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Abstract
This article considers the connection between German Arctic exploration and German nation-building during the period of unification. It uses transnational and environmental history to study the German interest and experience in the Far North alongside distinct social, cultural, political, and scientific developments at home. It proposes that polar explorers and enthusiasts leveraged Arctic nature in the struggle to forge a unified German nation. They did this not only by rendering the Arctic in a way that allowed Germans to identify with it, but also by drawing the place as a proving ground for German cultural values and scientific ambition.
Acknowledgements
Adrian Howkins and Elizabeth Jones helped me develop the arguments presented in this article. For their insights and encouragement I am very grateful. I would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable suggestions and criticisms.
Notes
1 Others have done this: Murphy, German Exploration of the Polar World.
2 Three “wars of unification” raged during this time: The Second Schleswig War (1864), the Austro-Prussian War (1866), and the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871).
3 This contention is not unlike Michael Robinson’s claim that American audiences saw the nineteenth-century Arctic as a “national landscape.” The Coldest Crucible, 3.
4 Sheehan, “What is German History?” 2. See also Sheehan, “The Problem of the Nation in German History.”
5 Two visions for the future of the German Empire emerged during the nineteenth century: a Großdeutschland (Greater Germany) and a Kleindeutschland (Lesser Germany). The former concept, promoted by the Austrian Empire, envisioned a single, unified state, including all of the major German-speaking areas in Central Europe. The latter, favoured by Prussia, imagined a selective union of German states which aimed, ostensibly, to keep Germany separate from Austria. For a good overview of this and the many later permutations of “the German question,” see Alter, The German Question and Europe.
6 Sheehan, “What is German History?” 2.
7 Karl Bosl quoted in Sheehan, “What is German History?” 16. Scholarship on the formation of national feeling has shown – I would argue definitively – that national identification was the product of cultural imagination and symbolic articulation. For more on the active construction of the nation, see Anderson, Imagined Communities. Many scholars have suggested that consciousness of belonging can be achieved outside of the state apparatus by individuals operating within networks of civil society. Although the literature on this topic is too large to conveniently condense here, civil society is most commonly defined as a site of social engagement both outside the state and beyond the individual where people participate in spontaneous and voluntary forms of association. In short, unlike the state, which is driven by formal, official authority, civil society is a collection of individuals pursuing “great aims in common.” Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 520. For an excellent study of civil society, see Putnam, Bowling Alone.
8 A good recent example is Kitchen, A History of Modern Germany.
9 Tyrrell, “What is Transnational History?” Samuel Truett and Elliott Young write that, “to understand … transformations we must find ways to see beyond the nation, even as we keep the nation in focus.” Continental Crossings, 1. See also Berger, “National Historiographies in Transnational Perspective.”
10 Bernhard Gissibl quoted in Lekan, ed., “Forum: The Nature of German Environmental History,” 115.
11 Cioc, “The Impact of the Coal Age on the German Environment,” 106.
12 A few outstanding examples of environmental histories that have gone beyond German borders include Rolf Peter Sieferle’s comparative study of industrialization in Britain and Germany, The Subterranean Forest, originally published in German in 1982; Thaddeus Sunseri’s body of work on German colonialism in Africa, including Wielding the Ax; and Kai F. Hünemörder’s investigation of the international context for German environmental policie, Die Frühgeschichte der globalen Umweltkrise und die Formierung der deutschen Umweltpolitik (1950–1973).
13 Wråkberg, “The Politics of Naming,” 157.
14 See Krause, Die Gründungsphase deutscher Polarforschung.
15 Ernst Moritz Arndt quoted in Dominick, The Environmental Movement in Germany, 22.
16 Riehl, “Field and Forest,” 417–18. This essay originally appeared in Riehl’s Land und Leute published in 1854 as part of his larger work Die Naturgeschichte des deutschen Volkes released between 1851 and 1855.
17 Coen, “The Greening of German History,” 143.
18 Hartwig, The Polar World, preface. This text originally appeared in German in 1858 as Der Hohe Norden im Natur- und Menschenleben (Weisbaden: Kreidel and Niedner).
19 Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature, 176. See also Cioc, The Rhine.
