In the autumn of 1874, Austrian popular society seemed ablaze with talk of ice. The Habsburg monarchy's first major polar expedition was returning, and, as the German geographer August Petermann put it, “No field commander, returning home with his army victorious from battle, could be received more magnificently and enthusiastically than this small band of twenty- two men.”Footnote 1 The first published narrative of the expedition was released in Vienna around 24 September and had sold out of its print run of forty-five thousand copies by 27 September.Footnote 2 This figure, however, is dwarfed by contemporary estimates of the multitude that turned up to welcome the explorers to Vienna on 25 September: around a quarter million, or approximately one-fourth of the city's entire population.Footnote 3 Although such figures should be taken with a grain of salt, the festivities that greeted the explorers involved possibly the largest crowds seen on the streets of Vienna between the revolutions of 1848–49 and the mass marches of the Social Democratic Party in support of universal male suffrage around the turn of the century.
The returning expedition in question was the First Austro-Hungarian North Polar Expedition, also known as the Weyprecht–Payer Expedition (after its co-commanders Austro-Hungarian naval Lieutenant Carl Weyprecht and joint army Lieutenant Julius Payer), or the Tegetthoff Expedition (after the name of their ship).Footnote 4 The expedition had departed from the northern Norwegian port of Tromsø in July 1872 with an ambitious agenda that included the first voyage through the Northeast Passage along the northern coast of Eurasia. Its aspirations were thwarted, however, when the Tegetthoff became frozen in Arctic pack ice. Beset for almost two years, the expedition was a prisoner of the current of the ice, which conveyed them north and east, eventually lodging the ship along the southern coast of a previously unknown territory. This archipelago was the northernmost land in Eurasia, and the expedition christened it Francis Joseph Land. Forced to abandon ship after a second winter trapped in the Arctic, the members of the expedition trekked south, dragging heavy lifeboats, in a desperate search for open sea. After a grueling ninety-six-day trek, they succeeded, and eventually they were rescued by a Russian fishing schooner. Remarkably, all but one member of the expedition survived.Footnote 5
More than rousing tales of adventure are at stake in the study of geographic exploration. Long considered more the purview of the antiquarian, exploration has been enjoying a resurgence as an object of academic enquiry in recent years. This has come from an acknowledgment of exploration's centrality for Europe's encounter with the wider world. Exploration set the stage for worldwide empires and facilitated the exchange of commodities and ideas, the migration of peoples, and the construction of scientific knowledge, laying the foundations for what we now call globalization. Crucially for our purposes here, exploration was an instigation for (and practice of) a sense of European/Western exceptionalism, a symbol of what allegedly set European civilization apart from the rest of the world.Footnote 6
Exploration, then, was a vehicle for Europeans (and/or their descendants) to create taxonomies not only of non-European peoples and places, but also of themselves. Exploration was an assertion of an advanced status, a claim to an agency in the advancement of knowledge. Exploration was an apt complement to, if not product of, Western ideals of positivist scientific, technological, and political advancement. It emerged from a worldview that often framed unresolved controversies not as problems but as questions. Increasing numbers of landless proletarians became the “social question,” political turmoil caused by the sultan's weakening control of the Balkans “the Eastern question,” and the blank spots on maps of the extreme latitudes of the globe “the polar question.” Implicit in this framing is that they all awaited answers, in what David Blackbourn has termed the nineteenth century's “habitual tone of confidence in human mastery.”Footnote 7 Although the destinations of polar exploration in the nineteenth century were, by definition, on the fringes of the planet, the issues present in exploration were by no means peripheral.
This article examines Habsburg polar exploration from a political perspective, particularly from the point of view of the monarchy's liberal elites. When the public campaign to raise funds for an Austro-Hungarian polar expedition began in late 1871, it was these largely urban, mostly German-speaking (with tremendously important exceptions) circles that responded most enthusiastically. This was because polar exploration spoke to the concerns and aspirations of this self-identified class; and when the members of the Tegetthoff Expedition returned in 1874 with a tale of endurance and heroism, it became a symbol of liberal political and cultural ascendancy, a symbol sorely needed in the post-economic-crash political scene. The discussion begins with avowedly German-national polar exploration projects in the middle to late 1860s, endeavors that first introduced many leading advocates of Austrian polar exploration to the practice. We then consider the unprecedented public campaign, conducted in late 1871 and early 1872, to raise sufficient funds to mount an expedition, before examining the expedition's use in liberal politics.
Inscribing Nationality on Icebergs: Polar Exploration and German Nationalism
Among the many changes taking place in the German-speaking world in the second half of the 1860s were the proposals and eventual execution of projects of self-styled “German” polar exploration, in which Austrian explorers and natural scientists played key roles. These ventures established precedents and tropes of legitimacy that would be carried over onto the Austro-Hungarian polar quest, with strategies of German nationalist legitimation reconditioned into Austrian liberal/imperial patriotism.
