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Thesis Constructing the Polar World: the German THESIS CONSTRUCTING THE POLAR WORLD: THE GERMAN ENCOUNTER WITH THE ARCTIC AND ANTARCTIC Submitted by Brandon Luedtke Department of History In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the Degree of Master of Arts Colorado State University Fort Collins, Colorado Spring 2010 COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY 26 March 2010 WE HEREBY RECOMMEND THAT THE THESIS PREPARED UNDER OUR SUPERVISION BY BRANDON LUEDTKE ENTITLED “CONSTRUCTING THE POLAR WORLD: THE GERMAN ENCOUNTER WITH THE ARCTIC AND ANTARCTIC” BE ACCEPTED AS FULFILLING IN PART THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS. Committee on Graduate Work Matthew Cooperman Elizabeth Jones Advisor: Adrian Howkins Department Head: Diane Margolf ii ABSTRACT OF THESIS CONSTRUCTING THE POLAR WORLD: THE GERMAN ENCOUNTER WITH THE ARCTIC AND ANTARCTIC This thesis examines how Germans invested the polar environment with both metaphorical and scientific meaning between 1865 and 1914. It argues that German nationalists put the Northern environment to use toward the process of German nation-building in the nineteenth century and maintains that German polar protagonists promoted travel to the Far South for primarily imperial purposes in the early twentieth century. During these years Germans used narratives of travel, science, and industry in various ways to support both the Arctic and Antarctic project. Further, this research contends that doing environmental history of the German exploration of the Polar Regions can reveal wider social, economic, and political priorities pressurizing the German state. By tracing, then, the German construction and representation of polar nature across the late nineteenth century and through the twentieth-century’s turn, this thesis insists that German priorities shifted over time as domestic and international circumstances changed. In investigating how the polar environment became increasingly subject to nationalist motivations and imperial ambitions, this thesis hopes to exhibit the earth’s Poles as regions where several national destines run alongside one another. To this end, it forwards the Polar Regions as particularly useful sites for examining the intersection of nation-building, empire, and the environment. Brandon Patrick Luedtke Department of History Colorado State University Fort Collins, CO 80532 Spring 2010 iii CONTENTS Introduction: Recovering the German Polar Narrative 1 1. Germans Encounter the Earth’s Poles 19 2. The North Becomes a German Landscape 40 3. The Antarctic as International Proving Ground 68 Epilogue: The Environmental Legacy of the German Polar Encounter 110 Bibliography 117 iv INTRODUCTION: RECOVERING THE GERMAN POLAR NARRATIVE In 1898 the German geographers Alfred Kirchhoff and Rudolf Fitzner introduced their “Bibliothek der Länderkunde” (Library of Regional Studies). A professor at the University of Halle, in Prussian Saxony, who combined scientific education with popular interests, Kirchhoff hoped the collection of monographs would offer the German public “a complete picture of a given country under all its aspects.”1 For the introductory volume of the series, the editors asked the German historian Karl Fricker to compile a text on the Antarctic regions. The decision to open the series in the Far South was a calculated one: the Sixth International Geographical Congress in London (1895) had recently reignited interest in the Antarctic, opening what would become the Heroic Era of Antarctic Exploration (1901-1922).2 The resulting text, entitled The Antarctic Regions, was just one of many attempts to mobilize national support for a German expedition to parallel those being mounted by rival European powers. “Will the German nation be mindful of what it still owes to science if it would retain its designation of the ‘Nation of Thinkers and Investigators’,” wrote Fricker in the conclusion. “Or will it once more allow itself to be outstripped even by smaller European nations?”3 It was an appeal to national pride familiar to those Germans who had backed Arctic exploration three decades earlier. “German prosperity is advancing on all sides,” pressed Fricker, “it is assuredly much greater than it was when the Germania and the Hansa set out for East Greenland [in 1869], not at the charge of any government, but supported by the contributions of private individuals of all 1 “Obituary: Dr. Alfred Kirchoff,” The Geographical Journal 29, no. 4 (Apr., 1907): 465. 2 It is generally accepted that the Heroic Era began with the launching of the British Discovery expedition and culminated with the death of Ernest Shackleton. 3 Karl Fricker, The Antarctic Regions, trans. Adolf Sonneschein (London: Swan, Sonneschein and Co., 1900), 280. Originally published in German in 1898 under the title Antarktis (Berlin: Schall and Grund). 