20 Dominick, The Environmental Movement in Germany; Schama, Landscape and Memory; Rollins, A Greener Vision of Home; Radkau and Uekötter, eds., Naturschutz und Nationalsozialismus; Mauch, ed., Nature in Germany History; Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature; Brüggemeier, Cioc, and Zeller eds., How Green were the Nazis?; Lekan and Zeller, eds., Germany’s Nature; Uekoetter, The Green and the Brown; Frohn and Schmoll, Natur und Staat.
21 Projection is a metaphor used often by polar historians. A recent example can be found in Roberts, The European Antarctic, 1. Roberts introduces his book as an investigation into “how the coldest and least hospitable region on earth was (and still is) also a screen upon which European values, dreams, and anxieties have been projected.”
22 The library on the German Sonderweg thesis is extremely expansive and extraordinarily contentious. For especially good primers, see Blackbourn and Eley, The Peculiarities of German History; Feuchtwanger, “The Peculiar Course of German History.”
23 Petermann, “Die Deutsche Nordfahrt.”
24 One of Petermann’s earliest biographers claimed that “there was at that time no man in Europe who knew better than Petermann the problems that were still awaiting their solution in the unknown parts of the globe, nor which of these problems must be attacked next, nor who would be the best man for the one which happened to be under consideration.” Genthe, “August Petermann: A Review,” 845.
25 Krause, Die Gründungsphase deutscher Polarforschung, 55.
26 Petermann, “Die Deutsche Nordpol-Expedition, 1868,” 208 (emphasis in the original).
27 Ibid., 207. See also Petermann, “Das nördlichste Land der Erde”; Petermann, “Der Walfischfang und die Robbenjagd im europäischen Eismeer.”
28 Ibid., 212. Petermann estimated that around 2700 groups and individuals had given to the cause.
29 Ibid., 212 and 213.
30 Koldewey, Die erste deutsche Nordpolar-Expedition im Jahre 1868, 2.
31 Petermann, “Die deutsche Nordpol-Expedition,” 214–18.
32 Koldewey, Die erste deutsche Nordpolar-Expedition im Jahre 1868, 48.
33 For more on the First German North Polar Expedition see Venzke, “Vor 120 Jahren.”
34 Koldewey, Die erste deutsche Nordpolar-Expedition im Jahre 1868, 54.
35 ”The German Arctic Expedition,” Boston Daily Advertiser, 10 November 1868, col. E.
36 Petermann, introduction to The German Arctic Expedition of 1869–1870, by Koldewey, 1–2. This is a translated and abridged version of the German edition published one year earlier by the Verein für die deutsche Nordpolarfahrt in Bremen as Die zweite deutsche Nordpolarfahrt, vol. 1.
37 Venzke, “The 1869/1870 German North Polar Expedition,” 83.
38 Helmholtz, Popular lectures on Scientific Subjects, 366–68.
39 Petermann, introduction to The German Arctic Expedition of 1869–1870, 23.
40 Ibid., 3–4; 7.
41 Ibid., 22.
42 Quoted in Murphy, German Exploration of the Polar World, 35–6.
43 Petermann, introduction to The German Arctic Expedition of 1869–1870, 6.
44 Adam of Bremen, History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, xi–xii. This is an English translation of Adam von Bremen, Hamburgische Kirchengeschichte, ed. Bernard Schmeidler (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1917), which is itself a German translation from the original Latin version printed in Germany in 1846 under the title Adami Gesta hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, ed. Georg Heinrich Pertz (Hannover: Hahn). A detailed history of the manuscript can be found in the English preface to Adam von Bremen, Adami Bremensis Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum Codex Havniensis, ed. C. A. Christensen (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1948).
45 Koldewey, The German Arctic Expedition of 1869–1870, 25. See also Bremischen Comite, ed., Die zweite deutsche Nordpolar-Expedition, 44.
46 Ibid., 60.
47 “Journal of Captain Friedrich Hegemann of the Ship Hansa,” 271–72.
48 Wordie et al., “The Cambridge Expedition to East Greenland in 1926,” 226–27.
49 Koldewey, The German Arctic Expedition of 1869–1870, 288–97.
50 “Journal of Captain Friedrich Hegemann of the Ship Hansa,” 287–88.