German-national polar exploration was spearheaded by the cartographer and geographer August Petermann (1822–78). In 1855, Petermann took up work at the Justus Perthes publishing house in Gotha. Through the pages of his journal, Petermanns Geographische Mittheilungen—the most authoritative and widely read geographical periodical on the continent—he became probably the most prominent European geographer of the second third of the nineteenth century, and turned Gotha into a major “center of calculation” (to adopt Latour's term) in the endeavor to explore and codify the planet.Footnote 8 In 1865, Petermann turned to the geologist Otto Volger, founder and director of the Freies Deutsches Hochstift für Wissenschaften, Künste und allgemeine Bildung, and began to advocate for a self-consciously “German” Arctic expedition.Footnote 9 The announcement for a convention that Petermann and Volger held in Frankfurt on 23 July 1865, enthusiastically proclaimed:
Regarding a northern voyage, the further exploration of the Arctic Ocean, the possible discovery of the immediate environs of the northern axis of the earth, the determination of the much-sought “Northern Passage,” the nearest sea route to Japan, China, California, and the other lands on the Pacific Ocean, we declare this belief, as Germans, with enthusiastic pride: The German mariner must and will solve his share of this problem! Footnote 10
This clearly stated agenda was importing German nationalist rhetoric into a space, the Arctic, where such language had been heretofore infrequently applied.
The discourse of nationalist glory and appropriation was crucial. “Honor will be brought to the German name…. What a triumph for Germany, and the German navy, if the seas and lands beyond the eightieth parallel received a German nomenclature, if a German keel was the first to furrow the waters of the North Pole!”Footnote 11 Petermann's reference to “nomenclature” is telling, as place-names could be especially potent tools for symbolic nationalist appropriation.Footnote 12
In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, Central European nationalist activists sought to inscribe national valence upon previously nonnational spaces, objects, figures, and practices. Through the efforts of these activists, minor village rituals or everyday commodities could be cast as vital expressions of national spirit.Footnote 13 However, Petermann's vision of German nationalist polar exploration, although potentially a forerunner for this practice, fits more securely in the context of the bourgeois/national festival culture, prominent in the German-speaking world in the early 1860s. At that time educated, liberal activists promoted events such as Schiller Festivals and Humboldt Associations to foster the idea of greater (großdeutsch) national integration.Footnote 14
Furthermore, the type of space in which Petermann was looking to inscribe German nomenclature was also significant.Footnote 15 The unknown wastes of the polar regions were no Heimat.Footnote 16 Nor did Petermann call for German activism on some constructed and allegedly contested national/linguistic frontier, such as the forests of southern Bohemia. Instead, Petermann designated the epistemic blank spaces of the Arctic for his envisioned national epic. This was not a fabricated borderland between an “us” and a “them,” or attempts to obscure or eradicate bilingualism. Rather, this was primo-lingualism in the sense of the first inscription of language, the creation of historical space out of (what was imagined to be) void. The “nation” was portrayed as an agent in the liberal advance of universal knowledge, not a stronghold of ethnic particularism.
Indeed, Petermann's vision of geographic appropriation and national(ist) rivalry was rather equivocal and cooperative. As the geographer told his compatriots, “It is now the time for our Germany … finally [to] enter the number of those civilized nations that take an interest in the geographic exploration of our planet.”Footnote 17 The Arctic space was to be explored by an explicitly nationalist-defined keel, and receive German-national nomenclature, but as part of an endeavor conducted by a broader sociopolitical community. The boundary between national competition and participation in a common international endeavor was by no means a clear one.
In 1865, Habsburg subjects' legitimate participation in such an endeavor was undebated. Several eminent Austrian geographical, scientific, and exploratory authorities, such as Professor Ferdinand Hochstetter, Vice-Admiral Bernard von Wüllerstorf-Urbair (imperial minister of commerce and commander of the Novara Expedition of 1857–59 that circumnavigated the globe), and Franz Schaub, Director of the Hydrographical Office of the Austrian Kriegsmarine in Trieste, worked prominently to organize this enterprise.Footnote 18 Indeed, Wüllerstorf was Petermann's first choice for its commander (but the vice-admiral declined, citing his age).Footnote 19
One of the potential projects that emerged from the Frankfurt convention was based on the recently signed Gastein Convention, the settlement among Austria, Prussia, and Denmark following the 1864 German–Danish war, which, among other stipulations, called for the establishment of a German Confederation navy.Footnote 20 This project was a joint Austro-Prussian Arctic expedition. Prussia, according to this plan, would provide one ship, with the costs defrayed by the German Confederation, while Austria would also supply a ship, along with scientific instruments and naturalists.Footnote 21 Hochstetter emerged as this scheme's key spokesman for the monarchy, and he seems to have envisioned it not just as a venture to expand scientific knowledge, but also to encourage cooperation between Berlin and Vienna. As Hochstetter excitedly claimed at a meeting of the Imperial-Royal Geographical Society in Vienna on 22 October 1865, “Would it be too much to hope … that a northern expedition in the year 1866 would be undertaken as the first peaceful deed of the allied fleet of the federal harbor of Kiel, by an Austrian and a Prussian warship, for the glory of Germany and the honor of Austria and Prussia?”Footnote 22 This was an undiluted liberal vision of a “Germany” that transcended political boundaries. In November of 1865, Hochstetter excitedly reported to Petermann that Wüllerstorf had even managed to secure the ship.Footnote 23 Perhaps polar exploration really could serve as a centripetal force in the politics of Großdeutschland.
