BIOGRAPHY

Klemm's work was rooted in his position as a patronized intellectual and collector, and his career provides almost the model of a successful and secure member of the pre-unification Bildungsbürgertum.Footnote ⁵ Born in Chemnitz in 1802 as the son of a tax official, he studied at Leipzig and Jena, following which almost his entire working life was tied to the state collections of the Kingdom of Saxony. He started work in the Königliche Öffentliche Bibliothek in Dresden in 1830, was given the task of reorganizing the famed royal porcelain collections from 1833, and was eventually appointed the library's director in 1852. Expectedly, his links with the ruling house were close: he dedicated almost all his major works to its members and could use the prestigious title Hofrat (court adviser) from the 1850s. Directly involved in the expansion and opening of Saxony's internationally renowned collections, he was at the centre of the major process of state building through the patronage of cultural institutions which Abigail Green describes as gripping the German principalities of the period.Footnote ⁶

Yet while being part of this courtly world, Klemm remained a constitutionalist liberal in his political views. This attaches him to a complex yet important historiographical area. Both general and closer studies portray German liberalism in this period as a shifting and diverse ideological formation—to the extent that many historians refuse to give clear definitions or limit themselves to very specific examinations of particular regions, debates, or semantic shifts.Footnote ⁷ Broadly however, these studies have combined to offer a vision of a diverse liberal milieu, generally tied to an expanding urban bourgeois culture and promoting such values as material development, constitutional reform and improvement through cultural refinement, education and responsibility. However, it was also a refracted culture, continually shifting according to local and national conditions, internal conflicts and debates, and increased competition from socialist, conservative and Catholic groupings. Within this variegated landscape, Klemm maintained a consistent moderate and constitutional orientation, citing the necessity of social and cultural reform along these patterns, but emphasizing gradualism and loyalty to existing states.

These values were built into his works, and followed through his biography. He was positively delighted that the Dresden Revolution of 1830 meant that he “joined Saxon royal state-service as a constitutional citizen,”Footnote ⁸ and consistently—even as Saxony itself moved through reform in the 1830s, violent revolution in 1848–9, reaction in the 1850s, and then a softening “pseudo-liberalization” in the 1860s—saw moderate political reform under a royal system as the ideal for a modern state. In many respects, this was in keeping with the trends of Saxon politics: as Andreas Neemann has argued, after 1850 the state made a strong effort to integrate the ambitions of moderate liberals within its economic and social policies, and in many respects succeeded.Footnote ⁹ Like most prominent intellectuals and members of his peer group, Klemm was also active in the waves of association formation sweeping Europe in these decades. By 1837, he was a member of fourteen different antiquarian and historical societies, and spoke at the inaugural meeting of the Gesammtverein der deutschen Geschichts- und Alterthumsvereine in Dresden in 1852, presided over by Crown Prince Johann of Saxony.Footnote ¹⁰ In his political and social connections, therefore, Klemm can be found at the junction of two major processes in nineteenth-century German society: the growth of an educated bourgeois milieu working towards the opening and reform of society, and the use of culture by established state powers to build prestige and authority.

While these local roots were important, they were comprehended in global terms. Even though he only seems to have left the boundaries of the German Confederation once, travelling to Italy in the entourage of Prince Johann in 1838, this was no obstacle to gaining a wider perspective. From his youth, he pored over maps and geographies, collected natural-historical curiosities, and avidly read travel accounts of journeys to exotic regions—not only a tremendously popular literary genre, but also regarded as a key source of ethnographic understanding. Growing up during the Napoleonic Wars, “a time of perpetual commotion, unrest and painful uncertainty,”Footnote ¹¹ was also crucial. The restriction of extra-European trade by the British blockade and Continental System caused formerly everyday products such as coffee and tobacco to become scarce or unavailable, with local substitutes being made from chicory and beetroot—an early lesson on the importance of global commerce.Footnote ¹² Saxony itself became a front line during the conflict, with French, Prussian, Austrian and Russian troops marching through the state, and Klemm later recalled that the sounds of the world-historic Battle of Nations were clearly audible from his residence in Leipzig. He therefore grew up in the midst of world-shaking events, and was given the opportunity of observing foreign soldiers and receiving early lessons in “practical ethnography and the study of weapons”Footnote ¹³—with the Russian army's Cossacks and “Kalmyks with their camels” making a particularly strong impression.

Further developments followed, with Saxony in many ways being in the vanguard of the major transformations overtaking the German lands in the first half of the century. While the state was elevated from an electorate to a kingdom during the Napoleonic period, it suffered territorial losses to Prussia at the Congress of Vienna, and at one point seemed likely to be annexed completely. This precarious position was, however, matched by economic development. Saxony was one of the first regions of central Europe to be industrialized on a large scale: its population more than doubled over Klemm's lifetime, and its growing cities drew on a long heritage of mining, porcelain manufacture and commerce to become centres of new technology. Dresden acquired gas street lighting in 1828, steamboats began being used on the River Elbe in the 1830s, and from the opening of the Leipzig–Dresden line in 1839 it became a focal point in the German rail networks.

Saxony had also long maintained a highly distinctive intellectual culture, in many ways being able to punch far above its weight and maintain a strong identity of its own.Footnote ¹⁴ In the preceding generation, Johann Adelung, Klemm's forerunner as director of the Royal Library, took a leading role in producing systematic and empirically grounded philological studies of German and other languages,Footnote ¹⁵ and students flocked from all over Europe to Freiberg's Bergbauakademie to study under the renowned geognostic and mineralogist Abraham Gottlob Werner.Footnote ¹⁶ Klemm himself was an associate of the artist, natural philosopher and racial theorist Carl Gustav Carus, who had corresponded with such luminaries as Goethe, Lorenz Oken, Alexander von Humboldt and Caspar David Friedrich,Footnote ¹⁷ and the architect Gottfried Semper, who developed new historicist theories of architectural aesthetics and worked on monumental prestige projects such as the Dresden Gemäldegallerie and Hoftheater—before being forced to flee following his participation in the 1849 Dresden May rising (alongside Richard Wagner and Mikhail Bakunin, two other contemporary residents).Footnote ¹⁸ Klemm engaged with many of the same issues as Carus and Semper, and “like so many nineteenth-century scholars, struggled to reconcile the explosive growth of empirical facts with an enlightenment ideal of universal knowledge.”Footnote ¹⁹ However, while in many other cases this led to a greater appreciation of the particular, Klemm followed a different track: his schema was persistently universalist rather than Romanticist or historicist, and his views were always moderate and constitutional rather than conservative or radical. In many respects this grew from his social and political placement. While firmly within the bürgerlich world of the historical and antiquarian associations, his continuance in office at the Saxon court was contingent on his maintaining a more covert and gradualist perspective, both to avoid censorship and to maintain his position, but also to reconcile a commitment to a liberal milieu with loyalty to a monarchic state.

