To the ends of the world in search of ourselves; Why we love travelling – and why it’s good for us.
VOM GLÜCK, UNTERWEGS ZU SEIN
(The Joys of Life on the Road)
by Christian Schüle
Siedler/PRH Verlagsgruppe, April 2022
Travelling is simply wonderful – that joyful sensation of heading out into the big wide world to experience the wholly new, that feeling of freedom and openness to accidental encounters… and it’s not least the ideal chance to experience time, the world and yourself differently. Whether it’s the beauty of old pilgrims’ ways in Scandinavia or dark alleyways in Cairo, the effortlessness of the flip-flop-wearing guides to Guatemala’s Atitlán volcano, the dogs dozing idly in the Portuguese sun, nights in Blackpool or Tokyo …
In this book, Christian Schüle – philosopher, traveller, flâneur and hiker – combines his personal experiences exploring the world with reflections on why unfamiliarity and distance are the perfect way to find yourself. VOM GLÜCK, UNTERWEGS ZU SEIN is both a philosophical road trip, and a celebration of meaningful travel.
Christian Schüle, born in 1970, is a philosopher, freelance writer and publisher whose award-winning essays, articles and reportage have appeared among others in Die Zeit and Mare, and on Deutschlandfunk, Deutschlandradio and Radio Bavaria. Since 2015 he teaches Culture Studies at the University of the Arts in Berlin. He has published a series of much talked-about and noteworthy essays on topical subjects, including his collection « Deutschlandvermessung » and, most recently, « In der Kampfzone: Deutschland zwischen Panik, Größenwahn und Selbstverzwergung ».
It’s a given that, as far as work is concerned, nothing these days is a given. The Second Machine Age of self-teaching computers and robots will revolutionise not only the job market, but also redefine what ‘work’ is in the first place, and why we still do it. What happens when machines do so much of the work that economies no longer need to rely on human productivity? Without the old wage labour society of the First Machine Age, our conception of work as defined by the nineteenth century will become a mere appendix – useless and outdated. The big prize we aim for will no longer be full-time work, but self-realisation, and the raffle tickets will change accordingly: society will cease to think of employment as the be-all and end-all, and place greater value on high-quality jobs and workplace conditions.
Schleswig, 1872. Emma’s mother is furious when she turns down a proposal from an eligible bachelor. Rather than marry a man she doesn’t love, though, Emma boards the steamship Borussia and emigrates to California. In San Francisco, she accepts a position as companion to a wealthy widow, and soon falls in love with the likeable timber merchant Lars. They get married and plan to start a family, and Emma goes to live with him on Humbolt Bay. Yet their marriage remains childless, Lars is often away on business, and Emma is lonely. When Hans – owner of a shipyard, Lars’s closest friend and best man at their wedding – offers her a position in his office, the two of them develop deep feelings for each other. But there is a love that cannot be.
I’m all alone now, is Jule’s first thought when her mother dies. But when she goes to sort out her mother’s flat, Jule discovers documents that show she was adopted. Jule never felt properly close to her mother, and starts questioning her whole past: their sudden move to the West, losing contact with her father, her sister’s disappearance and her mother’s persistent silence… What would her life look like today, if she’d grown up with her biological family? Would she be happy? Jule knows that she has to find her birth mother to get answers. But she isn’t the only one who has been looking for them all these years…
‘Boy meets girl’: anything can start with this sentence – there isn’t a story that cannot be brought into the world with it. For Nora, too, a brief encounter changes her life entirely. All of a sudden she realises that she has for too long been a mere visitor in her own life. Now the painful end of her marriage and her ageing father’s increasing helplessness finally inspire her to make changes.