In fact, this hope proved overly optimistic. Soon thereafter, Albrecht von Roon, Prussia's minister of war, notified Petermann that he would not let the Prussian navy participate, and Hochstetter was informed that Archduke Leopold Ludwig would not accept a joint project where Austrian and Prussian naval forces would be considered equals.Footnote 24 The impossibility, for many, of imagining a “Germany” without Vienna and Berlin, in this sphere as well, fell victim to growing alienation between the two governments. Still, even after the Austro-Prussian War, polar exploration continued to be a field of avowedly “German” practice in which the Habsburg monarchy could play an important role. Hochstetter worked as a diligent fund-raiser for the so-called First German North Polar Expedition, which set out in May 1868 for the east coast of Greenland but was only able to reach the Spitsbergen archipelago.Footnote 25 One of Petermann's initial choices for commander of this enterprise was a young officer in the Austrian navy, Carl Weyprecht. His naval duties ultimately prevented him from joining this particular venture.Footnote 26 This, however, did not put an end to Weyprecht's career as a polar explorer.Footnote 27
More significant was the Second German North Polar Expedition (1869–70), which sent two ships, the Germania and the Hansa, to the east coast of Greenland, where the former ship overwintered. Although the organization of this venture was primarily handled by commercial and nautical circles in and around Bremen, the more southern realms of “Germany” still played key roles. In terms of finances, Emperor Francis Joseph was the expedition's fourth most generous single benefactor, and the municipalities of Vienna and Prague also made significant contributions. In terms of personnel, two Austrians were among the six members of the expedition's “scientific” staff: the geologist Carl Gustav Laube and joint army Oberlieutenant Julius Payer, who already enjoyed considerable fame through the publication of his exploits as an alpinist.Footnote 28
But if Julius Payer's participation was largely uncontroversial when the Germania and the Hansa set sail in June 1869, by the time he returned to Europe in September 1870, in the midst of the Franco-Prussian War, the politics of polar exploration in Central Europe had changed. Controversy ensued in October 1870, when the German-language press reported that Emperor Francis Joseph “has most graciously deigned to accommodate the request of the originator of the German North Pole Expedition, Herr Petermann in Gotha, that the most valuable object of discovery, a large fjord that potentially cuts through all of Greenland … carry the name ‘Emperor Francis Joseph Fjord.’”Footnote 29 Even though Payer had been responsible for the fjord's discovery, this still came as an unpleasant surprise to the Bremen-based leadership of the expedition, which viewed this inscription of Habsburg as opposed to Hohenzollern nomenclature as subversive and evidence of Payer's unseemly thirst for fame.Footnote 30 For instance, Carl Börgen, an astronomer on board the Germania, bemoaned that “a member of the expedition can misconstrue the good intentions of the [organizing committee] and let himself get so carried away by boundless ambition.”Footnote 31 However, the public proclamation left Payer's former companions in a bind: how to rescind the name without causing offense to Francis Joseph? Due to this concern, along with Payer's threat to withhold his (highly popular) contributions to the official expedition report, the expedition leadership ultimately gave way.Footnote 32 Even though Emperor Francis Joseph's name came to be memorialized on the frozen coast of Greenland (and did so via an avowedly German-nationalist expedition), Habsburg nomenclature was now no longer so unproblematically “German.”
On 18 January 1871, a group of German aristocrats gathered at the palace of Versailles and proclaimed Wilhelm, the king of Prussia, “German Emperor,” marking the formal political establishment of a German state that excluded the Habsburg domains. Around the same time, another group of aristocrats gathered, this time at the Augarten Palace in Vienna, where Payer dined as a guest of Prince Konstantin zu Hohenlohe-Schillingfürst. Also attending was Count Johann (Hans) Nepomuk Wilczek, one of the wealthiest individuals in the Habsburg monarchy. Over dinner, Payer spoke excitedly. He had been in contact with Carl Weyprecht. The two were planning a major and avowedly Austrian polar enterprise. As Wilczek later recounted, the aristocrats were mesmerized by this prospect and hardly touched their food. On the following day, Wilczek invited Payer and Weyprecht to his palace and offered his support—financial backing sufficient for the construction of a specially designed ship for the expedition.Footnote 33 The Austro-Hungarian polar project had begun.
Contemporary accounts never place the genesis of this endeavor in the context of the proclamation of the German Empire, which could be a telling silence given how contemporaneous these two developments were. Even more telling, however, is the context in which advocates for the Austrian polar project most frequently placed their envisioned venture: the idea of progress. In a comical article titled “Forward!” one Austrian author argued (tongue admittedly in cheek) that, in terms of sailing the Northeast Passage (the expedition's proclaimed goal),
If the Austrian expedition succeeds in finding that long-sought path, or only conveys the certainty that that sea route is absolutely impossible, then Austria has fought on the battlefield of the intellect and won a victory for science, which could be boldly placed next to the bloody victories of Prussia in the years 1870 and 1871.Footnote 34
Although certainly exaggerated here, the humor in this passage derives from a correspondence to reality, an idea that sponsoring exploration was a way for Austria to reassert its claim to being on the cutting edge of culture and science. This was a claim that recent geopolitical events had done little to support.
Polar Exploration and Habsburg Society
One of the most conspicuous ways that Weyprecht and Payer raised awareness of (and funds for) their venture was through lecturing. Payer's lectures, such as the one he delivered to an audience of the Viennese Frauenerwerbsverein on 20 January 1872, focused on the history of polar exploration and his own exploits in the Arctic, and ended by evoking a vision that “upon the grave of Barents, who found his death with his comrades on [the islands of] Novaya Zemlya, the Austrian flag will wave, hopefully soon and with more success.”Footnote 35
Weyprecht took a different tactic, focusing more on scientific research. In March 1872, for example, at the Schillerverein in Trieste, the naval lieutenant explained why he did not plan to try to reach the North Pole. For science, he argued, the (geographic) Pole was just one mathematical point of many, possessing no particular value in and of itself. More interesting, he maintained, was the Northeast Passage, as this would allow for an analysis of Siberian river systems, and how their warmer water affected the pack ice of the Arctic. Weyprecht also evoked romantic adventure, showing off to his audience various exotic polar provisions, and discussed the eternal night of the Arctic winter, highlighting the dangers of lassitude, polar bears, and scurvy. Austrian patriotism was also an important leitmotif, as we can see with the climax of Weyprecht's lecture:
The name of this ship that shall undertake this expedition under the Austrian flag is of a man who is not only held in high honor due to his brave deeds, a name whose sound brings joy to the heart of every mariner, a name that is deeply intertwined with the fortunes of the Austrian navy. May we succeed, through our scientific research, in doing full honor to this worthy name. May we succeed in giving fame and honor to the Austrian flag, to have paved the way for further progress in science! Our ship is named Admiral Tegetthoff!Footnote 36
Weyprecht did not invoke Wilhelm von Tegetthoff only because of his nautically minded audience. The public campaign in support of the expedition was awash in passionate, at times overblown, expressions of Austrian patriotism. The dominant themes, however, called upon the idea of an empire associated with liberal progress.