These connections are further illustrated in his studies. Employment in one of Germany's prime libraries and links with cross-regional associational networks provided access to material on all manner of subjects, and allowed him to pursue a number of more personal avenues alongside his more “official” work in the state library and porcelain collection. Early in his career, he focused on the ancient Teutonic inhabitants of Germany, the Germanen: his first book, a history of Attila the Hun, spent much time describing their culture and society through an analysis of literary sources.Footnote ²⁰ This subject was pursued in greater depth in the Handbuch der germanischen Alterthumskunde in 1836, which mixed observations drawn from classical accounts, comparative mythology, and archaeological artefacts to produce one of the most detailed surveys of the period, intended to inspire an “extension of an essential knowledge of prehistory [Vorzeit] among the people, and an arousal of that respect towards it which is the surest lever of patriotism [Vaterlandsliebe].”Footnote ²¹ This distant ancestral past was a prominent theme for contemporary educated middle-class writers: Jacob Grimm was researching the history of the Germanic languages to illustrate the development of the German Volk; Germanic legal codes were being invoked by reformers to justify a return to “organic” constitutional forms; and the Völkerwanderung, the sweeping of the Germanic tribes across the collapsing Roman Empire, was being presented as a critical world-historic episode of regeneration and foundation. For the liberal–national generation of the Vormärz, the ancient forefathers offered an idealized image of an egalitarian and virtuous national origin, which had nevertheless been effaced and occluded by later developments.Footnote ²²

These ideas of submerged primordial roots and their use in patriotic narratives of revival and rebirth have been the main foci of historiographical interpretations of the Germanenmythos. In many ways, following Klaus von See, it is understood as a Romantic or historicist foil to the old traditions of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, forming a “conception in antitheses” to a dichotomous vision of “Rome”—potentially manifested as either Catholicism, arbitrary monarchism, cosmopolitan civilization, or France.Footnote ²³ Yet motifs of ancestry and lost essence could be used in other ways, and Klemm is a case in point. While he certainly adhered to the view of ancient constitutionalism, dynamism and world-historic importance which dominated much of the early Germanenmythos, his presentation lacked the counterestablishment edge of most others. The national ancestors were not understood as exceptional, but were instead contextualized in terms of his beloved travel accounts and work in the royal collections. When recreationally digging in Germanic and Slavonic burial mounds in Saxony and Thuringia in the 1830s, he began to “compare the ancient Germanic monuments with those of other peoples—and since I had been given the task of rearranging and exhibiting the royal porcelain collections, this became connected with renewed studies of China, and reflections on the technical production of pottery.”Footnote ²⁴ Following this, the Handbuch der germanischen Alterthumskunde contained a lengthy section describing the development of Germanic clay pots,Footnote ²⁵ and was written simultaneously with a guide to the Saxon collections, tracing the history of porcelain from its invention in China to its “perfection” in Europe (and, more specifically, the famed factories of the Saxon town of Meissen).Footnote ²⁶ In these projects, the official and personal work operated synergistically, and the national and local experiences were related in global terms. Pottery became emblematic of something more significant: the objects themselves displayed different forms, depending upon the availability of materials, the traditions of the producers, and their technological sophistication, but could still be arranged into common developmental trajectories and reveal universal facets of human life, including domesticity, commerce, and aesthetic sense.

These central issues—explaining the similarities and differences between human groups, linking their material culture with social practices and lifestyles, and remaining committed to a unitary view of progress—provided the basis for the near-obsession which was to dominate the next three decades of Klemm's life: the study of the development of all peoples, across time and geographical space. This was a huge task, and he devoted a great deal of money and effort to assembling a collection of artefacts from all corners of the world. The objects were acquired from a variety of sources. Many of the Germanic antiquities he had unearthed himself, while the ethnographic items were either bought from collectors or donated: he received objects from such notable travellers as Adolf Bastian and Johann Helfer, and was given a large set of artefacts from Siberia and the Russian Far North by Grand Duke Constantine Nikolaevich.Footnote ²⁷ By the time he died in 1867, the Museum Klemmium was one of the largest private collections in Europe, containing almost eight thousand classified objects and sixteen thousand other pieces. Most were from Europe and Asia, but the collection also included many items from Africa and the Americas, and a few from Polynesia and Australasia.Footnote ²⁸ The journal Das Ausland provided a general report on the museum in 1864–5, describing a rather cramped and eclectic holding ordered into a variety of galleries.Footnote ²⁹ These moved sequentially through: rocks; skulls, busts and body parts; natural materials used by humans; tools and weapons; examples of habitation, transport, clothing and jewellery; objects related to private, public and religious life; and finally a set of historic “relics,” including Napoleon's pen-stand and the Empress Marie Theresa's shoes. While the writer was impressed by the variety of objects and the principles underlying the arrangement, the observation that “the collection is currently packed on display around five moderately sized rooms, but a complete arrangement would require a six-fold greater space,”Footnote ³⁰ is possibly a more telling indicator of the condition of the museum—particularly in the context of Klemm's own statement that the collector's “worst enemies are visitors who pick up everything with their hands, and doubt the accuracy of widely proven things, confusing bronze with stone or iron, or asking if Luanda is in America or Asia.”Footnote ³¹

While the restricted space and fussiness of the curator certainly put limits on the display's clarity, it was nevertheless carefully and purposefully thought out. In one important sense, it was based on the persistent trends of antiquarianism, using often eclectically gathered material objects as a means of understanding the past in a practical and tangible manner.Footnote ³² As Suzanne Marchand and Susan Crane have pointed out, the upsurge in antiquarian collecting in Germany in this period was frequently intensely focused on a continuous local past, which was at most federalized into a wider “German” framework—such as in the Germanisches Museum of Hans von und zu Aufsess in Nuremburg or Ludwig Lindenschmit's Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum in Mainz.Footnote ³³ While Klemm's involvement within these national projects was made clear in his statement that “the tools of the ancient Germanen offer us . . . an overview of their course of development [Entwickelungsganges],”Footnote ³⁴ these principles were then vastly extended onto a global scale. In an example of the “comparative method,” where periods of the deep European past were understood in terms of foreign societies whose developmental condition they were held to parallel, the national was relativized within the universal. This was ingrained into Klemm's typology: the objects, rather than being classed according to which people had produced them, were arranged by the fundamental feature of human existence they were seen to reflect. The principles were not geographical, diffusionist, national or historicist, but based on a single schema of human improvement. In this way, the museum used an antiquarian regard for objects as indicators of history to illustrate theories of linear teleological development. Klemm wrote in 1853,

