In the second half of 1891, the German Anti-Slavery Lottery raised two million marks in support of its campaign to end the slave trade in East Africa. The campaign depended on the celebrity of the explorer Hermann Wissmann to raise funds from the German public. Two steamers were eventually constructed to patrol the Great Lakes of Central Africa, the Hermann von Wissmann and the Hedwig von Wissmann, named for the leading figure in the campaign and his wife. The Anti-Slavery Lottery's campaign came just three years after another public funding campaign had attached itself to celebrity explorers. In 1888, the German Emin Pasha Committee had raised four hundred thousand marks for an expedition to “rescue” Emin Pasha, the Prussian-born governor of Equatoria, and bring him back to Germany. A different explorer had led that campaign: Georg Schweinfurth, who had made a name for himself traveling up the Nile the previous decade. Schweinfurth portrayed the campaign as an essential part of German nationalism in the decades after unification. Through participation in such campaigns and engagement with the celebrity leaders who headed them, Germans could participate in empire at a moment when the German government under Otto von Bismarck offered little hope for them to do so. While the German public was largely excluded from participation in state imperial projects, or evinced little enthusiasm for them, the work of celebrity explorers was another matter.Footnote 1
Donations to the Emin Pasha Committee and to the Anti-Slavery Lottery suggest that German audiences felt connected with Wissmann, Emin, and Schweinfurth, and that spending on the public campaigns functioned as a form of “purchasing” and “consuming” German colonialism. As several historians have recently argued, Germans engaged with empire largely through practices of consumption. Products and advertising carried images of Germany's colonies into homes across the Reich, providing material for Germans to form identities as German, even as many of them showed little interest in formal empire.Footnote 2 Beyond colonialism, the definition of national belonging often took place through consumption practices or discussions about consumption.Footnote 3 Germans from all confessions, classes, regions, genders, and political affiliations consumed media with colonial and national themes, thereby participating in the process of defining Germany as a colonial empire.Footnote 4 Before the empire could be commercialized, explorers like Wissmann, Schweinfurth, and Emin were the most visible objects of colonial consumption in the first two-and-a-half decades of the Kaiserreich.
Audiences primarily “consumed” explorers through print media, which was made possible by changes in Germany's media landscape in the mid- to late nineteenth century. German explorers had been active in the service of other nations’ colonial governments and private colonial organizations before unification, and many of them had written scientific publications for German Bildungsbürger.Footnote 5 But in the 1860s and 1870s, print became a force in political and social life open to non-elites, and nearly all Germans could now participate in reading culture. New kinds of periodicals appealed to different segments of German society, especially to the country's growing urban population.Footnote 6 At the same time, new printing and advertising technologies and techniques made books, and especially periodicals, much cheaper and more widely available. Industrial labor and rising wages meant that workers could allot time and money to reading, the primary means of everyday entertainment, as literacy increased after unification.Footnote 7 By the end of the century, the publishing market would become segmented, as publishers founded new kinds of publications to appeal to smaller slices of the marketplace.Footnote 8 Explorers were thus able to provide compelling writing that would sell not only to Germans interested in science, but also to those looking for other kinds of reading. This meant that nearly all Germans could participate in the burgeoning discourse around explorers.
In an era of rapidly expanding media and marketplace competition among periodicals, publishers responded to audience demand for stories about the outstanding people of the day. Historians of celebrity have argued that this emerged as a phenomenon in nineteenth-century Europe with the development of modern media, urban democracy, and celebration of the individual in society. Celebrity requires mass media for figures to become famous for individual achievements rather than for the renown that accompanies people famous for their office or position.Footnote 9 These figures, explorers among them, became Germany's first celebrities in the era of mass media through a combination of media promotion and consumption by readers. In theorizing celebrity, scholars have turned to a German observer of this period, Max Weber, and to his theory of charismatic authority. According to Weber, charisma was a new phenomenon in the late nineteenth century, a form of “residual” authority that existed outside of—and undermined—traditional institutions.Footnote 10 Despite claims that celebrity has no substance, celebrities offered audiences recognizable individuals at a time when many Germans felt alienated in the modern city, as well as figures around whom they could form their own identities through imagined personal connections.Footnote 11 Such imagined personal connections create material around which audiences can construct their own identities, separate from those intended by the authors of works about celebrities. In the mass-media environment, celebrities maintained their authenticity as societal changes brought about by industrialization and urbanization otherwise eliminated authentic personal relationships from public life in increasingly anonymous cities.Footnote 12 Celebrities thus served as moorings who remained identifiable individuals despite the changing world.
Following Benedict Anderson's conception of the nation as an “imagined community” formed through print, scholars of celebrity have argued further that celebrities were figures who could link a heterogeneous population through mass media publicity and spectacle.Footnote 13 Though they lacked traditional and legal authority, celebrities captured the zeitgeist, attracted followers, and shaped political landscapes, especially when compared to political figures, who generally refused attempts to connect with the public emotionally.Footnote 14 Explorers’ celebrity along these lines has been the subject of extensive study in the case of both the United Kingdom and France. In both countries, explorers were “celebrities of a romantic, evangelical age … heroes to several generations of men and boys,” who could “embody the essence” of the nation.Footnote 15 Entertainment figures may have been more famous, but explorers embodied their audience's struggle against the pressures of modernity, asserting themselves as masculine European men overcoming the challenges of an unfamiliar situation. David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley in particular have attracted attention as the “first eruption of a kind of global media celebrity,” figures who drew the largest crowds of the era and provided moral backing for imperialism.Footnote 16 These celebrity explorers engaged people with empire in a way that governments could not.
