Simon Lindner graduated from a Master’s program in art history at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin with a thesis on Marcel Duchamp’s multiple “Boîte-en-valise” in 2021. During his studies he worked in the research cluster “translocations” at the Technische Universität Berlin. Following visiting fellowships at Harvard University (2021/22) and Humboldt-Universität (2022) he briefly took an editing job at the Munich-based publisher C. H. Beck in early 2023. He joins the eikones Graduate School in the fall of 2023.

Political Rambling: On the Appropriation of Landscape in German Romanticism

The landscape artists of German Romanticism addressed an audience whose desires included rambling. Since late Enlightenment, various print media such as guides, maps, graphic series, and travel books popularized rambling as a cultural technique for the benefit of bourgeoise aesthetic education – artists also sought this market with innovations in the genre of landscape. Oftentimes, they identified with non-bourgeois foot travelers, such as craftsmen, vagabonds, pilgrims, and pastoral workers. This performative appropriation contributed to the exoticization of the supposedly vagrant population on the one hand, and to the formation of an early bohemia on the other. The project explores how Romantic artists engaged with the power technology of rambling and what role they played in the making of modern class society.