Lustwandeln. Für Flaneure und Landstreicher

“I always return to my images. They are an eternal possession, detached
from the vicissitudes of life, something laid aside for the bad days,” writes the writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau.

This is how the communication designer, professor, and editor Irmgard Sonnen begins her book with the inspiring title: Lustwandeln. Für Flaneure und Landstreicher. Szenarien eines Spaziergangs.

With this book, Irmgard Sonnen encourages and inspires readers to go outside.
Lustwandeln. Für Flaneure und Landstreicher. Szenarien eines Spaziergangs takes the reader and viewer along paths leading to sources of inspiration, landscapes, and seas. Cities, too, with their distinctive atmospheres, can be discovered as landscapes. The selected short texts from the field of cultural studies reflect on the semantic realms of existence, path, journey, home, foreignness, silence, departure, arrival, and the many facets of perceiving the city. To stroll in the city means to move slowly in an accelerated world, to set oneself apart while simultaneously sharpening one’s perception of details. A familiar detail is transformed into something special. “People who go for walks are already slower simply through the use of their feet—and since they walk because they feel like it, not in order to arrive, they are temporally unpredictable,” says the walk scholar Lucius Burckhardt.

It is precisely the dialogue between text and image that is particularly stimulating in this book. Concrete information about individual places and landscapes can be found in an additional marginal column. The landscape and city views are not merely interpretations of reality, but also traces—like a footprint.

“My footprints will accompany and guide you through this book,” writes Irmgard Sonnen. The texts repeatedly attempt to view familiar subjects differently in order to reveal new perspectives of perception. Thus we read in Michel de Montaigne: “My thoughts fall asleep when I sit. My mind does not move forward unless my legs set it in motion.”