That one person's longing can have the same coordinates as another's hell is an experience with some tradition.
How one reacts to a certain place is not only a question of one's mood, but also of the circumstances that lead one there - whoever, like Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, voluntarily travels to Lake Constance to escape the family regiment, will be more comfortable with the idea of settling there than someone who, like the painter Otto Dix, flees there after losing his professorship at the Art Academy in Dresden.
However, the poetess could not properly use the house she had bought in Meersburg because she died too young, while Dix stayed on Lake Constance until the end of her life.
As early as 1936, he stated in a letter what he was missing there:
“There is nothing more stupid and mentally sterile than life in the village.” And looking back from 1965 he said: “I painted landscapes en masse during the Nazi era.
There was nothing else here."
Tilman Spreckelsen
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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An exhibition in the Zeppelin Museum looks at what has been at Lake Constance for almost two hundred years.
It would be difficult to find a more suitable place, after all the exhibition area in the lower part of the old sea station building faces a window front behind which you can see the Bodensee ships landing in Friedrichshafen.
The actual room, bathed in twilight and divided by parallel wooden frames, is intended by the curators to resemble a living room in which one can feel at home – if you like, you can complete the tour in slippers made especially for you; there are reading chairs on the ground floor and a comfortable seating set, and the admission ticket entitles you to come back several times.
The approximately 240 exhibits can be viewed more closely than would be possible with just one visit, or you can study the relevant books on display.
Right at the beginning one encounters the standard work on the subject, Manfred Bosch's great study "Bohème am Bodensee", published 25 years ago by Libelle Verlag, on other shelves and on side tables you can find books on individual artists and authors to whom the exhibition is dedicated .
It begins in the early nineteenth century, when, after the Napoleonic Wars and a further loss of importance of the region, the focus – as elsewhere – was on history.
Lake Constance novels abounded, the most famous being “Ekkehard” by Joseph Victor von Scheffel, published in 1855. One reading of the novel can be seen in Joseph Wopfner’s transfigured picture “Flight of the Reichenau Monks”, whose lighting casts a bright glow on the ecclesiastical dignitary in the middle of the puts refugees in front of the Huns and leaves no doubt as to who can count on support from the very top.
Where is the red thread?
Gustav Schwab with his poem "Der Reiter und der Bodensee", Annette von Droste-Hülshoff or Felix Dahn with the novel "Bissula" also contribute to the literarization of the landscape, which is now perceived as backwards by the numerous visitors.
The exhibition uses many examples to show what appeal lies in this, by characterizing the neighboring communities in their function as places of refuge, as scenes for artistic, literary or even educational experiments, favored by low living costs and a remoteness that provided freedom and in some cases apparently could also produce weariness after a while.