Extensive as it was, the museum alone was not enough for this endeavour: books needed to be composed to outline the principles involved. Klemm's main series, the Allgemeine Cultur-Geschichte der Menschheit, was written from 1843 to 1852, consisting of ten volumes, each over 450 pages long, attempting to provide a coherent narrative of development by arranging human societies within a cultural-evolutionist schema. After this work was completed, he revisited the central themes from different angles, while still holding the same theoretical model and concepts. Six volumes on Die Frauen were published from 1854 to 1859,Footnote ³⁶ and a further five-volume Allgemeine Culturwissenschaften was also planned. However, Klemm was incapacitated by encroaching blindness as a severe eye inflammation overtook him from 1861 and, as a result, only the first two volumes, on basic necessities and on weapons and tools, were produced.Footnote ³⁷

MAN IN NATURE: THE GROWTH OF CULTURE

Klemm's literary and museological efforts combined into a single project, aiming to illustrate patterns of graded development which were consistent across all of humanity. He posited two central mechanisms—Cultur and Rasse—as the driving forces in this development, and it is in the history of these concepts that his significance tends to be examined, if often separately. The first of these, Cultur, was a hugely important term in Germany, and Michael Carhart has shown it rapidly dominating learned discourse from the 1770s onwards.Footnote ³⁸ However, its definition and meanings were often diverse. Suzanne Marchand has noted that over the course of the nineteenth century there was a marked shift from a humanistic “older definition (culture as acquired refinement)” to “an anthropological definition (culture as a complex of traits),”Footnote ³⁹ deriving from the consolidation of ethnological sciences and museum collections. Klemm's particular definition, provided in the Allgemeine Culturwissenschaft, straddled these. In some respects it was firmly within the late-eighteenth-century meaning of culture as improvement, but in others went some way beyond it:

The acceptance of Adelung's definition clearly places the concept within the earlier “humanistic sense of the accumulation of mental achievements of a people.”Footnote ⁴¹ However, it was greatly extended to include everything related to practical usage and material life as well as awareness and moral advancement—with all these facets forming a single complex. This has meant that, especially in histories of anthropology, Klemm has often been taken as an originator of modern understandings of the term, being “the first to apply the term ‘culture’ to everything produced by man rather than to selected products of the human mind.”Footnote ⁴² However, he differed from modern anthropologists in that these complexes of culture were not understood as distinctive or unique. Typically for the period, Klemm did not use Cultur in the plural, at most referring to different Stufen der Cultur, Culturgrade, or Culturreihe. Indeed, the lack of pluralization was crucial to his meaning: it was in many respects the Enlightenment notion of culture as the refinement of universal morals and reason, but combined with an ethnological and antiquarian sensibility which saw physical objects as not simply by-products of this process, but intrinsic parts of it. Together, all the material, social, spiritual and intellectual facets of culture formed an integrated “complex of traits,” but each of these, far from being exceptional, was understood as a single step on a general ladder.

This perspective was also entwined with natural history. While culture was man's unique property, it grew from man's place in nature, depending on “the interplay between man and nature, and thereafter on the interaction of men among themselves.”Footnote ⁴³ Thus, in both his museum and his writings, Klemm devoted much attention to the world and environment. Early in the Allgemeine Cultur-Geschichte, he described the changing conditions of the Earth, “the home and habitation of man and the theatre of his history.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Thus he placed his theory on deeply naturalistic foundations, structured around Wernerian geognostic ideas. The world had progressed through three increasingly differentiated states, which conditioned the possible forms of life: the first was of crystalline Urgebirge, where huge mounds of hard stone were thrown up by oceanic water and underground fire; the second—the colossale Urwelt—saw giant creatures, such as the megalosaurus and pterodactyl, dominating a hot primeval landscape of dense forests and volcanoes; and the third had softened and cooled into the diverse climatic zones of the modern world. The rest of nature grew from these states, but according to advancing scales of complexity: minerals moved through grades of stone and metal; plants passed through lichen, mosses, roots and trees; animals from plant-like corals, worms, insects, fish, reptiles, herbivorous mammals, carnivores and apes; and, finally, man, who, while having some similarities with apes (particularly at lower levels of development), was unique owing to language, upright posture and brain structure—and moved along the higher track of culture.Footnote ⁴⁵

In this way, humanity was separated from the animal world, but continued within a set of natural processual hierarchies. As such, an important aspect of Klemm's culture concept was that it was found across all human societies—even the most primitive. Most earlier scholars (and indeed many “universal historians” up to the end of the centuryFootnote ⁴⁶) largely limited themselves to the literate inhabitants of the Old World—with Hegel explicitly stating that “the development of peoples [Völkerschaften] lies outside history.”Footnote ⁴⁷ However, Klemm unambiguously presented humanity everywhere as in a process of historical development. Certain capacities, including the use of fire, wooden tools, aesthetic sense, vegetative narcotics, care for the dead, cleanliness, and the domestication of the dog, were either innate or developed so early that they were effectively universal. Primitive “traces” of religion, social life and ritual were also to be found, but were unformed, as “their mind is still like an animalistic egg, an undeveloped, undifferentiated embryo.”Footnote ⁴⁸ All human faculties therefore existed on a single cultural continuum: the body decoration of the naked Brazilian Indians was an expression of taste through an imitation of the natural world, of which the artistic achievements of modern European civilization were simply the highest developed forms; the social authority of the Australian aboriginal father over his family was the basic expression of the political power of the modern state; tool manufacturing progressed through improvements in materials, from wood to stone to metal, but reflected the same drive towards refinement and utility. There were major qualitative differences in all of these manifestations of Cultur, but they were of degree rather than of kind, and all grew from a common source and purpose.