Contemporary accounts of these lectures that discuss their reception almost always emphasize a warm and enthusiastic response from the audience (“loud, unending applause,” in the words of one observer).Footnote 37 That sufficient funds were marshaled for the expedition suggests that such descriptions were fairly accurate. As one attendee at a lecture at the Austrian Geographical Society recalled,
I was myself a witness to the warm, patriotic appeal that the idea of such an undertaking by Austrian forces and resources found among all those present. With general and joyful consensus, the formation of an association was decided, with one goal: to bring an Austrian North Polar expedition into being in the near future and to energetically carry it out.Footnote 38
This public campaign was not just limited to Vienna. Between late January and the end of April, 1872, Weyprecht and Payer also conducted a “tour [Rundreise] through the Austrian cities.”Footnote 39 Either together or individually (Weyprecht spent more time in the Habsburg maritime provinces and then, on 21 March, departed for Bremerhaven to supervise the construction of the SMS Tegetthoff),Footnote 40 the leaders of the expedition delivered (often multiple) lectures in cities such as Graz, Teplitz/Teplice, Pola/Pula, Pest, Brünn/Brno, Trieste, Fiume/Rijeka, Klagenfurt, and Villach.Footnote 41
An array of individuals and organizations besides Weyprecht and Payer also contributed to this effort. For example, Heinrich von Littrow, the harbormaster of Fiume/Rijeka, translated Weyprecht's stump speech into Italian and delivered it at the Adria Association on 28 March, in addition to having it published.Footnote 42 In various municipalities of the monarchy, local notables formed their own committees in support of the expedition. Many elite Vereinen also worked to expose the educated public to polar exploration discourse. On 21 February, for instance, the Geologische Reichsanstalt hosted a lecture about the geology of eastern Greenland, based on the samples that Payer had brought with him from the Second German North Polar Expedition.Footnote 43 Meanwhile, other organizations raised publicity for the cause by declaring their backing for the expedition. Such associations included the Akademische Verein der Naturhistoriker, which passed a resolution, calling upon its colleagues “to support this endeavor, which does not advance material benefits, but is designed to serve science,” and the Lower Austrian Gewerbeverein.Footnote 44 The Viennese Military-Scientific Association not only made a public call for supporting the Austrian polar project, but also distributed a form for recording the name, rank, regiment, and contribution amount for the donors its members managed to elicit.Footnote 45 Almost every day for months, the Austrian press, especially in Vienna, reported breathlessly on where and from whom donations to the cause were flooding into the committee's accounts. Admittedly, such reports could be terse. A typical one reads (in its entirety),
“The following gentlemen have recently contributed to the Austrian North Pole Expedition: the brothers Benjamin Sachs and Co. 500 fl., Imperial Minister of War Baron v. Kuhn 100 fl., Prellog [sic] 200 fl., Friedrich Krzisch, gymnasium student in Baden, 6 fl., Dr. Josef Arenstein 100 fl.”Footnote 46
What such donation lists can tell us about the sociology of polar enthusiasm in the monarchy is discussed below. Important here is that, despite their frequent concision, the incessant pace of these reports' publication fostered a sense of participation; daily newspaper reports enabled advocates for the expedition to keep track of fund-raising efforts. Through endeavors such as these, the polar expedition became a fashionable cause.
In April and May 1872, the committee organized an exhibition of various polar exploration artifacts at Vienna's Kursalon to benefit the expedition. Visitors could behold an array of exploratory accoutrements, including nautical equipment (for instance, sails, rope, and oars), apparel suitable for the arctic environment (such as woolen undergarments, waterproof outerwear, and iron-studded shoes of “an especially good quality that a South Tirolean shoemaker has supplied for a really exceptionally low price”), special glasses for combating snow blindness, meat extract, preserved vegetables, sleds, and a collection of Arctic “natural products” that Payer had collected on his previous expedition, as well the explorer's sketches of the Far North.Footnote 47 Such was the exhibition's popularity that within a few weeks, a journalist quipped that he doubted there were many people left in the imperial capital who had not yet visited it—those who had not yet been to the Kursalon were missing out on the event of the season.Footnote 48 In this way, the discourse of popular enthusiasm in the Austrian press became an engine propelling its own realization.