51 Koldewey, The German Arctic Expedition of 1869–1870, 353.
52 Ibid., 68.
53 Ibid., 54, 71, and 292.
54 Ibid., 338.
55 Ibid., 320.
56 Environmental historians acknowledge that nature is as much real as it is constructed. As William Cronon writes, “the way we describe and understand [the nonhuman] world is so entangled with our own values and assumptions that the two can never be fully separated. What we mean when we use the word ‘nature’ says as much about ourselves as about the things we label with that word.” Therefore, although I am suggesting that Germans evaluated the polar environment using values and ideas external to it, they did not completely fabricate their image of the place. Cronon, “Introduction: In Search of Nature,” 25.
57 Friedrich Hegemann quoted in Koldewey, The German Arctic Expedition of 1869–1870, 134; 117–18.
58 Laube, Reise der Hansa ins nördliche Eismeer, 52.
59 Koldewey, The German Arctic Expedition of 1869–1870, 73–4.
60 Ibid., 264.
61 Ibid., 95, 113, and 242.
62 This referred to the contentious Open Polar Sea Theory. Petermann, among many others at the time, fervently believed an ice-free, navigable sea stretched over the North Pole. “The ice pack as a whole forms a mobile belt on whose polar side the sea is more or less free of ice,” reckoned Petermann. “Ships that break through this ice belt will find a sea navigable to the highest latitudes and to the Pole itself.” Petermann, “Die Eisverhältnisse in den Polar-Meeren,” 136–40. For more, see E. Tammiksaar, N.G. Sukhova, and I.R. Stone, “Hypothesis versus Fact”; Robinson, “Reconsidering the Theory of the Open Polar Sea.”
63 Koldewey, The German Arctic Expedition of 1869–1870, 19–20.
64 Ibid., 6–7.
65 Adams, Recent Polar Voyages, 386.
66 Bravo and Sörlin, “Narrative and Practice: An Introduction,” 18. For more on the concept of a scientific narrative driving the creation of a national past and destiny, see the other essays in the volume.
67 Verein für die deutsche Nordpolarfahrt in Bremen, Die zweite deutsche Nordpolarfahrt, vol. 2.
68 Koldewey, The German Arctic Expedition of 1869–1870, 50–1.
69 Ibid., 20.
70 Koldewey, The German Arctic Expedition of 1869–1870, 27.
71 Jones, Manual of the Natural History, Geology, and Physics of Greenland. An article in the newspaper the Milwaukee Sentinel reads: “The German Arctic Expedition, which returned from the Polar Sea this fall, has published the result of its researches …. The geological, zoological, and botanical collections brought home are of a rare and valuable character.” 30 December 1870, col. F.
72 Franz Buchenau quoted in Verein für die deutsche Nordpolarfahrt in Bremen, Die zweite deutsche Nordpolarfahrt, vol. 2, 3.
73 Koldewey, The German Arctic Expedition of 1869–1870, 366.
74 Ibid., 559–60.
75 Ibid., 312. See also Verein für die deutsche Nordpolarfahrt in Bremen, Die zweite deutsche Nordpolarfahrt, vols. 1 and 2.
76 Bremischen Comite, ed., Die zweite deutsche Nordpolar-Expedition, 44.
77 Alexander Mosle quoted in Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature, 178.
78 Lindeman and Finsch, Die zweite deutsche Nordpolarfahrt, vi–vii.
79 Verein für die deutsche Nordpolarfahrt in Bremen, Die zweite deutsche Nordpolarfahrt, vol. 1, 698.
80 “A Great Man’s Suicide,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, 15 October 1878, col. G.
81 Ibid. The article describes Petermann as “easy prey to the hereditary self-destroying mania.”
82 Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism in Germany, 54. Fitzpatrick contends that, rather than diverging from nationalist ideals, expansionism and naval exploration were closely tied to the aspiration of creating a united and powerful German nation. While Fitzpatrick’s argument focuses on German expansion into African and Latin American colonies, I have been proposing that the German polar project be added to this understanding of national unification through exploration beyond state borders.
83 Wichmann, “August Petermann,” 804.
84 Lindeman and Finsch, Die zweite deutsche Nordpolarfahrt, vi.
85 Murphy, German Exploration of the Polar World; Lüdecke, “Scientific Collaboration in Antarctica (1901–1903)”; Luedtke, “Dividing Antarctica.”