Klemm did not consider the histories he was writing to be separate from the processes of cultural development which they described. His Allgemeine Cultur-Geschichte in fact opened with a highly reflective outline of the development of historiography, which in certain respects served as an initial case study. Consciousness of the past was a form of social self-awareness, and an important index of development: it was only the lowest peoples “in the childhood of humanity” who lived entirely in the present, with vague dream-like recollections of the past and fears of the future. Klemm's natural man did not live in a benign Eden, but in a bewildering and timeless confusion, driven by basic necessity, disordered sensory input and unadulterated low emotion. Understanding of the past only came through moving up the ladder of culture: first, with tales and legends to pass on knowledge within family groups and tribes; then monopolized by religious hierarchies as a means of control; before being forged into heroic epics glorifying royal dynasties; broadening into the descriptive cosmographies of the early modern period; and, finally, used in the philosophical and political histories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in which:

This modern ideologization of the past would be succeeded by Klemm's own cultural history, which would empirically demonstrate patterns of development. Though his work, life and own “historical system” had strong ties to a gradualist liberalist position, assertions that his works went beyond the political struggles of the day served as both an important strategy and as a way of ensuring that his interpretations and analyses could be presented as factual and scientific, rather than partisan and ideological. The values implicit in his cultural history were thus broadened as universal drives. While this did mean that their political implications would often be buried in the models and narrative rather than openly stated, it significantly strengthened their claims to authority.

Beyond this, his accounts of the leading intellectual lights of these latter periods allow his influences to be more clearly understood—and also provide interesting examples of how a number of canonical “great minds” could be read and received in the mid-nineteenth century. While Klemm cited the significance of “deep-seeing Hegel” and his processual view of history, he disliked his emphasis on the state. Klemm presented a broader vision, drawing on a Saxon rather than a Prussian intellectual context, where society was more often understood in cultural and naturalistic terms. Also significant was the antiquarian method, where materials as well as texts served as historical evidence. Just as culture needed to be studied through all aspects of life, history needed to move away from a narrow political focus on events and rulers. Concentrating on any one feature was misguided as, like a natural scientist, “the historian should identify and analyse humanity as a whole in all courses and respects, according to all his structures, his emergence and development, his essence, being, and becoming.”Footnote ⁵⁰

This agenda explains why Klemm reserved much praise for Voltaire, whose Essai sur les mœurs et l'esprit des nations was described as “the first which put dynasties, lists of kings and battles to one side and sought out the essence, the culture, as it was manifested in customs, beliefs and governmental forms.”Footnote ⁵¹ However, most esteemed was Kant, whose Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Hinsicht was cited as “one of the most important works ever written.”Footnote ⁵² In this short essay, Kant stated that history moved according to definite laws, driven by humanity's contradictory needs for security within society and freedom for individuals. These needs combined into an “unsociable sociability,” with increasing morality and social cohesion offering the only means through which large numbers of people could survive the harsh dictates of nature and the clash of their own competing interests. This process simultaneously rooted the development of humanity in the environment and posited that, like all natural processes, it moved with a clear purpose. In the case of man, this was driving towards growing harmony, freedom and reason, which would eventually culminate in a world federation of peaceful states. The study of history should therefore be structured around explaining this process, in which refinement towards a rational utopia was the natural end of man. This was a call which Klemm resolutely took up—even if he did not explicitly mention Kant's end point.

Klemm also cited favourably another eighteenth-century giant of ideas of human diversity, Johann Gottfried Herder. However, he did not do so for reasons which conform to the conventional historical interpretation that contemporary German ideas of social development deriving from Herder tended to be pluralistic and divergent, and opposed to the social-evolutionist “ladder” theories of progress dominant in Britain and France. As the high estimation of Voltaire should indicate, Klemm stands in opposition to this, but this also illustrates how elements of this German intellectual tradition—including the writings of Herder, who himself made extensive references to the “Chain of Culture”—could be deployed in a strikingly ladder-like manner. Herder is perhaps best known for presenting each people as having a unique Volksgeist, developed and expressed through a complex of language, mythology, traditions and historical understanding. While this did in some ways conform to Klemm's vision of the culture of a people being the combination of all their mental, material and social forces, the core idea of national uniqueness was incompatible with the linear model of development. Instead, Klemm drew attention to the way in which Herder's ideas “are based on the consideration of nature, the climate, the condition of the country, and the difference of nations; they are one of the finest fruits of the philosophical century.”Footnote ⁵³ It was primarily Herder's arguments for the importance of environment in the manifestations of human difference that provided much of the basis for the first three books of the Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, which Klemm saw as significant. What appealed to Klemm was this German version of the eighteenth-century vogue for climatic determinism, using nature to explain the forces which helped push humanity along its track of growth and rationalizing the differences between peoples as caused by specific environmental conditions. For Klemm, though, the implication was that these differences were only surface variations, with the deeper line of culture being of far greater significance.

THE ACTIVE AND PASSIVE RACES

These views would appear to be rather inclusive, showing the unity of all peoples on a single chain of progress—even if this was a definite teleological hierarchy of superiority and inferiority. However, it was complicated through the presence of a very strong racial idea, which in many respects formed a parallel explanatory model to that of culture. There are pervasive references to Rasse in Klemm's work; this ensures that he has been described as the “true theoretician of the hierarchy of races in Germany,”Footnote ⁵⁴ and “deeply involved in biologizing history.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Yet there is nevertheless a great deal of uncertainty as to what exactly he meant by the term, and modern scholars often find it unclear whether he was “advancing a conception of races as permanent human types or using the terminology of race in a metaphorical fashion.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The answer to this question would most probably be “neither,” as his usage is quite distinct from the clearly variegated hierarchies of biological capacity which have tended to interest historians. Klemm explicitly distanced his concept from Blumenbach's varieties of Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American and Malay, based on skin colour and anthropometric characteristics; James Cowles Pritchard's more multivalent seven races; and Carus's fourfold vision of day, night, dawn and dusk peoples (corresponding to Europeans, Africans, Asians and Americans). Much like his views on the limitations of Hegel's philosophy of the state, Klemm felt that these were too abstract: for an accurate description “one must, when speaking of a nation or a race, understand it as an individual, as a large structured whole, whose specific characteristics, like those of an individual, are not merely shown in their bodily appearances, but specifically in their customs, belief, language and history.”

Following this, his races were classed by base essence in a very simple binary fashion, “separated into two complementary halves, an active and a passive, a male and a female.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The latter part of the definition is highly significant, given the long-standing historical conflation of race and gender: Nancy Stepan has identified this as being pervasive in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,Footnote ⁵⁸ and Susanne Zantop extensively discussed the ways in which German “fantasies” of pre-colonial expansion frequently imagined relations between Europeans and colonized subjects in terms of idealized male and female relationships.Footnote ⁵⁹ Klemm not only worked within this idiom, but offered one of its most extreme manifestations—unlike the usual trend, which was to use this gendered imagery metaphorically, it became the axiomatic principle around which his entire ethnological theory was based.