One of the leading scholars of Austrian exploration, Günther Hamann, asserted that all this publicity, especially Weyprecht and Payer's lecture tours, managed to instill an excitement for polar exploration in all the empire's classes and nationalities.Footnote 49 Was this really the case? If we take donations as an (admittedly imperfect) indicator of enthusiasm, it seems that support for the Austro-Hungarian polar project, although widespread, was not uniform across all regions and classes of the monarchy. It is true that the Tegetthoff Expedition found donors from many parts of the monarchy, from Innsbruck in the west (whose local committee raised 619 florins and 30 kreutzer) to Czernowitz/Chernivtsi in the east (738 florins), and from Prague in the north (whose chamber of commerce donated 3,880 florins) to Ragusa/Dubrovnik in the south (where 178 florins and 73 kreutzer were raised).Footnote 50 However, there are too few geographically specific donations listed to either confirm or completely repudiate Hamann's assertion. The lack, for example, of identifiably Polish names could be suggestive, but besides the difficulties of determining national self-identification purely through surname, not all donors are named. Nevertheless, a certain general trend is apparent: significant support for the endeavor was a largely urban phenomenon.
What about the socioeconomic status of the donors? Again, the list runs the gamut, from the emperor himself (4,380 florins), through Wilczek (30,000 florins, the largest single donor), to a certain “Frau Křzisch” (6 florins) and “Magda Nowak, cook” (60 kreutzer).Footnote 51 However, out of the 222,617 florins raised, 134,743—that is, 60.5 percent—came from individual donations of 1,000 florins or more.Footnote 52 Since so many contributions were amalgamated by local organizations before being submitted to Vienna, one cannot meaningfully break down the list of donors individually. Nevertheless, it is apparent that Austria's wealthy were able to contribute the majority of the expedition's funds. The accounts of the organizing committee also show substantial support for the Tegetthoff from less affluent people—not so many colleagues of Magda Nowak, but mostly the economically comfortable bourgeoisie. Donations in amounts of less than 100 florins (totaling 2,632 florins) comprised just under 1.2 percent of the total contributions. Of those 2,632 florins, 367 came from donations of less than 50 florins. Bearing in mind that by excluding the amalgamated municipal contributions from our tally we are surely undercounting the number of donors with more modest means, a bourgeois pattern of support is still apparent. Both intellectually and financially, Austrian polar exploration was a project of the monarchy's educated, urban liberal elites.
This is not to suggest that the state organs of the Habsburg monarchy itself were not involved. Besides obtaining a personal contribution from Emperor Francis Joseph, Weyprecht and Payer also successfully petitioned various agencies of government for financial support, including the ministries of Foreign Affairs, Trade, and Education.Footnote 53 Direct state financial support amounted to 16,795 florins, or 7.54 percent of the total funds. If we broaden the scope of inquiry to include individuals and institutions operating in the gray area between state and private society, such as members of the Habsburg dynasty and the Imperial Academy of Sciences, the sum rises to 11.26 percent (25,075 florins).Footnote 54 Although one should not undervalue this percentage, and even though the organs of the nineteenth-century state were also capable of providing meaningful nonmonetary assistance, this figure illustrates that Austrian polar exploration was primarily a project conducted and supported by civic society.
Did this concentration of patronage among the monarchy's urban, educated elites mean that support for polar exploration was predominantly a German-national phenomenon? There is a case to be made. As discussed above, the Austrian polar project had its roots in avowedly German-national arctic expeditions. Furthermore, as Schimanski and Spring have discussed at length, public discourse following the return of the Tegetthoff Expedition in 1874 could hold the enterprise up as a transnational, integrative symbol for the monarchy, but it was a disciplined, hierarchical one in which native German speakers had an unquestioned monopoly on the top positions.Footnote 55 Discussion of the Tegetthoff in the Viennese press could also expose intercommunal rifts, especially in uncovering resentments on the part of some German speakers to those who spoke Czech.Footnote 56 Such reproaches alternated between accusing Czechs of being insufficiently enthusiastic about the expedition's return to alleging that Czech nationalists were so enthusiastic about the expedition that they wanted to appropriate it as a Slavic-nationalist enterprise—as in a memorable accusation by the Deutsche Zeitung alleging the foundation of a “Vajprecht and Pajer Society.”Footnote 57
Still, a number of important qualifications need to be made. As Schimanski and Spring also point out, public mutterings about unenthusiastic Czechs were published alongside other descriptions of Bohemia and Moravia, this time depicting significant polar enthusiasm.Footnote 58 In October 1874, Payer (and the expedition's Hungarian doctor, Julius/Gyula Kepes) journeyed to Pest and were received enthusiastically.Footnote 59 Furthermore, one should not ignore the interest, support, and expertise that the expedition received from the monarchy's maritime provinces, especially in Trieste. It is true that a text search of the Austrian National Library's online newspaper corpus, using terms such as “Weyprecht,” “Payer,” and “Nordpol” (as well as “Polo Nord” and various spellings of “Sjeverni pol”) for the autumn of 1874, brings back many more hits from Viennese papers than from those near the Adriatic coast. However, one should not forget that there were also a great many more newspapers published in Vienna than along the Adriatic coast in the 1870s. The Austrian media's construction of “polar exploration” was not necessarily equivalent to Austrian polar exploration. This is not to deny that Vienna was the single most important locus for exploratory projects and discourse in the monarchy, but to suggest these not be regarded as almost entirely Viennese phenomena.
It is also important to bear in mind the type of German nationalism from which the Austrian Arctic enterprise emerged. This was a concept of “nation” that, as discussed above, was by and large more of the “big-tent” Kulturnation version than the ethnic particularisms that would come to the fore in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.Footnote 60 It thus seems more helpful for understanding the politics of polar exploration in the Habsburg monarchy in the 1870s to consider it through the framework of liberalism instead of nationalism. It was the ideology of liberalism that Habsburg advocates for exploration deliberately attached to their project far more than nationalism, and while it is of course important for a historian to “read against the grain,” one should also take seriously the language that the subjects of one's study chose to use.