Though the presence German explorers has been obscured by their country's short colonial history and a general lack of interest in the nation's colonial past after World War II, they were nevertheless celebrities with a similar cultural impact.Footnote 17 Works by and about them appeared in expensive, hardbound volumes, in cheap paperbacks and magazines, and in the new daily periodicals, each targeted to a different audience. The sources used for the present article consist primarily of periodical publications of the 1870s and 1880s: from national weeklies with a broad readership like Die Gartenlaube, to daily metropolitan newspapers like the Berliner Tageblatt, to satirical magazines like Kladderadatsch. While these articles do not necessarily reveal anything about audience reception directly, their sustained popularity and the way they changed over time do provide a window into readers’ mindsets, if one takes into consideration publishers’ efforts to meet audience demand. In addition to print sources, this article makes use of applications to participate in the Emin Pasha expedition in the late 1880s, which provide direct statements from explorers’ most devoted followers.
Their appeal across the dividing lines of German society made explorers important figures around which German national identity crystalized from the 1870s through the 1890s. German national identity was fractured, since different classes, confessions, and genders defined in different ways what made them “German.”Footnote 18 The public role of explorers not only forms a bridge from the period of colonial fantasies before formal colonialism, to that of everyday empire in the 1890s and beyond, but also shows the engagement of ordinary Germans with imperial projects. In media meant to appeal to different segments of society, an explorer could appear as a hero of science (and thus of progressive thought), of military valor, of antimodern connections with nature, of specifically German, pan-European, or pan-Western attributes, making the meaning of his travels a site for debating the future of the nation.
Germans of all classes and confessions consumed explorers in other kinds of publications, thereby participating in this celebrity culture. Through the discourse around explorers and the definition of their celebrity, Germany's encounter with Africa became a primary locus through which Germans of different classes formulated a national identity in the first decades of the Kaiserreich. In the decade and a half following unification, explorers served as symbols of a Germany defined by the scientific achievement and cosmopolitanism of the Bildungsbürgertum.Footnote 19 Although explorers viewed themselves as bürgerliche practitioners of science, the new kinds of publication eroded their control of their own public identities. An examination of diverse publications about explorers, and readers’ responses to them, reveals contestation over the meaning of explorers qua Germans. Germans from different backgrounds formed their own meanings of explorers’ work, which were distinct from those of the Bildungsbürgertum. From the mid-1880s, in a climate of debate over empire, German colonialists increasingly used explorers to define different kinds of German masculinity and national identity, characterized by international competition and mastery over nature and Africans. Pro-colonial readings of explorers’ celebrity were not unanimous, however, and, as we shall see, critics of the empire utilized scandals surrounding explorers to launch attacks against German colonialism.Footnote 20
Explorers as Celebrities
At the time of unification, the explorers’ reading public consisted of primarily middle-class, Protestant men interested in science. Beginning with Alexander von Humboldt, the publishing of scientific travelogues—which bürgerliche scientists and explorers continued to write through the end of the century—became central to the professional identity of explorers. Writings by and about explorers became common in other media as well after 1870, however. Accounts of travel in Africa were so ubiquitous by the 1890s that the Austrian explorer Ludwig von Höhnel lamented rejections from publishers because “the book market was saturated with African literature.”Footnote 21 By 1885, Germans from all social categories had become consumers of explorers’ exploits.
German print media boomed in the decades around unification and a mass German reading public developed, though this public was never homogeneous. Literacy increased, and Germans from all backgrounds could now participate in the new reading culture in their everyday lives. The world of print was, in fact, one of the most important locations for the consumer revolution of late nineteenth-century Germany.Footnote 22 Consumers demanded new kinds of reading material that would be cheaper and more convenient to access and read, and that would provide greater entertainment—and publishers and sellers gladly obliged. Differences in reading practices existed between classes, confessions, genders, and political affiliations, as well as within each group, and the reading of traditional hardbound volumes came to define “refined,” bourgeois culture.Footnote 23
The central element in every explorer's oeuvre was just such a volume—a richly-illustrated, often multivolume scientific account of his expedition. Yet, these publications were not accessible to most readers because of their price and technical style. Colportage booklets and penny dreadfuls, as well as daily newspapers supported by advertising revenue, were cheaper, which allowed working-class Germans to participate in reading about explorers—a practice previously open only to relatively few. Monthly magazines continued to be a central element in the literary landscape. Libraries and Lesezirkel (reading societies) offered alternatives to buying, as did bookstores that allowed customers to borrow books.Footnote 24 These changes eroded bourgeois control over the media, thus democratizing German culture, and new publications broadened the explorers’ public.Footnote 25
As the media landscape both expanded and fragmented, publishers competed for readers. Celebrity stories sold periodicals, and the appeal of celebrity lay (and lies) in the ability of celebrities to sell media as a consumer product. Readers wanted to have ecstatic experiences and to feel a connection to the people about whom they read.Footnote 26 In addition, reading the same publication on a regular basis made a reader part of an imagined community of fellow readers, participants in the same discussions about the world.Footnote 27 Stories and narratives about recognizable figures such as an individual celebrity made the transformations of industrialization and urbanization more comprehensible than did discussions of changes in society as a whole. Consumption of mass media stories about famous people also allowed Germans to mark their own identities against mainstream narratives—and works by and about explorers were ubiquitous in this context.Footnote 28 Reading about an explorer's progress in Africa and about his discoveries made a reader part of the explorer's expedition—and also part of the community of readers who shared the experience and defined the meaning of the expedition.
In an environment with so many entertainment options, explorers offered the perfect subject for the daily press. Publications competed to run regular, exclusive reports on expeditions as they were occurring, sometimes including exclusive letters or reports from the explorers themselves.Footnote 29 The daily Berliner Tageblatt led the way in exclusive contracts to carry explorers’ letters, signing agreements with Gerhard Rohlfs and Max Buchner, among others.Footnote 30 Other periodicals regularly published explorers’ letters as well. Such reports perfectly met the periodical press' demands for regular content, as well as audiences’ demands for authentic news of explorers’ exploits, thus interjecting real-life adventure into the everyday lives of readers.