Like the origins of culture, racial difference developed from man's place in nature, with both racial types having been molded by their initial habitats. The feminine passive races were the first to develop, originating in the dense warm forests which covered the primeval Earth in the second stage of geological development. While physically diverse, they shared the important similarity of being permanently darkened by the sun, with skin which ranged “from the most delicate yellow to the deepest black, through all shades of red and brown.” This initial warmth and security also affected their mentality: they were conservative, placid and timid, as the “drive for peace binds the passive peoples to their homeland, and they like to stay within their natural borders.”Footnote ⁶⁰ While they progressed through early stages of culture quickly (“just how young girls develop faster to a certain point, and then remain there stationary”Footnote ⁶¹), they did so in a manner which was almost entirely dependent on the environments in which they had found themselves once the Earth cooled. The Indians of the Amazon rainforest, who still lived in conditions similar to those of the Urwelt, provided evidence of the earliest state. While this “natural man” lived longer and was healthier than his civilized counterparts, his experience of life was stymied and unfulfilled by the absence of higher sentiments of love, friendship or shame. Lacking conscious reflection, “an inhabitant of the jungles of Brazil experiences in the hundred years which make up his life less than a German or Italian in their first twenty.”Footnote ⁶² After this were varying grades of Jäger und Fischervölker, including the Australian aborigines, who had developed a broader expanse of vision through living on the coasts and plains, and basic social and moral differentiation. Moving up the ladder (and into colder regions), the natives of North America had more refined tools, advanced artistic capabilities and a basic aristocracy. Eskimos, Kamchatkans and Chukchi were higher still, as the harsh conditions of their Arctic homes bound them into a closer social life. Further advances required animal domestication: the Lapps, Yakuts and Samoyeds lived in the same polar climate as the hunting and fishing Eskimos and Kamchatkans, and were described as almost identical in physical appearance, but had moved up a notch through reindeer herding, which fostered awareness of property, empathy and security. Passive herding peoples then advanced as they moved into warmer climates and gained better animals, grading into the Mongol nomads of Central Asia, who tamed horses, cattle and sheep, and maintained powerful princes and complex shamanic religions. Finally, the West Africans represented the highest development of pure passive humanity, living in a region suited to limited farming and building relatively organized states.

Early progress was thus defined by improvements in morality, material culture, subsistence, political organization and social differentiation, but was entirely dependent on the imprint of the world's variegated climates upon the passive races. Moving any further along the track of cultural development required a qualitative racial leap into the light-skinned masculine active races. These had initially inhabited the “highlands around the Himalayan mountains”Footnote ⁶³ and the “inhospitable deserts of Syria, Arabia and North Africa,”Footnote ⁶⁴ environments which forged a vigorous cast of mind and impressive physical characteristics. Unlike the physically diverse passive peoples, the active races were more uniform, presenting a large, white-skinned, and striking type: “the youths of these races display the essence and bearing of the Apollo Belvedere, and the men that of the Hercules Farnese.”Footnote ⁶⁵ This analogy is quite a firm expression of a dominant trend in eighteenth-century discourse, discussed by David Bindman, on human difference, where racial classifications were often linked to aesthetics, and the pinnacles of Greek art also defined as the ideal physical types.Footnote ⁶⁶ This is not at all surprising given that many leading early typologists, such as the Swiss physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavatar (who had also cited the Apollo Belvedere as the ideal head), and Carl Gustav Carus, were also classically trained artists. While Klemm's artistic ability seems to have been limited to sketching pottery and judging the quality of objects in his museum, this important connection between race and aesthetics was still refracted across his work, and used to promote a vision of innate purity and vigor.

Yet despite the racial differences, culture continued on its steady linear track across the racial divide. In their pure forms, the active races lived as nomadic herdsmen. The Bedouin of North Africa and the Circassians of the north Caucasus were the archetypal examples. However, their technological and material conditions were not very different from those of the Mongols of Central Asia, similarly living in wandering bands supported by their animals and limited agriculture. The key difference was a marked psychological break. Their entire lives were devoted to “the drive for mastery, independence and freedom” and “constant movement, rising and descending, but always driving forwards.”Footnote ⁶⁷ This contrast was demonstrated by contemporary events: while the passive Mongols had been subdued by the Russian Empire, the Circassians were continuing to fight and resist, and remained (at least when Klemm was writing) independent and free. The desert-dwelling Bedouin were similarly elevated, being intelligent, commercial, generous and hospitable, even if their desert habitats meant that they used camels and tents, rather than the horses and wagons of the mountain and steppe Circassians. Both were held to be liberated from the dark and smoky superstitions of the passive races, and possessed a greater ability to rationally comprehend the world around them. The differences between the active and passive races were reflected in their inbuilt mentality, morality and physical condition, which enabled them to move beyond pure environmental determinism.

“THE MARRIAGE OF PEOPLES”

This separation of active and passive races would seem to present a clear division of humanity into a superior and an inferior grouping. However, Klemm's need to assert the universal, and the rigidness of his gender-based model, made matters more complex—something perhaps best brought out in his ideas on the condition of women within human society. Klemm regarded relations between the sexes as hugely important, and his second book series after the Allgemeine Cultur-Geschichte, entitled Die Frauen, was devoted to demonstrating the importance of women for humanity. He introduced it in the following terms:

In all times and places, woman was subordinate to man, but man needed woman for restraint and to fulfill his true potential. Like everything else, the form that this subordination took depended upon social advancement: “the lower tribes [Stämme] stand on the scale of culture, the more subjugated the position of women . . . in general, the position of women is one of the surest means of estimating the cultural level of families, tribes, peoples and states.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Thus, while marriage was something found in all conditions, its form varied significantly. Among the passive races, where high emotion and sentiment were completely absent, wives were simply “beasts of burden” (Lastthiere). At best, polygamy was more pronounced among the higher passive peoples, as their elites could feed and keep more females. Yet with the monogamous Bedouin and Circassians, “we find woman as the friend and companion of man, whose love he competes for, whose attention he seeks and whose good properties he honours.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The moral development of the active races was thus again emphasized.

