Deutsche Reisende des 17. Jahrhunderts im Mittelmeerraum: schreiben, beschreiben, berichten

[Autom. eng. transl.] The Mediterranean Sea was already experienced as a border area in the early modern age: It marked the political border of the empire and the religious border of Europe. Then as now, the Mediterranean Sea meant danger to life and contact with other, little-known cultures; it gave rise to scientific observation (natural phenomena, new animal species) and at the same time enabled the experience of the wonderful and the terrible, the perception of which was often nourished by stereotypes and 'second-hand' reports. The article focuses on the lexical and syntactic patterns that were used to represent the Mediterranean region in travelogues of the 17th century. In this century, a gradual differentiation of linguistic communication strategies took place: From the dry, factual and classifying travel description, which can be classified under the usage texts, a wide range of discursive speeches developed, which not only emphasized the personal experiences and thoughts of the traveler more and more , but also contributed to the development of new types of travel texts. The lexical inventory shows the reaction to the foreign experience immediately, because by borrowing words one tried to deal with the foreign, to appropriate it; However, stylistic and syntactic properties also require attention. The first travel reports were factual and standardized, but over time they took on an individual character and this led to a constant expansion of the inventory of the morphological and syntactic structures that were used to describe this geographical and cultural area (the use of the evaluating adjective e.g. steadily to). Travel reports are also profitable from a discourse-analytical and cultural-historical perspective, because the linguistic formulation shines through topics such as the attitude to the foreign, national identity and alterity, fear of the unknown, which determined the perceptual horizon of the traveler.