As a rule, explorers seem to have personified the exotic adventure stories that attracted German consumers beginning in the eighteenth century. Adventure stories were especially popular among working-class readers, who were especially on the look-out for heroes with whom they could identify.Footnote 31 Germany's growing working class consumed reading material at a pace comparable to that of other classes, though it depended more on lending libraries than the bourgeoisie did. German youths also sought out stories about the extra-European world as sites of adventure.Footnote 32 Alberto Martino's study of German lending libraries, which shows that German workers liked to borrow books about exploration, argues that the lending of natural scientific, geographic, and historical works was higher among working-class readers. His statistics from the Wood Workers’ Association in Berlin shows that up to 31.5 percent of books checked out in the early 1890s were in the category of “Reisebeschreibung, Völkerkunde, Literaturgeschichte, Rechtwissenschaft” (travel descriptions, ethnology, history of literature, jurisprudence).Footnote 33 A 1910 study by Walter Hofmann, a Dresden librarian, similarly showed that over 20 percent of proletarian readers read books about exploration and colonization in Africa.Footnote 34 Brockhaus published excerpts of book-length travelogues in a Reisen und Abenteuer collection for children, as well as abridged versions for adults to buy at lower prices.Footnote 35 In this way, explorers offered authentic German counterparts to wildly popular figures like Buffalo Bill or Karl May's Winnetou.
Fictionalized adventure stories based on real-life explorers’ stories were also popular. Giacomo Meyerbeer wrote an opera, l'Africaine, about Vasco da Gama in the 1860s, for example. It was one of the most successful German productions of the 1870s and 1880s, and even enjoyed a revival in 1892. Two plays named Die Afrikareise premiered in Berlin in 1884.Footnote 36 Franz von Suppé’s Afrikareise achieved great success —despite a book “lacking in taste and spirit,” according to a review in the Berliner Tageblatt.Footnote 37 The Berlin production of Adolphe Belot's Das schwarze Venus included a backdrop based on Georg Schweinfurth's description of his visit to the court of Munza, a ruler of the Mangbetu people in the northern Congo, as well as an introduction in the accompanying program which mentioned that the explorer Gustav Nachtigal had sent his wishes that readers would themselves travel to Africa after watching the play.Footnote 38 When he died in 1890, Gottfried Keller, one of Germany's leading realist authors, was working on a novel whose protagonist was an explorer of Africa.Footnote 39 Together, these works created a trope of explorers as heroic figures, fighting for good against evil in the extra-European world.
The bravery of explorers made them ideal representatives of German manhood during its perceived crisis of the late nineteenth century. A generation of men, too young to have fought in the Franco-Prussian War, struggled to deal with the fast-paced changes of modernity and with defining their own masculinity.Footnote 40 An explorer's triumph over Africans provided a reference point for the superiority of German men, and being in Africa stripped away the trappings of civilization to reveal the “true” man underneath.Footnote 41 At a “moment of protest and rebellion against the standardized normal world and its mechanisms,” Thomas Nipperdey has argued, explorers were (primarily) bourgeois men who had completely escaped the drudgery of the everyday world to find “something authentic beyond bourgeois convention.” In addition, they embodied the era's high esteem for heroism and the study of nature, depicting a white, German masculinity that could dominate both nature and Africans, and they did so in a competitive fashion with other European nations.Footnote 42
The satirical magazine Fliegende Blätter lampooned young Germans’ enthusiasm for the adventure stories of explorers. In a scene set during army training, an Unteroffizier (non-commissioned officer) asks a soldier what to do upon first arriving in an enemy village: “I look for some natives and ask them about everything!” the latter responds. The Unteroffizier quickly becomes exasperated with the soldier's “African stories”—since there would not be any “natives” anyway in the European war for which they were training.Footnote 43 In Kladderadatsch, a smugly pro-regime satirical weekly, explorers similarly served as figures to lampoon changes in contemporary society. Its writers compared Georg Schweinfurth's travels among the Zande of Central Africa (called the “Niam-Niam” at the time in Europe) to the dangers of a pilgrimage to Rome during the Holy Year of 1877 proclaimed by Pope Pius IX.Footnote 44 That characterization played on readers’ familiarity with Schweinfurth and his tales of cannibalism among the Zande in order to criticize Catholics during the Kulturkampf. The magazine used Gustav Nachtigal's stories of courts and cannibalism in Central Africa to lampoon Pius as well.Footnote 45 As this suggests, an important aspect of explorers’ celebrity was their availability as known characters who could be used to satirize other aspects of German life.
An article in Kladderadatsch about women readers perfectly captures the tension between the roles of explorers as scientists and as celebrities. In a letter to her friend “Selma Müller in Misdroy,” a certain “Belinda Schultze” expresses excitement about all the famous people in Berlin, especially explorers Gustav Nachtigal and Gerhard Rohlfs. She mentions the stories for which the two were most famous: Rohlfs's close calls with death on his expeditions across the Sahara Desert, Nachtigal's decision to be circumcised to disguise himself as an Arab in the Sahel region. Schultze's excitement quickly dissipated, however, after attending lectures by the distinguished explorers, whom she found tedious and boring. For much of their audience, enthusiasm about the celebrity of the explorers far surpassed any interest in their scientific achievements, which are better known today.Footnote 46
The article also includes an element common in writing about explorers: excitement about their presence in German cities. They frequently traveled through the German-speaking lands upon their return, and many publications reported regularly on their lectures to scientific organizations in towns and cities across Germany and Austria-Hungary. Articles about these events praised the characteristics that the explorers themselves believed were important for travel in Africa; several reporters, for example, commented on Wilhelm Junker's “intrepidity” and “selfless dedication.”Footnote 47 In another case, upon hearing that he was staying at the Hotel Bristol, a reporter for the Berliner Tageblatt felt it to be his duty to “offer personally our greeting to the highly-honored” Hermann Wissmann. When the reporter arrived, he “instantly” spotted the explorer among the figures in the hotel's reading room, even though he had never before seen Wissmann: the reporter recognized him from the “life-sized wax model in Castans Panoptikum,” a popular wax museum in Berlin. He sent a visiting card and was overjoyed when Wissmann came out to meet him.Footnote 48 Events such as these, and publications about them, allowed audiences to imagine their heroes in the flesh—and as authentic Germans.
