Lüneburg Heath Location
On 1 April 1801, Caroline traveled from Zell (Celle) to visit her brother Gottfried Philipp Michaelis in Harburg, just across the Elbe River from Hamburg; her journey took her squarely through what was for her the completely new landscape of the Lüneburg Heath.
(Ducatus Luneburgensis adiacentiumque regionum delineatio, from Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, sive Atlas Novus in quo Tabulæ et Descriptiones Omnium Regionum, ed. Willem and Joan Blaeu [1645.])
The Lüneburg Heath, 1910.
The Lüneburg Heath is in part a breathtakingly beautiful landscape. Caroline, however, rarely expresses the kind of aesthetic reaction to natural beauty, e.g., in landscapes, that she does to works of art. So also in this case.
Given Caroline’s description, perhaps the following photographs provide a more accurate if less romantic approximation of the kind of roads she traveled and landscapes she saw on her way to Harburg.
(Oil painting by Arnold Lyongrün [1910].)
Lüneburg Heath.
Caroline writes to Wilhelm Schlegel on 4 April 1801 from Harburg:
“This haste was the best part of the journey, for heaven help us, what a countryside! I became seasick from the monotony of the heath and sky, since it is the same from Braunschweig all the way here, a single 18-mile stretch, nothing but scraggy, brown heath, sand, stunted trees covered with moss and mold, every mile or so a village instead of a milepost appearing quite as if it had grown right out of the earth itself.”
(Photographs: Richard Linde, Die Lüneburger Heide, Land und Leute: Monographien zur Erdkunde 18, ed. A. Scobel [Bielefeld, Leipzig 1904], plates 21, 31, 49, 59, 70, 73, 87, 94, 102, 107.)
Lüneburg Heath.
Lüneburg Heath.
Lüneburg Heath.
Lüneburg Heath.
Lüneburg Heath.
Lüneburg Heath.
Lüneburg Heath.
Lüneburg Heath.
