Travel Shadows by Justinus Kerner

Apart from his many scientific publications and his poetry, Kerner was also the author of one of the more intriguing literary works of German Romanticism, Die Reiseschatten (Travel Shadows, 1811). Ostensibly an account of his travels through Germany and Austria following his graduation from the University of Tübingen, the book is a highly imaginative, almost surreal concoction of Romantic, sentimental, grotesque, satirical, and Old German folkloric elements. Attributed by Kerner to an itinerant “shadow performer” named Lux, Travel Shadows was inspired by the tradition of “Chinese Shadows” (ombres chinoises) and represents Kerner’s attempt to create a travel narrative in the form of a grandiose shadow show.

In the introduction to his translation of Travel Shadows – the first in English – Harold B. Segel situates Kerner’s work in the context of the emergence of a German shadow show tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.