Women readers like the imaginary “Schultze” and “Müller” also played an important role in creating the celebrity culture of explorers. German women were, in fact, the primary audience for the nation's most popular magazine, Die Gartenlaube, which frequently printed articles about such men—carrying exclusive letters from Hugo von Koppenfels during his search for gorillas in Central Africa, for example.Footnote 49 Historians have estimated the readership of Die Gartenlaube to be between two and five million (many readers either borrowed copies or passed them among themselves). This primarily female readership crossed the urban-rural divide, as well as boundaries between classes and confessions.Footnote 50 As was the case for other publications, articles about explorers in Die Gartenlaube gradually focused less and less on science, suggesting a shift in perception among women readers, who increasingly regarded explorers as brave heroes of Germanness rather than as exemplars of German science.
Promoted by national publications like Die Gartenlaube, the celebrity of explorers crossed from major cities to the more rural regions of Germany. The case of a fake explorer provides a telling example of this: A man named Steller, presenting himself as “Stella,” traveled through northern Bohemia and Saxony, lecturing from 1887 to 1892 on his alleged experiences in Africa and even displaying African animals. The ruse was only discovered when Bernhard Schwarz, a well-known explorer of Cameroon whom, Steller claimed, he had accompanied, told members of Steller's audience that he had never heard of the huckster. The deceived audience, no doubt furious at the fraud, alerted the Saxon state prosecutor, who reported him to the police.Footnote 51 Steller's stories appealed to audiences because he brought the exotic with him, in the form of accompanying animals and in his own person. But that exoticness had to be authentic for audiences to appreciate it: when it was discovered that Steller was a fraud, the exotic stories he told his audiences quickly lost their appeal.
The vast array of places where German audiences could encounter German explorers meant not only that accounts of explorers were ubiquitous, but also that they could be whatever their audiences wanted them to be. The latter endowed explorers with charisma as figures that embodied their own daily struggles. Explorers claimed heroic attributes, but it is the statements of others that most clearly reveal their charisma. Eugen Wolf, for example, claimed that Hermann Wissmann had been, “to the last moment of his life, the simple, modest, and most tenderly considerate man to others in all things”; August Petermann wrote more generally that an explorer's appeal lay in what he had left behind—”position, family, European comfort, and riches … to rip from the dark continent a part of its secrets.”Footnote 52 For his part, the geographer Friedrich Ratzel described explorers as the “artists of the epoch” because of their “detailed painting” of previously unknown landscapes. Gustav Nachtigal, for instance—the “Odysseus of the desert”—had created the “most shocking painting” of life among “half-wild people.” The writing of Nachtigal's book—according to Friedrich Ratzel, “the best of German travel works” in literary terms—was only possible through his “spirit and feeling.”Footnote 53 Johann Krapf, who did almost nothing to promote himself in Germany, still received praise from one reviewer as a hero of mission work in the wilderness.Footnote 54
Explorers were ever-present in the popular culture of the 1870s and 1880s, and the appearances of explorers in print and in person appealed to German audiences across many of the divisions that rent Wilhelmine society. They became celebrities as their audiences expanded, figures through which the latter could articulate their own concerns about societal change. Over time, publishers and audiences supplied a new meaning for German exploration in Africa, namely, as an expression of a German masculine identity. As a result, however, the explorers’ control over the meaning of their own work eroded.
German Explorers and the Nationalization of Exploration, 1871–1885
The decade and a half after unification saw a major shift in the meaning that the work of explorers had for many Germans. This change in their public persona was tied above all to Henry Morton Stanley, who arguably became the most famous person in the world in the 1880s.Footnote 55 The geographer and publisher August Petermann described Stanley as the “Bismarck of African Exploration,” a figure who had bound explorers together as the German chancellor had bound Germany.Footnote 56 Stanley was at the center of nearly all the Berliner Tageblatt’s coverage of the Berlin Conference in 1884–1885, more renowned among the public than the political figures who attended the conference from around the world.Footnote 57 Stanley's chauvinistic style of writing about exploration resonated with larger audiences not interested in science and thereby provided a new model for German explorers. With the onset of formal empire, the latter became the public face of empire for people back home, figures through which Germans could develop a German imperial identity that claimed German superiority over other colonial nations.
Prior to unification, German explorers had been prominent in the exploration communities of other nations, especially that of the United Kingdom. They were especially important in the British and Russian empires, trusted there for their scientific detachment—not least because Germany had no colonies of its own.Footnote 58 The reputation of German universities also created demand abroad for their graduates.Footnote 59 And because the number of young German scientists outpaced the number of positions available for them at home, many sought out opportunities in foreign lands to make a name for themselves.
