer the friend’s question. A key moment in this effort occurs when Adams describes a map of the front lines, which he reproduces in the text (see figure 0.1). “I wish I could convey the sense of intimacy with which I am filled when I look at this map,” he exclaims. “It is something like the feelings I should ascribe to a farmer looking at a map of his property, every inch of which he knows by heart; every field, every copse, every lane, every hollow and hill are intimate things to him. […] So do I know every corner, every turning in these trenches […]” (103). Grounding his understanding of the war in a vision of the ground, and reimagining the landscape through the agency of the map, Adams relives his personal history and captures for his reader intimate glimmers of what it meant to be there. This book follows his lead by examining how topographical description works in literary engagements with the seemingly overwhelming, incomprehensible, and inarticulable event that was the First World War.

C. E. Montague asserted several years after the war, “A painter who is worth his salt will flatly refuse to give you just the precise physical facts of a landscape. It is not his business. His business is not to convey topographical information, but to express some emotion or other that he has felt in presence of that scene” (The Right Place 45). Montague exemplifies his prescribed method when relating the front line experience in his polemic memoir Disenchantment (1922). One primary emotion evoked by the war was pathos, which he conveys in this text through gestures to pictorial landscape depictions in which he subordinates topographical factuality to emotional content. For example, he likens disillusioned soldiers to the nineteenth-century French painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, for whom (according to Montague) the lifting of an obscuring mist from a landscape paradoxically occasions the end of work and signifies loss and regret.

In the introduction to this book, I noted that when Bernard Adams’s friend asks what the war was like, Adams falls silent, unable to find the words to describe his experience. As Fussell points out, “Whatever the cause, the presumed inadequacy of language itself to convey the facts about trench warfare is one of the motifs of all who wrote about the war” (Great War 170). Why do words seem to fail their speakers in these extreme circumstances—a condition that applies not only to Adams, but also to the sufferers of shell shock induced aphasia or to the countless war veterans moved to keep their war stories untold? (Harry Patch, the veteran who died in 2009 as the last British survivor of the trenches, was one who never spoke to his wife or children about what he had witnessed [“Death of Last Tommy”].) One answer may simply be that trauma, both physical and psychological, interferes with the capacity of the human intellect to comprehend or articulate the traumatic event. As this book does not focus primarily on the mental effects of trauma with regard to modern literature, however, I would have to leave that topic in the hands of the many scholars whose wide-ranging discussions resist easy summary here.1 Another answer has to do with the status of words as the currency of meaning. One way to account for the wordlessness permeating such stories as those by Adams and so many others would be to point to the meaninglessness of the described events. According to this reasoning, words necessarily fail in the face of trench warfare, whose participants wait for random death by shellfire in between the senseless repetition of “over the top” offensives.

A consequence of the Romantic movement was a profound preoccupation with "character"--the desire to understand the human psyche through the exploration of personalities created through literature. Authors and playwrights of the Romantic era turned to Shakespeare's works, both to seek inspiration for their own efforts, and to attempt a comprehension of the many rich and complex characters of Shakespeare's own creation. One result of this fascination with Shakespeare was the birth of character criticism, or, in the words of Romantic critic Charles Lamb, the desire "to know the internal workings and movements of a great mind, of an Othello or a Hamlet for instance, the when and the why and the how far they should be moved". Strangely, despite an intense interest in Shakespeare's characters, Romantic authors thought his plays singularly unfit for the stage, and plays of the Romantic era were unsuccessful. The Romantic playwrights had to contend with the remarkable and influential legacy of Shakespeare--a tradition which they tried to emulate--and their desires to maintain their own original creativity. They created a large body of important and successful poetry, and many bad plays.