Transculturality and German discourse in the age of European colonialism 9780810134782, 9780810134775, 9780810134799, 0810134772, 0810134780

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Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism

Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism Chunjie Zhang

northwestern university press evanston, illinois

Northwestern University Press www​.nupress​.northwestern​.edu Copyright © 2017 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2017. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Zhang, Chunjie, author. Title: Transculturality and German discourse in the age of European colonialism / Chunjie Zhang. Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017000246 | ISBN 9780810134782 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810134775 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810134799 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: German literature—18th century—History and criticism. | German literature—19th century—History and criticism. | Travelers’ writings, German—History and criticism. | Oceania—In literature. | Forster, Georg, 1754–1794—Criticism and interpretation. | Chamisso, Adelbert von, 1781– 1838—Criticism and interpretation. | Campe, Joachim Heinrich, 1746–1818— Criticism and interpretation. | Kotzebue, August von, 1761–1819—Criticism and interpretation. | Herder, Johann Gottfried, 1744–1803—Criticism and interpretation. | Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804. Classification: LCC PT289 .Z43 2017 | DDC 830.93209033—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017000246

献给爸爸妈妈 For my parents

Contents

List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction Defining Transculturality; or, Reading from the Other Side

3

Chapter 1 Georg Forster in Oceania: Enlightenment, Sentiment, and the Intrusion of the South Seas

21

Chapter 2 Adelbert von Chamisso’s Friendship: Genre, Kadu, and Relations

43

Chapter 3 Krusoe Robinson’s Adventure: Technology of the Self and Double Consciousness in Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere

65

Chapter 4 The New World, Femininity, and Refusal of Tragedy in August von Kotzebue’s Melodramas

87

Chapter 5 Johann Gottfried Herder: Historicism, Cultural Relativism, and the Iroquois Perpetual Peace

119

Chapter 6 Immanuel Kant’s Physische Geographie: Authorship and the Geographical Order of Things

161

Epilogue

177

Notes

181

Works Cited

229

Index

247

Figures

Figure 1. John Francis Rigaud, Johann Reinhold Forster and His Son Georg Forster on Tahiti (1780)

22

Figure 2. Image of Kadu, from Louis Choris, Voyage pittoresque autour du monde . . .

44

Figure 3. The boat Oa, from Louis Choris, Voyage pittoresque autour du monde . . .

57

Figure 4. Pare Watene, 1878



178

ix

Acknowledgments

I have incurred many intellectual, professional, and personal debts over the long period of writing this book. First, I would like to thank my erstwhile dissertation advisers at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—­Jonathan M. Hess, Ann Marie Rasmussen, Walter Mignolo, and Michael Hardt—­for their vibrant intellectual input. I owe a special thank-​you to Jonathan Hess, the best dissertation adviser ever, for his unwavering support, smart comments, and reliable guidance on the road to a transcultural German eighteenth century. I am deeply grateful to the special gift of Ann Marie Rasmussen’s immense generosity, which exemplifies and expands my ideal of an academic mentor. At Duke, a stimulating intellectual environment taught me different theoretical approaches and perspectives. The Work in Progress series cosponsored by the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature at Duke University and the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at UNC–­Chapel Hill gave me a broader understanding of German studies. I also want to thank Dominic Sachsenmaier, now Professor of Modern China at the University of Göttingen, Germany, for his help with Herder and China. For enduring friendships that have enriched my life since Durham, I thank Camila Majora, Johanna Schuster-​Craig, Stephan Manning, Koonyong Kim, Gabi Wurmitzer, Christophe Fricker, Tim Senior, Christine Oien, Uwe Ohler, Caroline Kita, Molly Knight, Michelle Eley, Marc Reibold, Jacob Jacobsen, Corina Stan, and Shian-​Ling Keng. My postdoctoral year at Columbia University was very fruitful for this book and beyond. I wish to thank Stathis Gourgouris, Kenneth Prewitt, Lydia Liu, Dorothea von Mücke, Bruce Robbins, and Gayatri Spivak for their support and help. The friendship of Reto Hofmann, Sarah Monks, Catherine LaSota, Christoph Schaub, Conrad Schirokauer, Lore Schirokauer, Marie-​ Hélène Koffi-​Tessio, and Fan Luyuan made fast-​paced and crowded New York City slower and roomier for me. An hour-​long conversation about this book in its earlier stage at the University of Chicago’s Society of Fellows was an incredibly stimulating and unforgettable intellectual experience. For their insights and encouragement, I thank Berthold Hoeckner, Daniel Desormeaux, and Jason Merchant. During the year I taught at Montclair State University, Elisabeth Emery, Jeff Gatrall, Thomas Herold, and Pascale LaFountain made collegiality the synonym for friendship. I also want to thank Lois Oppenheim for her special recognition of my academic profile.

xi

xii Acknowledgments

At the University of California Davis, I am grateful to David Biale, Edward Dickinson, Gail Finney, Jaimey Fisher, Alessa Johns, Jenny Kaminer, Caren Kaplan, Elisabeth Krimmer, Sheldon Lu, Molly McCarthy, Sven-​Erik Rose, Brenda Schildgen, and David Simpson for their collegial and friendly support during the final stages of this book. I also want to thank David Gundry, Carey Seal, and Toby Warner for their comments and help in the junior faculty writing workshop at Bodega Bay. I am grateful to Carlee Arnett, Katharine Burnett, Xiaomei Chen, Claire Goldstein, Mark Halperin, Yuming He, Katherine Lee, Colin Milburn, Chris Reynolds, Juliana Schiesari, Jocelyn Sharlet, Olga Stuchebrukhov, and Michelle Yeh for their collegiality at UC Davis. I thank the Volkswagen Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the generous fellowship that supported a research leave in Berlin for the academic year 2014–­15, during which time I completed and revised the book manuscript. I thank my Berlin host, Joachim Küpper and the Dahlem Humanities Center at the Free University, for their institutional support. Many thought-​provoking exchanges about this book with numerous colleagues in eighteenth-​century studies and German studies in the United States and in Germany have advanced my thinking on this project. I thank Thomas Beebee, John Bender, Franziska Bergmann, Russell Berman, Michelle Burnham, Kyung-​Ho Cha, Sebastian Conrad, Al Coppola, Adriana Craciun, Adrian Daub, Veronika Fuechtner, Thomas Gaehtgens, Gerd Gemünden, Johannes Görbert, Stephan Kammer, Stefan Keppler-​ Tasaki, Alexander Košenina, Karin Krauthausen, Robert Markley, Thomas Meinecke, Carl Niekerk, Daniel Purdy, Dagmar Schäfer, Cristobal Silva, Kathryn Starkey, Chenxi Tang, Birgit Tautz, Joseph Vogl, and Ban Wang. I am grateful to Klaus-​ Detlef Müller’s guidance when I had the very first ideas of this project back at the University of Tübingen, Germany. I owe a debt of gratitude as well to an Eleanore and Harold Jantz Research Travel Fellowship provided by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University. Thanks as well to the Manuscript Reading Room in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Preussischer Kulturbesitz, the library of the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, and the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek in Weimar. I greatly appreciate the generous permission of the descendants of Pare Watene in New Zealand to allow Lindauer’s portrait of Watene to be included in this book. I am very grateful to the anonymous reviewers of my manuscript for their insights and suggestions, which made this book better. I also had the great fortune to work with a smart and responsible editorial team at Northwestern University Press. Without their steadfast help, this book would not have acquired its physical existence as quickly as it did. I thank Henry Carrigan, Maggie Grossman, Marianne Jankowski, Nathan MacBrien, and J. D. Wilson. I also thank the descendants of Pare Watene and Geoffrey Heath at Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand, for their permission to print the portrait of Pare Watene in this book. I am also grateful for the publication fund provided by UC Davis.

Acknowledgments

xiii

An earlier version of a portion of chapter 1 was published as “Georg Forster in Tahiti: Sentimentalism, Enlightenment, and the Intrusion of the South Seas” in Journal for Eighteenth-​Century Studies in 2013. A part of chapter 2 was published in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation as “The Islander Kadu and Adelbert von Chamisso: Relations in Oceania” in 2017. An adapted version of a section in chapter 3 was published in German as “Krusoe Robinsons Abenteuer und die Technologie des Selbst in Joachim Heinrich Campes Robinson der Jüngere” in Poetiken des Pazifiks, ed. Johannes Görbert et al. (Könighausen & Neumann 2016). A portion in chapter 4 was published as “August von Kotzebue’s Bruder Moritz, der Sonderling and German Transcultural Consciousness around 1800” in German Studies Review in 2015. The section on China in chapter 5 was published as “From Sinophilia to Sinophobia: China, History, and Recognition” in Colloquia Germanica in 2010. A shorter version of the section on Herder’s Auch eine Philosophie was published in German as “Geschichtsphilosophie zwischen Eurozentrismus und Kritik der kolonialen Praxis: Johann Gottfried Herders Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit” in Herder und seine Wirkung, ed. Michael Maurer (Synchron, 2014). I owe the greatest thank-​you to Frieder for his fifteen-​year companionship either in person or on the phone. His words and deeds are inseparable from me and this book. Our darling son, Tonio, endured his mother’s unavailability for playtime with wit, patience, and imagination. My parents’ sacrifice of not seeing their only child as often as they would wish made this book possible after all. It is dedicated to the immensity of their nurture and love.

Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism

Introduction

Defining Transculturality; or, Reading from the Other Side

Aé ni gagit, ni mogit, Totian Chamisso. Den geschälten Kokos trinkt, Kokos isst, Chamisso.1

“Chamisso drinks and eats peeled coconuts,” the Marshall Islanders in the South Pacific sang to celebrate the visit of the French-​German traveler Adelbert von Chamisso in 1817. Chamisso, a writer with canonical status in German literature, weaves the indigenous lyric and its German translation into a single poem to commemorate the islanders’ hospitality. The syllabic and rhythmic similarities, especially with the name Chamisso, tie the two languages together and forge a unified poetic form. The linguistic amalgamation corresponds to the friendly integration of the European Chamisso in Oceania. After traveling around the world as the naturalist on board a Russian expedition ship from 1815 to 1818, Chamisso not only unreservedly expresses his desire to belong to the Marshall Islands but also acknowledges the intellectual capacities and cultural achievements of the islanders in his travel memoir Reise um die Welt (A Voyage Round the World, 1835). He criticizes the Christian mission in the Pacific and suggests that the missionaries should first learn to become like the islanders before embarking on Christianizing them. Chamisso’s memoir discloses the instability of his European identity and makes clear the extent of Oceania’s impact on his body and subjectivity alike. Indeed, the modest poem profoundly indicates a transcultural process in which not only does Chamisso have the authorial agency to represent the Pacific Islanders, but the islanders, through their impact on Chamisso, also actively participate in cowriting Chamisso’s memoir. The mutual influence between European and non-​ European cultures reflected in the German discourse from the mid-​eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries and, more importantly, the shaping impact of non-​European knowledge on German thinking in this period are the focuses of this book. Indeed, the eighteenth century is a period of tremendous transformations in German

3

4 Introduction

and European conceptions of identity and difference, of self and others. I endeavor to delineate the contours of a German transcultural discourse and trace it from 1756, when Immanuel Kant first lectured on physical geography (which he continued to do until 1799), to 1835, the year in which Chamisso published his travel memoir. In German studies and beyond, the eighteenth century, especially the decades around 1800, is commonly considered the founding era of a German national literature, with Goethe and Schiller as its icons. My book, however, endeavors to highlight the transcultural elements in this historical period. Indeed, the transcultural moments are an indispensable component of the German discourse in the global eighteenth century. More importantly, an adequate and comprehensive understanding of a transcultural past in German and European intellectual and cultural history pluralizes and subverts a German nationalist tradition that has been unjustifiably used to justify political programs such as Nazism and right-​wing extremism in the twentieth century and the more recent past. I practice a reading strategy that takes seriously the incongruities or ambiguities in literary and philosophical texts and highlights non-​European impact in three representative genres around 1800: travel writings by Georg Forster and Adelbert von Chamisso, literature by August von Kotzebue (drama) and Joachim Heinrich Campe (novel), and philosophical treatises by Johann Gottfried Herder (history) and Immanuel Kant (geography). Engaging with both canonical and popular texts, I choose these authors and genres to provide a broad intellectual and cultural spectrum of the German transcultural discourse around 1800. Within the vibrant field of eighteenth-​century postcolonial studies, I am inspired by the works of literary scholars, historians, and anthropologists such as Srinivas Aravamudan, Wendy Laura Belcher, Susan Buck-​Morss, Greg Dening, Simon Gikandi, Robert Markley, Felicity Nussbaum, Mary Louise Pratt, and Nicholas Thomas, to name just a few.2 Primarily focusing on the British, French, and Spanish colonial contexts in the eighteenth century, these scholars have exemplarily demonstrated the inextricable and complex entanglement between the eighteenth-​century European and non-​European cultural and colonial encounters. Yet, unlike France, Britain, and Spain, the German political powers did not have a unified political power and major overseas colonies of their own around 1800. It is true that the kingdom of Brandenburg-​Prussia had several small colonies in Africa and the Caribbean around 1700—­for example, Groß Friedrichsburg in today’s Ghana, founded in 1683 by the Great Elector, or Saint Thomas Island in the Caribbean, leased from the Danish West India Company by Brandenburgisch-​ Afrikanische Compagnie for the purpose of slave trade. These colonial sites, however, were soon sold or given up by Brandenburg-​Prussia in the early eighteenth century. They were sporadic and short-​lived in comparison to the expansive, long-​ term, and systemic enterprise of British, French, and Spanish colonialisms.3 Hence, for the period on which this book focuses, the German-​language representations of non-​ European cultures do not fully fit the theoretical

5

Introduction

paradigm of power and knowledge—­according to which knowledge production serves the purpose and need of European colonial control, capitalist exploitation, and imperialist expansion. Precisely because of the absence of colony and nation, the pervasive German fascination with non-​European cultures urges us to look for other explanations and demands a more refined historical and theoretical discussion. I thus argue that the significance of studying the German transcultural discourse lies in the way it redirects our critical attention toward enhancing the visibility of non-​European participation in the construction of the German, European, and globally shared network of knowledge during a crucial period of global modernity. Yet while I stress the differences between the German context and the British and French colonial powers, I also acknowledge the commonalities of German culture within Europe. Despite religious, political, economic, and linguistic variations, a communal sense of belonging existed among European peoples in the eighteenth century.4 Technological, economic, and military developments in the eighteenth century integrated and transformed European powers into one European collectivity with global predominance, though not without internal conflicts. Indeed, when Chamisso, Forster, Kotzebue, Campe, Herder, and Kant speak about non-​European peoples, their counterpart is always Europe; they barely directly compare Germany with non-​European cultures. While they stress German identity within the European context, with respect to non-​European cultures, they are less concerned with German specificity than with European cultural entity. Hence, being German in the eighteenth century was not primarily being politically, territorially, or nationally German, as indeed no unified German political authority existed. Instead, being German meant being linguistically, culturally, and intellectually German.5 Precisely because of the German specificity and similarity within the European community in the eighteenth century, an examination of German transcultural discourse in the global context will enrich the research agenda of postcolonial approaches to the eighteenth century, predominantly informed by British and French texts and contexts, and bring to light the non-​European participation in and contribution to European discourses through the German-​speaking culture of the age.

Beyond Empire and Enlightenment The first and foremost book-​ length study to critically engage with the relationship between German discourse and European colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is probably Susanne Zantop’s pathbreaking Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–­1870 (1997). Drawing on Edward Said’s powerful critique of Orientalist representations, Zantop points out the Eurocentric and racist elements and the feeling of superiority toward colonized peoples in German

6 Introduction

literature and culture.6 Zantop further interprets this cultural phenomenon before 1871 as Germany’s ideological preparation for its colonial enterprises from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth. Zantop argues that precisely the lack of actual colonies engenders Germans’ desire for colonial expansion and fuels their fantasies of material and sexual possession of the New World, in particular South America. Although Zantop’s work takes into consideration the lack of a unified German political authority and colonies of its own, her theoretical framework is indebted to the postcolonial criticism based on the French and British colonialisms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Zantop interprets German texts according to a colonizer-​versus-​ colonized model and reads them as examples of the colonizers’ epistemic violence permeating print culture and justifying European cultural and racial superiority and colonial control. Zantop treats the scattered German lands in the eighteenth century already as a unified political entity with non-​European colonies, just like France and Britain. Yet if we keep in mind the German fragmentation in the eighteenth century, then the framework of a protonational literature, in which Zantop situates the German discourse, proves problematic. Zantop’s argument about Germany’s precolonial fantasies runs the risk of projecting the later pattern of nation-​state onto a past that tells a different story.7 As Felicity Nussbaum points out, “Contemporary terms that refer to world connections and divisions often offer anachronistic tools for understanding globality’s earlier history. For example, the common modern division between West and East, between Renaissance Italy and the Ottoman Empire, was not a separation immediately recognizable to people living in the eighteenth century.”8 In the same vein, the conventional framework of national literature, originating in nineteenth-​ century literary criticism, projects a national tradition back to the eighteenth century and limits our understanding of the German discourse in the eighteenth century. Zantop’s argument about precolonial imaginations and their colonial and postcolonial repercussions invokes a teleological causation that does not always correspond to the array of variegated historical facts, events, practices, ideas, and their relations. Russell Berman and Sankar Muthu have also recognized the limits of the colonizer-​ versus-​ colonized binary and argue that Enlightenment not only supports the ideology of empire but also gives rise to the critical spirit that questions empire.9 Berman stresses the distinctiveness of German colonial experience among the European rivals and draws our attention to the humanist legacy of the Enlightenment. In his book Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture, Berman reminds us of the dialectic of Enlightenment and comments that “contemporary criticism is fraught with tensions deriving from an unresolved evaluation of the legacy of the Enlightenment: as being fully complicitous in structures of power and control, including colonialism, or as the only frame available with which credible

Introduction

7

criticisms of power and control can be articulated.”10 He warns that “the dismissal of the Enlightenment legacy entails a sophistry that does a disservice to the human capacity to think about the unknown, to pursue curiosity, and to inquire about the world.”11 Muthu’s book Enlightenment against Empire also argues that Enlightenment is not merely about control and subjugation. The contemporary critique of empire is inherently connected to the Enlightenment legacy of humanism, cosmopolitanism, and European self-​critique. Berman’s and Muthu’s counterarguments are valuable in reminding us of the multivalence of the Enlightenment legacy. In her study on oceanism in German literature, Stereotype Paradise: Ozeanismus in der deutschen Südseeliteratur 1815–­1914, Gabriele Dürbeck points out the multiplicity and heterogeneity of genres and topoi/stereotypes in the German representations of Oceania.12 She also considers the colonizer-​versus-​colonized model somehow limiting because it does not capture the complex and ambivalent images of Oceania in the German discourse. The concept of stereotype, Dürbeck contends, offers a viable alternative to register not only images of “noble savage” but also “non-​noble savage.” The debate over empire or Enlightenment, however, has not paid enough attention to non-​European agency, which is still largely invisible. Either the critique of Orientalist representations or the insistence on Enlightenment’s critical stance inadvertently grants agency almost exclusively to the European colonizers who actively represent the colonized, whereas non-​Europeans are mourned merely as the passive and exploited colonized. In other words, the Europeans and Germans are recognized as the sole speaking and acting subjects, while the agency of non-​European knowledge, as demonstrated in the poem cited at the beginning of this book, remains little recognized. Hence my approach differs from those of Zantop, Berman, Muthu, and Dürbeck. I focus on enhancing the visibility of non-​Europeans’ impact on the German discourse. This does not mean that I could offer a completely different picture of eighteenth-​century German discourse. Instead I aim to introduce a different perspective of reading from the other side, from outside Europe. This perspective yields different choices of texts and different emphases in arguments. Susan Buck-​Morss’s essay on the impact of Haitian revolution on Hegel’s conception of master and slave serves as an inspiration for my approach.13 Last but not least, the participation of non-​European cultures in the German discourse should not be and is not confined to the colonial context.14 The notion of transculturality, I shall argue, offers a theoretically and historically more precise alternative. Moving beyond the binary of Empire and Enlightenment, transculturality makes visible not only the problematic misrepresentations of non-​Europeans but also the challenges from and the participation of non-​European cultures in the German discourse. Transcending the opposition between the colonizers and the colonized, transculturality highlights the non-​European contributions within the German discourse.

8 Introduction

Transculturality While the Saidian postcolonial critique is inextricably connected to the critique of the European imperialist hegemony in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, in the eighteenth century the order of the global geopolitical constellation was more polycentric than Europe-​centered. As Kenneth Pomeranz shows in exemplary fashion in The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, the European economy in the eighteenth century had surprising similarities with the East Asian economy, particularly China’s.15 Core regions in China and Japan circa 1750 “resemble the most advanced parts of western Europe, combining sophisticated agriculture, commerce, and nonmechanized industry in similar, arguably even more fully realized, ways.”16 Recent research has shown that the gross domestic product of China in 1820 was $199 billion, whereas the United States and five European countries (United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Austria) altogether had $128 billion.17 Yet the “fortunate global conjunctures”—­that is, the European colonial exploitations and internal difficulties in East Asia—­ contributed to Europe’s economic breakthrough in the nineteenth century and its “great divergence” from East Asia.18 Pomeranz argues that Europe could have wound up on an “East Asian,” labor-​intensive path if it had not had the colonies. Pomeranz’s approach from the perspective of global history and the comparisons between Europe and East Asia in the long eighteenth century provide refreshing insights into the study of the relationships between European, German, and non-​European cultures.19 This should by no means foster a sinocentric understanding of the world and undermine or neglect the contributions of other parts of the world. Rather, the example of East Asia serves to highlight the polycentric nature of the global eighteenth century while not ignoring European colonialism. Against this backdrop, eighteenth-​century cultural relations—­ especially those between Germany and non-​ European cultures, I argue—­should be seen through the prism of a concept that recognizes the contribution of non-​European cultures in European and German discourses while not ignoring Eurocentric and condescending elements. I call this concept transculturality. The prefix “trans-​” has been widely used in recent theoretical approaches that aim to subvert fixed boundaries and teleological trajectories. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “trans-​” is a Latin preposition meaning “across, to or on the farther side of, beyond, outside of  .  .  .”20 Similarly, Duden defines “trans-​” as “hindurch, quer durch, hinüber, jenseits, über . . . hinaus (lokal, temporal und übertragen).”21 “Trans-​” stresses the integrative zones between conceptual and disciplinary categories such as national literature and culture and describes new intellectual and cultural concepts and practices; it denotes relations and connections between entities and emphasizes the processes of interactions and the integrations of different forces.

Introduction

9

Concepts such as transnation, transculture, transgender, or transdiscipline describe and encourage new practices and forms of life. The Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel’s concept of “transmodernity” stresses the concurrence of historical transformations of different regions and cultures in the global context around 1800 and challenges the teleological trajectory from European modernity to postmodernity that does not include contributions from the non-​European world.22 The concept of transmodernity should enhance the visibility of the non-​European world in the process of global modernity and offers us a new means of understanding our global history and envision our future in a polycentric way.23 If the prefix “trans-​” in transmodernity indicates polycentricity in the eighteenth century, then the term “transculturality” is an apt description of the German discourse in which various cultural interactions, mediations, and transformations take place. The notion of culture in German and Western intellectual history is often traced back to Johann Gottfried Herder.24 Herder’s insistence on the uniqueness of language and literature as the key components of an organic cultural tradition, called either Volk or Nation, has been used to shape German cultural identity since the eighteenth century. His famous dictum “Every nation has its own center of happiness, like every ball its own center of gravity” is often cited to justify the incommensurable essence of one particular culture and thus the equal status of all cultures—­which is known as Herder’s cultural relativism.25 Yet Herder’s cultural relativism, based on the notion of culture as a closed circle and an entity with clear boundaries, is different from my conception of culture as a porous and flexible environment in which different voices and agencies collide, mingle, and transform. My notion of transculturality is thus different from Herder’s cultural relativism. Following Herder, we can only talk about interculturality or multiculturalism, but not transculturality; I will come back to this point later. As I will show in the chapter on Herder, his philosophy of history and his ethics of historical revenge disclose traces of the influence of Native American and other non-​European cultures and are themselves transcultural documents par excellence. Indeed, the life stories of all of the authors in this book transcended the German-​speaking territorial boundaries in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and thus embody transculturality. Chamisso emigrated from France to Berlin with his family during the French Revolution. He later used German as the major language for his literary and scientific writings. Forster lived in different parts of Europe (Prussia, Russia, England, and Poland) and journeyed around the world with James Cook. Kotzebue, born and raised in Weimar, spent almost his entire adulthood in Russian service and lived in today’s Latvia for decades. Königsberg, the town in which Herder studied with Kant, was an important seaport frequented by ships traveling around the world. It was also a center of German book fairs, presses, and intellectual life while the town switched back and forth between Prussian and Russian rule in the eighteenth century. Hence transculturality is not a

10 Introduction

theoretical concept imposed on German discourse. Rather, transculturality describes and summarizes historical circumstances around 1800 that have not been sufficiently emphasized in scholarship. It highlights the integrative moments of cultures and moves beyond their fixed or imagined borders. Even though the notion of transculturality has often been used, as Wolfgang Welsch points out, to describe twentieth-​and twenty-​ first-​ century human migrations and circulations of cultural products, commerce, and goods, I deem it a historically and conceptually precise and productive notion for the eighteenth-​century German discourse in the global context.26 I differentiate transculturality from other widely used terms such as transnationalism, interculturality, or multiculturalism. Transnationalism primarily aims to describe twentieth-​and twenty-​first-​century supranational movements and communities that subvert national boundaries and construct shared networks of religion, ethnicity, language, and even terrorism.27 In German studies, transnational approaches have already yielded numerous scholarly works focusing on German culture and history in the global context after 1900. While transnationalism still implies and acknowledges the existence of nation-​states as the representative unit of political, cultural, and sociohistorical forces, transculturality better reflects the pervasive German fascinations with non-​ European cultures and the lack of a central German nation-​state in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and thus more precisely acknowledges the German-​language discourse as that of a cultural community, but not merely as another case proving the power-​and-​ knowledge paradigm. Transculturality, however, is also different from interculturality and multiculturalism. While interculturality and multiculturalism indicate the coexistence of diverse cultural communities under one political regime, the idea of multiculturalism still understands the cultural and ethnic communities as clearly separated from each other and thus reifies cultural identities. Transculturality, by contrast, recognizes the fluidity of cultural boundaries and is thus able to acknowledge the participation of non-​European cultures within the German discourse. Transculturality decisively breaks with the fixation on cultural origin and descent as the only cultural identity and recognizes that one single person or community can have multiple cultural and linguistic identities and affiliations.28 This aspect of transculturality’s nature also legitimizes my focus on German-​language texts because selecting texts from non-​European languages—­for example, Chinese—­would inadvertently undermine the moments of transcultural fluidity and solidify the cultural boundaries this book seeks to unsettle. The German texts would most probably have to represent some kind of German cultural identity set against texts in other languages, representing other cultures. My book, however, endeavors to show that, even within the German discourse, there are moments in which non-​European cultures influence German thinking and coconstruct the network of knowledge. If one argues that the non-​European components in

Introduction

11

the German texts, either in Forster’s or in Chamisso’s reports of their direct encounters or in the literary and philosophical works, are entirely representations, then non-​European knowledge is merely conceived as passive and does not have an active participation. I aim to stress the real-​world significance of the non-​European elements in German discourse in the polycentric eighteenth century. Non-​European cultures are not and should not be regarded as merely passively represented. Rather, with the concept of transculturality, I intend to render visible non-​European agency and its impact on the German discourse. The notion of fantasy, as in Zantop’s colonial fantasy, or the idea of imagination, as in Benedict Anderson’s imagined community, powerfully points out the possible arbitrariness of the politics of representation. Yet these concepts do not adequately reflect the innumerous interactions between European and non-European cultures over a longer period of time and on a global scale. I endeavor to bridge this gap and demonstrate the cross-​hatchings of cultural encounters on equal terms. The location of transcultural breaches and differences are situated within cultural and linguistic communities. Accordingly, my definition of transculturality differs from the notion of text-​immanent representation. This perspective of transculturality, however, by no means undermines the significance of nationalist movements and sentiments. Transculturality refers to a rich archive that is rarely and can hardly be narrated in the national paradigm. As Pomeranz points out: “Unless state policy is the center of the story being told, the nation is not a unit that travels very well.”29 I acknowledge that the German word Nation appears quite often in eighteenth-​century writings; yet around 1800 the German word Nation, taken from French and Italian in the sixteenth century, referred more to the German ethnic, cultural, and linguistic community, for Germany as a political unity did not exist until 1871.30 In terms of German-​speaking political authorities in the eighteenth century, we then need to refer to Prussia, Saxony, or Austria. Transculturality is therefore not in opposition to the German word Nation, meaning cultural and ethnic community with an emphasis on the place of birth; rather, transculturality is an important component of German European culture at large in the long eighteenth century. After historically and conceptually defining transculturality around 1800, I deem Foucault’s concepts of discourse and archaeology richly suggestive for approaching text as intertext and for enhancing the visibility of non-​ European contributions.31 Drawing extensively on the European eighteenth century, Foucault, in Archaeology of Knowledge, proclaims the insufficiency of using an author and his oeuvre as an organizing principle of knowledge as had traditionally been the practice in the history of ideas.32 He maintains that the ostensibly discrete and unitary concepts of author, text, and idea are caught up in “a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.”33 Such a network is what Foucault calls a discourse in which the author, the book, and the body of works lose their