These “precolonial” German explorers published extensively in Germany and abroad, and their publications about their scientific achievements allowed Bildungsbürger to formulate the identity of the new nation around scientific achievement, as well as around German service to the larger international human community. An article in Die Gartenlaube by Julius Löwenberg, a friend and biographer of Alexander von Humboldt, clearly makes this point: Löwenberg argued that German explorers deserved praise because they had expended such effort “in the service of science and civilization, because they had awoken hopes of real Culturkämpfe [sic] in the service of humanity.” A map of Africa divided by explorer nationality would show, he claimed, that Germany had contributed no less to European knowledge of the continent than colonial powers such as the United Kingdom and France had, and, moreover, that Germans motivated by the desire for scientific discovery had explored farther inland than British or French explorers, who were allegedly driven primarily by commercial interests. Germany had sacrificed many young scientists to this cause, but the survivors were “heroes” for Germany and for Europe as a whole.Footnote 60
German explorers continued in the same vein of international cooperation after unification, striving for scientific or humanitarian gain. They led the way in exploring the Sahara, for example, despite growing French influence there.Footnote 61 Their publications were meant to establish their scientific bona fides, as well as maintain their connections to the international scientific community. This was why most explorers chose to write in a Latin script accessible to international audiences. Georg Schweinfurth declared, for instance, that he had decided to do so in the hope that his work “could arouse much interest in Italy and France.”Footnote 62 Depicting German and foreign explorers as part of an international scientific community, German publications listed them together with foreign explorers and described their work as the same.Footnote 63 In this vein, one German writer declared that his countrymen should be proud to count their own among the British and French names that had created great empires and opened Africa to science and trade.Footnote 64
The figure who may have best embodied what it meant to be a celebrity explorer in Germany in the 1870s was Georg Schweinfurth, whom Friedrich Embacher's Lexikon der Reisen und Entdeckungen referred to as an explorer who “possessed the most scientific knowledge” and had accomplished much in ethnography, botany, and geography.Footnote 65 Schweinfurth's identity as a German was closely tied to a Bildungsbürger masculinity that emphasized erudition over physical feats—something illustrated in his writing by its demonstration of classical learning, the “religion” of the Bildungsbürger.Footnote 66 Upon learning of the existence of pygmy peoples in Central Africa, for example, he described his expedition as having the “character of an odyssey.”Footnote 67 And when he had the opportunity to drink wine, he compared his situation to Polycrates's great fortune in recovering a ring he had thrown into the sea.Footnote 68 As this suggests, Schweinfurth clearly identified with Germans who imagined the glory of the nation to lie in its education system and in international reputation for knowledge.
Schweinfurth's fame is significant because it underscores the fact that membership in the German exploration community—and thus identification as a German hero—was not limited to citizens of the Reich itself. He had been born in Riga in 1836, and was a Russian subject. Yet, Gerhard Rohlfs was quick to note for readers of his review of Schweinfurth's work that he was of German descent.Footnote 69 His travels had inspired Ludwig von Höhnel, an Austrian explorer; Höhnel's patron, Samuel Teleki, who was Hungarian; as well as other figures who eventually became part of the community of German explorers.Footnote 70 Despite these international connections, Schweinfurth remained enthusiastically German, and he became a German citizen in 1879, even though he did not live in the Reich at the time.Footnote 71 In short, Schweinfurth's Germanness illustrates—despite his birth—the wide vision during this era of who qualified as a German.
Making great efforts to become a member of the international scientific community, Schweinfurth was nevertheless able to establish himself as more than just a specifically German figure. His book Heart of Africa was initially published in English, after a British publisher had offered more money than German publishers had.Footnote 72 In addition, Schweinfurth took professional positions outside Germany. The Egyptian monarch, Khedive Isma'il Pasha, placed Schweinfurth in charge of creating a Geographical Society, which opened in Cairo in June 1875. The Society's headquarters became a stop on the itineraries of explorers from all nations, including Henry Morton Stanley and Joseph Thomson.Footnote 73 A figure of German pride because of his international reputation, Schweinfurth also became the head of the Institut égyptien in Cairo in the 1880s, while continuing to participate in international discussions about Africa.
Though Schweinfurth was better known internationally and inspired more of his fellow explorers, Gustav Nachtigal was the most prominent celebrity explorer in Germany itself in the decade and a half after unification, and writing about him and his exploits marked a shift toward defining explorers as martial heroes. Authors writing in the 1870s and the early 1880s focused on Nachtigal's scientific achievement as a great geographer, naturalist, and ethnographer.Footnote 74 His fame as a scientist even secured him a place in the panorama of the Berlin ethnologic museum when it opened in 1886—one of the paintings that drew such large audiences that the museum began opening on Sundays to meet demand.Footnote 75 After Nachtigal's early death in 1885 at the age of fifty-one, one obituary claimed that he had unified the “man of science” and the “man of action” in one person, opining further that one need only read a few pages of his Sahara und Sudan before shouting, “This is heroism!”Footnote 76 Deutsche Rundschau printed Paul Güßfeldt's entire twelve-page eulogy, which included a line claiming that Nachtigal's name would still be spoken “as long as science names its best men, as long as the youth raise up [aufrichten] their great role models, as long as Germans celebrate their heroes.”Footnote 77 Memorials were built for him in Stendal, his hometown, and near the site of his death in Cape Palmas. Wilhelm I contributed one thousand marks to the latter, writing to the memorial's organizers that he had taken a “lively personal interest” in Nachtigal's work.Footnote 78 For the German public of the mid-1880s, Nachtigal's bravery was as prominent as his scientific achievements.
Beyond such public displays, Nachtigal's celebrity can be seen in a series of Deutsche Rundschau articles published in 1885 and 1886 after his death. The intention was to connect women readers with the man on a personal level, and the series consisted largely of the publication of letters he had written to an old acquaintance, a certain Dorothea B., who claimed that Nachtigal had always remained the same despite his fame, “unchanged in friendship, unchanged in humor.”Footnote 79 For example, after a celebration of his expedition in Stendal, Nachtigal had joked that it had been more difficult to return from Africa than to travel there because of the crowds in Germany.Footnote 80 An article published at the time by Eduard Pechuel-Loesche in Die Gartenlaube, which described his final meeting with Nachtigal, similarly claimed that Nachtigal had always remained the same despite his fame.Footnote 81 Like contemporary celebrity gossip columns, such articles must have allowed audiences to imagine a more personal connection with the famous explorer.
