What is “Welten und Kulturen”?

I suppose it is not wrong to call “Welten und Kulturen” a travel blog. (For those unfamiliar with German, it means “Worlds and Cultures”.) What I show are photographs, most of them taken while travelling, and I describe my experience in these places in the articles on this page. However, you will not find the “Top 5 Best Sights” or “10 Things You Must Have Seen in X” here – except maybe in an ironic twist.

I have always been phenomenally bored reading those travel blogs. It’s just not to my taste. Why? Well: Either I read in it what a quick look at Wikipedia or Google Maps will also tell me, enriched with Instagram-worthy visuals. The advantage of such blogs is that it definitely saves you from buying a standard travel guide.

Not that we misunderstand each other: That is certainly helpful.s wir uns missverstehen: Das ist ja durchaus hilfreich. Especially if you are visiting a new destination and want to see as much as possible of what “you” have to see in a short time. I’m just not one of those people.

Are there no other travel blogs, then? Sure there are, and there are also those that relate personal travel adventures. Even those have never really been able to captivate me; because, as a rule, the cultural insights offered are limited. Bloggers are not on site long enough for that. And the adventures are not all that adventurous, most of the time. Whether Peter met Paul at the foot of the Himalayas and got drunk with him in some dive (“insider tip”!) – I’m not really interested.

Of course, this is due to my way of traveling and what interests me personally.

It’s probably already a scandal if I say: I don’t actually travel for the sake of human encounters. If I could throw on an invisibility cloak or travel in invisibility mode, just observing and silently perceiving – that would be something!

I have always enjoyed reading, especially for their poetic quality, accounts of travels from the 18th and 19th century. Of course, they also owe their poetic quality in part to their temporal and thus also conditioned linguistic “other-worldliness”. But there is more to it than that. Of course, these reports are also about human encounters, and most of them claim to present something quite “objective”. However, the authors are of course much more subjective than they imagine themselves to be. This is due to the fact alone that the possibilities of communication with the foreign cultures were often very limited.

Even if we don’t always speak the language of the local population today either, this is of course not at all comparable with such encounters: Globalization, the spread of English as a lingua franca, all this has contributed to the fact that the impression of foreignness – and also its expression – is significantly reduced today. The incredulous astonishment that can be heard from the early travelogues is something we hardly experience today.

And yet there is a poetic marveling at the world that exists still today. It is the radically subjective that we can experience and that we, as poets, can express. We who write or are otherwise artistically engaged have always lived in an augmented reality. The richer our inner life, the more we are able to enrich our sensory perceptions and transform them into artistic expression.

And that’s exactly the kind of blog “Worlds and Cultures” is supposed to be – I want to call it, because every thing needs a name, a “poetic travel blog”. “Worlds” and “Cultures” thus refer equally to the physically visited outside as to the experienced inside, which finds expression in poetic contributions to travel.