12 Introduction

individualized privileges as a complete and closed location of knowledge or the creative origin. Instead, through the prism of discourse, a text is defined within a web of interactions and juxtapositions of texts, and an individual author is inextricable from a set of heterogeneous voices embedded in the diffusion of discursive practices. In his essay What Is an Author?, Foucault explicitly points out that the author “does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses.”34 Discourse analysis is less about the search for truth, origin, and identity and more about the mapping of expansive effects, forgotten solidities, and their relations. My analysis in this book is then about mapping and highlight the underlying transcultural relations and forms of regularity in German-​language culture around 1800. Foucault’s decentralization of authors and their works corresponds to my attention to noncanonical works or the authors, who were marginalized through the process of canonization—­ for example, August von Kotzebue’s dramas or the German Robinsonades. Noncanonical works have equally contributed to the transcultural discourse and have revealed meaningful nodes of connections.35 Furthermore, the discursive perspective also allows us to read canonical literary works, such as Herder’s or Kant’s, not merely as a single person’s creative products but also as results of collective effort in given historical and geopolitical circumstances. In a similar vein, Mikhail Bakhtin also points out the multiple utterances within one author’s work and within a single language, or multiple social languages within a single national language, and multiple national languages within the same culture. Bakhtin argues: “The word is born in a dialogue with a living rejoinder within it; the word is shaped in dialogic interaction with an alien word that is already in the object.”36 “The word lives, as it were, on the boundary between its own context and another, alien, context.”37 Hence the act of writing is a process of negotiating and struggling with the influence of a variety of different voices in the author’s consciousness.38 Although Bakhtin recognizes this quality of discourse primarily as a generic trait of the novel, I consider it also applicable to the broader German transcultural discourse, in which German-​language texts are rooted in a porous discursive environment in which German, European, and non-​European agencies, voices, and consciousness encounter, engage, and integrate. Again, even though one could argue that everything in a text is representation, the pervasive non-​ European elements in the German discourse still prove a “disturbance” that interrupts the continuity and homogeneity of national culture and transform and coconstruct the discourse. The image of the discursive “monument” in Foucault’s archaeology is helpful to further illustrate my point of emphasizing non-​European contributions. Foucault argues that archaeological inquiry “does not treat discourse as document, as a sign of something else, as an element that ought to be transparent, but whose unfortunate opacity must often be pierced if one is to reach at last the depth of the essential in the place in which it is held in

Introduction

13

reserve; it is concerned with discourse in its own volume, as a monument.”39 The image of a monument renders visible a spatial relationship between different statements in a text. Through this spatial constellation, one does not subsume differences to a hidden logic but rather strives to accept their (sometimes contradictory) coexistence. Foucault maintains that archaeology “is a description of things said, precisely as they were said.” “There is no such thing as a latent statement: for what one is concerned with is the fact of language.”40 From this perspective, it is highly problematic to call the non-​ European elements in German texts “exoticism.” First, the term “exoticism” suggests a certain Eurocentrism: it implies that Germany and Europe are the center and non-​European places are “exotic” peripheries. Second, exoticism often refers the issues and problems back to the European center and claims the non-​European elements as pure allegorical costumes that are borrowed to cover the biting critique back at home. While I do not dispute the rhetoric strategy of “exoticism,” it is equally important to recognize the real-​world significance of non-​European cultures in the German discourse. It is high time to replace exoticism with transculturality to honor, archaeologically, the neglected discursive monuments of non-​European impact. Finally, Foucault’s concept of monument allows me to consider equally contradictory statements in one text or one author’s works. For example, while Herder, in his cultural relativism, claims that every culture possesses its own center of gravity and equal status, he still considers Germanic culture the most developed stage of history and dismisses non-​European cultures as primitive. This ambivalent attitude can be found in all the travelogues, literary texts, and philosophical treatises I discuss in this book. However, I do not consider one aspect more essential than another; rather, I see the two aspects as Herder’s and his contemporaries’ response to the challenges from the non-​ European world. Foucault’s method of archaeology does not strive to find a “deeper” coherence behind contradictory statements. Archaeology accepts that human beings’ discourse “is perpetually undermined from within by the contradiction of their desires, the influences that they have been subjected to, or the conditions in which they live.”41 Contradiction is the underlying rule for the formation and transformation of the discourse. The discourse is always already inscribed with contradictions.42 In the German transcultural discourse around 1800, this archaeological reading not only unearths the invention of European superiority and colonial fantasies, as Zantop’s work demonstrates, but also recognizes the statements that run contradictory to Eurocentrism, including the critique of the slave trade, the acknowledgment of the achievement of non-​European cultures, the sympathy with the miseries of the colonized, the euphoric admiration for Oceanic culture, and the lamentations over European moral debauchery in the colonies. More importantly, these contradictory statements are often not separated; rather, they coexist within one and the same text. If Foucault’s archaeology aims to describe different spaces of dissensions in order to

14 Introduction

determine the extent and form of the gaps that structure them, my book tries to grasp and map the discordance as the diversity and multivalence of transcultural encounters between German, European, and non-​European cultures in the global eighteenth century. I do not strive to even out the heterogeneity or oppositions within the German transcultural discourse. Precisely the heterogeneity enables me to emphasize the participation, the challenge, and the impact of non-​European knowledge and to further refine the debate on Enlightenment, empire, and the order of things. Travel writings, literature, and philosophical treatises contain the most prominent cultural and intellectual practices wrestling with non-​European knowledge around 1800. While different in form and expression, they share the historical transculturality of the polycentric eighteenth century and demonstrate similar attitudes and contradictions. While travel writings contain more empirical materials and more direct reactions, literature fuses European domestic situations with non-​European imaginations inspired by travel writings; and philosophy tries to order and categorize the non-​European world within the realm of history and geography, time and space. The studies I mentioned before have different material focuses. Berman’s book deals with travel writings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and anticolonial critique in the twentieth century. Muthu concentrates on philosophers, including Herder, Kant, and Diderot. Dürbeck is especially interested in the images of Oceania in popular travel reports, memoirs, magazines, and adventure novels from 1815 to 1914. Zantop’s book focuses on South America in the German discourse and discusses various textual genres, such as fictions, dramas, and philosophical treatises, between 1770 and 1870. For my purpose of making visible non-​European impact in an early phase of globalization before the pronounced arrival of European imperialism in the mid-​nineteenth century, I am interested in mapping the connections among the three most prominent genres that I have identified in the historical archive. The historical scope in this book is thus not defined by political events, as Zantop’s and Dürbeck’s books are. Rather, it is deeply related to the mode of transcultural thinking found in texts starting with Kant’s lecture on physical geography in 1756 and ending with the publication of Chamisso’s travel memoir in 1835. The texts and their contexts construct the central force of the German transcultural discourse around 1800, which can still today encourage us to move beyond our boundaries to encounter and appreciate the unknown and transform ourselves accordingly. The first two chapters of this book deal with two major travel accounts on the South Pacific, which played a significant role in the German imagiEuropean world. Readers will nations about and reflections on the non-​ notice that Kotzebue’s dramas and Campe’s Robinsonade, which form the third and fourth chapters, draw on Forster’s travel writing in an imaginative manner. Herder and Kant, the focuses of the last two chapters, use travel

Introduction

15

experience in a more systematic way. The three genres extensively engage with the European encounters with the non-​European world and articulate related views in different textual forms. The three genres are three prominent cultural practices around 1800: observing, reporting, and reflecting on cultural and geographical diversity (Forster and Chamisso), writing dramas and stories about non-​European cultures for entertainment and education (Kotzebue and Campe), philosophizing about cultural differences as developmental stages in history (Herder), and lecturing about the earth and its inhabitants to influence and shape intellectual and public discourse (Kant). These cultural practices emerged and thrived in specific historical conditions, individually represented aesthetic tastes of different social groups, and, as discursive nodes, connected German, European, and non-​European cultures. The three textual genres do not necessarily compete with each other. Rather, they represent different forms of transcultural practice and, in parallel, register the diversity, pervasiveness, and depth of non-​European cultural impact on German and European discourse around 1800. Sometimes, different forms serve different contents. For example, the thorny issue of gender and sexuality reflected in the “fallen women” trope finds its best expression in Kotzebue’s dramas that imagine a utopian place outside Europe; it would be difficult for philosophical treatises to deal with this contentious problem in such a creative manner. Likewise, extensive philosophical reflections would not be appropriate in a work of travel writing. Hence the organization of the chapters by genre is defined by the three different cultural/textual practices. At the same time, the three genres mutually informed and influenced each other’s expression and function—­the texts sometimes contain meanings and forms that go beyond their generic and linguistic borders and are part of a shared network of transtextualization and transculturation.43 I do not use generic categories to draw strict and absolute dividing lines between the texts I investigate. Jonathan Culler’s proposition of nongenre literature points out the egregious limitations of genre criticism and contends that literature, which intentionally breaks generic boundaries, enables us to become aware of the limits of our understanding and to invent new “conventions.”44 It is the interrelation between the texts, books, and documents that directs the reader’s attention toward a shared network of thought, interest, and practices. Although Kant’s first lecture on physical geography in 1756 marks the beginning of the time period covered in this book, I don’t start with Kant because I don’t conceive of the transcultural discourse around 1800 as a chronological and teleological process. Rather, I see the time period ending, roughly, with the publication of Chamisso’s travel memoir in 1835 as an era pregnant with still undecided and unstable transcultural negotiations. Meanwhile, we can also observe the historical shift from rational thinking to romantic sentimentalism around 1800, for example, in the differences between Herder’s early and late writings in chapter 5 or in the differences between Forster and Chamisso in chapters 1 and 2. I admit that the organization of the chapters

16 Introduction

by genre is not a historical one; rather, it is ordered by the different textual/ cultural practices that deal with non-​European cultures in different generic forms with different contents. I start the book with two voyages to the South Pacific: Georg Forster’s journey from 1772 to 1775 is the focus of the first chapter, and the second centers around Adelbert von Chamisso’s expedition from 1815 to 1818. For eighteenth-​century Europeans, the South Pacific was the “new world.” It played a particularly important role for the scientific and cultural imagination in Germany. The German version of Forster’s influential travel writing, Reise um die Welt (published as A Voyage Round the World in English in 1777 and in German in 1778), established the genre of scientific travel writing. A committed student of Carl Linnaeus’s project of natural history, Forster pursues objectivity in scientific observation as a naturalist on board Cook’s second expedition to the South Pacific. At the same time, he articulates his sentimental admiration for the South Seas, particularly the island of Tahiti. I juxtapose Forster’s firm belief in scientific objectivity with his sentimental moments to show the transformations that Forster undergoes during the encounters with the Pacific. The contact zone is, on the one hand, as Mary Louise Pratt defines it, controlled by the “imperial gaze” and laden with colonial greed but, on the other hand, deeply entrenched in the real-​world significance of non-​European cultures. My notion of transculturality thus places different accents on encounters from Pratt’s conception of contact zone. Oceania is not merely a passive object under the “imperial gaze” of Forster serving in a British expedition but also an active agent intruding upon Forster’s perceptive senses.45 A deserting sailor at Tahiti, New Zealand cannibalism, and violent encounters on the island of Tanna all have a strong impact on Forster’s identity when his preestablished idea of European superiority is confronted with Oceanic differences. Like Forster aboard Cook’s ship, the French-​ German writer Adelbert von Chamisso served as the naturalist on a Russian scientific expedition. Chamisso’s Reise um die Welt (A Voyage Round the World, 1835) embraces Oceania more emphatically and acknowledges the intellectual capacity and cultural achievements of the islanders even more respectfully than Forster does. Chamisso’s work gives us hope of envisioning a more balanced future after and during colonial and neocolonial conflicts then and now. Focusing on the islander Kadu, whom Chamisso holds up as a scientific authority over Oceania and an exceptional emissary between the islanders and the European travelers, I observe that Chamisso turns away from the scientific travel writing, established by Forster, toward an autobiographic style in order to more fully express his emotional attachment to the islanders. I argue that Chamisso’s encounters with the islanders cause this generic instability. Although the expedition served imperial Russia’s interests, several other prominent travelers on board, including the ship’s captain, Otto von Kotzebue, were ethnic Germans. Hence Chamisso’s writing is born in a transcultural environment

Introduction

17

of German, French, Russian, and Oceanic influences. Even though Chamisso is recognized as the author of the travelogue, he is by no means the only subjective voice representing others. Rather, I understand his text as a discursive field in which voices from diverse cultures articulate themselves at the same time. Against the backdrop of the coming heyday of European imperialism in the nineteenth century, Chamisso’s work is a breath of fresh air reminding us of the influential participation of non-​European cultures in the German transcultural discourse. Chapter 3, “Krusoe Robinson’s Adventure,” highlights Joachim Heinrich Campe’s novel Robinson der Jüngere (Robinson the Younger, 1779–­80), which draws on Forster’s travelogue to depict the nature and culture of the tropical islands and islanders. Campe’s novel, still in print today, is representative of popular German Robinsonades—­adventure stories that loosely adhere to the plot of Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner (1719). Immensely popular, by 1800, 9 Robinsonades were produced in English, 10 in Dutch, and 6 in French, but 128 in German. Robinsonades are important texts for the study of German transcultural discourse. In particular, the multilingual and multicultural sources of Robinsonades, which include an Arabic novel in the thirteenth century and are not merely confined to Defoe’s work, demonstrate the transculturality of the genre and broaden the conventional interpretation that sees Robinsonades as a national allegory of the German bourgeoisie. My reading of Campe’s novel highlights the two elements of technology and double consciousness. If the mastery of technology defines the making of the modern self, as the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg argues, then Campe’s protagonist Krusoe Robinson’s making of the self is a transcultural product because his mastery of technology heavily depends on the tropical nature of the Caribbean island. If Robinson’s desert island symbolizes the condition of an independent personal identity of a man, as Rousseau imagines it to be, then the occupation of the island by both Krusoe Robinson and the islander Freitag evinces a double consciousness of Europe and the non-​European world. The duality of Krusoe and Freitag is not merely a relationship between the colonizers and the colonized; rather, it symbolizes a European consciousness that incessantly negotiates with the maritime challenges from the non-​European world. I will show that Krusoe’s fears, uncertainties, and dependency on Freitag are predominantly described in the text, yet we should also not ignore the narrator’s sense of European superiority and his highly problematic remarks about the Africans or the “cannibal” islanders. In the fourth chapter, “The New World, Femininity, and Refusal of Tragedy in August von Kotzebue’s Melodramas,” I examine the active participation of non-​European characters and cultures in four dramas by Kotzebue: Die Sonnenjungfrau (Virgin of the Sun, 1789), Bruder Moritz (Brother Moritz, 1791), Die Spanier in Peru (Spaniards in Peru, 1795), and La Peyrouse (La Peyrouse, 1797). The most popular dramatist of his day, and also one of the

18 Introduction

most prolific, Kotzebue draws on travel writings and portrays Indians, Arabs, Pacific Islanders, and black Africans; he sets his dramas in the South Seas or Peru; and he unreservedly celebrates human sentiments and reliably offers happy endings. While Kotzebue has been dismissed as superficial and subservient to market needs by his contemporaries and present-​day literary critics alike, we would do well to take Kotzebue’s works and his popularity seriously as a representative voice of the desires of common people, as a countergenre to the canonical bourgeois tragedy, and as dramatic manifestations of non-​ European impact. In the eighteenth century, tragedy was seen as a high form of art because, according to Friedrich Schiller, only a tragic ending cleanses the soul, educates the moral senses, and punishes “deviant” desires. The non-​ European characters and cultures in Kotzebue’s dramas, however, help to smooth out the tensions, avoid tragic endings, and create new forms of love, sexuality, and family. They also allow socially unacceptable relationships to survive in geographical locations other than Europe. Much like Campe, Kotzebue harshly critiques the slave trade and European colonial cruelty, but at the same time he also couldn’t avoid the sense of European superiority. The expression of European superiority in Forster’s, Chamisso’s, Campe’s, and Kotzebue’s works is supported by the idea of historical development, which understands German and northern European culture as the most developed stage of history in the world. This intrinsic historicity in the self-​ understanding of eighteenth-​century Germans finds its most systematic and comprehensive expression in Johann Gottfried Herder’s philosophy of history, the focus of chapter 5, “Johann Gottfried Herder: Historicism, Cultural Relativism, and the Iroquois Perpetual Peace.” A central figure in European intellectual history, Herder incorporates a wide array of cultures, particularly Africa, China, and Europe, into a historical teleology. This approach later culminated in a Eurocentric historicism, which Dipesh Chakrabarty masterfully dissects in Provincializing Europe.46 At the same time, Herder emphasizes each culture’s incommensurability and uniqueness and therefore the relativism in cultural comparison. Instead of simply praising his cultural relativism, I emphasize Herder’s theory of sentiment, which gives rise to his critique of colonial violence. In Herder’s late works, the logic of historical development is influenced by a Native American tribe, the Iroquois, and transformed into an ethic of history that proposes peace and warns for the revenge of history. Reading Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (Yet Another Philosophy of History toward the Education of Humankind, 1774), Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humankind, 1784–­91), and Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität (Letters toward the Advancement of Humanity, 1793–­97), I interpret the coexistence of historicism, relativism, the theory of sentiment, the theory of race, and the critique of colonial atrocity as Herder’s move to forge a German historical identity against the backdrop of non-​European challenges. As I shall show in Herder’s discussion of Africa, China, and the

Introduction

19

peace treaty of the Iroquois, his philosophical treatises develop cultural strategies for the German and European self-​assertion in a changing global geopolitical constellation around 1800. Skin color did not play the most important role in determining the ranks among peoples; rather, according to Herder’s historicist logic, it is historical development that assigns Africa and China to lower stages. Chapter 6, “Immanuel Kant’s Physische Geographie: Authorship and the Geographical Order of Things,” deals with Kant’s lectures on physical geography (taught from 1756 to 1799 and collected in the volume Physische Geographie), which understand geography as the foundation of history. History, according to Kant, needs to be conceived and told from the perspective of global geography. Kant’s geographical order of things offers, maybe inadvertently, an alternative that resists the logic of the emerging historicism. However, Physical Geography, published by students of Kant in the early nineteenth century, is not a uniform, systematic text. Kant himself and his students constantly adjusted the lecture notes to accommodate new geographical and cultural findings during the second half of the eighteenth century. Physical Geography in its multiplicity not only contains Kant’s ideas but also reflects those of a broader educated public in the latter half of the eighteenth century. From this perspective, Physical Geography reveals a collective geographic consciousness in Germany around 1800. The unsystematic form of Physical Geography is not an intellectual embarrassment, as the geographer David Harvey finds it to be; rather, it reflects the multivalent and ongoing efforts to negotiate with the non-​European world in the German transcultural discourse.47 Ranging from the journeys around the world to the literary and philosophical works, the order of the chapters, again, does not reflect a chain of events with a necessary and teleological trajectory. Rather, the chapters are organized according to forms and cultural practices that intensively yet differently engage with non-​European cultures. The chapters delineate a discursive environment from 1756 to 1835, in which different forces, opinions, desires, and ideas from Germans, Europeans, and non-​Europeans interact and negotiate with each other in different forms of writing and practice. All these forces and practices coexist but are differently proportioned in different types of writing. The textual focuses in the chapters are by no means the complete archive in the long eighteenth century. Since the late seventeenth century, books and documents about global cultural and natural diversities had already flourished in the emerging and expanding German book market. German readers learned about cultural differences within and outside Europe from such popular books and collections as Thesaurus Exoticorum: Oder eine mit außländischen Raritäten und Geschichten wohlversehene Schatz-​ Kammer (Exotic Thesaurus: Or a Room of Treasure Tastefully Decorated with Foreign Rarities and Stories, 1688), Der neue Welt-​Bott mit allerhand Nachrichten dern Missionariorum Soc. Jesu (The New Messenger of the

20 Introduction

World with All Kinds of News from the Jesuit Missionaries, 1726), or the Göttingen professor Benno Caspar Hauris’s Nöthige Gründe zur Erlernung der Universal-​ Historie von Europa, Asia, Africa, und America (Necessary Reasons to Learn the Universal History of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, 1741). Notably, Eberhard Werner Happel, who edited Thesaurus Exoticorum, is also the author of Der insulanische Mandorell (The Islander Mandorell, 1682), a forerunner of Robinsonades that will be explored in more detail in chapter 3. Der neue Welt-​Bott already contains maps of Nagasaki (see the cover image) and Beijing with German descriptions in 1726. Indeed, the travel writings, literature, and philosophy investigated in this book share and further develop some interests and concerns already articulated in these early documents. The German transcultural discourse discussed here intensifies and expands the discussions about history, human relations, and colonial and cultural differences. Some of these ideas were taken further by later events in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries to become ideological demons, such as racism and imperialism, whereas others got lost over time. The German transcultural discourse around 1800 provides one of the richest resources for the study of Enlightenment, empire, power, knowledge, and global orders that remain relevant today. We cannot simply read these German-​language texts as Eurocentric and subservient to imperial interest; nor should we purely celebrate them as indexes of harmless intercultural tolerance, curiosity, and open-​mindedness. Instead, the emphasis on the participation of non-​European knowledge in the German transcultural discourse enables us to read from the other side and see the non-​European agency not outside but right at the heart of the German discourse, which was by no means merely nationalist. From this perspective, I hope that the contours of the chapters delineate the interrelated veins of the transcultural discourse from the latter half of the eighteenth century to the first decades of the nineteenth—­the transitioning period toward global modernity. The transcultural perspective looks beyond the paradigm of German national literature and reminds us of the multitude of the world, in which we all are entangled with transculturation through history, geography, imagination, and travel.

Chapter 1

Georg Forster in Oceania Enlightenment, Sentiment, and the Intrusion of the South Seas

As the title of the painting informs us, the green luxurious background is the tropical landscape of the legendary island of Tahiti in the South Pacific. The young man in the foreground intensively observes the bird in his father’s hand. The ship at the horizon and the two men’s clothing reveal their European identity. The young man’s hand is about to draw the bird on paper, to record the ephemeral sight in a longer-​lasting form. Strangely enough, the painter does not show him in the process of drawing but directs our eyes to concentrate on the point of his pen, which will touch the paper at any moment to document the details of the bird’s decaying body. This portrayal reminds us of the Greek statue of the Laocoön group, in which, according to Gotthold E. Lessing, Laocoön is captured at the moment before the real drama starts: his hand struggles in vain to tear away the head of the serpent, and he is about to cry at the snake’s approaching bite. Similarly, the pen’s tip in the young man’s hand also keeps our imagination in great suspense. The painting tempts us to ask: What is he going to draw? An apparently easy answer is: he is going to draw what he sees. But will his drawing precisely reflect what he sees? Will he add anything else to the bird, or will he omit some parts because his cultural background or some spontaneous ideas prompt him to do so? If the pen is not only the pen of a painter but also the pen of a writer, what is the relationship between what a writer sees and what he writes? As a matter of fact, the young man in the picture (fig. 1), Georg Forster (1754–­94), provoked extraordinary enthusiasm for the South Pacific and Tahiti among eighteenth-​century Germans not primarily through his paintings but through his famous travel writing: Reise um die Welt (A Voyage Round the World, 1777 English version, 1778 German translation). Indeed, in the eighteenth century, travel literature, along with encyclopedias, made an immense contribution to both transcultural understandings and misunderstandings. After the novel, travel literature was the second most popular and successful genre of eighteenth-​century European

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Chapter 1

Figure 1. John Francis Rigaud, Johann Reinhold Forster and His Son Georg Forster on Tahiti. 1780. @Collection Rheinberger, Berlin, Germany.

print culture.1 Forster, the naturalist on board James Cook’s second voyage to the South Pacific, thoroughly describes this expedition from 1772 to 1775. The German version of Forster’s travel writing became a great market success and proves a key document in the German transcultural discourse. Cook’s three voyages round the world in the late eighteenth century bolstered the British national confidence, which had been weakened by the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution. Cook became a national hero representing Britain’s pioneer ventures to waters and lands previously uncharted and undocumented by other rival European powers. Forster’s travel narrative proves a powerful combination of empirical observations and philosophical reflections on transcultural encounters and is a milestone in British and German travel writings around 1800.2 Now after knowing the importance of the writer and his work, the question we posed before is even more urgent: Does Forster’s narrative truly reflect what he saw during this voyage? Is there a discrepancy between what the traveler tells us in the writing and what the reality might have been? Forster consciously reflects on these questions. He ridicules the speculative nature of contemporary philosophical anthropology, presumably the Scottish Enlightenment’s “conjectural history.”3 Instead, he promotes the collection of facts based on empirical observation. Ten years later, this belief in empirical

Georg Forster in Oceania

23

evidence leads Forster to impugn the objectivity of Kant’s theory of race and human monogenesis.4 Furthermore, Forster’s complaint about speculation is directly connected to the fabrication of the travel narrative of Cook’s first journey to the South Pacific. The head of the British Admiralty, Lord Sandwich, did not approve of the style of Cook’s journal. Sandwich commissioned the essayist and poet John Hawkesworth, who did not take part in the journey, to adapt Cook’s journals and compose the official account of the expedition. Hawkesworth’s book, however, incurred censure for exaggerating a sexual scene in Cook’s journal and articulating doubts about the power of Providence.5 Furthermore, Forster claims that the tedious collection of facts only results in an accumulation of details but fails to produce general views of nature and humanity. Hence his method: The traveller was no longer to trust to chance for a variety of occurrences, but to make use of his first discovery, as the thread of Ariadne, by the help of which he might guide his steps through the labyrinth of human knowledge. It was therefore requisite that he should have penetration sufficient to combine different facts, and to form general views from thence, which might in some measure guide him to new discoveries, and point out the proper objects of farther investigation.6

Forster clearly believes that there is an external objective reality that the human mind can learn to know through close observation. In the German version of this quotation, he uses the common Enlightenment metaphor of light to illustrate factual truth and epistemic authority (einzelne Gegenstände richtig und in ihrem wahren Lichte zu beobachten). Light gained enormous attention in eighteenth-​century intellectual debates on aesthetics, philosophy, and physics. Newton’s famous treatise Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light (1704) revolutionized the common view of white light. The metaphor of light changed its function from symbolizing divine bliss to reason, knowledge, and freedom.7 Forster calls his book a philosophical travel account (philosophische Reisebeschreibung), in which he expects the eyes of the traveler to fulfill the demands for accurate description and universal conclusion about human societies, climate, topography, flora, and fauna. Enlightenment standards for natural history and anthropology, represented by Carl Linnaeus, Buffon, Rousseau, Adam Smith, or Adam Ferguson, are clearly at work.8 In a sense, Forster is fulfilling Rousseau’s vision of a traveling philosopher, who perfectly combines philosophical perspective with empirical observation.9 If we follow the logic of Michel Foucault’s archaeological inquiry, Forster’s writing draws on and contributes to a new organizing principle of knowledge, which signifies the emergence of modern sciences and profoundly alters the order of things around 1800.10 The metaphor of the truth-​seeking eyes is apt to summarize Forster’s method of

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travel writing and his positive belief in perceiving and interpreting human and natural diversity. The act of seeing is the intrinsic occasion when reality is communicated with human cognitive perception. To travel is to see, and to write is to impart and represent what one has seen, to transpose the unknown into perceivable and acceptable knowledge, and to create a reality, an order of things, ensured by eyewitness account. The readers then visualize and imagine what the traveler has experienced. According to Forster, travel writing is the linguistic representation of a visual reality based on objective observations. Forster’s self-​ proclaimed neutrality, however, meets with censure from twentieth-​ century critics of travel writing. Stephen Greenblatt warns us that voyagers are “liars . . . whose position virtually required the strategic manipulation and distortion and outright suppression of the truth.”11 Greenblatt’s unwavering skepticism suggests that it is an epistemological fallacy to believe that travel literature corresponds to reality. He contends that we can be certain only that travel writing reveals to us “the European practice of representation.”12 Travel writing turns out to be the mirror image of how the authors think and practice upon other people. It does not penetrate into unknown terrain and offering unbiased knowledge. Instead of describing other cultures, travel writing utterly confirms what is already known to its author, particularly the feeling of European superiority. From this perspective, Forster’s truth-​seeking eyes turn into an organ imbued with Eurocentrism that justifies colonial intentions. Mary Louise Pratt strives to show the connections between the rising significance of modern sciences and scientific expeditions, and the commercial and imperialistic interests of European colonial nations. She points out that the project of global natural history, founded by Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735), was carried out by traveling naturalists such as Forster, along with the supplemental activities of printing, collecting, drawing, and establishing museums and botanical gardens for plant and animal specimens. Pratt argues that the seemingly innocent and disinterested project of natural history in fact produces exploitable knowledge for later commercial purposes. European travelers “are chiefly present as a kind of collective moving eye on which the sights/sites register.”13 The act of seeing foreign culture and nature is likened to the act of scanning for “possibilities of a Eurocolonial future coded as resources to be developed, surpluses to be traded, towns to be built.”14 Focusing on the Pacific context, Vanessa Agnew draws our attention to the musical encounters between the European visitors and the islanders during Cook’s voyage and points out that the Tongan Islanders’ music performance outshines the firework performance of the Europeans.15 Even though the Europeans still illusorily believe in their weapons’ superiority, the Tongans were actually planning and might have been able to kill the intruders. Agnew also points out that although the European travelers noticed the Maori’s polyphonic music, they actively ignored it because they arrogantly

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placed the Maori on a lower stage of cultural development and assumed they should not have such a high musical achievement. If we follow the critical paradigm contained in Greenblatt’s, Pratt’s, and Agnew’s works, the blank paper in the painting discussed above would document the bird as a colonial object and, at the same time, mirror Forster’s white, male, imperial ego in a self-​congratulatory way.16 Forster certainly took part in Britain’s imperial project and sometimes articulates Eurocentric views.17 At the same time, Forster’s travel writing also discloses a form of relativism and moments in which Oceania challenges, changes, and regenerates his cultural identity. I shall argue that the islanders sustain a powerful impact on Forster’s writing that influentially represented and produced the South Pacific for the European and German readership. Focusing on colonial exchange, Nicholas Thomas also emphasizes the agency of the Oceanic Islanders in their material exchanges with the Europeans. Thomas challenges the idea that European colonialism has a “fatal impact” on Oceania, an idea that, in his opinion, downplays the indigenous peoples’ ability to incorporate European objects and change their values. Thomas contends that the romantic tendency to consider indigenous culture a unitary entity with a self-​sufficient coherence neglects the complicated entanglements between European colonizers and the islanders as well as the conflicts and inharmonious aspects within the assumed unity of indigenous culture.18 In Entangled Objects, Thomas calls our attention to the instability and the porous nature of a so-​called indigenous society, which in many ways is comparable to material culture in the industrialized West. He rejects the idea of an alternate social order represented by an indigenous culture and aims to show “a kind of symmetry between indigenous appropriations of European artifacts and the colonial collecting of indigenous goods.”19 Thomas demystifies the idea that the colonized are completely passive and forced to accept the colonizer’s model of economy and society. Thomas’s provocative and insightful argument sheds light on the agency and the practice of Pacific Islanders through the medium of exchanged objects from early cultural contacts around 1800 to colonialism in the twentieth century. I wonder, however, whether Oceanic agency is confined to the realm of material culture and whether this agency is also present in European writings about Oceania. It is important to bridge Thomas’s argument about material culture to textual interpretation. Given that Thomas’s “Europeans” are chiefly British and French travelers and colonizers, what can Forster’s German context offer and add to the debate in Pacific studies? I aim to make clear the agency and impact of Oceania in Forster’s influential narrative and to show that this piece of writing—­similar to Thomas’s understanding of material culture—­proves an open and porous space, in which ideas, opinions, and cultural identities also collide, mingle, and regenerate. Indeed, Forster’s special position as a scientist on board allows him to reflect on the events and encounters with different perspectives from Cook’s.