Even Kladderadatsch dropped its satirical tone to praise Nachtigal after his death. The “dark powers” of Africa had taken another victim, “one of the best, the bravest.” The contributors to Kladderadatsch wrote “from their hearts,” hearts that had often praised Nachtigal: an “envious demon” had killed Nachtigal with its “poisonous breath,” and now was the time for him to sleep in a place where he could hear the sounds of the ocean beneath waving palms. Because of the explorer, the German flag waved around the world and Germany's “conquerors” had “at last conquered.” In an age that pushed people to seek profits and pleasures, Nachtigal had instead chosen toil and struggle. Germany would never forget him, for, “like a leader on the battlefield,” he had fallen “for Germany's honor.”Footnote 82 Nachtigal was thus recast as a pioneer of German colonialism rather than as a hero of German science, a towering figure who had planted the German flag on the African continent.Footnote 83
Whereas the image of Nachtigal and Schweinfurth of the 1870s was that of international men of science, domestic “consumption” of them the following decade offered a clear example of the new meaning of explorers as the vanguard of the German overseas empire. Schweinfurth embraced that identity in the mid- to late 1880s after he had returned to Germany, and, at a meeting of natural scientists and doctors in 1886, he called for German colonization in Africa, riling up the audience in support of empire.Footnote 84 By the 1890s, he was even publishing suggestions for making use of African resources for Germany.Footnote 85 Schweinfurth and his colleagues thus moved away from their international networks to support German colonialism in Africa, whether formally or informally. Their status as scientific experts provided important backing to the colonialist movement's claims about the viability of German colonialism, and their status as celebrities arguably made them the most prominent proponents of overseas expansion.
Celebrity Explorers and Empire
The example of Emin Pasha offers the clearest indication of the shift to a new way of writing about exploration. Born Eduard Schnitzer in Prussian Silesia, Emin had been almost unknown in Germany before the mid-1880s. Those who did knew of him as a scientist, particularly as a collector of birds and plants from today's South Sudan, where Emin served under the famed British colonial administrator Charles Gordon as governor of the Egyptian province of Equatoria. He maintained regular correspondence at the time with Georg Schweinfurth in Cairo, and, in his letters, frequently requested greater assistance for his scientific endeavors.Footnote 86 When the Sudanese Samaniyya leader Muhammad Ahmad (known in Europe as the Mahdi) took Khartoum and killed Gordon in 1884, Emin was cut off from contact with the outside world. Reports about him only appeared in Germany later, e.g., when the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung reported that the explorer Wilhelm Junker was safe with Emin in Equatoria.Footnote 87 A new meaning of the celebrity explorer as a hero who dominated Africa and Africans through martial virtues would emerge through the subsequent campaign to save Emin.
Emin's plight in Equatoria became a cause célèbre in the climate of colonial enthusiasm and the anti-slavery campaigning of the mid-1880s, which rallied followers from across Europe in support of efforts to rescue him.Footnote 88 The rescue campaigns depended on grandiose rhetoric about Emin's achievements. Robert Felkin, for example, a British explorer who had assisted Georg Schweinfurth, Friedrich Ratzel, and Gustav Hartlaub with the production of an edited volume of Emin's letters and journals, wrote an introduction to the English-language edition describing Emin as a lone European fighting “a desperate struggle for liberty and civilization, carried on single-handed [sic].”Footnote 89 Inspired by such rhetoric, Emin's supporters raised significant sums for large expeditions to Equatoria. The first successful one was formed in the United Kingdom, where Stanley organized a rescue expedition to find Emin and bring him to the Indian Ocean coast.Footnote 90 Several of Emin's scientific colleagues in Germany subsequently created a German campaign to rescue the governor, with Wilhelm Junker calling for a crusade to reach Equatoria.Footnote 91 Schweinfurth was the leading figure in the campaign and (in addition to the volume of Emin's writings just mentioned) published in various fora pushing for the creation of a German expedition to rival Stanley's.Footnote 92 Depicting Emin as the ultimate explorer, he argued that “the hopes of friends of Africa were embodied in Emin.”Footnote 93
In most of these publications, Emin's scientific colleagues continued to depict explorers as members of an international community of science. But Emin was largely a cipher, which allowed German audiences to use him to construct their own version of a German explorer. So little was known of Emin, in fact, that many publications misspelled his birth name as “Schnitzler” and even confused his birthplace.Footnote 94 In any event, the public campaign to raise funds focused on Emin's skills as an administrator, on his youth in Germany, and on his dissemination of “Germanness” in Central Africa, rather than on his scientific achievements.Footnote 95 Writing of Emin's love of the people of Equatoria, even Schweinfurth acknowledged that he continued to provide hope for Kultur in Africa.Footnote 96 On a lecture tour, he told audiences that Emin's particularly “German” administrative skills had made him a “master of organization” in Africa, one in whose work all Germans could take pride.Footnote 97 The Emin Pasha Committee, formed to raise money for the rescue, called on Germans to protect the nation's honor and its commercial interests by saving Emin: doing so was a “national mission,” the best possible monument to Wilhelm I's unification of Germany, to show that Germany was united in its attempt to save one of its “bravest sons.”Footnote 98 Others described Emin as the European who best understood how to rule under African law.Footnote 99 In short, Emin became a figure through whom Germans could refashion their country's international identity into that of a colonial power.
The German government itself wanted nothing to do with the expedition, however, fearing that it would endanger relations with the United Kingdom—which is why the Kölnische Zeitung called its supporters “radicals” who were acting against the wishes of the state. Yet, the German public rallied behind the cause.Footnote 100 Old acquaintances wrote to Emin to express their pride in having known him, fondly recalling, for instance, their time together at the Stammtisch back in the Heimat. A certain Sthiren mentioned that he had even heard young children singing a song in the street about “Emil Pascha.”Footnote 101 The extant Emin Pasha Committee's files include page after page of donations, listed by date. While some donors sent up to twenty-five thousand marks, most donations were for quite small amounts—some for as little as four marks. Donations, which also came from Germans living abroad in Russia and London, clearly suggested widespread enthusiasm for Emin, though not necessarily for the colonial empire as such.Footnote 102
A clearer sign of the meaning that supporters of his rescue attached to Emin comes from what many men volunteering for the expedition wrote to the Emin Pasha Committee, as well as to the kaiser and to Bismarck—despite their lack of direct involvement. Their letters not only reveal the meanings that they attached to the work of Emin and other explorers, but also the concerns about modern life that were addressed in the writings by and about explorers. These included German nationalism, frustration about contemporary economic and political changes, as well as the late nineteenth-century crisis of German masculinity defined by a feeling of rootlessness in modern life. There was, however, no mention of their scientific achievement. As this suggests, science—the focus of writing about explorers through the 1870s—was no longer important to audiences in the second half of the following decade.