This conceptual non-disjunction was carried even further. While the pure active races were certainly higher on the chain of culture than the pure passive races, they were too impulsive and unsteady to develop beyond nomadic barbarism by themselves. Just as the foundation of personal fulfillment was found in marriage between man and woman, true civilization only grew from the combination of masculine-active and feminine-passive races in a “Marriage of Peoples” (Völkerehe). Of course, like the progress of marriage, its origin was not in a benign love-match: the Völkerehe began fragmented and violent, though it moved towards unity and peace. The warlike and migratory active races were driven by an impulsive need for glory, knowledge and a Streben in die Ferne to conquer the passive peoples. The initial stages were riven by brutal conflict, as the active races viciously fought and enslaved the passive. This was still observable on the South Sea Islands, where tribes of light-skinned invaders terrorized darker indigenes through human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism. Ancient Mexico and Egypt, with their rigid theocracies, slave-based economies and monumental architecture, provided parallel examples of an oppressed passive majority under a segregated active ruling caste—with much attention being given to depictions of light-skinned pharaohs and Aztec gods (for Klemm, this indicated that Mesoamerican civilization had been founded by an unknown seafaring population from Europe or the Middle East). China showed a massive indigenous passive population infused by periodic incursions of nomadic active peoples, resulting in a static culturally frozen empire lacking any expansionist or dynamic impulses. Next was “the Orient,” which contained relatively blended races, and a high standard of art, scholarship, military organization and taste. However, the persistence of religious domination and the harsh environment ensured that it remained “the homeland of tyranny and despotism.”Footnote ⁷¹ Its capricious rulers ensured that the basic principles of a well-ordered society, such as legal norms and property rights, were only arbitrarily followed. A combination of environmental, historical and political factors had led these societies to a dead end.

Klemm was therefore certainly fully involved in the hardening contemporary denigrations of other societies as backwards and unprogressive in comparison with Europe. But this was relativized through the notion of the universality of human development and the Kantian idea of history as the growth of social harmony from unpromising beginnings. While modern European society formed the pinnacle of all Klemm's works, having reached the highest stage of culture yet attained, its advance had run through the same furrows as these other civilizations. An initial passive population of Scythians, Finns and Pelasgians had reached a similar level to the Mongolian nomads, before a number of streams of active races had arrived to establish different civilizations. Celtic Gaul, with its druidic theocracy, sacrificial cults and megalithic monuments, mirrored pre-colonial Mesoamerica. Ancient Greece, rather than serve as a source of historical inspiration as was a frequent trend among educated Germans,Footnote ⁷² was placed by Klemm at a decidedly median stage: while its art showed the dominance of a pure active race, its slave-holding society, dress, architecture and funerary rites were like those of the modern Orient. The main differences were that it had moved away from tyrannical kingship towards a myriad of constitutional forms, which freed the active population to cultivate trade, colonization, literature, art and science. Rome had ascended above this, acting as the unifier of all prior European development through its empire and shifting political constitution. Conflict with powerful neighbours had built a strong state and commercial system, at “the firm crystallization point of culture.”Footnote ⁷³

Further progress required additional infusions. Following his earlier interests, Klemm reserved a central role for the Germanen. They were, like the Circassians, a free warrior people, living in constitutionally ordered settlements and with a public religion of nature. This reflected their mixture and balance: like the other European active races, the ancient Germanen had conquered an earlier passive Urbevölkerung and established a caste system, in which political participation in popular assemblies and the selection of customarily restrained monarchs was limited to the active elements. However, while the ancient Teutons were certainly esteemed, they were not presented as the ancestral utopia in need of restoration which dominated much of the liberal-nationalist Germanenmythos. For completion, they needed to merge with the Roman Empire, with its powerful state structures and advanced material development. Klemm's emphasis on the resolution of differing types was thus applied even to the Roman–Germanic opposition that has been seen as central to contemporary German visions of ancient society. The invasions of the fifth-century Völkerwanderung were the culmination of this: “the Germanic tribes did not have a merely destructive and devastating effect upon the subjected peoples . . . they rather brought with them many more new spiritual and primarily moral elements.”Footnote ⁷⁴ This resulted in the conjunction of two advanced peoples, ensuring that the combined Römisch-germanische civilization was able to reach higher cultural states than all other peoples of the world.

Klemm's racial-progressive model, mixing improvement and fusion with brutal yet ultimately constructive invasions, relates in interesting ways to wider issues in the history of race and human difference. Given the central idea of dynamic peoples from Asia driving history through conquest and migration, conspicuously absent in Klemm's work is any reference to the Indo-European and Aryan theories which were coming to dominate comparative philology at this time, and were spreading more widely into ethnology. Through detailed linguistic comparisons, philologists had asserted common origins for the languages, peoples and cultures of Europe, Persia and India, linked in the distant past as conquering horsemen from Central Asia.Footnote ⁷⁵ While Klemm's Circassian and Bedouin branches of the active races corresponded very neatly with the Indo-European and Semitic families of cultured peoples which scholars like Augustus Pott, Friedrich Schlegel, and Jacob Grimm were defining through this new approach to linguistics, Klemm never referred to these ideas, despite citing Grimm's works on several occasions and discussing the relevant languages, including Sanskrit.Footnote ⁷⁶ Again, his linear and holistic vision of culture was not compatible with these language-centred and rather diffusionist models. However, the common assumption that all modern civilizations were founded by Asian nomads emphasizes that this concept was rather older and more established than philological “Aryanism” itself. Indeed, the deep roots of ideas of a migratory past have been highlighted in many recent works on comparative philology, particularly in terms of biblical traditions (which saw modern humanity as descended from the wanderings of Noah's sons from Mount Ararat) and the critical importance given to nomadic tribes in contemporary history writing.Footnote ⁷⁷ These provided a strong independent basis for ideas that history was driven by the movement of peoples, and enabled Klemm and the comparative philologists to assert the same concepts while using differing source material and theories of development.

The centrality of notions of racial blending also ensured that Klemm's ideas were quite unlike the similarly binary models found among more pessimistic and conservative theorists, particularly two other oft-cited “founders” of racialism: the late eighteenth-century Göttingen scholar Christoph Meiners, who saw all human groupings as based on either “light and beautiful” Caucasian European or “dark and ugly” Altaic Tartar Hauptstämme;Footnote ⁷⁸ and the French orientalist and aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau, who contrasted superior civilization-bearing whites with inferior sets of coloured races.Footnote ⁷⁹ Gobineau even mentioned Klemm, noting that Klemm