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The British Admiralty’s official instructions to Cook disclose Britain’s imperial ambitions in the South Pacific. It is well known that Cook’s second voyage mainly set out to search for the hypothetical Continent of the South—­the Antarctic. The instructions, however, also document the colonial intention to explore and take possession of new land: If you discover Cape Circumcision, you are to satisfy yourself whether it is a part of that Southern Continent which has so much engaged the attention of Geographers & former Navigators, or Part of an Island. If it proves to be the former, You are to employ yourself diligently in exploring as great as Extent of it as you can . . . , as may be useful either to Navigation or Commerce; you are also carefully to observe the nature of the soil & the produce thereof; the Animals & Fowls that inhabit or frequent it; the Fishes that are to be found in the Rivers or upon the Coast, & in what plenty; . . . If you find any Mines, Minerals, or valuable Stones, you are to bring home Specimens of each, as also of the Seeds of Trees, Shrubs, Plants, Fruits & Grains peculiar to the Country, as you may be able to collect . . . ; You are likewise to observe the Genius, Temper, Disposition and Number of the Natives or Inhabitants, if there be any, & endeavour by all proper means to cultivate a Friendship and Alliance with them, making them Presents of such Trinquets as they may value, inviting them to Trafick, & shewing them every kind of Civility & Regard; . . . You are with the consent of the Natives to take possession of convenient Situations in the Country in the Name of the King of Great Britain, and to distribute among the Inhabitants some of the Medals with which you have been furnished to remain as Traces of your having been there. But if you find the Country uninhabited you are to take possession of it for His Majesty by setting up proper Marks & Inscriptions as first Discoverers & Possessors.20

These very detailed instructions demonstrate a penchant for knowing everything about the South Pacific. On the one hand, the naturalists were hired to document and collect specimens of plants, animals, and minerals as well as collect data of human and cultural differences. They are definitely part of the imperial project of controlling information and appropriating land. On the other hand, the naturalists also retained a certain independence on board as “experimental gentlemen,” as the crew humorously called them. The scientists had an unconventional and exceptional status on board.21 The instruction also commands Cook to confiscate all the log books and journals from the crew when they arrived in South Africa on their way home so that none of the important findings could be disclosed to other European rivals.22 Cook followed this command to the letter. Based on their civil status, however, Forster and other scientists on board were not subject to this restriction

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of the Royal Navy.23 This distinctive quality of intellectuals on board gave Forster more freedom and distance to reflect and comment on the events he experienced. He sometimes strongly disagrees with Cook’s violent behavior toward the islanders and critiques Cook’s position and attitude. Therefore it is necessary to differentiate Forster from the political authorities and not to imbue Forster’s writing entirely with imperial intentions and a colonizing attitude. As we saw previously, Forster believes in an immediate connection between reality and observation. At the same time, he is also conscious of emotion as a possible hindrance in the epistemological task of gaining factual knowledge: I have sometimes obeyed the powerful dictates of my heart, and given voice to my feelings; for, as I do not pretend to be free from the weaknesses common to my fellow creatures, it was necessary for every reader to know the colour of the glass through which I looked. Of this at least I am certain, that a gloomy livid tinge hath never clouded my sight. Accustomed to look on all the various tribes of men, as entitled to an equal share of my good will, . . . and neither attachment nor aversion to particular nations have influenced my praise or censure.24

An ambiguity in Forster’s epistemology emerges. Confessing the powerful dictate of his heart, he shakes the ground of the objectivity he has taken so much pain to establish in the mind of his readers. These human “weaknesses” break the continuity of the search for truth and indicate the inevitability of subjective and affective interferences in the construction of reality. In fact, Forster was an avid reader of fashionable sentimental literature such as Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and Lawrence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) while composing his travel narrative.25 Forster’s work demonstrates a strong capacity for empathy and a precise sensibility for possible situation-​related misunderstandings between the travelers and the islanders. Nigel Leask synthesizes the coexistence of Enlightenment and sentiment in Forster’s writings as an “affective realism.”26 Yet we cannot really tell whether the objective reality or its subjective construction is more fundamental to Forster. I argue that we should juxtapose the affective vulnerability to the demands for realistic rigidity to identify and illustrate the coexistence of both epistemological approaches. The imperative of a cold and lucid description is accompanied and simultaneously questioned by sentimental moments which blur the boundaries between the self and the other and confound the Enlightenment divisions between civilization and savagery, Europeans and their alleged others. David Marshall’s study on eighteenth-​ century aesthetic experience is extremely helpful to illustrate this point from another perspective. Aesthetic experiences—­reactions and sentiments aroused during encounters with art,

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literature, or theater—­are not disinterested or distanced. Rather, Marshall argues, they mark the moment of blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality. “The frame of art here identifies an ambiguous and paradoxical place; . . . the frame of art intrudes upon rather than excludes the world.”27 If we can draw an analogy between the mode of aesthetic experience in Marshall’s sense and Forster’s Pacific ventures, then the frame of art transforms into the frame of the South Seas, the locus at which Forster’s Europe and Oceania collide, mingle, change, and regenerate. Instead of being the passive object of the imperial gaze, the South Pacific intrudes upon its European spectators and coerces them into metamorphosis. For example, Cook conforms to the Tahitian custom and dresses himself with local cloth because the chief Tu would come on board only if this condition were met.28 Indeed, transference of foreign cultures into European experience and identity should receive more attention in the theorization of travel writing as a genre of encounter, contest, change, and creation of practices and perspectives. Identifying the discontinuity in travelers’ accounts makes it possible for us to go beyond the limits imposed on our understanding of empire, barbarism, and civilization.29 In the ensuing pages, I will first introduce the historical background and the impact of Forster’s work in German-​speaking culture. Then I will focus on three representative events during Forster’s voyage: the desertion on Tahiti, New Zealand cannibalism, and violence on the island of Tanna. These events demonstrate the conflicts and negotiations between Forster’s sentimentalism and his Enlightenment ideas about civilization and teleology in the Pacific.

Reise um die Welt and Its Impact The original version of Forster’s travelogue in English was not a great success in Britain. Although Georg’s irascible father Johann Reinhold Forster, the officially appointed naturalist on board, was supposed to publish the official travel account, the head of the British Admiralty, Lord Sandwich, withdrew from the initial agreement. Instead the admiralty supported Cook in publishing his own journal. The Forsters then decided to privately publish a travelogue in Georg’s name.30 Although the twenty-​two-​year-​old tried his best to publish A Voyage Round the World as early as March 17, 1777, Cook’s journal, available from April 30, 1777, won the attention of the British readership. Cook’s reputation as a great adventurer and a national hero and the beautiful engravings by the on-​board painter, William Hodges, aided in the successful marketing of Cook’s book. Even though Forster justifies the existence of his book by pointing out that Cook’s journal has diverging perspectives, because the captain and the naturalists had fairly different activities and tasks during the voyage, the book still did not sell well. To help out with the financial misery, Georg translated his own work into German and soon became a celebrity in Germany.

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In comparison to Cook’s rather technical report, Forster’s skillful prose, both in English and in German, meticulously documents and comments on the entire voyage around the world and received enthusiastic applause from German intellectuals. Although political authorities in the German-​speaking lands showed little interest in competing with Britain, France, Russia, or Spain for scientific circumnavigations, German intellectuals stood out in constructing the fashion of the South Seas. They actively used Forster’s travel writing for the debates about human nature, historical development, and physical anthropology and idealized the island of Tahiti as an earthly paradise.31 On his arrival in Germany, Forster was soon offered a professorship of natural history in Kassel at Collegium Carolinum. German novelist Martin Christoph Wieland published lengthy excerpts from Forster’s book several times in his influential journal Der Teusche Merkur. Inspired by Forster’s philosophical travelogue, Wieland also conceived of the protagonist in his own novel Geschichte der Abderiten (Stories of the Abderites, 1774–­80) as a traveling philosopher who explores different cultures. Forster’s description of Tahiti also inspired Carl Ignaz Geiger’s satirical and utopian phantasmagoria Reise eines Erdbewohners in den Mars (Voyage of an Earth Resident to the Mars, 1790). Prominent German intellectuals including Goethe, Schiller, Herder, the Orientalist Johann David Michaelis, the anatomist Samuel Thomas Soemmerring, and the philosopher and mathematician Georg Christoph Lichtenberg at the then famous University of Göttingen all highly praised Forster’s travel writing.32 For Forster himself, his South Pacific experience permeates his extensive publications on botany, anthropology, politics, and aesthetics, and his public dispute with Kant on human genesis and races in the rest of his life. The renowned South America traveler and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt held Forster’s travel writing as the pioneering work in a new era of scientific research on “the vast theatre of natural forces” and the “comparative history and geography of different countries.” Humboldt considers Forster his friend and teacher “who in our German literature . . . has most vigorously and successfully opened this path.” “Gifted with delicate aesthetic feelings, and retaining a vivid impression of the pictures with which Tahiti and the other then happy islands of the Pacific had filled his imagination, as in recent times that of Charles Darwin, George Forster was the first to depict in pleasing colours the changing stages of vegetation, the relations of climate and of articles of food in their influence on the civilization of mankind, according to differences of original descent and habitation.”33 While Humboldt emphasizes Forster’s contributions to natural history and nature’s impact on human life, I highlight Forster’s travel narrative as a key document of transcultural encounters around 1800. The deserting sailor at Tahiti, cannibalism in New Zealand, and the violent landing on the island Tanna, all these events, show us the interactions between Enlightenment ideology, human sentimentality, and the impact of Oceania.

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Desertion on Tahiti On Cook’s departure from Matavai-​Bay on Tahiti, Chief Tu came on board and wholeheartedly embraced all of the travelers in a farewell gesture. He requested that Cook fire some cannons and demonstrated his friendship by being the last Tahitian to leave the ship. Under cover from the noise of the cannons, a British sailor deserted the ship for the island. Despite the islanders’ help, the desertion was unsuccessful: the sailor was captured and brought back to the ship. Georg’s father, Johann Reinhold Forster, mentions this incident only briefly in his journal, without any further comment. Yet the young Forster spent pages pondering the advantages and disadvantages of the sailor’s decision and of life on Tahiti. Forster’s reflections on this anecdote document the ambiguity of his perception of Tahiti and Oceania. For Forster the sentimentalist, Tahiti is paradisiacal, and admirable for its fertile natural environment and unstained human goodness. Yet for Forster the Enlightenment thinker, Tahiti represents a lower stage in the development of human society in comparison to the blossoming of Europe. Hugh West points out that this recurring paradox in Forster’s perception of Tahiti registers an inconsistent deviation or “declension” in Forster’s thinking.34 I shall argue, however, that Forster’s contradictory perception of Tahiti demonstrates a process in which he negotiates between his preestablished European cultural values and the uncertainties, differences, and changes Tahiti inflicts on his sentiment and his intellect. First, let us consider Forster’s sympathy with the deserting sailor. Forster comments that, for the sake of sensual joys, the sailor definitely made the correct decision. Forster contrasts the hardship in the life of a European sailor to the easygoing lifestyle in Tahiti: If we fairly consider the different situations of a common sailor on board the Resolution, and of a Tahitian on his island, we cannot blame the former, if he attempted to rid himself of the numberless discomforts of a voyage round the world, and preferred an easy life, free from cares, in the happiest climate of the world, to the frequent vicissitudes which are entailed upon the mariner. The most favourable prospects of future success in England, which he might form in idea, could never be so flattering to his senses, as the lowly hope of living like the meanest Taheitian.35

Indeed, Cook echoes Forster’s view and evinces a similar sympathy for this sailor in his journal. After writing that the sailor has neither friends nor family, Cook comments: “Where than [sic] can Such a Man spend his days better than at one of these isles where he can injoy [sic] all the necessaries and some

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of luxuries of life in ease and Plenty.”36 Hence Cook released the sailor without punishment. Forster’s sympathy with the sailor and his euphoric description of Tahiti held sway over the Tahitian fashion in Germany and Europe. Tahiti, along with the rest of the South Pacific, was the “New World” for Europeans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It represented “a golden mean between European over-​refinement and South Seas savagery.”37 The fertile nature and the friendly culture, especially the (female) nudity and sexual “freedom,” fueled much intellectual and artistic imagining.38 In the European fantasy of utopia, Tahiti epitomized the island garden outside the topography of the quotidian and represented “the most influential imperial landscapes of the eighteenth century.”39 One of Forster’s contemporaries, the German garden theorist Christian Cay Lorenz Hirschfeld, criticized the predilection for chinoiserie in eighteenth-​ century garden design while praising Tahiti as a natural garden in which no artificial planning disturbed the harmonious union of humans and nature.40 The poet and essayist Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg fantasized about establishing an Arcadian colony of German writers in Tahiti, under the guidance of Forster.41 A secret society was founded in Stuttgart in 1806 to organize sixty to a hundred young people to emigrate to the South Seas.42 Three elements are crucial for Forster’s fascination with Tahiti: the fertile environment, especially the breadfruit tree; masculinity; and Tahitian hospitality. Among the necessary things Cook mentions, such as food, breadfruit trees were probably Tahiti’s most miraculous natural product. While the Europeans have to work arduously to earn their daily bread, Forster observes, the Tahitians only need to pick the breadfruits from trees for their basic subsistence. Forster notes that breadfruit trees bear fruits for a time period as long as a person’s life; and three such trees provide enough fresh food for a person for three-​quarters of a year—­then one can eat preserved breadfruits for the remaining one-​quarter. The cultivation of the breadfruit tree in Tahiti inspires Forster’s natural historical treatise Vom Brotbaum (On Bread Fruit Tree, 1783), which understands this plant as deeply situated within its climatic environment and sketches the concept of a biogeography marked by an innumerable diversity, manifold connections, and a universal coherence of the natural world. Forster’s understanding of the breadfruit tree inspires Humboldt to study plant geography and supposedly helps Charles Darwin to develop his theory of descent. Yet in addition to natural history, the breadfruit tree also proved attractive to British colonialism: the British naturalist Sir Joseph Banks proposed to King George III that the breadfruit tree be transplanted to the Caribbean in order to feed black slaves with nutritious but cheap food. This project failed, however, because of the infamous mutiny on the Bounty in 1789. Besides nature in Tahiti, Forster is also fascinated with Tahitian masculinity. The ostensible sexual “freedom” is the epitome of Tahitian culture for

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European travelers and readers. The French traveler Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s account of a Tahitian girl who casually threw off her garment on deck and revealed a bodily beauty resembling the goddess Venus inaugurated a long tradition of European ethnographic and aesthetic perception of the South Pacific as a place of boundless heterosexual indulgence.43 The Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm II had a chamber furnished in Tahitian fashion (otaheitisches Zimmer) to experience “Tahitian” pleasure. As I will explore in chapter 3, Kotzebue’s dramas La Peyrouse (1797) and Bruder Moritz (1791) and the French philosopher Denis Diderot’s Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1772) all discuss the South Pacific sexual “freedom” and its moral discontent. In his narrative, Forster’s comments on sexual indulgence between Tahitian women and European travelers are marked by distance and moral disdain.44 If we understand this disinterested and dismissive manner as the result of Forster’s pursuit of his objective observations and moral judgments, then his depiction of Tahitian male bodies betrays an enthusiastic and emotional approbation: This climate, and its salubrious productions, contribute to the strength and the elegance of their form. They are all well-​proportioned, and some would have been selected by Phidias or Praxiteles, as models of masculine beauty. Their features are sweet, and unruffled by violent passions. Their large eyes, their arched eyebrows, and high forehead, give a noble air to their heads, which are adorned by strong beards, and a comely growth of hair. These, as well as their beautiful teeth, are the proofs of vigour, and of a sound habit of body. The sex, the partners of their felicity, are likewise well-​formed; their irregular charms win the heart of their countrymen, and their unaffected smiles, and a wish to please, insure them mutual esteem and love.45

This detailed documentation of the Tahitian male body demonstrates that Forster follows Buffon’s dictum in Histoire naturelle that an object be described from the outside physiognomy to its inner characteristics. At the same time it discloses a fervent admiration, which tempts Forster and his (male) readers to identify with the Tahitian male, which Forster calls “our sex” (unseres Geschlechts). The comment on Tahitian femininity, particularly in the German version, does not tell us much about the women themselves; it merely mentions the females’ ability to please the males. Tahitian femininity is thus defined in relation to masculinity. The narrator indirectly suggests that the deserting sailor and other European men may transform into these beautiful and healthy Tahitian males, who are also accompanied by an agreeable and devoted female sex. Clearly, Forster’s masculine subject is not primarily interested in observing and controlling the foreign female body as a colonial object. Rather, it seeks to identify with Tahitian men as idealized human

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beings.46 Male corporeality transgresses the boundaries between European and Tahitian men and conjures up a new Pacific masculinity. The third important aspect of Forster’s positive reception of Tahiti is articulated in his praise of the islanders’ generous hospitality and genuine sentiments, which contrast with European mistrust and hypocrisy. As Cook arrived at Matavai-​Bay, an old woman emotionally embraced him as the friend of her lost son. Forster was deeply moved by this scene and comments: “Such sensibility . . . affords an undeniable proof of the original excellence of the human heart.”47 On one of his botanizing tours, an elderly Tahitian couple treated the travelers so generously that Forster compares them to Philemon and Baucis in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who represent the prototypes of pious hospitality and guest friendship in the European tradition. When Forster heard that a Spanish sailor, who deserted his ship and stayed on Tahiti, probably persuaded the chief not to give Cook the most important provision of all, pigs, Forster vehemently criticized European moral corruptness and its negative influence on the islanders: It were indeed sincerely to be wished, that the intercourse which has lately subsisted between Europeans and the natives of the South Sea islands may be broken off in time, before the corruption of manners which unhappily characterises civilized regions, may reach that innocent race of men, who live here fortunate in their ignorance and simplicity. But it is a melancholy truth, that the dictates of philanthropy do not harmonize with the political systems of Europe!48

The phrase “the corruption of manners which unhappily characterizes civilized regions” (die verderbten Sitten der civilisirtern Völker) reveals that Forster’s critique of European debauchery is accompanied by his judgment that Europe is still more civilized than Tahiti. The idea of the noble savage finds its anthropomorphic realization in Tahiti. The word “civilization” first came into use in French in the 1750s to describe the increase of commerce and wealth. The term rapidly came to be associated with the refinement of manners, as Forster’s usage shows, and gained “an extraordinary ideological weight as the standard for measuring and comparing societies and cultures around the globe.”49 Larry Wolff points out that this term, which the European Enlightenment coined in a singular mode, designates a vast number of cultural phenomena as its opposite: “uncivilized” or “precivilized.”50 At first glance, Forster’s critique of European corruption reminds us of his contemporary Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, who famously claimed in his Discourse on Inequality (1755) that civilization is accompanied by inequality and moral corruption. Although Rousseau praises the benign state of nature, he insists that, once a society has abandoned it, it is impossible to go back.51 This historical progress is unfortunate but irreversible. For Rousseau, the pure and innocent state of nature is more a hypothesis than a reality. He

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imagines such a state of nature to critique the current state of culture and history. Rousseau deems education the antidote for cultural corruption. Yet, for Forster, the “noble savage” is not a conceptual construction but, rather, realistic human beings. Forster’s wishful and romanticized judgment of Tahiti’s innocence and naïveté betray the projection of his preestablished European ideal of utopia. In fact, Tahitians have had wars and conflicts among themselves and are not as naive as Forster imagines. A Spanish sailor may not be able to corrupt the Tahitians. However, Forster’s critique of the ignoble behavior of the legendary sailor reveals Tahiti’s impact on him and his deep connection with the islanders. He thus wishes to protect Tahiti even though he does not give up the idea about Tahiti’s underdevelopment. He warns that encounters with Europeans may speed up the arrival of the unhappy stage (unglückliche Periode) of revolution and inequality in Tahiti: “If the knowledge of a few individuals can only be acquired at such a price as the happiness of nations, it were better for the discoverers, and the discovered, that the South Sea had still remained unknown to Europe and its restless inhabitants.”52 In a fiction-​like fragment, Forster composes a conversation among travelers and Tahitians. Instead of using the Latin spelling of his and other travelers’ names, he uses the spelling based on how the Tahitians pronounced their names. Georg is now transcribed to Teori. If a name and its very written form epitomize a person’s cultural belonging, then this transcription reveals a “Tahitianization” of Forster’s cultural identity. In the conversation, as the host asks his daughter to carry the travelers over a creek, the Tahitian girl picks up Teori (Georg) and asks him to hold tight to her neck. Teori exclaims: “O may my hand grow together with your breast!” (O festwachsen soll meine Hand an diesem Busen!).53 Obviously, Forster is intimately connected to Tahiti. Hence, even if Rousseau’s invention of the state of nature echoes Forster’s praise, it is Tahiti itself that attracts and fascinates our traveler. At the same time, Forster’s belief in historical teleology, according to which he attributes Tahiti to a less civilized stage, causes him to disagree with the deserting sailor and to consciously decide not to stay on Tahiti himself. Congruent with Rousseau’s idea of historical progression, Forster believes in a historical teleology that forecasts a social revolution in Tahiti due to the development of inequality. Yet unlike Rousseau, who observes historical progress with skepticism and scorn, Forster optimistically believes in historical development and is committed to the project of natural history. In his later essay Leitfaden zu einer künftigen Geschichte der Menschheit (Guidelines of a Future History of Humankind, 1789)—­similar to Herder’s philosophy of history, which I will discuss in chapter 4—­Forster delineates a history of the humanity according to the development of a human body from childhood to adulthood and considers the European Enlightenment culture of reason the highest stage in the development of human history.54

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Although Forster first praises the fluid boundaries of hierarchy in Tahiti, he predicts that this equilibrium will not endure. In the future, Forster contends, the ruling class will become lazier and larger and indulge themselves more in voluptuousness, whereas the ordinary people will have to work and suffer more. The consequence is that “the common people will perceive these grievances, and the causes which [produce] them; and a proper sense of the general rights of mankind awaking in them, will bring on a revolution. This is the natural circle of human affairs.”55 This teleology also persuades Forster to recognize what he deems the “inadequacy” of the Tahitian lifestyle for modern Europeans. He reflects that all the aspects of natural and cultural attractiveness of Tahiti are merely sensual pleasures (Vergnügen der Sinnlichkeit), which are essential for people who are purely concerned with happiness in the current moment (Freuden des Augenblicks). People with more power of judgment, like Forster himself, have to admit “that being born and bred up in an active sphere of life, acquainted with numberless subjects, utterly unknown to the Taheitians, and accustomed to extend his thoughts to past and future occurrences, he would shortly have been tired of an uninterrupted tranquility and continual sameness, suited only to a people whose notions are simple and confined.”56 Tahiti’s naïveté is attractive to the sentimentalist Forster but not to the Enlightenment naturalist Forster. The scientific thirst for novel knowledge holds sway over Forster’s writing and over other European travel narratives on Asia, Africa, or the Americas in the eighteenth century.57 The longing for a state of paradisiacal happiness is thus quickly abandoned for the sake of the pursuit of knowledge and the enrichment of the archive of natural history. Forster’s Enlightenment optimism and teleology denigrate the carefree Tahitian lifestyle. At the same time, though, Forster feels uncertain about the positive belief in science and progress. According Uwe Japp, Forster’s praise and belittlement of Tahiti articulate a double critique: a critique of the imperfect Europe, which has not yet reached the stage of Enlightenment; and a critique of the South Seas, which lack refinements in culture and commerce. Japp’s reading shows us how Forster projects certain strands in European intellectual discourse onto a foreign society.58 I argue, however, that Forster’s travel writing tells us more than his projection of European intellectual discourse onto Tahiti. Tahitian nature and culture play an irreplaceable role in Forster’s sympathy with the deserting sailor and his critique of European moral corruption. While Forster’s belief in the advantages of European sciences and civilization demonstrates traces of Enlightenment ideology, it also negotiates external challenges from Tahiti. Tahiti not only represents an imaginary place of utopia, or an object of colonial fantasies. Rather, it bears its own real-​world significance as an alternative counterbalance to Europe in the eighteenth century. Forster’s agreement and disagreement with the desertion on Tahiti disclose not so much a double critique as a Pacific relativism in his thinking. Forster

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reflects that “the ideas of happiness are infinitely various in different nations, according to their manners, principles, and degrees of civilization. As the productions and apparent good qualities of our globe, are either profusely or sparingly distributed, on its different parts, the diversity of human opinions is a convincing proof of that paternal love, and unerring wisdom, which, in the plan of this world, has provided for the good of mankind, alike in the torrid and the frigid zone.”59 Forster’s Pacific relativism at some points overcomes the concept of Enlightenment utopia and renders the anticipation of human perfection illusory. Tahiti is thus not only an imagined paradise but also a realistic alternative to European reality.60 After deciding that he will not follow in the sailor’s footsteps and stay on Tahiti for good, Forster concludes by recognizing the insurmountable attraction Tahiti bears for human senses and sentiments, at the same time, he legitimates his rational practice as a naturalist and a traveling philosopher. Forster’s endeavor to grant value to the differences of happiness, culture, and morals obscures the teleological abyss between Europe and Tahiti and evinces the degree to which he internalizes the impact of Tahiti on his thinking, despite the engrained notion of historical teleology. If Tahiti’s beauty is easy to embrace, Forster’s text also reveals his empathy and the impact of New Zealand’s Maori even in the case of cannibalism.

