Uncanny Encounters: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the End of Alterity. By John Zilcosky. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016. 264 pages + 27 b/w illustrations. $39.95 hardcover, $27.95 paperback.

This unique and innovative study links the genre of travel writing by popular as well as canonical German authors around the turn of the century to Sigmund Freud’s 1919 concept of the “uncanny” (in German: das Unheimliche). Freud, in a footnote, described an encounter he had while traveling on a train: “I was sitting alone [when] the train swung back the door of the adjoining washing-cabinet, and an elderly gentleman [ … ] came in. I assumed he had [ … ] come into my compartment [but] realized to my dismay that the intruder was nothing but my own reflection in the looking glass of the open door. I can still recollect that I thoroughly disliked his appearance” (“The Uncanny,’” trans. Alix Strachey, 156). This experience, confirmed by contemporary psychoanalytic theories of the “double” by psychoanalysts such as Otto Rank, suggests that one would like to imagine seeing an “other” when, in fact, all one sees is a reflection of one’s own self. Hence Zilcosky’s thesis in Uncanny Encounters critiques current discourses on alterity and post-colonialism that, he argues, “either neglect unconscious motivations (Edward Said’s Orientalism) or examine these primarily through the lens of ‘difference’ (Homi Bhabha)” (13). Based on Freud’s definition of the “Uncanny” as “something familiar which has been repressed” (“The ‘Uncanny,’” 155), Zilcosky explains that the German traveler would have set out on a trip to search for difference but “discovered instead the unheimlich ‘long familiar’ which shocked him and led to attempts at denial” (13).

Uncanny Encounters begins with a reference to topography that includes visual imagery of historical maps. Zilcosky describes the German traveler’s desire to discover uncharted territories in the form of searching for imaginary blank spaces, and the ensuing disappointment upon discovering that someone else had already “been there.” The book’s first chapter engages popular German travel narratives, including Norbert Jacques’s Hot Land: A Journey to Brazil (1911); this is followed by a chapter on Hermann Hesse’s travel writing about India. Hesse, according to Zilcosky, was disturbed by the recognition that he was not the only European male to visit brothels in search of exotic-looking women; this makes for an interesting read. What European males were looking for, Zilcosky suggests, was an erotic experience that would lead them away from themselves—yet what they found were merely “other” versions of themselves.

It may seem commonplace to assert that one cannot get away from one’s own predicaments; or that Heimweh and Fernweh are, really, two sides of the same coin. However, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory is based on the “unconscious” as an added layer, which means people can be blind to their own self-knowledge. In cultural-critical terms, the uncharted territories on the map of the European “self” Zilcosky describes in Uncanny Encounters rear their ugly heads in the recognition of a supposed “other” that is always already part of European consciousness. Chapter Three is about Freud himself, introducing the idea of his own, internalized anti-semitism, as evident from his apparent fear of being grouped among the Ostjuden. Chapter Four, appropriately titled “Exotic Europe,” further pursues this idea by demonstrating how canonical German authors, including Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, and Robert Musil, portray the “foreign” at the heart of Europe in narratives that include characters ostensibly European—yet nonetheless, somehow, “alien” (e.g., the Polish boy Tadzio in Mann’s Death in Venice). Near the end of Uncanny Encounters, which includes disturbing visual imagery from the history of ethnography, Zilcosky refers to antisemitism in Nazi Germany, which he describes as a fear of being unable to differentiate Germans from Jewish-German “others,” perceived to look uncannily “the same.” And in a surprising but logical conclusion, the book arrives at our contemporary global moment, suggesting that the fear of “foreign” terrorists is fueled by this same inability to differentiate “them” from “us.”

What makes this book original is that the “uncanny,” which in Freudian psychoanalytic terms represents repressed aspects of the self, is addressed in relation to the genre of travel writing. Freud’s concept of the “uncanny” is often cited in relation to nineteenth-century gothic literature; but it is here unexpectedly paired with an entirely different genre. By the same token, Zilcosky successfully interprets texts as travel writing that one would not normally group under this rubric and in that way, expands the confines of the genre. Uncanny Encounters is elegantly composed to lead straight back into the heart of darkness constituting Europe and the West. As a form of cultural criticism, Uncanny Encounters suggests that the embrace of globalism has not only not done away with fears of the “other”, but that these are, in truth, grounded within the more immediate confines of one’s “self.”

For readers interested in the discipline of psychoanalysis, this link to travel writing is particularly useful. Freud’s definition of the “uncanny” is focused on the etymology of heimisch (feeling at home) and heimlich (secretly). To withdraw into one’s Heim (home), or personal space, means one may wish to cover up or hide something. In Freud’s definition, this is associated with the secret Oedipal desire to kill one’s father and marry one’s mother. Hence Zilcosky’s book emphasizes the traveler’s secret fantasy of being able to return to the realm of the maternal “home.” This, in turn, indicates the concomitant fear of losing the power of the imaginary phallus, which in Freud’s “Uncanny” is associated with castration anxiety. Zilcosky convincingly demonstrates that what German travelers around the turn of the century may have feared most was to lose their “masculine” power. This knowledge of vulnerability and impotence, which they would have sought to cover up when traveling, appears in opposition to the familiar point of origin associated with both the female body and the Heimat (homeland).

Uncanny Encounters invites readers to pursue such lines of inquiry associated with conventionally gendered ways of thinking; and it does so in conjunction with the genre of travel writing, from a thought-provoking, inter-disciplinary perspective. It is a timely contribution to the growing body of scholarship on gender and alterity in the context of German and Jewish studies (see, for example, Daniel Boyarin et al., eds., Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, 2013 and Frank Scherer, The Freudian Orient, 2015). It should be a welcome addition to both graduate and advanced undergraduate courses on modern German and European literatures, history, anthropology, art history, comparative literature, gender, and cultural studies.