1 2 classes.”4 Fricker’s closing words drove the message home by asserting that there existed a link between the unified German nation and the unveiling of the nature of the polar worlds: “Not merely the rich, but everybody who possesses knowledge of, and interest in, this undertaking can contribute his mite [sic] and aid in the realization of this aspiration.”5 Many of the German polar protagonists are forgotten: August Petermann’s theorized open sea leading to the North Pole proved nonexistent; Georg Neumayer’s suspicion of a warm current cutting a navigable waterway to the South Pole invalidated; the North Polar ventures of Karl Koldewey were usurped by the glorious achievements of the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen and the Americans Richard Byrd and Robert Peary; and the South Polar endeavors of Erich von Drygalski and Wilhelm Filchner were superseded by the heroic feats of the Norwegian Roald Amundsen and the Britons Robert F. Scott and Ernest Shackleton. Those individuals who have endured in the popular polar memory have done so not simply because of their contribution to the opening of the Poles but also for the sensational character of their exploits. These men – for the project of polar exploration and promotion was exclusively male – led expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic during the ‘heroic’ age of polar exploration, an era typified by traits seen neither before or after: enthusiastic public attention, intense international competition, rampant patriotism, and, in general, the desire to display one’s flag and do so with gusto or die trying and do that with honor.6 The trials and tribulations of these explorers in pursuing recondite goals have become the substance of an expansive (and growing) body of polar literature.7 4 Ibid., 281. Emphasis in the original. 5 Ibid., 281. 6 The high-water mark of Arctic exploration was reached in the mid-1800s when, among other goals, expeditions sought out a navigable Northwest Passage. Roald Amundsen, who later became the first to reach both the South and North Pole, was the first to traverse the Northwest Passage between 1903 and 1906. And though Antarctic interest had arisen in the late 1700s, exploration of the region climaxed in the early 1900s during the period commonly referred to as the Heroic Era of Antarctic Exploration. 7 Though much too large to cover in full, this body includes both the narratives of polar explorers [see, for example, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World, 2 vols. (London: Constable and Co. Ltd, 1922) and Fridjtof Nansen, The Farthest North, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1897)] as well as studies analyzing those stories and their cultural impact [see, for example, Roland Huntford, The Last Place on Earth: Scott and Amundsen’s Race to the South Pole (New York: The Modern Library, 1999) and Francis Spufford, I May be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1996)]. 3 This research, however, intends to look beyond those vaunted polar ‘firsts’ (first to the Poles by land, sea, and air) attained by Germany’s English, American, and Scandinavian rivals. Inasmuch, it displaces the all-too-common revelry in the epic, sometimes mortal, struggles of those men who claimed for their nations the great prizes of polar exploration. Instead, this thesis tells the story of how Germans discovered and constructed the polar natural world in the popular imagination and how they put that image to use toward particular cultural, political, economic, and environmental ends. It tracks both the turning of German popular interest toward the high latitudes as well as the contribution of German science to the apprehension of polar nature. In doing this, it shows how the polar environment shaped the formation of a modern German self-understanding. It is a history that stretches from the early modern period – marked by ambiguous conceptions of the ends of the earth – into an age of Enlightened optimism – branded by the belief in the capability of science to discover the secrets of the Earth – over a period of industrial and technological appropriation of the Poles, and, finally, to a phase of nationalistic expansion into polar space. This thesis seeks, then, to examine how the Polar Regions came to be known to the German people; its primary concern is the ways in which the Poles became increasingly subject to nationalist motivations and their material environments scrutinized by science within the context of competing imperial ambitions. In a forum on the status of German environmental history published in 2009, the German historian Bernhard Gissibl suggested that scholars of German history must “bring nature back in by drawing the ‘naturalness’ out of history.”8 “How, for example,” questioned Gissibl, “have ideas and conceptions of nature and the natural been used to legitimize social and political constellations in the course of German history?”9 Following Gissibl’s lead, my main preoccupation is to investigate how late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century environmental and scientific discourses surrounding the Polar Regions informed pre- and post-unification German concerns over national identity, fin-de-siècle Germany’s anxiety over its place in the world order, and the German 8 Bernhard Gissibl quoted in Thomas Lekan, ed., “Forum: The Nature of German Environmental History,” German History 27, no.
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