Cannibalism and Forster’s Empathy Cannibalism demarcates the boundaries between civilization and “savagery” in the eighteenth century. Cook’s speculation of cannibalism in the South Pacific was not given credence after his first voyage around the world. This conjecture, however, was empirically confirmed during his second global circumnavigation. The European travelers were not only direct observers of the Maori anthropophagy in New Zealand but also its victims. Already during the second visit to New Zealand, Cook’s crew noticed that the Maori ate their enemies. During their third visit to New Zealand, their encounter with the Maori became a horror story: the Maori killed and ate ten sailors from Cook’s consort ship Adventure. Indeed, cannibalism is one of the most intriguing and terrifying motifs in European ethnography and philosophy from the early sixteenth century to the twentieth. In works like Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere (Robinson the Younger, 1779–­80), which I will discuss in chapter 2 of this book, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, or James Sligo Jameson’s Story of the Rear Column of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition by the Late James S. Jameson . . . (1890), anthropophagi are perceived as real threat to European travelers.61 Cannibalism, on the one hand, represents the typical travelers’ lie.62 On the other hand, the consummation of human flesh holds sway over the imaginative bounds of natural laws and universal history in eighteenth-​century European intellectual discourse.63

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Unlike those crew members who only wished to revenge the cannibalistic Maori for the devoured sailors, Forster blames the rude behavior of the European travelers. Forster regrets that, only because of the possible theft of a jacket, the sailors fiercely shot at the Maori until they ran out of munitions. The enraged islanders then killed the seamen. Forster complains that the leader of the team, Mr. Rowe, must have been a major cause of this tragedy. According to Forster, Rowe had always showed his contempt toward the islanders in their earlier visits to New Zealand. Rowe felt that he had the right to treat them with rudeness and violence just as the Spaniards had treated the Native Americans in earlier centuries. Sarcastically, Forster highlights the detail that Mr. Rowe’s hand was later recognized in a basket with many other body parts. Forster contextualizes this event with other instances of violent behaviors of European seamen in the South Pacific. For example, during the same visit, a party of Cook’s crew robbed a Maori of his handicraft tools and forced him to accept some nails as exchange. Forster concludes that the cannibal accident should be seen as Maori’s defense triggered by their instinct of self-​preservation. He stresses the friendly character of the Maori and reminds his readers that the Maori had had numerous other opportunities to kill the travelers, but had not done so. Instead the Maori generously provided Cook’s crew with fresh provisions. If the travelers treated them with respect and politeness, Forster contends, they would return the kindness in equal amount. The killed sailors must have behaved in an outrageous manner to provoke the Maori’s lethal attack. The Europeans, Forster reflects, would not behave differently from the Maori in such a situation. In this emotional outburst infuriated by the exaggerated insult and the threat to their lives, Forster reflects, he definitely would not run to the judge first; rather, he would punish the villains right on the spot.64 Emotionally, Forster completely identifies with the Maori. He further critiques the lack of mutual love and sympathy among the Europeans: Civilized people, who would perhaps, like some of our sailors, have turned sick at the thought of eating human flesh, have committed barbarities without example amongst canibals. A New Zeelander, who kills and eats his enemy, is a very different being from an European, who, for his amusement, tears an infant from the mother’s breast, in cool blood, and throws it on the earth to feed his hounds. . . . The New Zeelanders never eat their adversaries, unless they are killed in battle; they never kill their relations for the purpose of eating them; they do not even eat them if they die of a natural death.65

Forster hereby refers to the Spanish colonizers in the Americas whom Las Casas indicts in A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542). In Forster’s description, the Maori are a people of principles compared to

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the cruel Europeans. Cannibalism appears rather harmless and insignificant to European colonialism. The warfare among European rivals, Forster further reflects, is much more barbarous than the New Zealanders’ cannibalism. It was commonplace in the eighteenth century to use non-​European anthropophagy to criticize the diabolical aspects of European body politic. Cannibalism, however, gradually disappeared as the subject of moral discourse because it “has been eclipsed by the State, the new agent of absolute cruelty.”66 Forster’s statement above definitely testifies to this gradual change: the cannibalistic Maori do less harm to the general humanity than the cruelty and ruthlessness of the “civilized” people. At the same time, despite his sympathetic comments, Forster still considers the Europeans “civilized” compared to the cannibalistic islanders. He observes civilization and cannibalism from the perspective of natural history and sees cannibalism as the defining feature to discern barbarism from civilization. After citing two other examples of cannibalism in Germany and Brazil, Forster reflects that “the action of eating human flesh, whatever our education may teach us to the contrary, is certainly neither natural nor criminal in itself. It can only become dangerous as far as it steels the mind against that compassionate fellow-​feeling which is the great basis of civil society; and for this reason we find it naturally banished from every people as soon as civilization has made any progress among them.”67 Although Forster very skillfully detaches himself from defining cannibalism as legally punishable or genetically determined, he still hopes that the Maori will abandon their cannibalism after the Europeans have introduced them to domestic animals and agriculture. Compassion and moral sentiments are the goals toward which the history of humanity should proceed. Forster’s harsh critique of European sailors, colonizers, and warfare also potentially accuses the Maori of their lack of empathy and demands them to abandon anthropophagy as their way of war in order to become “civilized.” Forster’s sympathy with the Maori’s revenge now seems to be at odds with his ideology of development: while he emotionally legitimizes the Maori’s revenge and criticizes the sailors’ rudeness, he considers the Maori at a lower stage of development in the history of humanity. Similar to his conflictive reflections on the deserting sailor on Tahiti, Forster is torn between the Maori’s influence on him through the channel of emotion and his European idea of development. Forster’s Enlightenment ideology, however, does not induce him to completely condemn the Maori as lesser human beings. Rather, his critique of the sailors’ ruthlessness and his comparison of them to the Spanish colonizers point toward a compassionate perspective of cultural observation, according to which cannibalism should also be abandoned for the sake of humanity. Forster’s empathy, moving beyond cultural and geographical differences, is deeply influenced by his encounters with the Maori. If, for example, we compare Forster’s narrative to Darwin’s travel writing Voyage of the Beagle (1839), Darwin certainly considers the Europeans superior to the South Pacific Islanders: “Wherever the European has trod,

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death seems to pursue the aboriginal. We may look to the wide extent of the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope, and Australia, and we shall find the same result.  .  .  . The varieties of men seem to act on each other; in the same way as different species of animals—­the stronger always extirpating the weaker. It was melancholy at New Zealand to hear the fine energetic natives saying, they knew the land was doomed to pass from their children.”68 Even though Darwin also demonstrates his melancholic sorrows, he does not see any injustice in the fatal effects of European intrusion. Rather, he rationalizes it as the process of natural selection and a necessary step of the ongoing historical progress. Darwin does not mourn the dead islanders, just as Forster does not grieve the devoured sailors. Against Darwin’s natural law of European superiority, Forster stresses emotional commonality. Forster’s empathy almost invalidates the difference between “savagery” and “civilization.” While Forster is not free from European Enlightenment ideology of development, the Maori influence Forster through their friendliness, generosity, and their right of revenge. In terms of textual quantity, Forster’s sympathetic validation of the Maori’s cannibalism preponderantly outweighs his rational definition of cannibalism as a sign of the underdevelopment of the New Zealanders. His justification for the islanders reveals the impact of the South Pacific on his sentiment and his intellect. On the island of Tanna, Forster once again demonstrates his emotional identification with the islanders and critiques the violence of the European travelers—­and this time, the renowned Captain Cook.

Visit to Tanna: Violence, Self-​Preservation, and the Love for Peace Cook’s visit to Tanna, a part of today’s archipelago nation Vanuatu, exemplifies violent fights for material self-​preservation by both the islanders and the travelers. The armed islanders refused to provide the travelers with food supplies and denied them access to the island. Desperately depending on the islands for fresh water and food, Cook, after failing to dock the ship peacefully, enforced the landing with guns and cannons.69 Cook did not aim the weapons at the islanders, however, as he did not intend to hurt them. Rather, he meant to impress them with the superiority of European weaponry so as to instill fear and gain respect from them. More importantly, the Tannese refusal of Cook’s landing potentially reduced the chances of the travelers’ survival and endangered their self-​preservation on the vast ocean. Cook’s violence, on the one hand, is a coerced reaction to the islanders’ denial and provocation (one islander showed his backside and clapped on it); on the other hand, it has a symbolic function of establishing authority and generating a new order at Tanna.70 Forster oscillates between his understanding for Cook and his empathy with the islanders’ self-​defense. Since the islanders’ denial of access also

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endangered Forster’s own existence, he considers them vindictive, mistrustful, and not highly civilized.71 Forster first explains the islanders’ distrustful and violent behaviors by pointing to the universal principle of self-​preservation because the islanders need to first ensure their own survival.72 Furthermore, Forster attributes their distrustful nature to the lack of communication with honest and peaceful people. He is convinced that the encounter with the more “civilized” Europeans will promote their love for peace and more refined manners among the Tannese.73 Foster also gradually discovers that one cannot completely repudiate the fundamental human goodness among the Tannese. When Cook demanded that the islanders put down their weapons and stayed clear off the shore, Forster comments that the islanders may deem this command from a foreigner ridiculous (lächerlich) and iniquitous (unbillig) in their home. Forster adopts the perspective of the Tannese and legitimizes their protection of land and freedom. Forster’s understanding of freedom reminds us again of his reading of Jean-​Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1754). Rousseau writes: While a trained horse suffers patiently even the whip and spur, savage man will not bend his neck to the yoke which civilized man wears without a murmur; he prefers the most turbulent freedom to the most tranquil subjection. We must not, therefore, look to the degradation of enslaved peoples as a basis for judging man’s natural disposition for or against servitude, but look rather to the prodigious achievements of all free peoples who have striven to protect themselves from oppression.74

Forster’s comments on the violent encounter between the travelers and the islanders correspond to Rousseau’s praise of the “savage’s” pursuit of freedom. Over the course of his stay, the homicide of a Tannese by a marine marked the turning point of Forster’s judgment over the islanders. He recognizes the good nature of the Tannese in terms of not only general humanity but also bloody practice. After the enforced landing, Cook claimed an area for themselves and let the soldiers guard it. When an islander who was not aware of this and did not know about the travelers’ violently enforced landing wanted to enter the area as he was used to, the British guards stopped him. When he tried to enter again and was harshly pushed back, he pulled his arrow and targeted it at the guard. Before he could launch his arrow, he was shot dead by the soldier.75 Forster’s narrative copiously evinces his solidarity with the Tannese and reflects his passionate indictment of the injustice in this event. Although Cook intended to punish the soldier for his imprudence, the officer in charge admitted that he did not impart the captain’s order not to shoot at the islanders; instead he exhorted his soldiers to fire at the slightest opportunity.

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The soldier was hence not punished; nor was the officer. An ironic footnote only in the German version of Forster’s travel account informs us that the reason for Cook’s tolerance may lie in the fact that this officer had important relatives in the British government.76 Strongly disquieted by the fear and the sorrowful mourning of the locals, Forster reflects on the good nature of the Tannese and comments that they did not take revenge on him while he was highly vulnerable during a botanizing trip.77 Through this brutal murder the travelers had now ruined all the refined and civilized impressions they had made. They arrived under the veil of friendship but departed after a crime. The violence used by the European travelers on Tanna was not the first encounter of this kind. Even on peaceful and friendly Tahiti, a soldier killed a Tahitian on Cook’s first voyage. Again, Forster empathizes with the Tahitians and assumes that the Europeans must have unintentionally given them a reason for their attack. Even if this were not the case, Forster argues, the Tahitians are still justified for their deeds according to the law of self-​ preservation and their right of freedom, an argument similar to the violent encounter on Tanna.78 Forster considers generous tolerance and the love for peace the best way to avoid violence because, after all, the Europeans also need to survive on their lengthy journey around the world. Forster comments that it is truly comforting for him to see that the Tannese, after experiencing the violent effects of European weapons and understanding that the travelers only needed fresh provisions, treated the travelers with generosity and trust. This is not only Forster’s passionate plea to the Tannese to become more hospitable and open-​minded, but also a vision of a peaceful communication and commerce of goods and knowledge between Europe and Oceania. Jonathan Lamb contends that the law of self-​preservation acts as the fundamental guideline for both the travelers and the islanders during the scientific circumnavigations. The need of the survival and security of the self actually hinders a real communication between the two parties and merely redoubles ignorance and misunderstanding.79 On Tanna, however, the law of self-​preservation played the decisive role for Forster’s justification of and sympathy for both the travelers and the islanders. Furthermore, the law of self-​preservation necessarily brings both parties into mis/communication and provides Forster the opportunity to go beyond the limits of his culture and take sides with the Tannese through universal emotional bonds. These three key events during Forster’s journey in the South Pacific—­the desertion on Tahiti, the cannibalism in New Zealand, and the violence on Tanna—­offer a grammar of the transactions between South Pacific impact and European ideology. Harry Liebersohn rightly observes: “At times an enthusiast for European civilization and at times its critic, Forster in some passages left his shifting moods side by side, unreconciled.”80 As a matter of fact, this seeming contradiction is inextricably entangled with the penetration of the epistemic alterity of Oceania into the European discourse of anthropology and natural history in the eighteenth century. Forster’s empathy, provoked by

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various encounters with the South Pacific Islanders, complicates the unidirectional application of Enlightenment ideology of civilization and historical teleology. Hence the contact zone is, on the one hand, as Pratt defines it, controlled by the imperial gaze but, on the other hand, deeply entrenched by the real-​world significance of non-​European cultures.81 Forster’s account is less a distortion of Pacific history than a pivotal documentation of cultural transgression around 1800. Let me conclude this chapter with Forster’s comment on his first night on Tahiti: “This evening was therefore as completely dedicated to mirth and pleasure, as if we had lain at Spithead instead of O-​ Taheitee.”82 In the end, Oceania is inscribed so profoundly into Forster’s and other travelers’ cultural identity that it even confounds their idea of home. A similar but more intense transcultural experience also happened to Chamisso forty years later when he went on board a Russian expedition to the South Pacific in 1817.

Chapter 2

Adelbert von Chamisso’s Friendship Genre, Kadu, and Relations

In Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (Peter Schlemihl’s Miraculous Story, 1813), a novella by Adelbert von Chamisso (1781–­1838), the protagonist Peter Schlemihl journeys the globe with a pair of seven-​league boots. While he is able to explore Europe, Asia, and America, Peter deeply regrets that he has not visited Oceania and thus cannot complete his study of the world’s flora, fauna, and geography. But this desire of Chamisso, reflected in the fictional character, was fulfilled a few years later: in 1817 Chamisso traveled as the naturalist on board the Russian expedition ship Rurik to the South Pacific. A French aristocrat, Chamisso fled the French Revolution as a child with his family to Berlin and became a prominent figure in German literature with his poetry and his novella Peter Schlemihl. After his journey around the world, Oceania would no longer remain a literary imagination in a fictional world. Rather, Oceania—­the ocean and its islanders would forever change Chamisso and become part of him. In particular, the islander Kadu played an essential role in the process of Chamisso’s transformation and transculturation. This chapter focuses on the friendship between Kadu and Chamisso as described in Chamisso’s travel memoir Reise um die Welt (A Voyage around the World, 1835) in order to show the islanders’ impact on Chamisso and his writing. To put it more radically, Chamisso’s travel memoir is not fully controlled by the author but is cowritten by the islanders. Chamisso’s experience in the Pacific is more intense and intimate than Forster’s observations. On February 23, 1817, at Aur Atoll of the Ratak Chain, Chamisso met the islander Kadu and was genuinely impressed. As soon as the travelers cast anchor, the islanders came on board, and Kadu emerged as the most remarkable person: “He was not regularly tattooed like the Radackers, but wore indistinct figures of fish and birds, singly and in rows, round the knee, on the arms and on the shoulders. He was of a more compact make, and of a lighter colour, and had more curly hair than they.”1 The Rurik expedition’s painter, Louis Choris, only partially registers Chamisso’s description in his painting (fig. 2). Indeed, the difference of Kadu’s tattoo reveals that he, like the

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Figure 2. Image of Kadu, from Louis Choris, Voyage pittoresque autour du monde . . . (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1822), xvii.

European travelers, was a foreigner in Radak as well. Kadu originated from the Caroline Islands in the western part of Micronesia and had had many more contacts with the seafaring Europeans than the Marshall Islanders had. Kadu was an intellectually stimulating person. He immediately declared his intention to stay on board the Rurik and soon gained respect and friendship from Chamisso and other crew members. Kadu spent almost nine months on board and traveled to Alaska and Hawaii. In the Marshall Islands, he skillfully connected the European travelers with the other islanders and proved a bona fide cultural translator beyond the binary of native and stranger. Chamisso respectfully calls Kadu a “scientific authority” in his memoir and praises Kadu’s intellectual capacity highly. He also humbly acknowledges that he learned from Kadu. Chamisso unreservedly links his life with Kadu’s and celebrates his deep attachments to the islanders and their culture in Oceania. Chamisso calls his journey to the Marshall Islands the dearest memories of his life: “Be indulgent, friends, if I repeat myself sometimes; here I am speaking of my love.”2 In the islanders, Chamisso finds “pure, uncorrupted customs, charm, grace and the gracious bloom of modesty.”3 Hence his memory of Kadu and that part of the world warms his heart and dampens his eyes.4 This memory also has a long-​lasting effect on Chamisso’s later life in Berlin.

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He once dressed like an islander and called on Madame Henriette Herz as an “Indian from the South Sea Islands.”5 Kadu and Oceania profoundly influenced Chamisso and transformed the boundaries between Europe and Oceania, between the local and the global. According to Bruno Latour’s actor-​ network theory, the global and the local are profoundly intertwined: “No place dominates enough to be global and no place is self-​contained enough to be local.”6 Latour aims to “do away with the micro/macro distinction” because this distinction has “been very strongly linked to the superiority of the West—­including, of course, its shame at being so overpowering and so hegemonic.”7 Hence I conceive of Kadu and Chamisso as equal actors in a globally and locally entangled network of knowledge in the long eighteenth century. This network, according to Latour, is “a concept, not a thing out there.” It is not “what is represented in the text, but what readies the text to take the relay of actors as mediators.”8 I read Chamisso’s travel writings from the perspectives of Kadu as mediator and of his impact on Chamisso. Critics have endeavored to interpret early encounters between the islanders and the Europeans registered in European travel writings from different angles. Against the backdrop of European political dynamics, Harry Liebersohn explains Chamisso’s sympathy with the values and status of Hawaii nobility as his nostalgia for the declining European aristocracy after the French Revolution. Because of his frustration with the personal and political realities in Europe after 1789, Liebersohn argues, Chamisso, a French aristocrat in German exile, fantasized about consoling nobilities outside Europe.9 Jonathan Lamb, as mentioned in chapter 1, points out the uncertainties and dangers during Cook’s expeditions and thus the fragility and the labile condition of the seamen’s selfhood. Lamb insists on the necessity and the anxiety of self-​preservation on both sides of Pacific encounters.10 Liebersohn and Lamb read the encounters predominantly from the perspective of the European travelers’ home background and their seafaring situations on board the expedition ships. Yet the beach at which the encounters took place is not merely a site in which projections happen and selfhood is preserved but also a liminal space, as Greg Dening beautifully demonstrates—­a space in which crossings occur, affiliations and relations develop. Dening’s inspiring and meditative Beach Crossings narrates Oceania’s power of change on the lives of three European and American beachcombers, “those who left their ships and ‘went native,’ those who crossed beaches” in the Marquesas in the late 1790s.11 Dening’s reflective ethnohistory also poetically discusses how his own intellectual interest is deeply entwined with the stories he tells of the three beachcombers, how his personal experiences are also beach crossings metaphorically comparable to the adventures of the beachcombers. Beach crossing also functions as a leading metaphor for my reading of Chamisso and Kadu. Although Dening mentions in passing individual islanders such as Tupaia and Patu, I think they deserve more focused attention, especially as a constitutive voice in European travel writings.

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Nicholas Thomas, in his Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire, points out that colonial histories rightly highlight the resistance of the Pacific Islanders and do not merely see them as victims of European colonialism, yet they reify the islanders in local communities “that are bounded, firmly situated in place and culturally coherent.” Islanders “inhabit particular places, they are the ‘local’ opponents, translators, or recipients of ‘global’ forces, meanings and commodities, emanating largely from the West.”12 Thomas thus endeavors to portray islanders as cosmopolitans—­they not only traveled in the Pacific, but some of them also voyaged with Cook and George Vancouver around the world and visited China and European countries. Thomas’s richly informed study refuses the myth of the indigenous idiosyncrasies of immobility and innocence. He sets the islanders at the same level as the European travelers and thus qualifies them for all the characterizations associated with cosmopolitanism and its philosophical and cultural eminence in its European context. However, Thomas does not further elaborate the notion of cosmopolitan and uses it in its common sense. If the islanders are not confined to their “own” world and are as adventurous and curious as the Europeans in contacts and interactions, then what influence do they have, and what do they contribute to eighteenth-​century cross-​cultural encounters with the Europeans? Reading Chamisso’s Reise um die Welt, I aim to show, with a slightly different approach from Dening’s and Thomas’s, that the islanders not only share similar human and cultural qualities with the Europeans as cosmopolitans but have also entered German and European discourses and coconstituted German transcultural consciousness around 1800. Chamisso’s account is not merely a document solely controlled and created by the author but also, to a certain extent, a travel narrative cowritten by Kadu and other islanders. Chamisso’s recognition of Kadu’s intellectual capacity and his confession of his friendship with the islanders stand out remarkably among his European contemporaries. His emotional dedication to Kadu is much more intense and intimate than Georg Forster’s experience. Forster more generally admires the Tahitian easygoing lifestyle but contrasts them to European Enlightenment values. Forster dismisses the Tahitians as people on a lower stage in the history of humanity, as discussed in the previous chapter. Chamisso’s acknowledgment of Kadu as a scientific authority, however, recognizes Kadu’s realistic and personal importance for the European Enlightenment project in its pursuit of knowledge and does not merely categorize him as a happy innocent prehistoric residue, as is in the accounts of Forster, Joseph Banks, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, or the Rurik’s captain, Otto von Kotzebue. Chamisso values the islanders and Europeans equally and almost transcends the boundaries set by the ideas of progress and cultural and historical hierarchy. Hence Kadu also has a special status among the islanders in European travel accounts such as Ahutoru, Mai, Tupaia, or Patu.13 Kadu is not treated as an exotic curiosity in Europe like Ahutoru and Mai, or as an “ignorant and impolite Indian” whom Cook

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had to prevent from giving “wrong” instructions, like the high priest Tupaia; nor is he treated as a disciple who must learn Christianity in Boston and then spread “civilization” in the South Seas like Patu. Kadu is celebrated as an extraordinary person with courage, intelligence, and intercultural competence. In his essay on Tupaia’s drawings, Glyndwr Williams points out that “the uncertainty about Tupaia’s status on the Endeavour is a reminder of how much is lacking in our knowledge about shipboard relationships on the discovery vessels.”14 Kadu’s case casts a glance into this lesser-​known terrain. Moreover, as Latour’s actor-​network theory encourages me to argue, mutuality and relationality in beach crossings provide meaningful perspectives in addition to imperial domination and control for the understanding of European-​Pacific encounters in the long eighteenth century. The case of Chamisso and Kadu urges us, apart from the critique of Eurocentrism in transcultural encounters, to diligently unearth non-​ European impact on European discourse in a shared knowledge network and to give more visibility to the islanders’ contributions. Elizabeth Povinelli shows in The Cunning of Recognition Australia’s mean-​spirited recognition of Aboriginal rights in its alleged politics of multiculturalism. With an awareness of such discussions on multiculturalism and its discontent, I don’t mean to naively suggest a harmless cross-​cultural friendship between Chamisso and Kadu.15 Rather, precisely because of the precariousness or even the impossibility of achieving a perfect justice in legal and political practice as well as in scholarly interpretation, I venture to emphasize the indigenous component within the German and European context to demonstrate a better balance of entanglement and mutuality. In the ensuing pages, I will first point out how the Pacific induces generic instability in Chamisso’s Reise um die Welt. After discussing the form, I will then delve into the content of Chamisso’s travel writings and focus on Kadu and his impact. Chamisso’s desire to get tattooed in Ratak and his critique of Christian missions in the Pacific, in the end, demonstrate his full embrace of Oceanic culture, body and soul.

Instability of Genres: Travelogue and Autobiography In Chamisso’s official travel report as the naturalist, Bemerkungen und Ansichten auf einer Entdeckungsreise (Remarks and Opinions of the Naturalist of the Expedition, 1821), Kadu is recognized as one of the new sources (neue Quellen) for geographical, linguistic, cultural, and climatic knowledge of the Pacific Islands. Chamisso, however, is economical here with cultural, political, and emotional comments on the events he experienced during the three-​year journey. The fact-​oriented style of the scientist’s report does not allow much room for Chamisso to describe Kadu’s character and articulate his personal attachment to Kadu and the Pacific. Fourteen years later,

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however, in his travel-​journal-​styled memoir Reise um die Welt, Chamisso lets his emotions flow and ardently commemorates his friendship with Kadu and other islanders: After what I said in my “Notes and Opinions” [or Remarks and Opinions, depending on the translation] there remains to be told here only the story of our appearance between those reefs and the report of how we made the acquaintance of that whom I learned to love above all the other sons of the earth. . . . My friend Kadu, who, a stranger on those islands, joined our company, one of the finest characters I have met in my life, one of the people I have loved most, later became my teacher about Radak and the Caroline Islands. In my essay “On Our Knowledge of the First Province of the Great Ocean” I have had occasion to mention him as a scientific authority, and I have there attempted to put together his picture and his story from the disparate features of our life together.16

Chamisso’s emphatic confession of friendship reminds me of Vanessa Smith’s study of the friendship cult in eighteenth-​century Tahiti. Smith discusses the Tahitian word tayo or taio, understood as “friend” by British travelers, and the diplomatic strategies on both sides of the beach reflected through this word. The beach is the locus of the claim of friendship as well as mutual obligations: the Europeans secured allies and provisions, whereas the Tahitians bound the Europeans in an exchange relationship and effectively reduced the chances that the Europeans would use their destructive weapons. Smith also shows that, while the rising value of commerce discerned sincerity from calculated friendship, the intense friendly interactions between the Bounty’s crew members and their hosts still disentangled the marine order on board and eventually led to the infamous mutiny.17 In Chamisso’s case, the friendship with the islanders induces him to divert from the genre of scientific travel writing, established by Forster, to a mixed genre of autobiography and travelogue. Though it bears the same title as Forster’s travelogue published six decades earlier, Chamisso’s Reise um die Welt turns away from Forster’s rigorous quest for truth through untainted glasses. While Chamisso the scientist follows Forster’s Enlightenment call to convey true facts and avoid subjective prejudices in his Bemerkungen und Ansichten, Chamisso the poet further develops the sentimentalist side of Forster and consciously celebrates his subjective manner in Reise um die Welt. Keeping the journal-​style structure of documenting dates and places that resembles Forster’s work, Chamisso starts his memoir with an invitation to participation: “Anyone who wishes to accompany me sympathetically on this great journey must first find out who I am, how fate played with me, and how it transpired that I boarded the Rurik as a titular scholar.”18 Instead of being impersonal to gain distance and

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to secure objectivity, Chamisso deliberately integrates subjective perspectives with his experience of travel and beach crossing. Chamisso’s decision corresponds to Dening’s way of writing in Beach Crossings. Dening argues: “A storyteller is always in the story, heart, mind and soul. Better to be occasionally seen than to hide. . . . There have been moments of crisis and moments of reflection in my life when I have felt that I have seen the plot in this complex business of writing cross-​cultural history. I tell of those moments in story.”19 Chamisso asks his readers, to whom he now imparts a major part of his life, to be his friends, not strangers. “Friend” in Chamisso’s vocabulary gestures and invites beach crossings of times, cultures, and self. Mixing travelogue with autobiography, in Reise um die Welt Chamisso describes his interactions with the Pacific Islanders in greater detail, articulates his strong emotional attachment to them, and airs a critical tone toward European Christian mission—­everything he was not able to do in Bemerkungen und Ansichten. Whereas Forster’s work demonstrates the impact of Oceania on his sentiment through his ambiguous attitudes toward the English sailor’s mutiny, the impact of Oceania induces the generic instability in Chamisso’s Reise um die Welt. Kadu and his fellow islanders are the force that propels Chamisso to turn away from the scientific style of travel writing and articulate his personal identification with the islanders in a blended form. This generic blurring in Chamisso’s work resonates with Claude Lévi-​ Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques. Clifford Geertz points out that Tristes Tropiques bears a generic instability between autobiography, travelogue, theoretical treatise, ethnography, and literature. This blurring of genres, Geertz claims, is more than a matter of odd sports and occasional curiosities, or of the admitted fact that the innovative is, by definition, hard to categorize. It is a phenomenon general enough and distinctive enough to suggest that what we are seeing is not just another redrawing of the cultural map—­the moving of a few disputed borders, the marking of some more picturesque mountain lakes—­but an alteration of the principles of mapping. Something is happening to the way we think about the way we think.20

Geertz also points out that generic mixture reveals a deeper epistemological disquiet beneath the formalistic surface. The change of form discloses a need to recognize something new, something we try to animate and give a form to in writing. Following this logic, Reise um die Welt’s generic instability discloses the instability of Chamisso’s cultural identity. The diverse generic coexistence of autobiography, ethnography, literature, and travel journal in Chamisso’s work reflects the Oceanic impact that compels Chamisso to turn away from the genre of scientific travel writing and search for a more adequate form to best represent his emotional relation with the islanders.

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In Bemerkungen und Ansichten, Chamisso documents the lyric of two common songs of the Radackians. In the printed book, Chamisso’s German translations of the songs are on the right side of the original transcriptions. He also tells us the number of repetitions of each song. This rather technical style disappeared in Reise um die Welt. Chamisso narrates here that the islanders used their names to make songs. Registering the song created with his name, Chamisso integrates the original transcription with the German translation and thus creates a new poem: Aé ni gagit, ni mogit, Totian Chamisso. Den geschälten Kokos trinkt, Kokos isst, Chamisso.21

This song’s simple lyric, meaning “Chamisso drinks and eats shelled coconuts,” vividly documents Chamisso’s presence in the Pacific and his friendship with the islanders. In this blended form combining both the indigenous language and German, Chamisso not only translates the song into German but also creates a new poem with a tail rhyme that transcends linguistic boundaries. The German translation, unlike those in Bemerkungen und Ansichten, is smoothly integrated with the original transcription. The four lines of the poem combine an ethnographic documentation, linguistic translation, and literary creation. The linguistic and stylistic hybridity indicates Chamisso’s beach crossings in the Marshall Islands in his thinking and writing. This simple poem epitomizes Reise um die Welt, which indiscernibly weaves together Chamisso’s life story with those of Kadu and other islanders. Polynesian episteme invokes the instability of knowledge, genre, and cultural identity. Kadu and other islanders have forcefully transformed Chamisso’s discursive relationship with writing in German and his cultural relationship with Europe.

