Examining the Danish historian Christian Molbech's 'Travels in my native country' from 1811-15 this paper will discuss the complex transition from understanding landscape within logics of natural history to more national and romantic notions and new entanglement of history, people and landscape.
Paper long abstract:
Examining the Danish historian Christian Molbech's “Ungdomsvandringer i mit Fødeland” (Youth wanderings in my native country) published 1811-15 this paper will discuss the complex and ambivalent transition from understanding the Danish landscape within logics of natural history to more national and romantic perceptions of the fatherland and especially the new entanglement of history, people and landscape. Molbech was one of the first national tourists to describe the aesthetic and experiential values of the Danish landscape – nature was emotionalized and historicized. His text is thus an example of how a distinct way of knowing and sensing nature understood as an emotional and ‘peopled’ landscape (i.e. inhabited by past and present national subjects) emerges in descriptions and paintings in the first decades of 19th-century. However, different versions of the entanglement of history, landscape, and temporality as well as culture and nature are articulated and practiced during the journeys.