Jana Mezerová
German wandering. The Journey of Anton Amand Paudler and August Frind from Ještěd to Růžovský vrch
In 1902, hiking enthusiasts' associations from the northernmost tip of Bohemia and the neighbouring Lusatian border region agreed on a joint project to build a uniformly marked hiking trail connecting their areas. The plan was realised shortly afterwards, and since the trail mostly followed the ridges of the border mountains, it was called the Kammweg. Anton Amand Paudler, a local historian from Česká Lípa, northern Bohemia, became the promoter of this newly created hiking route, which in the following years, thanks to the care of other mountain associations, also included other border mountain ranges and almost encircled the entire Bohemian basin. In 1904, Paudler published a book called Der neue Kammweg vom Jeschken zum Rosenberge (The New Ridge Route from Ještěd to Růžovský vrch), which is both a tourist guide and a travel diary or tourist report. It was illustrated by his friend August Frind. The book is part of an extensive German-language local-history production that seeks to define identity not only through landscape but also through history and folk culture. The images and symbolism of individual places are, of course, often different from those created for Czech national society by Czech-language production. Against this background, the study attempts to show various aspects of relationship to the countryside that are characteristic of German-speaking local-history production, ranging from the practical, such as signposting and tourist facilities, to the perception of the role of the landscape - border forest, wild landscape versus cultural landscape, rural landscape as a "preserve" of folk culture; to the insertion of symbolic meanings into the landscape.
Keywords: tourism - hiking trails - northern Bohemia - Ještěd/Jeschkenberg - Růžovský vrch/Rosenberg - Anton Amand Paudler - August Frind
design by Bedřich Vémola