The Russian Expedition’s German Background Similar to Forster, who moved from Germany to England at a very early age, Chamisso was exiled as an eleven-​year-​old boy: he and his aristocratic family fled from France to Germany to escape the French Revolution and its consequences. Unlike Forster, who returned to Germany for his adult career and published his travelogue in both English and German, Chamisso stayed in Berlin and adopted German as his primary language for his literary creations and scientific writings. Chamisso served as naturalist on board the Russian expedition from 1815 to 1818. This voyage around the world, financed by the Russian nobleman, then minister of commerce, Nikolai Petrovich Rumiantsev and commanded by Otto von Kotzebue, ventured to explore a nautical passage between

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northern Europe via the Arctic Ocean, the Bering Strait, and North America while further researching the South Pacific for scientific and geographical purposes. The Russian brig Rurik sailed from Denmark via England, Tenerife, Brazil, and Chile to the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Bering Strait, and Alaska. In order to return to the North during summer, the travelers went down to California and Hawaii and “discovered” the Ratak Chain of the Marshall Islands for the first time in documented European maritime history. Here they took the islander Kadu on board and traveled up again to Alaska, then down to Hawaii and Ratak, where Kadu left the expedition. The Rurik then headed home via Guam, Manila, and the Cape of Good Hope, and arrived in England in 1818 at the end of its three-​year journey. The sought-​after Northwest or Northeast Passage (depending on one’s point of view), explored in vain by other European maritime expeditions such as the ones led by Cook and Vancouver, promised a shorter, faster, and probably safer way of traveling and trading between Europe and America’s west coast, which was traditionally undertaken around the dangerous southern tip of South America. Since the early eighteenth century, Russia had been actively involved in the highly profitable sea otter fur trade in Russian America (now Alaska). The tsar’s empire chartered the Russian American Company in 1799 to centralize Russian activities in North America and the Pacific. The company’s shareholders were high government officials and the tsar himself. Although the Russian business benefited from their colonial control of the local Aleutians in comparison to British, Spanish, and American competitors, the Russians were banned from Canton in southern China, the most lucrative fur market in the world. They had to use the strenuous inland path to northern China, via Siberia, instead of the faster sea route to the south. Facing European competitions and indigenous resistance, the Russian American Company started its southward expansion into the Pacific and established armed forts in California and Hawaii.22 Hence the pursuit of an arctic passage between North America, Asia, and Europe and more detailed knowledge about the Pacific for future trading posts were of great importance for Russia’s economic welfare. Although this expedition served Imperial Russia’s interest, several prominent travelers on board in addition to Chamisso had German backgrounds. The commander of the ship, Otto von Kotzebue, was the second son of August von Kotzebue, the popular German dramatist who served the Russian court for decades. The painter Ludwig (aka Louis) Choris and the ship’s doctor, Johann Friedrich Eschscholz, were both Russian Germans. This German-​Russian connection on the Rurik, however, was not accidental. Germans and the German language occupied a special place in Russia and the Baltic region around 1800. Some Russian tsars married German princesses: for example, Catherine the Great was probably the most prominent German princess in the Russian royal family. German emigrants went to Russia and the Baltic as farmers, landlords, and skilled artisans. Upper-​class Germans

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accepted official positions in the Russian government and also served in the army and navy. To widely varying degrees, the Germans adopted Russian language and culture but also diligently further cultivated their German cultural and linguistic heritage.23 Despite the Russian sponsorship, Kotzebue, Chamisso, and Eschscholz published their official travel reports in German in 1821 with the detailed title A Voyage of Discovery into the South Sea and Beering’s Straits, for the purpose of exploring a north-​east passage, undertaken in the years 1815–­ 1818, at the expense of His Highness  .  .  . Count Romanzoff, in the ship Rurick, under the command of the lieutenant in the Russian imperial navy, Otto von Kotzebue.24 Kotzebue’s journal and Chamisso’s Remarks and Opinions are the two major parts of this publication. Chamisso, whose first language was French, stresses in the foreword to Bemerkungen und Ansichten that “he farther recognizes only the German text: for the various foreign subjects of which he had to treat have made him too sensible how difficult it is, when aiming at brevity to avoid obscurity, for him to answer for translations of which he cannot judge.”25 Clearly he wants the European republic of letters to know that he does not take responsibility for the English or French translations of his German text. However, Chamisso’s conscious linguistic identification with German does not contradict his multifaceted cultural and linguistic background. Growing up in Berlin, Chamisso adopted German as the language of his scientific treatises as well as literary works. He chose to use German to communicate with the European republic of letters. At the same time, he was also genuinely interested in linguistic diversity and documents Oceanic languages in Bemerkungen und Ansichten. His work contributes to the enrichment and diversification of the German discourse and the German transcultural consciousness. Chamisso’s text is composed in German, but it contains impulses from non-​European cultures. Chamisso is the author of his travel writings, yet he is not in full control of his representations of others. Rather, his texts function as an environment in which Oceanic voices also strive to convey knowledge and share the discursive field simultaneously. Kadu’s voice, besides Chamisso’s, is among the strongest in this context. The case of Kadu offers us an opportunity to recognize the Oceanic share of knowledge production in the German discourse.

Kadu and Relationality Both on board the Rurik and in the islands of the Ratak Chain, Kadu travels, converses, learns, adapts, and teaches. Through these actions of receiving, transmitting, and generating knowledge between Kadu and Chamisso, Kadu connects the Europeans to the islanders, introduces them to each other’s cultures, and brings them together. If we borrow Latour again, “an actor-​network

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is what is made to act by a large star-​shaped web of mediators flowing in and out of it. It is made to exist by its many ties: attachments are first, actors are second.”26 Then Kadu and Chamisso are tied in a network in which they are simultaneously mediators, attachments, and actors. When Kadu met the Rurik expedition team, he immediately expressed his desire to travel with them. Chamisso recounts that, although the European travelers first had difficulties understanding Kadu’s language, Kadu was finally able to communicate his intention and receive permission from the captain. While many of Kadu’s fellow islanders did not share his passion for travel and even tried to dissuade him from his plan, Kadu was not the only islander who expressed the will to travel. For example, the island’s chief, Eap, was not allowed to journey on board the Rurik due to his advanced age. Islanders, as Chamisso recognizes, had been traveling in the Pacific Ocean between islands of remote distance for over four thousand years, and they traveled as far as the greatest distance across the Atlantic. From this perspective, Kadu is not a native who merely receives the visit by the European travelers. Rather, Kadu is a traveler par excellence. During the nine months Kadu spent on board the Rurik, he not only was a representative of the islanders among the Europeans but also gradually became part of the expedition. Chamisso comments: “Kadu had feeling, sense, and wit; the more we became acquainted with him, the more partial we were to him.”27 Kadu tried to learn the languages of the travelers, while others also made an effort to learn Kadu’s language. Over time the Rurik expedition had transformed from a Russian and European mission to a transcultural enterprise. In Chamisso’s Bemerkungen und Ansichten, Kadu significantly contributes to the book chapter on the vocabulary of Chamori—­ the dialect spoken on the islands Eap, Ulea, and Radak. Chamisso carefully records that they heard words like medid, irud, dilé; Kadu, however, pronounced these mesid, irus, and thilé. Hence they were constantly uncertain about d, th, and s and about ch, k, and g. Chamisso’s vocabulary list is probably the first Chamori-​German dictionary coconstructed by him and Kadu. Kadu is also portrayed as a person who swiftly learns and adapts. He first treated the sailors as slaves, imitated how the captain walked, and once ordered a sailor to bring him a glass of water. Yet after a short time, Chamisso comments, Kadu “reflected, and studied our relations, and the spirit of our manners, to which he soon learnt to conform, and to adopt our behavior at table, as well as in general.”28 Noticing the differences between him and the Europeans, Kadu also gave up some of his own cultural customs. For example, according to the culture of the islanders, Kadu once adjured the wind in favor of the Rurik. After the European travelers laughed at his action and made it clear they considered it a superstition according to European Enlightenment standards, Kadu, for better or for worse, immediately stopped his adjuration and only occasionally did it for the amusement of others. Kadu’s ability to adapt to the new situation on board the Rurik amazingly

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demonstrates his mental flexibility and cultural sensitivity, which in many respects triumph over the European travelers’ ignorance. Both Chamisso and Kadu share the idea of mutual benefits. Besides botanizing for new species in service of the scientific project of natural history, Chamisso the naturalist also sees his task and duty in enriching food supplies for the islanders by planting vegetable and fruit gardens. Indeed, agriculture was regarded as advancement toward civilization in the European Enlightenment. In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith argues that, according to the natural course of things, the development of a growing society is first to move toward agriculture, then toward manufacturing, and finally toward foreign commerce. Smith, for example, comments that China, India, and ancient Egypt were nations with extraordinary agricultural achievement; but they lagged behind in the development toward foreign commerce.29 Smith’s historicist view of progress is directly connected to Herder’s geohistorical hierarchy, which we will discuss in chapter 4. Yet unlike Herder and Smith, Chamisso does not explicitly, or arrogantly, mention his gardening project as a mission to civilize the islanders. Rather, he modestly calls this task a philanthropic and altruistic activity. Chamisso’s rather personal rhetoric diverts the overconfident Eurocentric attitude toward a new dimension of transcultural friendship and mutual help. Chamisso’s autobiographic travel writing articulates his different approach to and understanding of his relationship with the islanders. When Kadu learns of Chamisso’s project, he also willingly and effectively participates. The idea of sharing and mutual benefits is not new to Kadu and his culture if we consider the islanders’ friendliness and their generosity in giving provisions to European travelers documented in numerous travelogues. On the island Unalashka in Alaska, Kadu intends to plant coconut trees to help the inhabitants of this seemingly destitute land. Noticing the impracticality of this idea and observing how Chamisso and others collect plants, animals, and seeds, Kadu begins to gather pieces of iron, broken glass, and grindstones for his fellow islanders, to whom he will return. Back at the Marshall Islands, on Otdia Atoll, Chamisso recounts that Kadu has become a “European-​styled” gardener. Kadu diligently participates in “planting, sowing, and managing the animals, and in explaining and instructing the natives in every thing necessary.”30 At the same time, Kadu is deeply attached to the islanders and thus transgresses the boundaries between them and the Europeans. Chamisso comments: Kadu, I say, from the moment he caught sight of and recognized the reefs of Otdia, belonging to the present and seizing it firmly, was a complete Radakian among the Radakians. He brought them presents, stories, fairy tales, joy and exulted with them in rapturous pleasure. But always in control of himself, as he was when action was involved, he was incessantly active and started a job while others still hesitated.

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He did this with all his heart in the way we desired. He was our right hand among the Radakians, and up to the last day he was one of us without reservation.31

Chamisso’s ascription of Kadu to “ours” positively affirms Kadu’s deep intellectual connection to him and the expedition. At the same time, Chamisso’s statement does not negate Kadu’s belonging to Oceania. Again, according to Latour, “subjects are no more autochthonous than face-​to-​face interactions.”32 Kadu is a border figure promising mutual understanding and benefits between the Pacific and Europe. Kadu not only learns from his journey and his European travel companions; he also teaches them valuable information about the Ratak Chain and the Caroline Islands. Kadu uses the songs he knows from different groups of islanders, among whom he has lived, as his reference to local geographic and cultural knowledge. Chamisso acknowledges the reliability of Kadu’s account: “With what we know from our own experience, we shall illustrate Kadu’s account, in whose accuracy we were confirmed in the last visit we paid our friends.”33 Kadu is named as one of the major sources for the nautical and geographical report about the South Pacific. The list of islands and atolls or popular sea routes that he provides significantly enriches European knowledge about the Pacific. Dening tells us that islanders call navigating “way-​finding” and that, according to Thomas Gladwin, the complex knowledge of seafaring “might be transmitted through generations and be systematized on principles different to the global navigation principles of the Europeans.”34 Similar to Chamisso’s admiration of the islanders’ long-​ distance voyages, Dening insists that the amazing way-​ finding tradition displays a continuity of Oceanic identity. Arguing against Andrew Sharp, who denies the islanders’ long-​distance voyaging ability, Dening documents the voyage from Tahiti to Hawaii by Nainoa, a young man of Hawaiian birth, in the canoe Hokule’a in 1980. Dening considers Nainoa’s action a celebration and the continuation of Oceanic way-​finding heritage. Dening points out that the islanders recognize themselves in the existence of canoes and that the canoe voyages “become signs of the living vitality of a long cultural past.”35 In contrast to Cook’s ignorance and arrogance toward Tupaia, Chamisso’s acknowledgment of Kadu’s expertise and the islanders’ voyaging ability is among the Europeans’ first fair recognitions of the islanders. Kadu’s knowledge and way-​finding abilities benefit the findings of the Rurik expedition. Through Kadu, Chamisso admits that he has gained a much better understanding when the travelers call on Ratak for the second time: I myself, after I had through my earnest endeavors convinced Kadu to talk about Radak, had collected, compared, and studied his statements and had only to compose the more abstract chapters on their

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beliefs and their language, etc. After I had become more familiar with the customs, mores, and conditions of this people, I now had a clearer view of them and could read and get an overview of what before I could only write down laboriously.36

The islanders, Chamisso observes, “were much closer to us now. Kadu’s connection with them and with us was the bond that united us. With respect to us our friend became for them what he was for us much more easily and rapidly. We were now one family.”37 Chamisso’s ardent claim about the kinship between the Europeans and the islanders effectively attaches these two separate groups and ideally transcends cultural, geographic, linguistic, and religious boundaries. This claim also testifies to his identification with Oceania in addition to the French, German, and Russian layers in his personal history and mental structure. Kadu undoubtedly impresses Chamisso with such intensity that Chamisso severely critiques the term “savage” (Wilde/r), which European travelers customarily used to refer to the islanders. While Forster, like Cook, Bougainville, and Otto von Kotzebue, still often unconsciously applies the word “savage” to the Pacific Islanders, Chamisso explicitly protests against it.38 He defines “savages” as people without fixed homes, agriculture, and herds. The Pacific Islanders, however, have coins, written languages, and all kinds of inventions—­hence they live in a highly complex civilization. Even though Chamisso does not entirely abandon the idea of historical progress and civilizational hierarchy, his critique still challenges and destabilizes the Eurocentric ideology and points toward a more balanced view. Once when Rurik was unable to reach the island Bigar, which other islanders often visited, because of weather conditions, Chamisso ironically comments that these islanders, “whom we call ‘savages,’ ” are obviously superior to the Europeans in maritime navigation maneuver.39 Chamisso also compares their ship Rurik to the boat Oa (fig. 3) in Ratak and enthusiastically acknowledges the advantages of the Oa: “And behold! I was the one who had to look on in surprise, as, while we laboriously tacked about and gained very little on the wind, they in their artfully constructed craft went straight ahead on the same route we went in a zig-​zag fashion, hurried on ahead of us, and dropped their sails to await us.”40 Kotzebue also recognized the advantages of this Oceanic boat and had a model made by the islanders. Similar to Dening’s celebration of the islanders’ seafaring abilities, Chamisso’s statement ridicules the “superiority” of European knowledge and praises the maritime prowess of the islanders. Chamisso endeavors to show that they are culturally equal or, in some respects, even superior to the Europeans; that the Europeans can truly learn from the islanders. Chamisso’s attitude is exceptional among his contemporaries: it was, and still is, common for Westerners to consider themselves superior non-​Westerners with regard to science and technology.41

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Figure 3. The Oa, from Louis Choris, Voyage pittoresque autour du monde . . . (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1822), xi.

In The Savage Mind Lévi-​Strauss compares indigenous magic with Western science. He argues that both “science and magic  .  .  . require the same sort of mental operations and they differ not much in kind as in the different types of phenomena to which they are applied.” He elaborates: “These are certainly not a function of different stages of development of the human mind but rather of two strategic levels at which nature is accessible to scientific enquiry: one roughly adapted to that of perception and the imagination: the other at a remove from it. It is as if the necessary connections which are the object of all science, Neolithic or modern, could be arrived at by two different routes, one very close to, and the other more remote from, sensible intuition.” Hence the “science of the concrete,” as Lévi-​Strauss calls magic or myth, is “no less scientific and its results no less genuine” than natural sciences of Western style.42 Lévi-​Strauss breaks the historicist boundaries set between “primitive” and “modern” societies in that he uses nomenclatures, such as science, that bear social and epistemological significance for his readers at home to describe and make sense of cultural phenomena in indigenous or nonindustrialized cultures. Yet in his theory, the “primitive” and the “modern” are two separate systems that run parallel to each other. In Chamisso’s description, the “primitive” and the “modern” are intertwined—­ the “primitive” even contributes to the development of “modern” technology. The islanders enrich European knowledge with their unique contributions. Chamisso, Kadu, and other islanders are apparently involved in the network of words, actions, emotions, and cultural perspectives.

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Obviously, in Chamisso’s travel writings, Kadu stands out as the most conspicuous figure. However, Kadu is not completely portrayed and controlled by the author Chamisso. Rather, he has actively shaped Chamisso’s writing. Latour argues that subjectivity, interiority, and identity are made to be an individual, an agency. “Every competence, deep down in the silence of your interiority, has first to come from the outside, to be slowly sunk in and deposited into some well-​constructed cellar whose doors have then to be carefully sealed. None of this is a given.”43 The dichotomy between the inside and the outside should be suspended. Chamisso and Kadu are both inside and outside Europe and Oceania. Chamisso’s travel writings are coconstructed by forces from European and Oceanic cultures alike. Subjectivity, represented by the idea of the author, is “not a property of human souls but of the gathering itself.”44 The anthropologist Marilyn Strathern’s theory of eating is revealing in this context. Strathern argues that eating, besides describing actions, also describes relations. Discussing eating both as a philosophical problem of subjectivity and as rituals in Amazona and Melanesia, Strathern comes to the insight that “eating points to how in their countless interactions people draw energy from one another, for it is as energy that their agency is implicated in the agency of others.”45 Following this logic, if eating connects one to another through borrowing and providing vitality and energy, then writing is the outcome and the output of eating, of absorbing and precipitating energy. Chamisso’s travel writing, from this perspective, is not merely his sole production; it also contains the “food” and energy he “ate” from Kadu and others during his voyage. Hence, in Chamisso’s portrayal, Kadu does not merely appear as Chamisso’s invention, but also articulates his own energy and cultural perspective through Chamisso’s texts. While one could argue that Chamisso might have exaggerated or even fantasized about the friendship between the Europeans and the islanders, there is no way for us now to verify this as a historical fact. Hence I deem it more meaningful to highlight the notion of relationality to understand Chamisso’s writing and Kadu’s contribution. Chamisso’s travel memory provides an environment in which Kadu and Chamisso have the opportunity to articulate the mutual influence and transformation. In other words, Kadu is not merely depicted by Chamisso; he has also coconstrued Chamisso’s prose. Kadu transforms Chamisso’s travel memoir into a document that expands the boundaries of cultural identity and illustrates the usefulness of the concept of relationality. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari deconstruct the idea of a book and its author and argue in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia that a book is an assemblage or a multiplicity of lines, strata, segmentarities, constructions, or selections, which cannot be attributed to a single author or a certain subject. Similarly, authors “have been aided, inspired, multiplied.” In terms of their coauthorship, Deleuze and Guattari make clear that it is no longer important to claim the authorship or the I: “We are no longer

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ourselves. Each will know his own.”46 From this perspective, again, Chamisso is not the single author of his travel writings—­they include the effort and influence of Kadu and other islanders. Chamisso’s travel narratives are documents that map and survey the Pacific and transgress the received boundaries between cultures. Indeed, Chamisso himself and other European travelers did not merely stay at the level of admiration. They went so far as to fully embrace and become Oceanic with their bodies and souls: Chamisso desires to get tattooed in Ratak and also severely critiques European Christian missions in the Pacific. In Strathern’s vocabulary, Chamisso decomposes and re-​creates himself through his experience in the Pacific.

Tattoos, Christian Missions, and Chamisso’s Ambiguity Kadu once tells Chamisso that six white men in an European boat landed at the island of Eap. They received friendly hospitality from the islanders, and one of them, Boëlé, was even adopted as a son by the chief. While five other men left after several months, Boëlé stayed on and was tattooed on the thighs.47 Obviously this European beachcomber has willingly adopted Oceanic culture to a great extent. According to Kadu, tattoos are related to religious convictions in Oceania and cannot be granted without divine signs.48 Hence the white man Boëlé’s tattoo visualizes, on the one hand, his full immersion and acceptance among the islanders and, on the other hand, his re-​creation of self in a new state of being. Chamisso truly desired to get tattooed. He reports: “At that time I would gladly have purchased that beautiful covering with all the pain that everyone knows it costs.”49 After trying several times, however, he was still denied by the islanders. Comparing tattoos in different regions, Chamisso values highly the tattoos in Ratak: “Tattooing . . . on Radak forms an artistic whole. It neither covers nor disfigures the body but rather blends in with it in graceful adornment and seems to enhance its beauty.”50 If the white man Boëlé’s choice to receive tattoos could be partly attributed to the pressure of adopting local culture to assimilate and survive, as numerous European beachcombers did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then Chamisso’s desire for tattoos and his regret about not obtaining it illustrate his immense longing to stay deeply and permanently attached to Ratak and its inhabitants.51 Chamisso’s admiration for tattoos also betrays the instability of his already multilayered European identity and demonstrates the impact of Oceania on both his body and his subjectivity. Chamisso’s admiration for the permanent body marker is accompanied by his critique of the European style of clothing. He highly praises the free bodily expressions of the islanders and comments that the Europeans force themselves into “hideous clothes,” that they “renounce the expression of body and arms; mime fades in importance among . . . North Europeans,” and

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they “hardly glance at the face of the speaker.”52 The Polynesian, however, in Chamisso’s account, “speaks with mouth, face, and arms and with the greatest economy of words and gestures, so that expeditiously the shortest and fastest expression is chosen, and a gesture takes the place of speech.”53 Chamisso also considers that European shoes and boots restrict the use of the feet to walking. In the Pacific, feet have different functions: a Polynesian “holds and directs with his feet the object on which he is working with his hands, the mat he is weaving, the cord he is twisting, the piece of wood on which he is attempting to bring forth fire through friction.”54 Chamisso depicts the Europeans as clumsy and slow in this respect. Chamisso’s appreciation of Oceanic idiosyncrasy and its differences from European cultures also induces his ambiguous position toward Christian missions which imposed European cultural customs on the islanders. On the one hand, Chamisso considers Christianity beneficial to improve social order and public morality in Oceania. On the other hand, Chamisso critiques the way Christianity is practiced and regrets that Oceanic cultures are vanishing under the pressure of Christian missionaries. These two elements constitute Chamisso’s melancholic ambiguity. First, Chamisso is similar to Forster. Toward the end of his travelogue, Forster comments that, after visiting different islands, every “unbiased” (unpartheyisch) person has to admit that Christianity, which has brought civilization and benefits to Europe, must be valuable in Oceania as well.55 Forster positively believes that Christianity will exert a corrective force on sexuality and morality among the islanders. In the same vein, Chamisso also confesses “that I am a man of progress and that the spirit of Christianity with all its blessings means more to me, I believe I demonstrated when I published my poem ‘A Day of Judgment on Huahine.’ ”56 The notions of history and progress in Chamisso’s account, certainly, have to do with a hierarchical development of humans, a history with a universal validity and global applicability, as Herder’s philosophy of history shows (see chapter 5). Though he is not without nostalgia and melancholy, Chamisso regards the development of history (Fortschritt der Geschichte) as necessary and irreversible. In this sense, like many European intellectuals, Chamisso is also under the compulsory sway of historicism and considers that European societies represent a higher stage of development than non-​European ones. Chamisso’s ballad poem “A Day of Judgment on Huahine” (“Ein Gerichtstag auf Huahine,” 1833) draws on the British missionary William Ellis’s report Polynesian Researches (1829). Ellis positively comments that European-​styled law, in the form of a printed legal code, exerts positive impact on Huahine, an island close to Tahiti, and creates “a new order of feeling and action in their civil relations.”57 Chamisso’s poem depicts how this legal code and the sense of justice, promulgated by the Christian mission, bridle and correct the arbitrary rule of local elites and empowers the commoners to speak up and gain unprecedented agency and equality in their society.

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Yet a decade after the publication of the ballad, Chamisso, in Reise um die Welt, assumes a deeply skeptical position toward Forster’s and his own optimistic view. Chamisso criticizes missionary work: Even in pious Ellis . . . I have failed to find two things: it seems to me he should have become an O-​Taheitian [Tahitian] himself before he undertook to alter O-​Taheitians, and he could have conceived and carried out his work in a more spiritual manner. . . . The quiet observation of the Sabbath and the forced attendance at church and school still do not amount to Christianity.58

Chamisso’s demand that the missionaries should first acquire an insider’s understanding of the islanders before they can make any reasonable changes discloses his empathy with Oceania and shows its impact on him. Chamisso’s opinion about adopting other cultural perspectives also corresponds to his efforts to become tattooed and his friendship with Kadu and other islanders. Only with such an attitude supported by actions, Chamisso contends, can a genuine exchange of values and knowledge between Europe and Oceania take place. Chamisso’s critique of the mission’s mannerism and its lack of spirituality renders visible his ambivalence between the arbitrary missionary practices he witnessed and the Christian values he believes to be universally applicable, such as justice and equality, as expressed in his ballad. Chamisso is also aware of the controversy that the Christian mission in the Pacific causes. He comments on the Christian mission at Hawaii: The missions that have become so controversial [eine Parteifrage] did not set foot on these islands until after my time, and I do not take any side in this matter. Look at the documents and don’t listen to those who without having seen for themselves raise their voices in the controversy. I myself have not read all of them. The native culture, which must perish in the wake of rising Christianity, I have seen and found worthy. That I mourn for it I am frank to confess. . . . But that as it may, in accordance with the progress of history, the main isles of the Great Ocean will sooner or later join the world of our way of life: already a newspaper is appearing in the native language and mostly written by natives in O-​Taheiti!59

Whereas Forster uses the German word unparteiisch (neutral) to claim his unbiased endorsement of European culture and Christianity in Oceania, Chamisso uses the word Partei (party), the nominal stem of unparteiisch, to call the mission a Parteifrage—­a thorny and controversial issue. Even though he declares that he does not take any side, Chamisso laments the demise of Oceanic cultures and emotionally indicts the inappropriateness of Christian mission. Chamisso’s melancholic critique differs from Forster’s wish that the

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Pacific should remain unknown to the Europeans forever so that the corrupt European ideas and behaviors will not affect the “innocent” islanders. While Forster criticizes that the Europeans destroy the pure innocence at Tahiti, he naively portrays the Pacific Islanders as childlike and places them on a lower stage of historical development. The Tahitians thus will benefit from the more “advanced” and benign side of European civilization such as Christianity. Chamisso, however, gives the islanders and their cultures an equal standing with the Europeans. Instead of mourning the loss of innocence at Tahiti, Chamisso deplores the loss of idiosyncrasy in Oceania and grieves the fact that the Europeans were forcing the world to become more uniform. Watching a Hurrahurra dance festival in Hawaii, Chamisso highly praises its artistic manifestation, compares it to European ballet, and exclaims: “We barbarians! These people so endowed with a sense of beauty we call ‘savages,’ and we allow the ballet to crowd the shy poet and the mourning mime out of the halls that we boast we have consecrated to art.”60 Chamisso further regrets that before real European artists could ever have a chance to visit the Pacific Islands and document the irreplaceable Oceanic culture, it is already too late: “In Tahiti and in O-​Waihi the missionary shirts already veil the beautiful bodies, all artistic activity is becoming mute, and the taboo of the Sabbath is sinking quietly and sadly upon the children of joy.”61 From this perspective, despite his own Christian conviction, Chamisso does not advocate the Europeanization of Oceania. He articulates a melancholic critique of European colonial and missionary practices and is torn between the ideology of history’s progress and the decline of Oceanic cultural idiosyncrasy since his visit in the early nineteenth century.