The social position of the men who applied for the expedition revealed some of the explorers’ appeal as well. Many applicants were in their teens and therefore lacked the money to pay for their travel—such as Wolfgang Schwartz, a self-styled “Prussian” Gymnasiast from Riga in the Russia Empire, who volunteered his “sharp eye and good hearing” to the cause. His father was dead, he explained, which had left him in a precarious position (this was also why he included a permission note from his mother).Footnote 103 Joseph Geisel of Bremerhaven, the seventeen-year-old “son of poor parents,” offered his services—but only if the government would pay his parents a monthly stipend of twenty marks.Footnote 104 Many of the adult applicants also found themselves in precarious socioeconomic situations, e.g., a waiter from Magdeburg, a baker from Rosenheim, an assistant controller (Hilfsrevisor) from Leipzig, and a tailor from Frankfurt am Main.Footnote 105 To strengthen his case, the last complained that he could not get a “secure position” because he was not a Social Democrat: his loyalty was only to the kaiser and to the Reich, which was why socialists would not buy from him and why he had to struggle to feed his wife and two sons.Footnote 106 These men all occupied skilled occupations, but not ones likely to have benefited from the changes in German society resulting from industrialization. These applications for the expedition make clear that those members of the lower social strata who had read about the explorers had created their own meanings of explorer celebrity—meanings that had little in common with the self-presentation of explorers in the previous decade: to them, exploration offered an opportunity to achieve “manly” success despite recent socioeconomic changes.
Given that the organizing committee had specifically highlighted Emin's “Germanness” in its calls for donations—at one point even declaring the expedition to be a tribute to Kaiser Wilhelm I—some men also seem to have volunteered because of feelings of national pride.Footnote 107 As a certain Adolf Mauthner from Vienna wrote, saving Emin was important for the goal of German unity, and he hoped to contribute a “palm branch to German honor” by beating “Stanli” [sic] to Emin: whether or not Austrians were Germans, “our place is at Germany's side.”Footnote 108 Mauthner's letter and the committee's appeals suggest at least some belief in the importance of explorers for building German national prestige as an imperial power.
Tied up with feelings of national pride were concerns about masculinity. Many men cited military service as their main qualification, but this service had invariably taken place after the Franco-Prussian War. The volunteers were thus men who had been too young to have been active participants in the process of unification, and who therefore sought another form of glory apart from noncombatant military service. L. Lahn, an unmarried waiter from Magdeburg, wrote directly to Bismarck that he had just missed out on the war, only joining the army in 1872; Wilhelm Heuser of Frankfurt am Main had similarly served in the infantry from 1873 to 1876.Footnote 109 These and similar applications evoke the crisis felt by many German men in the latter years of the century: destabilized by the changes wrought by industrialization, they lacked the traditional markers of masculine belonging, i.e., combat experience.Footnote 110 Explorers, by contrast, were men who had found their way as self-reliant adventurers in places that Europeans imagined were filled with danger, and thus offered an alternative model of modern masculinity.
The German expedition failed in the end: Stanley reached Emin first and took the Pasha to the coast (against his will), helping the celebrity of both Emin and Stanley to reach even greater heights. At a banquet celebrating Stanley's success—where Emin fell out of a second-floor window, drunkenly mistaking it for a door—Hermann Wissmann graciously toasted the British explorer as “his teacher in African exploration.”Footnote 111 Wilhelm I congratulated Stanley in writing for saving Emin, and also wrote Emin directly to praise him for his “real German faithfulness and fulfillment of duty.”Footnote 112 After Emin fell from the window, Kladderadatsch declared that, in the past, Africa's climate had served to protect the continent from curious Europeans, “who are falsely labeled researchers and adventurers and swindlers, who call themselves carriers of culture.” But now there was a new danger besides the climate: while living in a tent in Africa, the explorer had apparently forgotten what windows and doors were!Footnote 113 Emin seemed to confirm fears that time in Africa could strip away a European's trappings of civilization.
Stanley's fate also took a turn for the worse after he became wrapped up in a scandal over his treatment of the other white members of his expedition, leading Germans to draw a stark contrast between his Anglo-American—and Emin's German—styles of exploration. The elder Helmuth von Moltke, for example, described Stanley as “an adventurer, a kind of mercenary. He does everything for money.”Footnote 114 Friedrich Dernburg similarly lamented Stanley's “streets of blood” (Straßen von Blut) and his “embodiment of the wild reporter's search for the newest … sensation.”Footnote 115 Emin himself was not tarnished by the negative reports about Stanley and thus remained a German hero.Footnote 116 The contrast remained in place for years, in fact, as various authors unfavorably compared the methods of the egoistic Stanley to those of German science.Footnote 117 This celebrity scandal of the 1890s—one of the first of its kind ever—thus allowed German audiences to declare the alleged superiority of Germanness over Britishness.
Emin and Hermann Wissmann became the personification of the German colonial empire for the German public, then, and their charisma prompted the donation of large sums to causes with which they were associated. Wissmann raised over three hundred thousand marks for the campaign by the German Antisklavereigesellschaft mentioned at the outset of this article—including three thousand marks from the kaiser himself.Footnote 118 The Kolonialgesellschaft similarly called on its members to donate money for the undertaking, and to support Emin as well.Footnote 119 Interest in the two men did not abate. Wissmann's betrothal to Hedwig Langen, the daughter of a major funder of the steamer campaign also mentioned earlier, “stimulated lively interest across Germany,” for example.Footnote 120 And when rumors about—and then the actual demise of—Emin spread to Germany from East Africa in 1892 and 1893, many glowing obituaries appeared. Die Gartenlaube printed a facsimile of a letter that Emin had sent to the periodical immediately after his rescue, providing readers with one last tangible link with their hero.Footnote 121 Emin's name “belongs to history,” another newspaper wrote, for all he had achieved in opening Africa.Footnote 122 Emin and Wissmann thus represented the type of national achievement that German supporters of colonialism wanted imperial Germany to represent.
