Kolumbus na Slovensku alebo O vlastnom zvuku mesta. Portrét Bratislavy z pera Leopolda Wolfganga Rochowanského
Columbus in Slovakia, or On the City’s Specific Tone. Leopold Wolfgang Rochowanski’s Portrayal of Bratislava

Summary/Abstract: The article analyses the image of Bratislava in the 1936 ethnographic-literary travelogue Columbus in der Slowakei [Columbus in Slovakia] by the Austrian author Leopold Wolfgang Rochowanski (1888 – 1961). Drawing on Paul Rodaway’s sensuous geographies, the article takes a look at how Rochowanski connects the flaneur’s view of the city with sensual perception, especially taste, sound and vision and constructs the “city’s specific tone” – a unique flavour of Bratislava. Flaneur’s view determines both the elements from which the image of the city is composed (cafés, wine bars, restaurants) and the fragmentary narrative techniques that combine anecdotes, legends, stories and musings of the narrator with historical-ethnographic discourse. Rochowanski accentuates cultural and linguistic heterogeneity of the place and in doing so semantically opens Bratislava’s urban text. As the result of period political context, however, he also ignores or marginalises some of the semantic layers of the city (portrayal of Jews) and in effect reduces the urban text. Rochowanski portrays Bratislava as a space of imagination coded in a complex way. From the point of view of perception, this prevents the separation of material and non-material (imaginary) layers of the urban palimpsest.

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