“My Friend Kadu Is Not an Anthropophagus” Epeli Hau‘ofa (1939–­ 2009), an eminent Oceanic anthropologist, writer, critic, and public intellectual, once points out that the islanders commonly believe that the small island states and territories in Oceania are too insignificant, isolated, and poorly endowed with resources to be independent from other wealthier nations in the global economy. Because of this self-​perception imposed by the West, Hau‘ofa argues, a real political autonomy, which was hoped for after the independence of a series of island states in the 1970s, did not materialize. According to Hau‘ofa, European colonizers set boundaries, separated territories, and made Oceania fragmented and isolated. Hence Hau‘ofa challenges this belittling view, a result of European colonialism and neocolonial economistic and geographic determinism, which imposes a continental perspective on the islands and overlooks the depth of Oceanic cultural history and the mobility of the islanders. Instead, Hau‘ofa draws our attention toward the myths, legends, and oral traditions of the islanders who do not conceive of their world in terms of the size of land; rather, “their

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universe comprised not only land surfaces but the surrounding ocean as far as they could traverse and exploit it, the underworld with its fire-​controlling and earth-​shaking denizens, and the heavens above with their hierarchies of powerful gods and named stars and constellations that people could count on to guide their ways across the seas. Their world was anything but tiny.”62 Hau‘ofa forcefully promotes the idea of the “Sea of Islands” to demonstrate the immensity and the diversity of Oceanic culture and space. He emphasizes the interconnections between islands and the navigating capacity of the islanders in the vast ocean in order to conjure a lost world of Oceania before European colonialism and to establish a new order thereafter. Hau‘ofa’s critique of the colonial and neocolonial conception of the Pacific and his commitment to changing the islanders’ mind-​set concur with Chamisso’s efforts in Reise um die Welt. Chamisso recounts that Maltebrun, the publisher of the expedition’s painter Louis Choris’s travel album, calls Kadu a cannibal and erroneously reports that the islanders in Eap consume alcoholic drinks the whole night. Chamisso emphatically claims that “my friend Kadu is not an anthropophagus” and rectifies Maltebrun’s report by stating that he only saw the islanders in Eap drink water. Chamisso’s lament underscores that the popularization of knowledge about the Pacific does not reflect the differentiated views of the intellectual travelers, such as Forster’s views on cannibalism in his travel writing. Rather, the publisher, Maltebrun, intentionally amplified the grotesque, indulgent, and horrific images of the Pacific to attract readers and achieve commercial success. Hence Chamisso foresees a dismal future of a well-​balanced European perception of Oceania based on such published misrepresentations: “Once something palpably tasteless is put down on paper, it rolls on incessantly from book to book, and it is the first thing the professional writers of such books reach for. As long as books are written, in each one that there is room for it, the nonsense will be found that the natives of the Marianas or the Ladrones first became acquainted with the use of fire through the Europeans.”63 Even though Chamisso’s critique debunks cannibalism, sexuality, and intoxication—­common themes of European fantasies about Oceania—­through Hau‘ofa’s critique we know that Chamisso’s fear still sadly became reality. Chamisso’s lament marks the vanishing scene of the South Sea fashion distinguished by curiosity, admiration, and recognition but also occasionally accompanied by arrogance and condescension in the writings of Cook, Bougainville, Lapérouse, Georg and Johann Reinhold Forster, Joseph Banks, and Denis Diderot. Chamisso’s lament foresees the heyday of European imperialism and contains little hope for observing the tenor of triumphant Eurocentric ideology of historicist progress in the nineteenth century. Reading Chamisso today, however, I have shown the discursive entanglement between Europe and Oceania as well as between the colonizers and the colonized. While Hau‘ofa endeavors to empower the islanders with a new identity, he also inadvertently excludes Europeans from this Oceanic coherence. Chamisso’s travel writings, however,

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not only bear testimony to Hau‘ofa’s twenty-​first-​century vision but also illuminate Oceanic connections to and influence on Europe. Oceania permeates Chamisso’s travel writings, induces the generic instability, gives Kadu voice and gestalt, and brings Chamisso to desire tattoos and critique Christian missions. In this sense, Chamisso’s German texts document Oceania’s immensity, vitality, and connectivity within and beyond the Pacific and gesture toward a future that is even greater than Hau‘ofa’s sea of islands. Through Forster’s and Chamisso’s traveler’s tales, Oceania also enters into other areas of German and European discourse. The fascinations with the ocean and insular existence find one of their most enduring articulations in German Robinsonades, particularly Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere (Robinson the Younger, 1779–­80).

Chapter 3

Krusoe Robinson’s Adventure Technology of the Self and Double Consciousness in Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere

The land was still at a great distance, and the storm was so violent, that everyone thought it impossible to reach the shore. However they rowed with the utmost diligence, and very luckily, the wind blew them toward land. Suddenly they saw a wave as high as a mountain rolling after their boat. At this dreadful sight, they all stiffened with terror and dropped their oars. Now the frightful moment approached them! The monstrous wave reached the boat, overset it—­and they all sunk into the raging sea!1

Yet no matter how gruesome the shipwreck is, Krusoe Robinson, the protagonist in Joachim Heinrich Campe’s novel Robinson der Jüngere (Robinson the Younger, 1779–­80), survives the storm and embarks on his adventure on a deserted island. Indeed, the shipwreck is the end and the beginning of Krusoe’s fortunate and unfortunate journeys in many adventure stories: not only in Daniel Defoe’s canonical novel The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner (1719) but also in numerous Robinson stories in German literature throughout the eighteenth century. Johann Christian Ludwig Haken, the editor of the five-​volume Bibliothek der Robinsone (Library of the Robinsons, 1805–­8), reports on the pervasive popularity of these adventure stories known as Robinsonades: There was a period in German literature, in which the never ending need for literary entertainment and the writers’ activities favored this type of story with such an ardent zeal, that later the sinful flood of the sentimental novels about knights, ghosts, and robbers threatened to overflow all embankments. Inspired by Defoe’s Robison Crusoe, numberless Robinsons rained down for several decades throughout the last century.2



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Apparently, Defoe’s fiction, a work with an enormous impact worldwide, plays an essential role in the conception of German Robinson stories. Even a new word was invented to name this narrative genre—­Robinsonade, a neologism first used by Johann Gottfried Schnabel in 1731. Wilhelm Retchir, the author of Der Sächsische Robinson (Robinson of Saxony, 1722), reports that in German the word “Robinson” has adopted a meaning like that of the French word avanturier: it describes a person who experiences all kinds of extraordinarily lucky and unlucky situations in his life.3 According to the statistics of Hermann Ullrich, by 1800, 9 Robinsonades were produced in English, 10 in Dutch, and 6 in French, but 128 in German.4 Some German Robinsonades have gone through numerous editions, and Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere is one of the most important examples. Soon after it was published, Campe’s Robinsonade for children’s education was translated into French, English, and other European languages. Remarkably, it is still in print today in the twenty-​first century. Robinsonades’ popularity is significant for the study of German transcultural discourse around 1800.5 In particular, the multilingual and multicultural sources of Robinsonades, by no means confined to Defoe’s work, demonstrate their transculturality and broaden the conventional interpretation of this genre as a national allegory of the German bourgeoisie, as some critics understand it to be. A detailed analysis of Campe’s novel, which will follow the introductory part of this chapter, renders visible the indispensable non-​European component in the making of the modern self, as defined by technology and a double consciousness consisting of both the German Krusoe Robinson and the islander Freitag.

Sources Almost always incorporating non-​European characters and settings, Robinsonades draw from broader sources than just Defoe’s novel. If we define Robinsonades as adventure stories on a deserted island, then Defoe’s novel is rather an unprecedented highlight in the generic history of Robinsonades than its origin. In the European literary tradition, utopia novels and picaresque novels (Schelmenroman) also prove close relatives to Robinsonades. August Kippenberg, in his study published in 1892, mentions a series of “forerunners” of Robinson Crusoe including Ibn Tufayl’s Arabic novel Hayy ibn Yaqzan in the twelfth century, the adventure of Gudrun in the Nibelungen saga, Wolf Helmhardt von Hohberg’s Der habsburgischer Ottobert (The Habsburg Ottobert, 1663), Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s Simplicius Simplicissimus (1668), Eberhard Werner Happel’s Der insulanische Mandorell (The Islander Mandorell, 1682), and the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk’s autobiography The Story of Alexander Selkirk (1713).6

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Kippenberg surmises that Defoe may well have known the Arabic novel by the philosopher Ibn Tufayl living in twelfth-​ century Islamic Spain. Indeed, Kippenberg’s nineteenth-​ century conjecture is echoed by today’s scholarship. In addition to the familiar British national sources of Robinson Crusoe, such as Selkirk’s memoir and William Dampier’s A New Voyage Round the World (1697), Srinivas Aravamudan argues that the striking parallels and their structural functionality inextricably connect Robinson Crusoe to Hayy ibn Yaqzān, even though it is difficult to directly prove that Defoe read the Arabic novel and used it for his own work. Yet the audacity to make such a connection effectively diverts the history of the novel from a national narrative tradition, promisingly connects British literature with a non-​European language, and leads us toward the concourse of world literature.7 Another source for German Robinsonades mentioned by Kippenberg—­ Eberhard Werner Happel’s Der insulanische Mandorell, which introduces geographical knowledge in the framework of Captain Mandorell’s survival story on an isolated island, also includes the first German translation of the French Abbé Pierre Daniel Huet’s Treatise on the Origin of Novels, or Romances (1670). Aravamudan considers Huet’s treatise “a transcultural reminder” that provides a “refreshing alternative” to “the nationalist paradigm of novel criticism.” Aravamudan claims that, from Huet, “we learn that the study of modern fiction could (and maybe always should) involve the consideration of narrative interchange among a variety of people, sources, languages, and epochs; that cultural geography can be just as effective as vertical national history.”8 While Aravamudan’s argument is mainly concerned with British and French novels, Happel’s translation of Huet in 1682 connects Huet’s transcultural theory of the novel with the German discourse. Happel contends that during the period when the number of novels (Romanen) was rapidly increasing in Germany, there was no theoretical work in German discussing the history and different types of the novel. Huet’s work filled this gap and provided the best genealogy in which Happel would like to situate his own novel. Happel considers the novel a common means to register useful things and teach good morals to its readers. This type of writing, according to Happel, is an ancient literary phenomenon that can be found among the Persians, the Arabs, the Greeks, the Spaniards, the French, the Welsh, the English, the Germans, and the Jews. Happel states that he has consulted novels in different cultures and languages to compose his own adventure story.9 He clearly considers the novel a transcultural product and also practices accordingly in his own writing. Therefore German Robinsonades, either before or after the publication of Defoe’s novel, constitute a discursive network of maritime adventure fictions, to borrow Margaret Cohen’s term, in which Robinson Crusoe is not the origin but definitely plays a decisive role.10 German Robinsonades are not merely inextricably connected to the transcultural genealogy of British and

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French novels that Aravamudan convincingly describes. More importantly, compared to other European languages, the exceptionally high quantity of Robinsonades in German also contributes to this new ground of studying novels’ transculturation and bears the potential to enrich the national tradition of German literature with non-​European components.

National Allegory or Transcultural Tale Many critics of Robinsonades, however, have seen Robinsonades as the national allegory of the German bourgeoisie. Kippenberg argues that, in comparison to French, Dutch, and English readers, Robinson’s maritime adventures provide room for fantasy and imagination for the Germans who are not as familiar with the ocean as some other European nations. Kippenberg sees in Robinson’s psychological and physical struggles the quintessential metaphor for the German bourgeois (bürgerlich) identity that has won prominence over the course of the eighteenth century. The strict one-​dimensional state control gave rise to Robinsonades, which combined the advantages of heroic and love romances, craft novels (Kunstroman), and picaresque novels, integrating psychological characterization with practical tips of survival. Instead of dry morals, the character of Robinson vividly explicates and practices the desire for freedom, a unified nation-​state, and a spirit of tolerance, compassion, and religious piety, all of which represent Germanness with enduring exactitude and validity.11 Jürgen Fohrmann disputes Robinsonades’ status as a “low” literary genre because he observes that the writers and readers of Robinsonades all belonged to the educated bourgeoisie (Bürgertum): they were teachers, higher officials, clerics, and businessmen—­the only groups of people besides the aristocrats who could read and write in the eighteenth century. Statistically speaking, the educated bourgeoisie numbered approximately two hundred thousand and were spread across seventy cities, while the entire German population at that time totaled a maximum of 23 million. They were the producers and receivers not only of Robinsonades but also of the “high genres” of literature, after all. Hence, Fohrmann contends, Robinsonades were not produced by and for the allegedly lower classes. To the contrary, Robinsonades articulate the wishes and desires of German bourgeois culture and reflect the process in which an individual encounters social instability with creative survival skills and transforms oneself from the object to the subject of history.12 Precisely because of Robinsonades’ significance for the German bourgeoisie, we should emphasize the non-​European components in them and render visible the transculturality in German discourse. Susanne Zantop highlights the non-​European locations and cultures in Robinsonades and their real-​world significance. Zantop points out that the arguments, which are purely concerned with inner German circumstances, ignore Robinsonades’

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connections to the European expansionist and colonialist project. Focusing on Campe’s extremely successful and popular Robinson der Jüngere (1779), Zantop contends that, in Campe’s novel, which uses the story of Robin Crusoe for pedagogical purposes, “education is metaphorically equated with colonization and colonization with education, the domestication of little savages. As Robinson colonizes his Freitag on the island, creating the perfect colonial society, so Father Campe educates, colonizes, and colonializes his young audience to prepare them for their role as future colonizers.”13 Zantop explains Robinsonades’ popularity as a result of German colonial fantasies—­a term I explained in more detail in the Introduction to this book. Yet while she is right about the narrator’s condescending attitude toward the “savages,” Robinsonades’ indissoluble relation to the ocean and the pervasive descriptions of manual labor provide new grounds for further explorations into these stories’ profound entanglement with the impact of non-​European culture and nature. Moreover, Zantop does not identify the contributions of Freitag to Robinson’s survival and thus fails to acknowledge the non-​ European maritime challenge and the mutuality in the dynamic process of the making of the modern self in Campe’s novel.14 Margaret Cohen’s approach to interpret Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe from the perspective of technology offers an innovative way out of the antagonistic binary between colonizers and colonized. Although she does not mention and perhaps is not aware of German Robinsonades, in The Novel and the Sea Cohen considers Robinson Crusoe the prototype for maritime adventure fictions, a neglected genre in the history of the novel. Cohen emphasizes handicrafts and their performance as the key element in defining maritime adventure fictions. The descriptions of handicrafts do not propel the movement of narrative plot; rather, they provide information about non-​European maritime places. “They are fascinating and thought-​provoking, both for governments and entrepreneurs thinking about profiting from foreign lands, as well as for armchair sailors seeking entertainment.”15 Cohen thus calls Robinson Crusoe a “mariner’s manual lite.” In contrast to Wolfgang Iser’s theory according to which novels offer their readers a nuanced and differentiated introduction toward ethics, Cohen argues that maritime adventure fictions invite their readers to solve practical problems with Robinson Crusoe beyond good and evil. Ethics, according to Cohen, does not occupy a privileged position in the interactive relationship between the protagonist and the readers in maritime adventure novels. Rather, the readers are encouraged to imaginatively engage with the situations of Crusoe and psychologically practice flexibility and creativity to survive.16 Focusing on British and French novels, Cohen wonders why there was a gap between 1748 and 1824 in which adventure fictions did not thrive. However, if she only moves one step eastward, to the German-​speaking regions, then the chronological problem she posed becomes a geographical and linguistic one. While Cohen stresses handicrafts’ practicability, I am more

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intrigued by the question of why the performance of handicrafts is staged on an isolated island outside European cultural and geographical boundaries. Indeed, in Campe’s novel, unlike in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the protagonist Krusoe Robinson does not have any European tools from the shipwreck. In order to survive, his technological survival skills are inextricably connected to the natural environment of the Caribbean island. The performance of practical handicrafts depends on his learning about the climate, flora and fauna, and maritime conditions of the non-​European island. Moreover, the islander Freitag contributes significantly to Krusoe’s survival by teaching him how to make fire and other useful techniques. Krusoe gradually develops an emotional tie to Freitag, without whom he cannot imagine life anymore. All these non-​European natural and cultural elements, I argue, shape the making of Krusoe’s German identity in Campe’s coming-​of-​age novel. I explain this duality in Krusoe’s self with the help of W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness. I read German Robinsonades not merely as enrichment to the discourse of maritime adventure fictions Cohen delineates. More importantly, they demonstrate how non-​European geographies and cultures coconstruct and influence the German discourse through technology and emotion. The local German and European identity and the global insular consciousness are closely intertwined with each other. In the ensuing pages, I will first investigate how the natural environment of the Caribbean island determines the performance of technology and the making of the modern self in Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere; second, I interpret the deep emotional connections between Krusoe and Freitag as the double consciousness within the German identity.

Sentimentalism, Technology, and the Making of the Self Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere, published in 1779/1780, was so popular that it was in its 6th edition in 1797, the 17th in 1827, the 40th in 1848, and the 122nd in 1923. The novel is still in print today. It was translated into Italian, Hebrew, Latin, and French in the same year it was published, and later was translated from French into English. The story is written in the style of a dialogue and chiefly narrated by a father to his children. In addition to the father narrator, there are six children—­Gotlieb, Nikolas, Johannes, Lotte, Diederich, and Fritzchen. In the twenty-​fifth of the thirty chapters, six other children join the evening story time. They are Matthias, Ferdinand, Konrad, Hans, Christel, and Karl. A mother, a friend B, a friend H, and a friend R are also present. While the friends and the older children help the father comment and pass judgment on the behavior of Krusoe Robinson, the small children ask questions about the motivations of Krusoe’s actions, the meanings of words, or other things they don’t understand. Certainly, the father narrator is the absolute authority who “corrects” the children’s “wrong”

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judgments and opinions, teaches them the “healthy” morals, and instills trust in divine providence. In such a constellation, the story has two layers: one is the world of Krusoe Robinson and, later, Freitag; the other is the circle of the father narrator and his listeners. The readers of Campe’s novel form the third stratum of Robinson’s story. Produced during the heyday of the sentimental cult induced by Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774), which took the youth’s heart by storm, Campe’s work aims to debunk this sweeping cult in German culture by emphasizing the healthy practice of handicraft and technology. In his essay Über Empfindsamkeit und Empfindelei in pädagogischer Hinsicht (On Sentimentality and Sentimentalism from a Pedagogical Perspective, 1779)—­published shortly before Robinson der Jüngere—­Campe considers it necessary to cultivate healthy emotions (Empfindsamkeit) and get rid of the unwanted weeds of Empfindelei. While the former is true and natural and conforms to public mores, the latter is artificial, forced, and damaging. The former is shy, simple, short, and serious; the latter is loud, flamboyant, and vain. The former articulates less in words than in unnoticeable deeds; the latter appears playful, dramatic, declamatory, and frivolous. Healthy emotions are rooted in one’s firm belief and reason (Vernunft) and are in accordance with human nature and the nature of other things; unhealthy sentiments always depend on other people’s unpredicted feelings and are thus mercurial and unaccountable. Campe contends that healthy emotions come from a good education of body and mind. Only through physical training and mental cultivation can a young person possibly approach the perfection of humanity. Campe divides the human into two dimensions: one animal (tierisch), the other spiritual (geistig). The spiritual dimension is also divided in two: the reason, the faculty to know; and the heart, the ability to have moral sentiments (sittliche Empfindungen). Campe remarks that real humans can only be adults but not children because children still need to learn to control their bodily senses and bridle their animal part through education. Hence Campe suggests that, first of all, educators use objects to explain the physical world to children before working on their emotions. Handicraft (Handwerksarbeit) is considered the foremost important pedagogical method. Campe also lists the principles for emotional education: no exaggerations, no unrealistic feelings, emotional control toward all kinds of passion except the love for God, more emphasis on the positive sides than on the negative sides of human characteristics, no suggestions of the emotions that children cannot yet feel themselves, always connecting emotion to useful deeds to avoid idleness and overindulgence, the awareness of the gender differences that allow women to have more emotions than men, and careful book choices for children. At the end of his treatise, Campe also more concretely explicates what he means by good and bad emotions in a fictional conversation between two girls. One girl, Leonore, reads a tragic love story and

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becomes melancholic, indolent, and disinterested in taking care of others, whereas Charlotte, the other girl, happy and healthy, does lots of handicraft work and takes care of her little brother. Campe sees the greatest danger in the emotional responses caused by love affairs and sentimental literature that negatively influence a reasonable education of the youth. According to Campe, technology and handicrafts in Defoe’s novel are the most effective way to debunk the encroachment of harmful emotions caused by fashionable love fictions. Yet Campe considers an adapted version of Defoe’s novel necessary to more effectively achieve his pedagogical goals.17 It a huge disadvantage, Campe argues, that, in Defoe’s story, Robinson is already equipped “with all kinds of European tools” (mit allen europäischen Werkzeugen). Such a tool kit, Campe avers, already provides the comfort of civilization and promises the success of Robinson’s survival. It does not allow readers to realize what our hands and common sense (Verstand) can develop and accomplish. Campe thus reorganizes the story into three parts: in the first part, his protagonist Krusoe Robinson from Hamburg is deprived of everything. Campe aims to showcase the helpless barrenness of an individual cast out of society and what this person can achieve to reintegrate into society merely with the power of self-​reflection (Nachdenken) and the will toward improvement (anhaltende Strebsamkeit zur Verbesserung). In the next phase, Campe gives Robinson a companion, Freitag (Friday), so that Robinson may learn to appreciate human companionship. Only in the third phase does Campe’s Robinson gain access to European tools and other necessary utensils through a shipwrecked European vessel so that Robinson, and the readers, can really appreciate these tools’ usefulness and value. Most importantly, Campe’s technological education also conveys the transcultural consciousness by putting the scene of Krusoe’s schooling on a non-​European island (I will come back to this point later). Toward the end of the story, as the narrator summarizes in chapter 26, Krusoe Robinson has learned almost all types of handicraft after the shipwreck: the baker, the smith, the tailor, the shoemaker, the carpenter, the cabinet-​ maker, the wheeler, the potter, the gardener, the farmer, the hunter, and the fisher. The narrator comments that Krusoe has actually mastered even more artisan skills and can make hundreds of things for which the lazy Europeans (europäischer Faulenzer) need help from many other people. Krusoe is now different from his fellow Europeans. The personal benefits of learning and doing manual labor are also visible: the more craft Krusoe and Freitag do, the stronger their bodies are and the happier and more mentally stable they become. Indeed, from the third chapter through the last chapter, Krusoe never ceases to learn to use objects for practical purposes. Handicraft is the central activity throughout the story, confirming the proclamation in Goethe’s Faust: “In the beginning, there was deed” (Am Anfang war die Tat). Commenting on Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Karl Marx considers the self-​sufficient way of life through handicraft the ideal mode of production for a society without

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inequality and the fetishism of commodity. Marx stresses Robinson’s economic independence and his needs as the primary motivation for labor and production. Robinson’s labor is not defined by material objects, not reified, but solely serves his needs—­he is thus free and independent. Marx further imagines that if a society consists of “free men, working with the same means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-​power in full self-​awareness as one single social labour force,” then Robinson’s independent labor based on personal needs serves as the model for a need-​based society with more equality and less exploitation:18 “The total product of our imagined association is a social product. One part of this product serves as fresh means of production and remains social. But another part is consumed by the members of the association as means of subsistence. This part must therefore be divided amongst them.”19 Obviously, Marx takes Robinson’s tale seriously as the starting point of an alternative society—­a society without the alienated relationships between laborers and their products, between consumers and the values of commodities, a society with a simpler and more transparent system of production and distribution than a capitalist society based on commodity production. Although Marx does not specify the cultural and geographical aspects and exercises a thought experiment in the social realm with a potentially international gesture, in Campe’s novel the non-​European location of the island, I argue, is crucial for Krusoe Robinson’s creative mode of production. It is crucial that Robinson’s survival—­especially, in Campe’s story, when he is bereft of all man-​made tools—­is far away from European circumstances. Rather, Krusoe adapts his experiences and knowledge acquired in Hamburg, his German home, to the natural world in the tropical Caribbean. To survive in this new world Krusoe learns about the climate and the flora and fauna on the island and makes useful tools. His production is not only based on need but also depends on what’s available. The supply in the tropical island is key to his survival. When Krusoe finds a small cave in the rock, he needs to enlarge it to make it suitable as a bedroom. The narrator comments that if only he had some tools such as a tool bit (Hakeisen) or a stone chisel (Steinmeissel), it would not be a problem to fulfill this wish—­but he has nothing. Krusoe uses big shells as spades and water containers; discovers a fiber plant to make ropes and rope ladders; finds suitable stones to use as ax, wedge, and mallet (Beil, Keil, and Klöpfel); creatively fashions an umbrella using coconut leaves, fish bones, and tree branches; and makes many other household utensils as well. He also learns to appropriate plants and animals for his survival: he eats oysters, coconuts, and sea turtles; he plants trees and builds a wall around his hideout; he dries hay to make a bed, makes a calendar on a tree, and learns to cultivate potatoes, corn, cocoa beans; and he keeps llamas for milk, meat, and fur. Krusoe’s survival is not merely a self-​ sufficient production, as Marx sees it in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Rather, it is a process of the transformation of European knowledge in non-​European

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circumstances. The natural environment on the Caribbean island challenges and enables Krusoe’s survival—­the remaking of his selfhood happens at the same time. Krusoe’s survival adventures are not merely fictional inventions but are also connected to important events in the history of European exploration and colonization in the early modern period. For example, when Krusoe finds potatoes, the father first tells the children the physical appearance of the potato roots and asks the children to guess what plant it is. The young listeners swiftly jump to the right answer so that the father can briefly review when and how potatoes were imported to Germany: in the 1730s through colonial trade. Describing llamas, the father also teaches the children that the Peruvians domesticated llamas long before the “discovery” and the colonization of the Europeans in the Americas. The father also confirms the children’s query that Peru is the land from which the Spaniards massively export silver and gold. In a similar vein, the father talks about the cultivation and economic values of corn and cocoa beans in European colonies. Unlike Defoe’s story, in which the protagonist works alone, Campe’s narrative tells the reader that the young listeners greatly admire and eagerly imitate Krusoe’s practical ingenuity in overcoming the scarcity of tools and supplies. In the fifth evening, after the father has related Robinson’s resourceful construction of an umbrella, one of the children, Nikolas, comes to the story time with a self-​made bag and a kitchen sieve installed on a wooden handle to imitate Robinson’s parasol. The father calls Nikolas “our friend Robinson” and then shows an umbrella he himself has made. These imitations within the narrative framework encourage the readers to imitate Krusoe and adopt his technological conception of the world. The desire to live like Krusoe, however, is not only a domestic matter. When Hans expresses his desire to be with Robinson and make the raft with him, Diderich comments that he does not need to travel to a remote island to do manual labor. It is equally good to work at home. At first glance, this small conversation between the two children brings the exotic story back home. Yet it also bears the story’s global concern. While we can definitely argue in the fashion of exoticism that Campe uses the remote island and maritime adventure as a narrative convenience to educate children at home, why then didn’t he use a domestic story, as many of his contemporaries did? I argue that Campe uses the story not only as a fictional and exotic context but also as a real-​world geographical description to teach about the entanglement between non-​European geography and culture, European maritime enterprises and colonialism, and the role of technology in the process of individual identity formation around 1800. For Campe, it is the combination of domestic rootedness and the knowledge of non-​European culture and geography that should define the German identity of a new generation. From Campe’s perspective, it is necessary to keep the world in mind, to know the details of the challenges from the non-​European world so that the Germans of future

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generations can live a reasonable and practical domestic life—­to be at home in the world. Campe’s pedagogical emphasis on technology reflects the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s thesis that technology (Technik) is a constitutive element of modernity (Neuzeit). Blumenberg considers technology a historical phenomenon, yet not merely a phenomenon that has existed since the beginning of humanity. He identifies two key aspects of the technological epoch (technische Epoche) of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries: the disappearance of a previous order (Ordnungsschwund); and human self-​assertion (Selbstbehauptung). Blumenberg defines the disappearance of order as a “fundamental transformation in the understanding of the world and in its implicated expectations, evaluations, and meanings.”20 He emphasizes the premise of subjectivity in self-​assertion and claims that human subjectivity requires the new quality of technicity (Technizität) to reposition self-​identification and redesign self-​realization in the historical period after the Middle Ages.21 A new kind of seriousness emerges in the modern era: it is the force and pressure (Zwang) to constantly and irredeemably prove oneself in the control of reality and, finally, in the self-​definition of humanity. Blumenberg interprets the crisis of order toward the end of the Middle Ages as the dissolution from a pregiven theological world order and as a process in which human activities have become autonomous (Autonomisierung der menschlichen Leistungssphäre). Hence the critique of theological teleology forms the essential kernel of this intellectual movement. The result is, as Blumenberg puts it, the functional separation of God’s natural world from the working world (Werkwelt) of the humans. Nature is reduced to pure materiality, and truth can only be verified through the character of technical utility. Technology replaces divine providence as the basis for the human understanding of the world. Self-​assertion then is not only a response to the disappearance of the theological order; it also accelerates this disappearance for the conception of a new world order.22 Krusoe’s story of finding useful things on the non-​European island and using craft and technology to enable his survival offers a narrative metaphor for Blumenberg’s history of technology. On the desert island, the order of Krusoe’s German world has disappeared—­he is forced to prove himself and to re-​create a different identity and personhood, which is new but, at the same time, also inherently connected to his former self in his German home. Krusoe’s new identity is fundamentally defined by handicrafts and the discovery of useful things in a little-​known non-​European site. When Krusoe searches the shipwrecked vessel on his shore, he finds a barrel of gold coins and a bag of diamonds. The narrator tells us that though this bag is the one that Europeans would grab first, Krusoe does not show any interest in possessing this treasure, because in his situation gold and diamonds are technologically useless. Hence technology, materialism, and utilitarianism construct the foundation of Krusoe’s insular existence and his new personhood. His survival or,

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borrowing Blumenberg’s term, his self-​assertion (Selbstbehauptung) is not only a result of his own labor but, more importantly, also the recognition of and the commitment to technology and its usefulness. If Krusoe’s transformation symbolizes the emergence of the modern individual based on technology, then this modern identity is inherently connected to both the European and the non-​European world. As discussed above, Krusoe’s survival is a process of adaptation to the natural world of the Caribbean island. His new self-​definition is necessitated by non-​European conditions in the historical period around 1800. Krusoe does not merely represent German bourgeois identity; he also responds to the challenges and differences from the non-​European world through technology. Blumenberg contends that self-​ assertion as a historical category is not a self-​contained human behavior or characterization, but one that indicates a transitioning process in which the individual searches for a new identity and self-​definition.23 Krusoe’s effort to survive in the Caribbean island, surrounded by the dangerous element of the ocean, illustrates the struggle to redefine German identity in the process of learning how to know the non-​European world. Therefore it is neither a random coincidence that Robinsonades have become so popular nor a narrative convenience to use the non-​European “exotic” location to describe the feeling of isolation. Rather, it is the maritime challenges from the non-​ European world that force Krusoe to evaluate the unfamiliar natural world by its usefulness and to survive it by means of technology. Krusoe’s transformation on the Caribbean island not only illustrates the process in which the new conception of the self emerges with technology but also renders visible the non-​European participation in the making of the European modern individual. Campe’s story tells us that it is not enough to confine the technological era within European cultural realm: technology has to be the skillful connector between European individuals and the non-​European natural world. In order to become a capable modern man like Krusoe Robinson, Campe sees that it is necessary to become aware of the challenges from the non-​European world and use technology and manual labor to effectively handle the problems and make the world intelligible and livable. From this perspective, the Swiss pastor Johann David Wyss’s Der schweizerische Robinson (The Swiss Family Robinson, 1812)—­a classic of children’s literature in English-​speaking cultures that is still internationally popular today, with multiple film adaptations—­follows and expands Campe’s program. A Swiss family of two parents and five children is stranded on a Pacific island, though not only Oceanic plants and animals but also Asian, African, and Caribbean flora and fauna are introduced, described, and incorporated into the family’s living conditions. Their island is not located at a specific place—­rather, their island represents the entire non-​European world. The Swiss family Robinson replaces the male individual (i.e., Campe’s Krusoe) with a nuclear family as the singular unit of society. Written approximately three decades later than Campe’s book, Wyss’s novel is embedded

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more in the time of European colonialism and imperialism of the nineteenth century. Hence Wyss’s family already has a complete European structure for teamwork, procreation, and then colonization in the non-​European island. Campe’s Krusoe, however, is closely related to the islander Freitag after the first phase of his survival endeavors. The relationship between Krusoe and Freitag is not necessarily colonial, I argue; instead, Krusoe’s technological re-​creation of the self heavily depends on Freitag’s presence and help. The making of the self is inherently inscribed in a double consciousness incorporating both the European and non-​European world.