The aggressive model of empire promoted by the Emin Pasha campaign also became the basis for the type of national identity promoted by the German right through organizations like the Pan-German League.Footnote 123 Carl Peters, the leader of the Emin Pasha Expedition, became a key figure in the League, in fact. Writers continued to describe explorers as great heroes of an earlier age, and one claimed that they were the “real martyrs” of colonialism.Footnote 124 Some colonialists complained, at the same time, that the bureaucrats running the empire were destroying the legacies of explorers’ great works with their “Assessorismus.”Footnote 125 As explorers died or faded out of public life, memory of them remained associated with a period of greater hope for Germany's future on the part of conservative Germans.
The German government itself did not support such an antagonistic vision of empire, however, and even tried to eliminate the role of explorers in colonialism. Under Chancellor Leo von Caprivi, for example, it attempted to minimize the role of Emin, Wissmann, and Peters by appointing them as commissars in the East African interior under the authority of the governor there, Julius von Soden.Footnote 126 There they would be far from the public eye and thus unable to participate directly in conversations about the future of German colonialism. More to the point, the explorer serving as a bureaucrat did not have the same appeal as had earlier been the case. As the generation of explorers reached old age and died off, there were no new colonial heroes to take their place.
The celebrity of aging explorers remained important in discourses around empire, serving as legible symbols of German colonialism to the German public. This could cut two ways, however, with critics of colonialism using explorers’ celebrity to define what they saw as the problems with colonialism. Ludwig Bamberger, a leader of the Freisinnige Partei (Radical Party), made such an argument in a March 1892 Reichstag debate, explaining that he was distrustful of the “true African explorers” because of their “taste for adventure” and their self-celebration—while all the time ignoring the fact that people back home had to pay for their escapades. Describing Emin as an “idol” for the colonial movement, he claimed that “something not completely healthy” had resided in him, thereby dismissing the greatest hero in colonialist circles.Footnote 127
Bamberger's criticisms of explorers became common in subsequent challenges to the colonial empire. In the middle of the 1890s, for example, August Bebel launched an attack on Peters for having had sexual relations with an African woman and for having summarily executed people in East Africa; the Social Democratic leader used this as a central element in his critique of the colonial empire as a whole. Peters was disgraced and political opponents quickly took advantage of his celebrity to mount the first successful challenge to the structure of German colonialism. Similar to Bamberger's criticism of Emin, Peters's accusers claimed that he was not mentally fit for government service. Paul Kayser, the head of the Kolonialabteilung (Colonial Branch) in the Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office), sacrificed Peters to protect his administration.Footnote 128 The scandal made it clear that opponents of colonialism, as well as its supporters, could use explorers to define the larger meaning of the empire. Peters's very celebrity meant that his actions caused a greater public spectacle concerning the problems of colonialism than other issues with the empire did.
Conclusion
With Peters disgraced, and Wissmann in ill health, none of the great heroes of exploration was directly involved in actually running the colonial empire. In the three decades after the turn of the century, explorers nevertheless remained a central part of the academic identities of Bildungsbürger, even as their importance for the broader public faded. Hans Meyer, who explored Mount Kilimanjaro, later served as a professor of colonial geography and politics at the University of Leipzig from 1915 to 1928, where he remained a powerful voice on colonial affairs. Max von Oppenheim, one of Germany's leading archeologists from the 1910s through the 1930s, wrote to Georg Schweinfurth in 1919 that the explorer's tales had inspired his own expeditions.Footnote 129 Explorers returned, in short, to their standing primarily as men of science until the 1930s.
The interwar era did witness a small revival of explorers as figures of German pride: they were central to German colonial memory and to national identity as superior colonists who, during Weimar, became a rallying point for Germans angry about the postwar settlement.Footnote 130 Books on explorers as symbols of German pride remained popular.Footnote 131 Bavaria Film even released a notorious biopic about Carl Peters in 1941, which attempted to turn Peters into a figure of German racial pride who had struggled against Jews working in the Colonial Office.Footnote 132 As a whole, explorers and their exploits were used to make claims about German empire as a benevolent force, forming part of a broader intellectual movement to revive German colonialism as a source of national pride and unity.Footnote 133 Long after their heyday, then, they remained available for the formation of a chauvinist national identity.
That narrative of German explorers ended after World War II, but, beginning in the immediate postwar period, explorers did return as objects of German identity because of their international scientific achievements—a narrative that continues today. Georg Schweinfurth was, according to a 1954 biography, the “last Humboldtian explorer,” someone skilled in a variety of scientific fields. Schweinfurth's biographer thus placed him in an imagined tradition of German science stretching back to the eighteenth century, a tradition free of the aggression associated with Germany's imperial expansion—one in which explorers sought knowledge for its own sake.Footnote 134 More recent retrospectives on German explorers have taken a similar approach. Heinrich Barth was the subject of a 2004 symposium and of a 2007–2009 exhibition, both of which depicted him as a man of science particularly attentive to African perspectives—not as a forerunner of empire.Footnote 135 A similar exhibition about Karl Mauch, who had searched for the biblical city of Ophir in today's Zimbabwe, appeared in that country in 2007, and a 1994 article about Gerhard Rohlfs, an explorer of the Sahara, described him as one of the more unprejudiced European explorers of Africa.Footnote 136 Such perspectives have brought back the precolonial image of the German explorer as part of a scientific Bildungsbürgertum, free of much of the baggage of colonizing powers like the United Kingdom and France, and somehow less blameworthy for it. In this way, explorers once again help define German identity, this time in the postwar era, while portraying Germany as a nation defined by scientific and technical achievement.