Parallels certainly existed in their interpretations. Gobineau saw all civilizations across the globe as having been founded by superior, rational and dynamic white types conquering impulsive black or apathetic yellow races. Europe had also reached a higher point than anywhere else owing to the same two dynamizing infusions, one in the depths of the past and the other during the Germanic migrations. Yet there was a crucial difference: Gobineau saw the period immediately following the racial conquest as the pinnacle of culture and creativity, as it had allowed the intrinsically superior whites, dominating the inferior coloured peoples through segregated class systems, to devote their powerful energies to the promotion of civilization. What followed was invariable decline. A slow overcoming of the natural repulsion between the races led to mixing and, with it, the dilution and deterioration of higher faculties. The only way to stave this off was by attempting to preserve the boundaries of the old order or make further infusions of pure dynamic elements, and even these were only temporary expedients. As argued by Michael Biddiss and Steven Kale (albeit with different emphases) this model was rooted in the French legitimist tradition, which valued hierarchy and aristocracy, but in which racial history was intrinsically cyclical and pessimistic, marked by rise and fall, and inevitable degeneration.Footnote ⁸¹

This pessimism ensured that, as noted in Erich Voegelin's extended juxtaposition of the two in Rasse und Staat, Klemm's and Gobineau's accounts of racial mixing moved in almost opposite directions.Footnote ⁸² While Klemm saw similar racialized caste systems early in the past, he interpreted them quite differently: rather than permit a transient blooming of civilization, they were in fact a marker of a low cultural condition. It was instead the very process of overcoming the divisions between the races, and the social and cultural structures which had formed around them, which led to civilization. As is seen in his account of European history, the more mixed a society's active and passive elements became, the higher it was on the scale of culture. Some elements of decline certainly existed within this process: the lifespan and overall physical health of the earliest pure races were far in excess of those of civilized man, and the ideal physical forms of the pure active races were lost with development. However, these were necessary preconditions for the more important advancements—harmonious integration, mastery over the natural world and the elaboration of culture. Interactions between races were presented as drawing humanity up this more significant scale, rather than sending it collapsing into cycles of growth and decay.

This is an important point, as the works of Gobineau in particular, and their emphasis on racial antagonism, decline and threat, tend to be presented as almost the archetypal expressions of mid-nineteenth-century European thinking on race. This frequently, of course, neglects that his influence was minimal prior to his “rediscovery” in the 1880s, and that many of the scholars who did know of him actively opposed his arguments. The philologist Augustus Pott, for example, flatly rejected his fatalistic “chemistry of nations,” instead presenting a liberal view of perfectibility in which human groups were better classified (and arranged into mutable degrees of superiority and inferiority) through their languages.Footnote ⁸³ This form of progressive optimism was possibly more widespread, and Klemm shows how racial classifications could also be closely connected with notions of improvement. His developmental theory offered a way in which germinating (and hardening) theories of racial difference could be narrated into a story of progress. While struggle, environmental dependency, racial warfare, suppression of lower populations, class divisions and religious hierarchies were intrinsic at lower stages of development, advanced societies were defined by freedom, regulation, balance and material improvement. Races were complementary rather than antagonistic, and this offered a far more hopeful view.

This progress, however, needed to occur in an ordered and regulated fashion, and it did so in a way which was imprinted with Klemm's constitutional liberal opinions. Though often hidden within his scholarly presentation, these can be illustrated reasonably clearly by examining where he placed his own society within his historical system. Cultural, environmental and racial conditions meant that Europe in general and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Germanic countries in particular had reached the present summit of human development: the powers of paternalistic religious authorities had been broken through the Reformation; autocracies had given way to ordered constitutional monarchies; overseas exploration and colonization was channelling the migratory impulses of the powerful active elements through modern technology; and industry and manufacturing, trade and commerce, art and literature, and the natural sciences were all at their fullest development. Europe was at the forefront of cultural growth, owing to its conformity to natural laws and patterns of general development:

Not only was progress the key trend in human existence and modern constitutional Europe its vanguard, but the terms of the movement of history resonated with those of the liberal milieu. Its summits and directions moved in line with present ambitions and demands for political reform, constitutionalism, the privileging of education, commerce and science, and the drive towards enlightened improvement through urban development and economic activity. In this way, these key liberal values were proven, endorsed and expressed as the necessary direction of human society.

However, there remained a few caveats; Klemm also used his idea of culture as universal yet historically determined progress to oppose a number of contemporary trends. Any demands for the equality of women, particularly in political and economic matters, were described as an aberrant “fruit of a sentimental hyperculture [Hypercultur].”Footnote ⁸⁵ This view was simultaneously an expression of the values of his peer group and a natural component of the theoretical framework: we need only recall that Klemm saw feminine forces within society as crucial for its growth, but placed them within a particular sphere, having a stabilizing rather than a proactive role in the social body. Moving them beyond this would be detrimental to improvement as a whole. Also, while he presented revolutions as something natural when pressures built up to untenable levels (particularly under conditions of autocratic despotism), he decried the events around 1848. Particularly worrying was the recent growth of an “unpropertied urban population” agitated by socialist doctrines which “preached that work was a misfortune, ownership an injustice, and human enjoyment the only goal—driving them to the barricades, and ending by filling the penitentiaries and deportation-ships with the unfortunate.”Footnote ⁸⁶ This was a potentially disastrous and regressive step for both the afflicted individuals and humanity. Gradual and incremental reform, material improvement, and demands which agreed with the proven lines of cultural advancement were the only desirable or possible changes. In this respect, the model of progress through universal patterns of elevation and integration could also serve to buttress support for gradualism in politics, a key feature in the more moderate and constitutional forms of liberalism which Klemm adhered to. Advancement was, of course, necessary and almost inevitable, but needed to occur in a steady and rational way.

LATER INFLUENCE, AND CONCLUSION

Klemm developed a cohesive narrative synthesis which linked and reworked a number of dominant trends in contemporary German intellectual life. It was necessarily idiosyncratic, as the very act of synthesizing diverse sources, influences and materials in this period required that meanings, concepts and traditions be shifted and configured according to a highly individual set of criteria. The extent to which this vision was informed by personal experience comes out strongly in his final book, Vor fünfzig Jahren, a series of autobiographical reflections to an unnamed Theure Freundin, published in 1865, after his eyesight had almost completely deteriorated. Here, he moved from the panorama of the whole of humanity back to the locality, contemplating the changes he had witnessed in Saxony and the German lands over his lifetime. Describing how he enjoyed the new experience of sitting at the railway station with a glass of beer watching the sudden interruption of peace as the trains arrive, observing how geological changes—either catastrophic and dramatic or slow and incremental—mirrored political and social transformations, reminiscing on all the altering fashions and smoking habits he had witnessed since his student days, and describing the stalwart passivity of the Saxon peasantry (marking their descent from the region's Finnic Urbevölkerung), Klemm related the same themes as in the Allgemeine Cultur-Geschichte, but in a more direct and personal manner. All levels of human society, from the great to the small, were driven by the all-pervasive interactions between race, culture and nature, which strove for balance and development as reason and material conditions advanced.