Freitag’s Contribution or Double Consciousness In his foreword to Robinson der Jüngere, Campe admits his indebtedness to Jean-​Jacques Rousseau for the use of Defoe’s story to cultivate children’s individuality. In Émile, or On Education (1762), Rousseau stresses that the most important educational feature of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is the location of the desert island. This isolated state is not that of social man; very likely it is not going to be that of Emile. But it is on the basis of this very state that he ought to appraise all the others. The surest means of raising oneself above prejudices and ordering one’s judgments about the true relations of things is to put oneself in the place of an isolated man and to judge everything as this man himself ought to judge of it with respect to his own utility.24

Obviously, Rousseau encourages children to cultivate an imagined insular space deep within their psyche in order to make the best observations and the soundest evaluations of others. Robinson’s island—­a place that does not exist in human society, or, better, a psychic space—­symbolizes the personal identity that every individual needs to adamantly defend against and, at the same time, skillfully relate to others. Rousseau’s concept of insular identity within society reminds me of Leibniz’s monadology. According to Leibniz, the dominant monadic entelechy in every individual, which is the soul, represents the universe from its unique perspective. While these perspectival worlds of mind are set apart from each other, they communicate with each other and are joined in harmony by virtue of the correspondence of their actions and perceptions. If Krusoe’s island is a metaphor of Leibniz’s monadic entity of mind, then it is by no means an island of one single mind; rather, this island comprises both Krusoe and Freitag. If, according to Rousseau, the island functions as a pedagogical province, as in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels, then the process of education develops a double consciousness combining both the European and the non-​European worlds. Similar to Moritz and Omar in August von Kotzebue’s drama Bruder Moritz, discussed

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in chapter 4 of this book, Krusoe and Freitag’s relationship is not as simple as that of master and slave, or of colonizer and colonized, as Zantop interprets it: they also display a dialectical constellation of mutual dependence. The modern self in Campe’s Robinsonade is an individual with a double consciousness informed by both European and non-​European knowledge. The African American thinker W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness is very helpful in this context. Parallel to Campe’s pedagogical objective of shaping children’s identity, Du Bois endeavors to point out the double consciousness in the formative years of black children in America. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois explains that double consciousness is this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—­an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—­this longing to attain self-​conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.25

Du Bois does not strive to reconcile the twoness into a synthesis. Rather, his thinking about the color line aims to maintain, theorize, and reinvent the duality, the fragmentation, and the juxtaposition within the self-​consciousness of black Americans.26 In particular, Du Bois’s concept of a productive double consciousness helps reconceive the education of black children in America, as Michelle Phillips points out. Phillips argues that Du Bois once, in his magazine The Crisis, juxtaposes idyllic images of childhood with the reports on brutal stories of black Americans. Du Bois intends to guide black children in their development of a resilient double consciousness, to have them face the history and the hardship of black Americans from a young age, instead of treating them children as “innocent toys” and creating a romanticized image of childhood. Confronting black children with adults’ reality, Du Bois refuses to take the double consciousness as an articulation of inferiority complex but calls for its use as the inexhaustible source for compassion, inspiration, honor, ambition, and action. Black children do not necessarily have to see

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themselves through the eyes of the condescending whites. Instead their double consciousness bestows, as Phillips claims, the “transgeneric, transatlantic, and transgenerational” responsibilities on their shoulders to actualize this “reimagined model of twoness as a uniquely resilient subjectivity.”27 In Campe’s novel, children are also guided toward a double consciousness exemplified by the inseparable partnership between Krusoe and Freitag. Although the children in Campe’s novel considerably differ from Du Bois’s black American children in historical, social, and racial terms, I am inspired by how Phillips highlights the resilient twoness in Du Bois’s double consciousness. I argue that the duality of Krusoe and Freitag symbolizes a double consciousness that acknowledges, integrates, and negotiates with the maritime challenges from the non-​European world and global differences. My reading reveals Freitag’s input for Krusoe’s survival. While not downplaying Krusoe’s master narrative, I also want to make clear his fears, uncertainties, and dependence on Freitag’s knowledge and existence. I emphasize the mutuality between Krusoe and Freitag in order to redirect our critical attention from the oppositions between the European colonizers and the non-​European colonized toward the intimate connections between the two parties both internally and externally. Three themes are important in Krusoe and Freitag’s mutual relationship: emotion, cannibalism, and key skills for survival. When the father describes the actions of Freitag and Krusoe, he often refers to Krusoe as Freitag’s master (Herr) and uses the verb befehlen (to command, to order). But if the narrator describes Krusoe’s intention toward Freitag, the islander is usually referred to as Krusoe’s friend (Freund). Obviously, while the narrator makes clear the hierarchy between Krusoe and Freitag, Krusoe himself often treats Freitag as his friend. Although Krusoe teaches Freitag European-​styled handicrafts and the German language (while he himself never makes an effort to learn Freitag’s language), Freitag significantly contributes to the improvement of Krusoe’s life. First of all, fire. The narrator tells us that Krusoe fails to make a fire and only comes to use the fire accidentally caused by a thunderstorm. After a flood extinguishes this fire, Krusoe does not have fire for eight years. After Krusoe meets Freitag, however, the first thing Freitag does is to make a fire. If fire symbolizes a foundational feature of human civilization beyond cultural boundaries, as Goethe’s poem Prometheus metaphorically illustrates, then Krusoe is indebted to Freitag for this decisive improvement of his living condition as a human being. Krusoe also plans to build a boat so that he can eventually sail to the American continent and then go back to Europe, but he does not have efficient tools for carving out the wood. Freitag, however, immediately suggests that he use fire to complete this job in a better and faster way. Krusoe feels enlightened by this advice. As was common in eighteenth-​century German discourse, the narrator calls Freitag and other islanders Wilden (savages)—­so did Georg Forster, James Cook, Otto von Kotzebue, and others. Despite this problematic appellation,

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however, Freitag’s contributions are well acknowledged. The working community and the mutual friendship are celebrated. Freitag is also much superior to Krusoe in swimming and diving—­very useful abilities for survival on an island. The narrator also calls Freitag a master (Meister) in making and using a bow and arrow. Freitag knows how to make clothes using tree fibers, so Krusoe can now finally take off the uncomfortable fur. By mixing coconut fibers with the fiber plant Krusoe has used, Freitag also makes much better (bei weitem überlegen) ropes than those Krusoe had made. Freitag also knows how to make tools such as knives, chisels, graters, and files out of bones, stones, shells, corals, and fish skins; he also uses these tools to make household utensils that seriously enhance the quality and comfort of their lives. Freitag is skillful in cooking, too: his llama stew is much more tender and delicious than Krusoe’s simple grill. Even after Krusoe has managed to survive and before the European tools arrive from the shipwreck, Freitag significantly improves Krusoe’s life with a series of technological advances. Krusoe’s existence is inextricably connected to Freitag and his skills, which the narrator acknowledges and values. These examples of Freitag’s skills are balanced by the comic scenes in which Freitag is mocked and laughed at. For example, he is frightened to death simply by touching hot water or hearing a gunshot, experiences that are quite common to Krusoe; he then considers Krusoe a sorcerer or a god. These comic scenes portraying Freitag as ignorant, superstitious, and inferior, however, are efficiently debunked by the passages describing Freitag’s skills and expertise. The seemingly conflictive portrayal of Freitag also reveals the narrator’s double standard in depicting Freitag as someone who is knowledgeable and skillful, yet inferior to other European achievements. Hence the narrator tells us that, after seeing the ship’s supplies and hearing the gunshot Krusoe fires, Freitag is so in awe and admiration (Ehrfurcht) of the European that for days he does not feel comfortable in using a familiar tone of speech with him. And the father narrator, in particular, considers Christianity superior to Freitag’s “superstition” and believes that Freitag needs to be “civilized” and Europeanized by Christianity. Krusoe’s effort to Christianize Freitag, however, does not merely stem from his Eurocentric arrogance. It is also based on the fear of cannibalism. Indeed, cannibalism is a recurring theme that accompanies Krusoe’s insular stay from the very beginning. Although Krusoe is alone, his fear leads him to arm his home against possible onslaughts of cannibals. When he spots the footprints in sand, Krusoe is first filled with fear and anxiety because “he did not think of any civilized Europeans at the sight of this trace; rather he thought about one of the savage cannibals, who should have lived, as you know, on the Caribbean islands at that time.”28 The wording “should have existed” (sol gegeben haben) betrays a conjecture on cannibalism but by no means conveys a confirmed fact. Still, the novel’s many condescending remarks and descriptions express concern about this “barbarian custom.” Krusoe’s survival involves not only the external destruction caused by

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shipwreck but also the essential annihilation of the self through cannibalism. If a shipwreck causes the complete devastation of the familiar material world of Europe, then cannibalism dismally promises the extinction of human flesh as the material basis of life itself. When Krusoe asks Freitag if people after death are well treated by Toupan, the god of thunder, equivalent to the Christian God, Freitag answers that they will be treated well only when they have killed and eaten lots of their enemies. This brutal vision shocks Krusoe and compels him to “teach” Freitag “better” ideas about God and the life hereafter. Freitag is gradually Christianized and admits that cannibalism is evil, which he did not previously believe. As the father narrator informs us, Campe’s source for cannibalism comes from travel writings including Georg Forster’s Reise um die Welt. Cannibalism, as discussed in the chapter on Forster, was perceived and imagined as a major threat to the European travelers on maritime journeys in the eighteenth century. The narrator considers cannibalism destructive not only for Krusoe’s sole survival but also, more broadly, for the care of the self and the preservation of identity. Of course, the narrator’s comments about how Freitag’s cannibal culture is stupid, cruel, weak, and wrong and thus need to be Europeanized, civilized, and Christianized are arrogant and Eurocentric. At the same time, the narrator’s arrogance goes hand in hand with fear and anxiety. The story’s constant contact with the theme of cannibalism proves the impact of non-​European cultures and also reveals the Eurocentric arrogance and condescension as a preventive mechanism of self-​protection and Christianization as a strategy of active survival, as one phrase of the father illustrates: “For his own safety, he must do so.”29 Moreover, while the father clearly despises cannibalism and promises the children that the British colonizers will tame the anthropophagi and they will disappear one day, he also corrects the children and insists that these man-​eaters are also human because “being savage or civilized is not the essential thing.”30 I certainly don’t intend to excuse the arrogance and ignorance of the European Christian mission, which, as Chamisso informs us, directly caused the destruction of Oceanic culture in the Pacific. My purpose here, again, is to highlight the contributions and the impact of the non-​Europeans on the making of the modern self. The acknowledgment of non-​European contributions and global entanglements is as important as the critique of Eurocentrism because the emphasis on non-​European contributions effectively deconstructs the myth of Eurocentrism from its inside. After Freitag becomes a Protestant and the urgent danger of cannibalism gradually vanishes, the narrator also advocates religious freedom when the Spaniard (a Catholic) and the father of Freitag (a pagan, according to the narrator) join them on the island. The narrator asks the listening children whether Krusoe as the owner of the island has the right to force his subjects (Untertanen) to convert to his religion. All the children answer “Absolutely no!” (O bei Leibe nicht!) because religious belief is an individual matter and

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cannot be forced upon one by others. Forced belief does not reflect what one truly thinks, hence Krusoe is firmly determined to protect religious freedom on his island.31 Again the narrator’s double standard results in two quite different ways of dealing with religion: on the one hand, Freitag is converted to Krusoe’s religion so that Krusoe secures his own survival; on the other hand, Krusoe grants religious freedom not only to a fellow European but also to another islander. Even though Freitag’s father is dismissed as a savage pagan, his belief is recognized and protected by Krusoe. Common humanity’s sense of equality is also reflected in the narrator’s condemnation of European colonial slavery and the slave trade. Unlike in Defoe’s novel, where Robison Crusoe is directly involved in the slave trade, slavery in European colonies and the slave trade itself are condemned in Campe’s novel. When the shipwreck is introduced in the novel, the theme of the slave trade appears in the narrative. The ship should bring hundreds of Africans to Barbados in America. The father explains to his children: In Africa, in which the blackamoors live, most of the people are still so raw and uncivilized like those beloved animals. Their chiefs or kings, who are not much smarter themselves, also treat them accordingly. If any Europeans arrive there, they are offered crowds of black people for sale, just like one sells the cattle on the market here. Fathers even bring their own children and exchange them for trifles; thus the Europeans purchase a great number of them every year and carry them to America, where they must do the hardest work and are kept in pretty miserable living conditions. Such a slave (as people call them) suffers a lot and prefers often to die than to live like that.32

Clearly, the father’s explanation of the circumstances in Africa is deeply troubling and untrue. One of the children, Gotlieb, comments immediately that it is not right to treat human beings this way. The father comforts the children by telling them that this gruesome slave trade will soon be abolished. Even though the father describes the Africans in a derogatory way, the child’s remark confirms them as human. In other words, although the father’s account of the situation in Africa is deeply disturbing, the child’s comment eradicates the degradation of the Africans and insists on human equality. Krusoe’s further reflection that the terrible storm that caused the shipwreck actually spares those Africans on board of their gloomy fate as slaves reinforces Gotlieb’s remark. In particular, Krusoe’s emphatic glorification of divine providence, which must have intended to use the storm to save the Africans, bathes the readers in a strong religious passion that enhances a child’s comment to God’s will. Along with the narrator’s disturbing depictions of the Africans, Campe’s novel also critiques colonial slavery and the slave trade. Emotion supports the moral condemnation of slavery and genuinely connects Krusoe and Freitag in addition to technology and religion. Although

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Campe aims to campaign against the weepy sentimentalism in German culture, his heroes are not emotionless automatons that are merely equipped with technology. While Krusoe and Freitag are bound by technology for the sake of their survival, emotion plays another important role in their mutual ties. Robinson der Jüngere contains greater emotional expressions and communications toward the end of the novel. However, Campe’s agenda of emotional education is exclusively concerned with friendship between men. Indeed, the world of Campe’s Krusoe Robinson is a world without women, as in Defoe’s work. Even children’s affections toward parents are also exemplified only through Freitag’s love for his father and the children’s admiration for their father, the narrator. Krusoe is at first reserved in expressing his emotion to Freitag. Before Freitag joins him, Krusoe’s emotions are primarily concerned with his remorse for not following his parents’ instructions and his gratitude to divine providence. After Freitag joins him, he warns Freitag to curb (mäßigen) his happy emotions after escaping a storm, be grateful to God, and focus on getting back to the island. In this phase, Krusoe’s feelings are more or less confined within the theological and ethical dimension but not directed toward a concrete event or a real person. When Freitag cries and jumps for joy because Krusoe agrees to travel to Freitag’s island to visit his father, the narrator does not reveal any of Krusoe’s emotions, only tells us how Krusoe carefully and practically prepares the trip. The mother in Campe’s novel, however, calls the children’s attention to the noble characteristics of Freitag, the noble savage, and asks the children to learn from his affection toward his parents. After this event during the story time, the father starts to say more about Krusoe’s emotion. When Krusoe spots the first European ship, however, he is for the first time unreservedly excited, like Freitag: Robinson did hardly know how to express his joy. Sometimes he jumped up, sometimes he cheered up, and sometimes he embraced Freitag and asked him, with glittering tears of joy in his eyes, that he should also be happy about it! Now off to Europe; now off to Hamburg! There, Freitag should see how the people lived in Hamburg! What kind of houses people could build there! How comfortable, peaceful, easygoing their lives are!33

Clearly, Krusoe’s desire to return to Europe always includes Freitag. His emotional outburst on seeing the ship involves not only his escape from the island but also Freitag’s visit to his home. Now, later in the novel, Krusoe more frequently uses his language and his body to express his happiness. Krusoe hugs Freitag when he volunteers to swim to the ship to check out the situation. When Freitag is scared by the gunshot Krusoe fires to entertain him, Krusoe immediately feels sorry, realizing that Freitag does not enjoy it and that he should have warned him beforehand. Krusoe “affectionately

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raised the trembling Freitag, embraced him, and told him to take courage.”34 Just as Omar saves Moritz’s life in Kotzebue’s drama Bruder Moritz, discussed in chapter 3, Freitag saves Krusoe’s life from a storm. When Robinson wakes up and asks where he is, Freitag answers: “In my arms, dear sir!”35 Tears roll down Freitag’s cheeks. The narrator continues: “Now a moving scene took place: Robinson thanked his savior, and Freitag hardly knew how to express his joy at seeing his beloved master restored to himself.”36 The father then tells the children that such a moving scene is the best conclusion for that day’s story time. Interestingly, the narrator refers often to the speechlessness of Krusoe and Freitag when they are overjoyed. Toward the end of the novel, the body overrides language and becomes the dominant medium for articulating emotions for the scene in which Krusoe realizes that his return to Europe is finally possible. He “flung his arms around Freitag’s neck, who sat asleep on the grassy slope of the terrace; Robinson embraced him and bedewed his face with his tears, unable to utter a single word. ‘What happened, dear sir?’ asked Freitag, waking up, and terrified at the stormy caresses. Robinson, overjoyed, could only say: Ah, Freitag!”37 Freitag is not as excited as Krusoe, however, because he does not want to leave his island home. The father narrator then warns his children to control their emotions and not to be as excessively emotional as Krusoe. This is because he suffers a huge disappointment when he can no longer see the ship and presumes that it has sailed away without him. (In fact the captain has simply moved the ship to another location.) Yet no matter how the narrator criticizes Krusoe’s sentimentalism, it is clear that Krusoe’s ties to Freitag have grown stronger. Comparing this passage with the one about Krusoe’s happiness when he views the first European ship, we realize that the level of excitement is completely different. Krusoe’s caress and hugs reveal that these two men have a much closer relationship now than at the beginning of their relationship. Even though Krusoe hopes to return to Germany, his connections to the islander do not begin to loosen but grow closer. Krusoe and Freitag maintain a lifelong friendship. Freitag accompanies Krusoe to Hamburg and learns a trade. The narrator comments that they stay together for the rest of their lives. Instead of a heterosexual love story and the establishment of a family, Krusoe Robinson the German and Freitag the islander embody a maritime double consciousness for the late eighteenth-​century youth generation. Chamisso and Kadu’s friendship in the early nineteenth century echoes this fictional relation. In Campe’s pedagogical novel, it is not Krusoe alone who symbolizes the process of identity formation. Both Krusoe and Freitag render visible the non-​European maritime impact on German culture and manifest the double consciousness in this coming-​of-​age tale. The formation of individual subjectivity, as the reference to Rousseau and Leibniz reveals, is defined by the integration and mutuality between German/European culture and the non-​ European world in the long eighteenth century. The double consciousness is

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not so much about an inferiority complex in which the dominating force of the white race impresses and permeates the sense of the black self. Rather, it is about a transcultural consciousness through which the Germans become aware of the impact of non-​European maritime challenge and strive to negotiate and integrate with the world’s differences. If Campe’s story is about the rebirth of the self after the destructive shipwreck, then it is the rebirth with a transcultural consciousness consisting of both the German/European and the non-​European world. In Shipwreck with Spectator, Blumenberg discusses the metaphor of shipwreck throughout German and Western intellectual history and argues: “Explaining the exotic foreign body as ‘just a metaphor’ is an act of self-​assertion: the disturbance is described as an aid. This corresponds, in experience, to the need to incorporate, as part of the total causal system, even the most surprising event, bordering on a supposed ‘miracle.’ ”38 That is to say, the foreign body does not function merely as a metaphor but proves a fatal challenge to the existing order. To claim it as a metaphor is the attempt to integrate it but, at the same time, to wishfully assign it to the margin, although the challenge of the foreign already hits at the core of the system. Following this logic, in Campe’s novel, non-​European knowledge, symbolized by Freitag and the island’s natural world, disturbs the conceptual and empirical harmony Krusoe Robinson has acquired back in Hamburg and demands a new subjectivity that can integrate the estranged circumstances. The incorporation of the foreign element in the style of a double consciousness is an inevitable move. “It is only under the pressure of the need to repair an imperiled consistency that the element that is at first destructive becomes a metaphor.”39 Hence the shipwreck metaphor has survived the waves of intellectual history for centuries and still retains its freshness and power to resist conceptuality’s quest for definition and exactitude. Following this logic, the Robinsonade also proves such a disturbing element that provides a metaphorical locus in which non-​ European and non-​conceptual knowledge finds its persistent articulation in the German transcultural discourse. Similarly, non-​European locations and characters in August von Kotzebue’s extremely popular dramas even transform the genre of tragedy to melodrama and offer an alternative way of life outside German and European culture. Robinsonades, Kotzebue admits in his autobiography, were among his favorite books as a child.

Chapter 4

The New World, Femininity, and Refusal of Tragedy in August von Kotzebue’s Melodramas

Kotzebue’s Popularity, His Critics, and the Transcultural Perspective The most successful and productive dramatist of his day, August von Kotzebue authored more than 230 dramas, several novels, history books, travelogues, and innumerable journal articles. Between 1779 and 1870, a prominent German stage—­the Hof-​und Nationaltheater in Mannheim—­ performed Kotzebue’s dramas 1,870 times, while it staged Schiller’s works 486 times and Goethe’s 181.1 Approximately one-​seventh of the dramas performed in Weimar under Goethe’s own direction were written by Kotzebue.2 Beyond German-​ speaking stages, Kotzebue’s works were translated into English, French, Danish, Dutch, Italian, Russian, Swedish, and Spanish and garnered great success outside German-​speaking culture.3 There are compelling intertextual resonances between Kotzebue’s dramas and other European literary works, such as Richard Sheridan’s drama Pizzaro or Jane Austen’s Emma. The early American writer Charles Brockden Brown commented in 1799 that “Kotzebue, as a dramatic writer, stands almost unrivalled among the Germans” and that “there is little or no danger to be apprehended, that the English stage will be inundated with German plays.”4 More important for my purpose in this book, in the first eleven years (1787–­98) of Kotzebue’s career, the period when his popularity became established, many of his most successful dramas deal with intercultural and interracial conflicts as well as love stories between Peruvians, Indians, Spaniards, or Britons. European slave trade and colonialism in the Americas, the fashion of the paradise-​like South Pacific, and the emergent Orientalism leave their traces in these dramas. Except Menschenhaß und Reue (Misanthrope and Remorse, 1789) and Das Kind der Liebe (The Child of Love, 1790), his early dramatic works—­including Der Eremit auf Formentera (The Hermit on Formentera, 1787), Die Indianer in England (East Indians, 1789), Die Sonnenjungfrau (Virgin of the Sun, 1789), Bruder Moritz, der Sonderling, oder die Colonie für die Pelew-​Insel (Brother Moritz, the Stranger, or the Colony on the Pelew Islands, 1791), Der Papagey (The Parrot, 1792), Sultan Wampum (Sultan

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Wampum, 1791), Graf Benjowsky (Count Benjowsky, 1794), Die Spanier in Peru (Spaniards in Peru, 1795), and La Peyrouse (La Peyrouse, 1797)—­all feature major non-​European characters or locations. In his autobiography, Kotzebue admits his predilection for Robinsonades (discussed in chapter 3 of this book) and mentions that Defoe’s novel and the famous German Robinsonade Insel Felsenburg (1731) by Johann Gottfried Schnabel were his favorite books as a boy.5 Kotzebue’s huge popularity also had political consequences. George Williamson considers Kotzebue’s public success a major cause for his murder in 1819. Williamson argues that it was the quest for a perfect purity of public morality and a masculine nationality that brought the Burschenschaftler Karl Sand to kill the literary icon Kotzebue, who outspokenly attacked Germany’s emerging nationalist movement and promoted, in his dramas, a benign and sympathetic attitude toward women, commonly known as “fallen women,” whose behaviors challenged puritan social and sexual mores of bodily chastity and marital loyalty.6 For example, in the extremely successful drama Menschenhaß und Reue, known and performed in England as The Stranger, the leading male figure forgives his wife, who has run away with a seducer and is now reunited with her husband with remorse and gratitude. Whereas this happy ending moved theater audiences to tears across Europe and North America for decades, it also enraged critics and intellectuals who followed stricter gender-​based moral principles. Indeed, Kotzebue’s entire career was haunted by a wild popularity on stage as well as repeated charges of immorality, shallowness, and excessive sentimentality by the most significant of his educated contemporaries.7 Despite his success, Kotzebue was frustrated about the critics’ rejection. He wondered why critics were particularly harsh toward his dramas with “fallen women” but lenient or even favorable toward other works such as those by Otto Heinrich von Gemmingen, Pierre Beaumarchais, or Goethe, who also portrayed pregnant unmarried girls. In today’s literary criticism, one group of critics, although not directly criticizing Kotzebue’s immorality, assigns him an inferior position to canonical writers. Esteeming the Aristotelian notion of tragedy’s catharsis, the critics disfavor the happy endings in Kotzebue’s dramas and do not see them as high-​quality literature with psychological and philosophical depth and aesthetic value. Kotzebue’s dramas are thus labeled as Trivialliteratur (trivial literature), Unterhaltungsliteratur (entertainment literature), Rührstücke (tearjerkers), or the degenerated version of bürgerliches Trauerspiel (bourgeois tragedy).8 Since there was no freedom of assembly around 1800, theater as an institution played a central role in forming and transforming the literary and political public sphere and bore a critical function toward the political state.9 However, the emerging popular literature, as Christa Bürger argues, has lost the critical function and merely seeks to please audiences and achieve market success.10 Kotzebue is often seen as a major representative of the market and a danger to the fulfillment of