For example, as we saw above in Weyprecht's speech to the Schillerverein in Trieste, the name of the ship (which was specially built for the expedition), the SMS Admiral Tegetthoff, had a high symbolic value. It was a sign of how polar exploration intertwined with liberal politics in the monarchy. Admiral Wilhelm von Tegetthoff (1827–71) was Austria's naval hero par excellence following his victories over Danish forces in 1864 and the Italian navy in the Battle of Lissa two years later. He was appointed chief of the Austro-Hungarian navy in 1868. As a consequence of this position, Tegetthoff held a seat in the upper house of parliament, where he always voted with the liberals.Footnote 61 The admiral also conducted a series of reforms for the navy that involved recruit education, fleet expansion, technical modernization, administrative improvements, and the simplification of personnel organization.Footnote 62 Tegetthoff had also been planning an Antarctic expedition before his sudden death from pneumonia in 1871.Footnote 63
The identification of the Austro-Hungarian polar expedition with Tegetthoff performed two main functions. The first was to place this Arctic enterprise within the context of Austria's naval legacy, as part of a martial institution and culture whose experience of recent decades had been one of victory. It also served to place Austrian polar exploration in the broader context of contemporaneous liberal reform projects that typically advocated increasing foreign trade and a greater emphasis on Austria's nautical resources.Footnote 64 In 1872, for example, Wüllerstorf published an extensive feuilleton on “Austria and the Sea.” Therein, he argued that increased international trade along with domestic reforms such as the abolition of internal tariffs would both integrate center and periphery and significantly enrich all concerned.Footnote 65 Such plans significantly resembled eighteenth-century British projects designed to inspire imperial growth through international science and commerce.Footnote 66
Broadly speaking, advocates for Austrian polar exploration saw their project and putatively rational political reform both as manifestations of liberal, positivist advance. “The mystery of the ice [is] only a special form of that great, world-shaking principle of the human mind,” a Viennese newspaper claimed—that is, general rational inquiry and the consequent advance of knowledge.Footnote 67 The idea of this advance was also at the root of Austrian liberal political reform.Footnote 68 Placing imperial governance on an allegedly rational basis would be a crucial step to increasing Vienna's economic (if not political) sway around the world.
How closely did such reform schemes stand to the Austrian polar project? Wüllerstorf himself was a close associate of Weyprecht, and he would be in charge of editing and publishing the meteorological observations of the Tegetthoff Expedition.Footnote 69 Further examples include Admiral Tegetthoff himself and his abovementioned plans to lead an expedition to Antarctica. We should also not neglect Franz Kuhn von Kuhnenfeld, imperial minister of war from 1867 to 1874, a central figure in liberal politics in the 1860s and 1870s whom the prominent Austrian historian Heinrich Srbik described as a “representative of the liberal state bourgeoisie [Staatsbürgertum], of the spirit of progress and of the constitutional state.”Footnote 70 His efforts to rationalize and reform the joint army eventually cost him his position as head of the Habsburg military.Footnote 71 He was also Payer's main governmental patron, and he published theories about the existence of an open, navigable polar sea.Footnote 72 It was no coincidence that such a prominent figure in the monarchy's liberal politics was also a published polar theorist. In the years following the Tegetthoff Expedition, polar exploration even gained direct access to the dynasty itself: from 1885 to 1887, then–Corvetten-Capitän Emil von Wohlgemuth, the leader of an Arctic expedition that was Austria's contribution to the First International Polar Year (1882–83), worked as aide-de-camp for Crown Prince Rudolf.Footnote 73 As this was Wohlgemuth's first assignment after finishing his work on his expedition's scientific results, his background in polar exploration does not appear coincidental.
The close alliance between liberal elites and polar exploration meant that, when the expedition returned home in triumph, it was transformed into a symbol of the potential benefits that liberalism could bring to the Habsburg monarchy. The incipient legend of the Tegetthoff provided a rhetorical locus for visions of a new Austria, reformed and liberal, rational and centralized. As the lead story in the Neue Freie Presse proclaimed on the day the explorers arrived in Vienna, “New Austria! How wonderful it sounds, and how wonderful it has become!”Footnote 74 More specifically, the Deutsche Zeitung claimed that “the success of this ‘reborn Austria’ in the fields of knowledge and research brings to mind a symbolic promise and at the same time, a reminder of the paths of the future.”Footnote 75 The Tegetthoff was symbol of what liberal Austria could achieve.