Yet with all this contemporary placement, what was his later influence? Future generations of German ethnologists and anthropologists were reluctant to cite Klemm (and, indeed, the same is true of their attitudes towards many other earlier scholars, including Carus and Meiners). Much of this was due to the nature of his racial theory. The institutionalizing anthropology from the late 1860s onwards, under such figures as Rudolf Virchow and Johannes Ranke, continued to link liberal politics with studies of human diversity. However, as demonstrated by Andrew Zimmerman, these researches tended to be based on non-deterministic statistical studies defining “the static typology of nature.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Their liberalism was expressed more by claims to occupy an elite role reforming society than by asserting narratives of historical change, and their non-speculative positivism was at odds with Klemm's conjectural evolutionary theories and idea of race as an unquantifiable combination of mental, spiritual and physical potentialities. Likewise, when stronger theories of racialism were revived in the waves of völkisch engagement from the 1890s, Klemm's thought was too optimistic and fusionist to be widely cited as a precursor: for these, the writings of Gobineau proved much more useful, with their valuation of racial purity, hierarchies of natural aristocracy and fears of degeneration.Footnote ⁸⁸ Klemm's definition of human biological difference was therefore incompatible with the shifting meanings of race in the following decades—even if gendered metaphors remained common, and the terms “active and passive races” were occasionally used, if detached from his overall model.

While a specific school of “Klemmian ethnography” could therefore never be said to have existed, echoes of his theories can nevertheless be seen across the changing contours of the later nineteenth-century human sciences. The fate of his museum provides both a concrete example and an apt metaphor. After his death, the collection was split up, with his son selling most of the European objects to Augustus Wollaston Franks of the British Museum, who had received significant funds to bulk out his new Department of British and Mediaeval Antiquities and Ethnography.Footnote ⁸⁹ And, indeed, Klemm's work, and particularly his cultural model, was more likely to be cited in countries like Britain where linear ideas of progress remained dominant: Joan Leopold has analysed his influence on the “Anglo-American” school of cultural evolutionism, specifically the anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor.Footnote ⁹⁰ His impact upon Otis Mason's reorganization of the Smithsonian museum in Washington, DC, along social-evolutionist lines in the 1880s has also been highlighted,Footnote ⁹¹ and even Karl Marx was apparently greatly impressed by the range of material and typologies in his Werkzeuge und Waffen.Footnote ⁹²

In Germany itself, however, things were more ambivalent. Reflecting the increased importance of well-stocked museums as sources of civic pride, a hastily formed body of concerned citizens in Leipzig lobbied to purchase the remainder of Klemm's ethnographic material in 1869, to form the nucleus of a new Museum für Völkerkunde. This was then quite quickly reorganized away from linear social evolutionism, and into new galleries based on geographical and cultural regions—even if (as noted by Hugh Glenn Penny) the collection soon became almost as overcrowded and confusing to visitors as Klemm's own efforts.Footnote ⁹³ As well as giving a further indication of the practical difficulties of nineteenth-century museum arrangement, this shift reflects the move in German museology and ethnography further and further away from linear social evolutionism, and towards diffusionist or divergent patterns (and in this, the argument of branching growth coming to dominate German ideas of human difference can be usefully highlighted). Much of this transformation in fact occurred within the Saxon intellectual milieu itself, through the work of cultural historians such as Karl Lamprecht and the anthropogeographical circle around Friedrich Ratzel.Footnote ⁹⁴ While this may seem to be a further instance of the rejection of Klemm's legacy, the core models of these thinkers, of culture growing from relationships between humanity and the natural world, and being reflected in all aspects of a people's way of life, persisted. Yet it was increasingly pluralized, with scholars speaking of development occurring within and across specific “cultures” or “culture areas,” sometimes moving through similar general phases (as was suggested by Lamprecht), but not forming a rigid or universal ladder.

The broad repudiation of Klemm's ideas of race and linear progress has meant that his influence has been sidelined by historians such as Woodruff Smith, who argued that “it was not the forgotten Meiners nor the ponderous Klemm who created effective ethnology in Germany, but people such as [Theodor] Waitz and [Adolf] Bastian”Footnote ⁹⁵—dominating figures in the subsequent generation. Yet while Waitz and Bastian were certainly more important in establishing the institutions for formalized ethnology, Klemm is still something of a key forerunner. Waitz heavily criticized the “stark differentiation between the active and passive races,”Footnote ⁹⁶ but binary divisions persisted very strongly in the work of Waitz as well as of Bastian, particularly expressed through the dominant concept of the Naturvölker and Kulturvölker.Footnote ⁹⁷ This separated humanity into two groups. The “natural peoples” represented the original condition of man, in conflict with the natural world and primarily adjusting according to the dictates of environment. The Kulturvölker refined their fundamental characteristics into historical forms—although following divergent patterns. Like Klemm's schema, this bifurcation was premised on the universality of core human faculties, and the need to understand change through the dual workings of nature and culture. Investigations of these categories of peoples were also conducted according to the same principles, through the comparison and accumulation of objects and data from across time and space. Their studies also met with many of the same limitations: Bastian in particular has become renowned for his complex theoretical works, full of “monstrosities of condensed thought [which] cannot be presented to any public, not even to a scholarly audience,” and his own (partly state-supported) Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin rapidly assumed a similarly disordered, cramped and baffling character as the Museum Klemmium, although on a grander scale.Footnote ⁹⁸

The similarities between Klemm's works and these later scholars may be primarily because they were drawing from the same traditions and seeking to use the same types of material. It is certainly true that the core underpinnings of Klemm's synthesis—linear progress, an impressionistic idea of race deriving from contemporary natural-historical traditions and the legitimization of moderate constitutional liberalism through historical narrative—were very much products of his period, and primarily illustrative of the intellectual culture of his specific time of activity and milieu. However, while the model as a whole could not survive the changes and consolidations in the human sciences over the following decades, he remains significant for being among the first to place “natural man” clearly within investigations of cultural development, and for his early attempts to understand humanity as a whole by combining a comparative ethnographic collection with systemized descriptive and theoretical accounts. In this sense, he can be seen as something of a bridge between the thinkers of the Enlightenment and the later institutionalization of ethnology, anthropology and museology, mixing a number of dominant motifs from the former period with concepts and methods which would come to dominate later. He and his work thus illustrate the extended continuity, but also the disjunctions, within these understandings of human diversity, and how they were continually readjusted and blended across the nineteenth century.