It helped that the Austro-Hungarian expedition was roughly contemporaneous with an American effort, the Polaris Expedition, led by Charles Francis Hall, in 1871–72. This venture to reach the North Pole via the west coast of Greenland ended in chaos, mutiny, half of the crew abandoning the other half on the ice, and the death (likely murder by poison) of Hall.Footnote 76 The comparison with the Tegetthoff was a salutary one for Habsburg subjects:
What a contrast is the behavior and crew of the two recent expeditions, namely the American under Hall and the Austrian under Weyprecht! On one side, an undisciplined horde, mutiny, and proceeding from that, despondency and distress to the highest degree, and on the other side … courage, cheerfulness, endurance, submissiveness (Botmäßigkeit), and the humanity of its leaders.Footnote 77
Here was a stark contrast to the string of defeats in war and international politics the monarchy had faced since 1859. At last, it was the Austrian effort that was better managed and more successful, a dizzying prospect for Habsburg patriots. As the Deutsche Zeitung put it, “After lost battles and forfeited provinces, after economic blows which affected us harder and more disastrously than a war—finally, once again a success.”Footnote 78 The world was perhaps finally righting itself. The return of the Tegetthoff Expedition, this newspaper theorized, could symbolize a turning point in “great historical epochs.”Footnote 79
In this vision of Austria, liberal governance and the Tegetthoff were inextricably bound. As Franz Josef Singer reminded his readers, in times past civic authorities had worried that the study of the natural sciences could have been harmful to the state; but since the coming of liberal constitutionalism to the empire, “now Austrian thinkers are allowed to take part in the contest working to unseal the book of nature. The successes of the heroes of the day are therefore also a fruit of our political accomplishments.”Footnote 80 In this reading, liberal constitutionalism had been a prerequisite for the glories of the victorious explorers. Liberalism was inseparable from the Tegetthoff. Liberal politics, many polar proponents argued, were directly responsible for the laurel wreaths upon the proverbial brow of the monarchy. Advocates of exploration and liberal governance in Austria almost immediately conflated popular excitement about one into fervent support for the other. As Weyprecht pronounced at a banquet in honor of the expedition:
People say to us that our fatherland must be proud of us, but I read these words in another way and say that we must be proud of our fatherland…. A reception of such magnificence, with all classes of the population participating, did not arise much from a great desire for adventure, nor much from a sympathy for those who have risen again from the grave; it is an ovation that science has offered, by the learned out of affection for it, by the uneducated out of respect for it.Footnote 81
First to note in this passage is the idea of universalist participation, “all classes of the population,” in the festivities that greeted the men of the Tegetthoff. There is also a strong conflation between excitement about the return of the polar explorers and a devotion to science, whether expressed as “affection” or “respect.” That is not the only conceptual fusion here, for this alleged pride in the “fatherland” also immediately translates into an ardor for science. Exploration, science, and politics all became commingled.
The multinational composition of the Tegetthoff expedition lent itself to the venture's apotheosis into symbolic status.Footnote 82 Aside from Elling Carlsen, a Norwegian ice pilot, every other member of the expedition was a citizen of the monarchy. Sitting around the officer's table were Weyprecht (originally from Hesse but who now identified as a Triester), Payer, Brosch, Orel, and the machinist Otto Krisch (all from Bohemia and Moravia), and the Hungarian doctor Julius/Gyula Kepes. The crew included two Tirolean mountaineers, a Moravian stoker, and a Graz-born cook. The boatswain, Pietro Lusina, and the remaining twelve sailors all hailed from the monarchy's Adriatic coast, including Istria, the main ports of Trieste and Fiume/Rijeka, and Dalmatia.Footnote 83
The language of command on board was Italian, but the Tegetthoff was actually a multilingual environment. As Payer described it, “the crew speaks primarily Slavic among themselves, Italian on duty. German is [spoken] in the cabin, Norwegian with the harpooneer, Carlsen…. He interacts with the boatswain Lusina … in English…. Doctor Kepes interacts with the crew in his medical practice in Latin and Hungarian, but with Lusina in French. Yet we have another peculiar language on board—this is the German of the two Tiroleans, which initially was comprehensible only to me.”Footnote 84 Boatswain Lusina called all his men to work with the Slavo-Italic imbrication ”Junaci, ragazzi, amici!” (lads, boys, friends!).Footnote 85 Even in the context of individual sentences, Italian and “Slavic” intermingled with each other. It was, many contemporaries remarked, as if the Tegetthoff expedition had formed a tiny multilingual paradigm of the heterogeneity of the Habsburg domains and its alleged (or potential) harmony under educated, liberal rule.
Hermann Quiquerez's exuberant Austria-Hungary High Up in the North! exemplifies this interpretation.Footnote 86 According to this Habsburg loyalist, the Austro-Hungarian explorers had only one motivation for their expedition: “it was in praise of the fatherland to set sail … everything only in the interests and for the honor of the dear, beloved homeland!”Footnote 87 In this treatise, Quiquerez portrayed the Tegetthoff Expedition as a paradigm of kaisertreu patriotism, an endeavor worthy of emulation (at least in terms of sentiments, if not practice). On board the ship, the members of the expedition, who spoke “all the languages of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy,” came to represent “a small Austria.”Footnote 88 Although Weyprecht does not fully resemble Emperor Francis Joseph in this reading, he does become a kindly, if somewhat distant, paterfamilias, who refers to the crew of the ship as his children.Footnote 89 Quiquerez depicted the expedition as an idealized version of the monarchy in miniature: multinational but relatively centralized, smoothly functioning, and one in which “Not once did a single case of insubordination occur, no grumbles, no complaints about anything that had befallen [them].”Footnote 90 Echoing this theme, the poet Friedrich Marx extolled the members of the expedition, “Cheering greets you, dear heroes, / one people, one heart, one fatherland!”Footnote 91
Discourse celebrating the Tegetthoff therefore centered around a variant of integrative, transnational Austrian patriotism that also did not necessarily focus on the Habsburg dynasty itself. As Payer wrote for the Neue Freie Presse in the summer of 1872 as the expedition began to get under way, “Everyone has one feeling, a sense of harmony, of mutual trust and pride, that we are allowed to serve the honor of the fatherland in a battle for scientific goals, and that back at home our progress will be followed with rapt concern.”Footnote 92 Though we should take such statements by explorers skeptically in terms of fact, they accurately depict how Payer wanted his endeavor to be understood. This was an integrative myth for the monarchy, one in which all the members of the expedition were united in a “battle” for the honor of the country; but it is the idea of scientific progress, rather than dynastic loyalty, that forms the rhetorical and emotional center. There is never a sense that exploration advocates necessarily perceived a contradiction between dynastic loyalty and scientific progress, but the weight of emphasis was clearly on the latter.
The Tegetthoff Expedition functioned not just as a symbol for advocates of liberal governance in the monarchy, but also as a rhetorical tool to further the liberal political agenda. As one journalist for the Morgen-Post wrote as the festivities celebrating the returned explorers were dying down, “hardly ever had men been caught up with the same [degree of] enthusiasm, to risk life and limb in order to solve purely scientific problems. Only one discordant note sounded therein. The clerical [press] organs did not join in the boisterous cheers!” The reason for this allegedly scandalous behavior, this author argued, was that the Catholic Church was opposed to scientific discovery and therefore, “the daring man who wants to wrest from the North Pole its mysteries, is today also an enemy of the Church.”Footnote 93 In this reading, the polar explorer had become not just a symbol of the promise of liberal governance, but an active agent in the sociopolitical battles being conducted by the monarchy's liberal politicians. “To equip polar expeditions and to support Jesuit missions,” another liberal journalist inveighed, “… the state cannot serve two masters.”Footnote 94
Conclusion
Following their triumphant entrance to Vienna in September 1874, none of the Tegetthoff explorers stayed in the imperial capital for very long. The press closely followed their movements, plans, and departures, and there were many grand ceremonies in honor of the explorers when they arrived home. At the same time, the Vienna city council organized a public campaign to raise funds for what they called a “gift of honor” or at times a “national gift” to the explorers, which was intended both to support the publication of the expedition's scientific data and to reward the crew.Footnote 95 Just as in the initial campaign to raise funds for the Tegetthoff, donations were publicized, and in the following months exploration advocates raised funds all over the empire, from Silesia to Istria, and from the Balkans to the Alps. Most donations were given either by or through municipal authorities, although individuals also made their mark, ranging from Nathaniel and Albert Rothschild, who contributed 2,500 florins, to a Viennese barber named Freisinger who offered twelve free shaves and haircuts to each member of the crew.Footnote 96
There was at least a perception (if not a reality) that there was something unique about the degree of popular support polar exploration could expect from the populace of the monarchy, a sense recognized both within Austria and abroad. As an internal report within Petermann's journal (an organization with no professed bias toward Austria) put it, the Tegetthoff did not find its main base of support in “the great port and mercantile cities,” (as the two “German” expeditions had) and “not, as in England, from the navy,” but “instead [support for] this new, epoch-making expedition came from deep in the interior from Vienna,” where “just by looking around the required sum of 200,000 guilders came together.”Footnote 97 As we have seen, this was in fact a misreading of from where the Tegetthoff Expedition received the majority of its financial donations. Nevertheless, this text is indicative of a perception, not just limited to Austria, that, especially in the wake of the return of the Tegetthoff, there was something deeper and more broad-based in terms of support for polar exploration and science in the Habsburg monarchy than elsewhere. It seemed as if enthusiasm for exploration transcended divisions of class, nation, and geography.
This was because the Tegetthoff Expedition fulfilled several needs that elements of Austrian society, above all members of its educated liberal elite, were feeling in the 1870s. Looking abroad, the monarchy and many of its citizens were still smarting from its humiliating defeats in “Italy” and “Germany.” On 2 September 1874, the day before news of the Tegetthoff's rescue reached the monarchy, the cornerstone to the imperial parliament building was laid in Vienna. Carl Schorske argued that the classical allusions of its architecture betrayed the lack of historical traditions and legitimating myths that Austrian parliamentary liberalism possessed.Footnote 98 With ample justification, several scholars have since problematized this reading.Footnote 99 Yet regardless of the strength or historical rootedness of political liberalism at the time, the classical monumentality of the parliament building still indicates that the making of myths was a concern.
The return of the Tegetthoff Expedition offered such a myth to the liberal order in Habsburg Central Europe. The brave polar explorers provided a moving tale of specifically Austrian prowess and dramatic accomplishment. Austria's polar accomplishments suddenly put the monarchy in the first rank of exploring polities, and therefore into the vanguard of European rational and scientific progress. The expedition's accomplishments could be held as an example of what the paternal leadership of liberal (German-speaking) men and a mixture of allegedly less cultured/educated (but eminently loyal) nationalities and social groups could accomplish. Weyprecht and Payer's command did not, allegedly, derive from a self-interested desire for power, but from an altruistic desire to advance knowledge and raise the level of culture for all. In their spare time, for instance, while trapped on board the Tegetthoff during the long polar night, the officers taught the crew how to read and write. In this interpretation, the Tegetthoff was a personification of a (highly utopian, of course) rational, liberal Austria. With its stalwart Dalmatian sailors and hardy Tirolean mountaineers, the multifarious lands of the Habsburg domains had produced an array of cultures and skills that, combined together, resulted in a whole that epitomized the personal motto of Emperor Francis Joseph: Viribus Unitis.
But it was not so much the emperor as liberal constitutionalism, several argued, that had been a prerequisite for the Tegetthoff, by creating a cultural and political climate where scientific accomplishments could earn such high regard. And, so it seemed to prominent liberal elites, the popular polar enthusiasm evinced on the streets of so many urban centers in the monarchy, above all in Vienna, meant that wider swaths of the population were as excited about the advance of liberal rational science as they were. This would hardly be the first or only time when Central European liberals presumed a universalism in their outlook and interests that might not have been completely warranted.