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the project of the Enlightenment and its education (Bildung) program around 1800. Goethe comments: “If I as writer had aimed to satisfy the wishes of the masses, I would have told them little stories and made fun of them like our good Kotzebue has done.”11 The mass audience of Kotzebue’s dramas, however, did not consist of “uneducated” people. Rather, it encompassed the high aristocracy like the courts in Berlin and Vienna, the bourgeoisie, and the so-​called lower classes.12 Hence critics such as Rolf Haubl, Leif Ludwig Albertsen, and Gert Ueding point out that Kotzebue’s dramas verbalize the limits of the straitjacket of bourgeois morals and offer temporary and illusory, but loosening and relieving, solutions.13 Indeed, contemporary critique of the Enlightenment points out that the project of Enlightenment and aesthetic education not only mean critique, freedom, and emancipation, but also have a strong focus on control, punishment, exclusion, subjugation, patriarchy, and Eurocentrism.14 I observe that the non-​European elements in Kotzebue’s dramas challenge the limitations of German social conventions, provide an opportunity to break away from restricting European moralities, and thus enable the story to end happily despite difficult situations in marriage and love affairs, which would commonly end in death or separation in bourgeois tragedies such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Emilia Gallotti (1772) or Friedrich Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love, 1784). I argue that non-​European cultures also contributed to Kotzebue’s popularity, which is inextricably connected to his dramas’ happy endings.15 Zantop, in her Colonial Fantasies, also recognizes the importance of Kotzebue’s popularity but interprets Kotzebue’s dramas Die Indianer in England and Die Sonnenjungfrau as exemplary manifestations of “colonial fantasy”—­the imaginations of sexual and political conquest of “virgin” lands. While Zantop’s approach is valuable in illuminating Eurocentric colonial thinking in German culture through Kotzebue’s dramas, we also cannot ignore that Kotzebue’s dramas often portray Arabs, Pacific Islanders, or Indians as morally noble and innocent, reminiscent of Jean-​Jacques Rousseau’s idea of the “noble savage.” The non-​European characters also actively propel the plot and significantly contribute to the emotional and moral development of European characters. They exert powerful impact on German and European social and cultural norms and offer unprecedented solutions to thorny issues. Non-​European cultures are not merely portrayed as the passive colonized in Kotzebue’s dramas. Rather, they are active participants, coconstructing the happy endings and challenging European social and cultural values. Hence in addition to Zantop’s approach, I deem it necessary to recognize the actual significance and contribution of non-​European cultures in German and European quotidian reality in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Certainly, as with Robinsonades, non-​European cultures in Kotzebue’s dramas, predominantly informed through travel literature, have inevitably become pastiches, clichés, and twisted images, which serve theatrical purposes

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but do not correspond to cultural authenticity. This, however, still does not mean that Kotzebue completely invented the non-​European characters and settings. In the context of expanding European colonialism and increasing world trade around 1800, fabrications and facts necessarily coexist in Kotzebue’s non-​European elements. They register transcultural interactions in a historically unique and meaningful way. Hence the notion of exoticism, as discussed in this book’s introduction, might not be the most accurate way to view Kotzebue’s dramas. If we describe them as examples of exoticism, we run the risk of ignoring the real-​world significance of European colonialism and transcultural interactions, which are directly connected to Kotzebue’s life and works. For example, in the preface to his drama Die Negersklaven (The Negro Slaves, 1796), Kotzebue harshly critiques colonial slavery. He asks his readers, audience, and reviewers to see this drama not merely as a fiction, because the dramatist has only fitted the story for the stage but has not invented it. As Kotzebue points out, numerous publications, such as Guillaume Thomas François Raynal’s L’histoire philosophique des deux Indes (Philosophical History of the Two Indies, 1770), German philosopher and geographer Matthias Christian Sprengel’s journal Beiträge zur Völker-​und Länderkunde (Contributions to Ethnology and Geography, 1781–­90), German botanist and abolitionist Paul Erdmann Isert’s Neue Reise nach Guinea und den Caribäischen Inseln in Amerika in den Jahren 1783 bis 1787 nebst Nachrichten von dem Negerhandel in Afrika (New Journey to Guinea and the Caribbean Islands in America between 1783 and 1787 with Reports on Slave Trade in Africa, 1790), and the infamous code noir have all offered material for this drama.16 In the subtitle, Kotzebue calls Die Negersklaven a historical portrait (historisches Gemälde) and intentionally uses the medium of theater to condemn colonial cruelty and express sympathy for the misery of black slaves. He dedicated this play to the counselor of justice in Denmark, the country that first abolished slavery in its Caribbean colonies among European colonial countries. Kotzebue’s antislavery position, however, is also determined by his experience with slavery in the Baltic region. Kotzebue, a native from Weimar, was forced to leave Germany twice in his life. He gained his fortune in Russia as a jurist and spent a long period of his life in Reval (now known as Tallinn), Estonia. As a matter of fact, German immigrants made up one-​third of the whole population in Estonia and were the ruling class in this Russian province. Almost all Estonian peasants were in a bondage relationship (Leibeigenschaft) with German aristocrats. Kotzebue was strongly influenced by antislavery criticism in the Baltic region. The pastor Heinrich Johann von Jannau described the miserable situation of the Estonian and Latvian peasants in German enslavement in his book Geschichte der Sklaverey, und Charakter der Bauern in Lief-​und Ehstland, ein Beitrag zur Leibeigenschaft (History of Slavery and Characteristics of the Peasants in Livonia and Estonia, a

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Contribution to Serfdom, 1786). Unlike this pastor, who strongly disapproved of theater and saw it as a useless entertainment, Kotzebue claimed that theater was the place where human sympathy and fine feelings can be educated and influenced. Garlieb Merkel, Kotzebue’s collaborator and coeditor of the journal Der Freimüthige (The Frank), also called for an improvement of slavery conditions in Latvia according to Enlightenment standards in his highly controversial book Die Letten, vorzüglich in Livland am Ende des philosophischen Jahrhunderts (The Latvians, Who Primarily Lived in Livonia at the End of the Philosophical Century, 1796). The German aristocrats in Latvia saw Merkel as a traitor and forced him into exile.17 Against this backdrop, Kotzebue’s Die Negersklaven and other dramas are determined by both European overseas colonial enterprises and the reality of his everyday life. Die Negersklaven is an ideological support for contemporary abolitionist discourse and, due to strict censorship, an indirect critique of the German colonization in the Baltic region. In addition to British and French scientific expeditions, the Russian empire’s maritime explorations were deeply intertwined with Kotzebue’s personal life: Kotzebue’s second son, Otto von Kotzebue, commanded an expedition to the Bering Strait and journeyed around the world. Adelbert von Chamisso, as discussed in chapter 2, was the naturalist on this expedition. Today’s Kotzebue Sound near Alaska is named after Otto. Kotzebue’s second wife was the sister of Russia’s first world traveler, Adam Johann Ritter von Krusenstern, another Baltic German in Russian service. Hence, although Kotzebue’s dramas are composed in German, the vantage point from which Kotzebue conceives of his dramas is not confined to the German-​speaking regions in Europe. The interpretive framework of national literature hence has some limits in Kotzebue’s case. His dramas not only reflect intellectual debates and literary fashions in Germany, France, and England; they are also products of his experience in the Baltic and his global vision. Reval in Estonia, not Weimar or Göttingen, was the place where this most popular German dramatist from 1790 to 1870 saw his career unfold. Kotzebue’s huge popularity profusely manifested the impact of non-​European cultures on the German and European transcultural consciousness in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the ensuing pages I will first explicate the relations between tragedy and Kotzebue’s happy endings enabled by non-​European elements. Non-​European cultures are deeply inscribed in the fundamental structure of Kotzebue’s dramaturgy. I compare Schiller’s theory of tragedy with Kotzebue’s polemic Fragmente über Recensenten-​Unfug (Fragments on the Nonsense of Reviewers, 1797). Peter Brooks’s notion of melodramatic mode offers insightful help for “excusing” Kotzebue’s “shallow triviality” and understanding his dramas as predecessors of modern melodramas. I will then compare Kotzebue’s short drama La Peyrouse (1795) to Goethe’s Stella (1796/1806) to show that even though both dramas deal with a similar love-​triangle theme, Goethe’s drama

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ends tragically, whereas Kotzebue’s characters live happily on a Pacific island. Oceania helps avoid the tragic ending and envision a different way of love, sexuality, and family. After clarifying the structural importance of non-​European elements in Kotzebue’s dramas, I will analyze three major transcultural dramas: Bruder Moritz (1791), Die Sonnenjungfrau (1789), and Die Spanier in Peru (1795). Bruder Moritz critiques European society and morals by depicting a “strange” person, Moritz, and his close friendship with an Arab named Omar, his love for a lower-​class fallen woman, and his plan to emigrate to the paradise-​like Pelew Islands (now Palau). Kotzebue conceives of Moritz as the ideal German and an integrated outsider whose identity is strongly determined by non-​European cultures and spaces. The subject matter of Kotzebue’s Peru dramas, Die Sonnenjungfrau and Die Spanier in Peru, is the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire. While Kotzebue’s contemporary Jean-​François Marmontel portrays a superior and good Spaniard Alonzo, Kotzebue’s Alonzo is melancholic and lacks confidence and action. Condemning Spanish conquest, these two dramas portray the Peruvian woman Cora and the Peruvian man Rolla as the ideal human beings. All of these dramas uniquely and representatively demonstrate the challenge of non-​European cultures to European moral and social norms and reveal how Kotzebue imagines the still unstable transcultural relationships.

Kotzebue and Schiller: Melodrama or Tragedy? Strong emotions and happy endings are the hallmarks of Kotzebue’s dramaturgy. Literary critics, however, often see them as evidence of his aesthetic superficiality, personal unreflectiveness, and blind obedience to the market, and thus his inferiority to such dramatists of bourgeois tragedy as Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe.18 In his polemic Fragmente über Recensenten-​Unfug (Fragments on the Nonsense of Reviewers, 1797), Kotzebue airs his dissatisfaction with his critics and also reflects on tragedies. Disfavoring the dagger driven into the heart of Emilia Galotti, the poison drunk by Miß Sara Sampson, or the bullet Werther shoots into his own head, Kotzebue states that tragedy is not the best dramatic form to gain audiences. He talks about his experience as a practitioner of theater: “Perhaps there are a few tragedies that bring forth a more exalted state, but very few people go to see them, which goes to prove that the poet who wishes to take our hearts by storm has not chosen the best path.”19 Tragedy, Kotzebue argues, contains too many pains, horrors, and desperations, but no moving moments. If the dramatists keep thinking in this direction, Kotzebue concludes, they will lose the stage and audience. Kotzebue’s view of tragedy is verified by Wolfgang Heribert von Dalberg, director of the Hof-​und Nationaltheater in Mannheim, where Schiller’s famous Die Räuber (The Robbers) premiered in 1782. In a letter

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to Kotzebue in 1793, Dalberg asked for new pieces and admitted that tragedy seemed to have reached its end: “It is high time for the German stage to receive a new gift from the hands of the dramatic muse, for the wellspring of useful plays, especially tragedies, is drying up, and the theater directors are at a loss. Your newest product will be a big help! Please don’t make me wait too long, my good and honorable man!”20 Instead of tragic consequences, Kotzebue prefers strong emotional expressions and splendorous performances: A play either works on the senses by means of external pageantry, fairy dances, tournaments, ghosts, soldiers, stage sets, song, and music; or it works on the faculty of reason by means of a philosophy of life, aphorisms, and reflections; or on the heart by showing noble traits, touching situations, domestic bliss, repressed rectitude, and so on. . . . (Ingenious plays based primarily on reason, such as Goethe’s Iphigenie and Huber’s Secret trial, suffer the same fate. Their worth is noted but no one goes to see them very often because the pleasures of reason are less than those of feeling and because the admiration for such a play is always cold.) In such cases the public’s enthusiasm seems dignified and honorable to me.21

Without using a satirical tone toward Goethe and Huber, Kotzebue consciously detaches himself from their works and celebrates sentimentalism and the eventfulness of theatrical performance. Strong emotions (Rührung), Kotzebue explains, also include pain but are less painful than tragic sorrow. Instead of using linguistic complexities and metaphorical grandeur to elevate the intellect, he prefers spectacles and effective coups de théâtre to visually and acoustically entertain the audience.22 If Menschenhaß und Reue was the most popular drama by Kotzebue in Europe, then Pizarro, or The Spaniards in Peru, the English translation of Die Spanier in Peru, oder Rollas Tod by Richard Sheridan, received the loudest ovation in North America from 1798 to 1840.23 To some extent this popularity should be attributed to the spectacular costumes, decorations, colorful sceneries, and elaborate settings. A friend of Kotzebue reported from Vienna that three new stage settings and fifty-​seven costumes were made for the performance of Die Sonnenjungfrau. It is thus not difficult to imagine that the South American elements were quite spectacular. Peter Brooks’s notion of melodramatic mode—­a mode of excessive expression—­is extremely helpful to “excuse” Kotzebue’s superficiality and situate him as a pioneer articulating modern imagination and desires. Brooks claims that melodrama emerged during a period in which the traditional moral principles lost their validity and truth value and melodrama became “the principal mode for uncovering, demonstrating, and making operative the essential moral universe in a post-​sacred era.”24 In melodramas,

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the characters have no interior depth, there is no psychological conflict. It is delusive to seek an interior conflict, the “psychology of melodrama,” because melodrama exteriorizes conflict and psychic structure, producing instead what we might call the “melodrama of psychology.” What we have is a drama of pure psychic signs—­called Father, Daughter, Protector, Persecutor, Judge, Duty, Obedience, Justice—­that interest us through their clash, by the dramatic space created through their interplay, providing the means for their resolution.25

This summary of melodrama’s psychology offers surprising insights into Kotzebue’s dramas with strong emotions (Rührung) and happy endings. Kotzebue’s dramas focus on the exteriorization of inner conflicts and turn the inside out. Indeed, as Lothar Fietz’s historical study convincingly shows, Kotzebue’s dramas prefigure crucial traits of British melodramas in the nineteenth century, and his dramas with happy endings prove salient ways of making sense of modern experience.26 If melodramas articulate a necessary mode of modern experience, as Brooks claims, then Kotzebue’s dramas with non-​ European elements reflect German and European transcultural consciousness in the global eighteenth century. Kotzebue’s predilection for emotional overindulgence is also reminiscent of the sentimental literature in England, France, and Germany flourishing during the 1750s.27 The celebration of excessive inner feelings, however, was soon criticized for its unpractical melancholy and illusory exaggerations, traits often attributed to women. As the division between high-​brow and low-​brow literature becomes wider, sentimentalism without a tragic ending merely represents a “feminized” vulgar passion.28 Williamson points out that “the formation of the civil society” (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) in the eighteenth century hardens gender differences and becomes “the exclusive preserve of men; women, by contrast, were to be denied civil rights and confined to the family.”29 Kotzebue’s dramas, however, were especially popular among women and avoided “the strict gender-​based moralizing of Kant, Fichte, Schiller and their followers. Rather than hold his characters (male and female) to an impossible standard of virtue, he forgave them for their imperfection and drew them back into the circle of humanity.”30 Vanessa Smith, discussing British travelers’ reactions to Tahitian women’s grief, also asks why William Bligh, the captain of the ship Bounty, considered a Tahitian woman’s mourning excessive and insincere. Smith discusses Adam Smith’s statement on silent mourning and the skepticism of Rousseau and Diderot toward the theatrical fakeness of emotions and sentimentality. Smith came to the conclusion that female mourning is usually seen as excessive and dishonest, whereas male silence is evaluated as modest and sincere.31 Kotzebue’s dramas excel at accepting female mourning as honest and authentic. Schiller’s theory of tragedy illustrates the ideological and dramaturgical differences between the German idealists and Kotzebue’s sentimental dramas with happy endings.

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In Schiller’s aesthetics of drama, the critique of “feminized” sentiments is accompanied by his promotion of tragedy. Schiller maintains that tragedy impresses the human heart with the most powerful images and effects and tragedy creates a story with dreadful endings in order to promote sympathy.32 Sympathy, a concept Schiller borrows from Lessing, represents the result of the fulfillment of moral laws. Tragedy should foster reason and moral senses (Sittlichkeit) in order to transcend vulgar motifs, for example theft and seduction, and soft sentiments, abundant in Kotzebue’s dramas, into the realm of the dreadful (dem Schrecklichen) and the sublime (dem Erhabenen).33 The demands on the audiences are fairly clear: only those who can endure the tragic catastrophes or, in Kantian terms, only those who already have reason and moral senses can be aesthetically uplifted and morally educated.34 Schiller also admits that the majority of theater spectators of his day cannot fulfill this requirement because what ordinary people enjoy is simply insulting and horrific for the genius.35 In his essay Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken? (What Effects Can a Good, Established Stage Actually Achieve?, 1784/1802), Schiller emphatically stresses drama’s important function in education (Bildung). For him, theater is the channel of the Enlightenment through which light shines down from the educated part of the population. Kotzebue observes that this gesture resembles that of parents to their children: if something does not taste good, they will say, “This is healthy, .  .  .  you have to eat this.”36 Schiller considers theater an amplification of religion and law and claims that theater will reach into the realms of human emotion where religion and law do not have access. Theater’s effects are subtler and more stable.37 Even if theater cannot eliminate or punish crimes and wrongdoings, its impact on the human psyche is stronger. Theater can thus more effectively function as fictional warnings and prevent crimes from happening in real life.38 This idea recalls Michel Foucault’s argument about the shift from physical punishment to psychic control during the eighteenth century: “Since it is no longer the body, it must be the soul. The expiation that once rained down upon the body must be replaced by a punishment that acts in depth on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations.”39 Whereas Schiller’s theory of tragedy focuses on moral education and psychic control, Kotzebue uses non-​European elements to offer a way out of the straitjacket of German and European social conventions and envision a different order of love, family, and sexuality. Kotzebue’s happy endings can be read as signs of melodramatic transculturality and disclose the impact of non-​European cultures on the German discourse. I by no means aim to downplay the cultural and theoretical significance of Schiller’s theory of tragedy to promote Kotzebue’s often mean-​spirited remarks. Instead, this comparison between Schiller and Kotzebue strives to demonstrate the contribution of non-​European cultures in the making of German-​language dramas and cultural consciousness in the eighteenth century. The differences between Schiller

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and Kotzebue not only exist on the theoretical level but are also reflected in the practices of writing and staging dramas. A comparison between Kotzebue’s La Peyrouse and Goethe’s Stella illustrates how non-​European cultures play a decisive role in turning an inevitable tragedy into a happy ending.

Kotzebue and Goethe: Love in a Trio Constellation La Peyrouse and Stella share the same theme of one man loving two women. Yet the endings are completely different. Kotzebue’s drama ends with the three happily living together on an Oceanic islet, whereas Goethe’s drama takes an abrupt turn toward tragic deaths of the man and one of the women. The paradisiacal South Pacific enables Kotzebue’s conception of a different model of a heterosexual relationship and his refusal of tragedy. La Peyrouse draws on the life of the French explorer Jean François de Galaup, comte de la Pérouse, who disappeared with the entire crew during their world travel in 1788. A new expedition in search of la Pérouse was sent out in 1791 with his wife on board, but it returned fruitlessly. For centuries, with the most recent search in 2008, France has been trying to solve the mystery of the lost la Pérouse expedition in maritime history. Kotzebue was fascinated by the report about la Pérouse that he found in a newspaper and commented: “My imagination sailed with the ship, created interesting situations, and indulged in all kinds of possibilities.”40 Clearly, the fashion of the South Seas, to which Forster’s travel writing significantly contributed, is inextricably connected to this drama. The popular legend of Graf von Gleichen (Count von Gleichen), who lives harmoniously with both a Christian wife and a Muslim wife, also provides raw materials for Kotzebue’s and Goethe’s dramas. Yet Goethe’s Stella is not set in a non-​European location and culture. In a way, Goethe transformed the message of religious tolerance in the legend of Graf von Gleichen into a German nationalist context. Kotzebue imagines that la Peyrouse is rescued by a female islander named Malvina on an Oceanic islet after a shipwreck. They fall in love and live happily with their son until the rescue mission with his French wife Adelaide arrives. When Malvina “naively” suggests that they should all go to Europe and live there together as one family, la Peyrouse rejects: “It would be malice to cheat you, but you cannot be my wife in Europe.”41 Our law, he continues, forbids polygamy. Adelaide, contrary to Malvina, demands that la Peyrouse should behave like a man and choose between herself and Malvina. As la Peyrouse cannot decide whom he loves more, the brother of Adelaide, the ship’s captain, Clairville, suggests that they should start a colony in the South Seas and abandon the idea of returning to Europe. France, he reports, has had a revolution—­now anarchy and chaos dominate everyday life. Since the rich people are now made into beggars in France, la Peyrouse and his family, once rich as well, should not go back and live in poverty. Europe, Clairville

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complains, sends the small thieves (kleine Diebe) out to remote colonies but keeps the big thieves (die großen) at home. He predicts a better future for them in Oceania: “Health, energy, the pleasure to work, and a piece of land on which the sun shines and which the rain wets—­I think, we are still rich.”42 On the suggestion by Malvina that they should become sisters, Adelaide finally changes her mind and stops forcing la Peyrouse to choose between her and Malvina. Instead she suggests that the women live in one house and la Peyrouse in another; since the two women can’t share the husband, no one will have him; they raise the children together during the day and separately at night. The drama ends with all three embracing emphatically. In addition to the critique of European corruption and the skepticism about the French Revolution, this drama also illustrates that Europe—­particularly France—­is not an ideal place for Malvina, la Peyrouse, or Adelaide, especially given the thorny issue of sexuality. The “naïveté” of Malvina, which represents authentic humanity, and the peaceful South Pacific now represent an ideal alternative to corrupted and anarchical Europe in Kotzebue’s imagination. The Oceanic location, in which the pressure of European morals does not exist, induces the change of Adelaide’s attitude. Malvina’s suggestion and the living conditions of Oceania enable Adelaide to imagine a new relationship between her, la Peyrouse, and Malvina. Although she desexualizes their relationships and turns them into a sibling constellation, similar to the relationship between Recha and the knight (Tempelherr) in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s drama Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, 1779), a trio relationship without a tragic ending was nevertheless a stunning end to such a drama. Kotzebue’s contemporaries interpreted the drama as a proposal of polygamy and charged it with immorality. For example, Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann, in one of his dramas, sarcastically lets a married man talk about the impact of Kotzebue’s dramas on his own life: “They [Kotzebue’s dramas] contain everywhere a true system of ethics and life! At the beginning, Benjowski teaches me to be loyal to only one wife; but then la Peyrouse shows me that it is not so problematic at all to have relationships with two women at the same time.”43 In response, Kotzebue refers to Goethe’s Stella, Werther’s suicide, and the vulgar and erotic language in the scene Hexenküche in Faust and wonders why the critics were tolerant toward him.44 Indeed, Goethe’s Stella resembles the trio constellation of La Peyrouse. But the most conspicuous difference is the sudden and tragic ending in the staged version. Stella was originally written in 1776 but was not performed until 1806. In the first version, Goethe wrote a happy ending with the three people harmoniously living together. But after consultation with Schiller for its performance in theater, Goethe changed the ending to a tragic one. He reports the reasons for this change: “Only after careful observation we came to realize that, according to our culture that is exclusively based on monogamy, the relationship of a man to two women, especially like it appears here, cannot be successfully mediated and is thus completely qualified for tragedy.”45 Goethe

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changed the drama and it “took a tragic turn and ended in a way that satisfies the feeling and elevates the passion [Rührung].”46 If we recall that Kotzebue considers Rührung less painful than tragic sorrows, then Goethe’s statement here demonstrates Schiller’s and Kant’s influence that Rührung needs to be elevated into the realm of the sublime through the medium of tragedy. The transition to tragedy in Stella, however, is not seamless. The tragic ending appears abruptly: it is not so much an ending as simply the fall of the curtain. Before the ending, the entire plot runs smoothly, so that all three characters are surprised to meet each other but then start to admire and love each other. The plot provides a solid basis for the suggestion by Cäcilie, the wife, that they should all live together. She tells her husband Fernando the story of Graf von Gleichen (Count von Gleichen). Fernando is moved and exclaims that he finally sees a light beam of hope in his life. It seems that he would accept the trio relationship and maybe also persuade Stella, his lover, to accept it. But instead of tracing the line of hope, the drama ends unexpectedly with the death of Stella, who poisons herself. Fernando then immediately shoots himself dead. Instead of gradually developing from the plot’s inner motivation, the tragic ending gives the reader the feeling that it is imposed from outside the story. Kotzebue’s La Peyrouse then, contrary to Goethe’s adjustment to a more “realistic” love story, finds its fantastic way out in a non-​European location. The contrast here between Goethe and Kotzebue also reflects the disparity between realism and melodrama. Frank Kelleter and Ruth Mayer point out that “the very terms realism and melodrama have thus been in highly evaluative ways, with realism signifying rationality, order, pragmatism, and clear-​ headedness, while melodrama stands for feeling, excess, sentimentality, and grandiose gestures.”47 According to Isabel Hull, toward the end of the eighteenth century, the practitioners of civil society outlawed many sexual behaviors and practices that were already decriminalized by the Enlightened absolutist regimes in the course of the eighteenth century. The results are a tighter moral-​legal coercion, a reduction in public discussions on sexuality, and stricter moral ethics.48 Goethe, apparently, is more willing to conform to the changes toward sexuality so that the “ignoble” sentiments can be elevated into a “higher” realm with soul-​cleansing effects, whereas Kotzebue, conjuring help from the Pacific, imagines other options to critique the taboos and avoid tragedy. In order to portray herself as a pure woman fully devoted to her love for Fernando and her friendship with Cäcilie, Goethe’s Stella must kill herself to show her deep remorse and iron resolution.49 Kotzebue’s Malvina, however, takes full advantage of her non-​European and non-​Christian background and can thus “naively” suggest that they all live together. Because of her Pacific difference, Malvina does not need to transcend her love and demonstrate her pureness through death. Adelaide’s desexualizing suggestion, even though it is hard to imagine, proves an imaginative compromise with the idealizing and transcending moral demands by Goethe and Schiller. Yet the presence

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of the Pacific Islander Malvina avoids the radical turn toward tragedy and functions as a rupture in the representation of love, sexuality, and family. At the same time, the portrayal of Malvina as childlike and naive resonates with Forster’s description of the Tahitians and the historicist attitude, which I will discuss more in the chapter on Herder. Despite the allusion that Europe is historically more advanced, the strong tenor in La Peyrouse articulates Oceania’s challenge to bourgeois sexual morals in eighteenth-​century Germany and Europe. In the drama Bruder Moritz, non-​European impact is spelled out in richer details.

Alter Ego, Fallen Women, and the Emigration to Palau in Bruder Moritz, der Sonderling In Bruder Moritz, der Sonderling oder die Kolonie für die Pelew-​ Inseln (Brother Moritz, the Stranger or the Colony for the Pelew Islands, 1791), the protagonist Moritz Eldingen is eccentric and strange. Once an impoverished German nobleman who later earned his fortune in the Orient, Moritz claims equality between people with different skin colors, between cultures, between men and women, and between all social classes, especially between the nobility and the common people. He has an Arab as his best friend, randomly proposes marriage to his own sisters, and falls in love with a housemaid—­a woman from a lower social class and with an illegitimate child. Moritz also encourages his sister to marry the Arab and, toward the end of the drama, emigrates with his new family and friends to the Palau Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Bruder Moritz immediately enjoyed great popularity. After performances in Reval, Estonia, and Pyrmont, Germany, it premiered at the Berliner Nationaltheater on September 25, 1790, the birthday of the Prussian king, Frederick William II. By 1792 it had already been repeated there twelve times. Meanwhile Bruder Moritz was performed on other major German-​speaking stages in Mainz, Dresden, Hamburg, Breslau, and Weimar. Yet despite its popularity, like other dramas by Kotzebue, Bruder Moritz also experienced harsh critique. A reviewer in the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, a leading journal of German Enlightenment literary criticism, considers Bruder Moritz artistically unsuccessful and morally inappropriate: If we consider Brother Moritz or The Eccentric as a character play, then it is not accurate or excellent enough. . . . Once again, the prohibition against siblings marrying and the marriage of a girl robbed of her innocence are treated as mere prejudice. Why? There is much that is fictional in this play and for that reason it is perhaps less surprising when in the end the characters decide to become adventurers and embark for the Pelew Islands.50

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Among the “immoralities” that the reviewer is particularly unhappy with is Moritz’s decision to marry the housemaid, Marie, a “fallen woman” with an illegitimate child. Apparently, sexual morality is seen as the most controversial and disquieting aspect in Bruder Moritz. Another contemporary reviewer, who otherwise highly praises this drama, also identifies the story between Moritz and Marie as the major concern.51 Isabel Hull contends that in the German lands in the eighteenth century, “extramarital pregnancy challenged the state’s self-​imposed, but universally recognized, responsibility to uphold public order and seemliness.”52 Hull argues that marriage was seen as a way to define, distinguish, and consolidate the boundaries between different social groups.53 Moritz’s marriage to a “fallen woman” from a lower class radically breaks social taboos and questions the standards of social honor, humiliation, and human dignity. Concurrently, the charge of the unrealistic emigration reflects the reviewer’s opinion that theater should stage stories based on “real” sociocultural circumstances. Lessing, one of the towering figures of German theater criticism in the Enlightenment era, once claimed that everything on the stage should stem from the most natural causes (aus den natürlichsten Ursachen) and bear strict moral functions: “We only tolerate wonders in the physical world; in the moral realm, everything must keep its order because theater ought to be the school of the moral world.”54 Following Lessing’s view, Moritz’s “strange” behaviors and the almost surrealistic emigration to Palau certainly fall out of the category of “natural” causes and fail to fulfill the function of moral education. Yet the emigration to Palau dissolves the conflicts in the drama through cultural and geographical dislocation and effectively challenges the validity and universality of European conventions. If we take the popularity of Bruder Moritz as an indicator of a broad public interest in the drama’s messages, we are tempted to ask: Does the happy union of Moritz and Marie transform the role of theater as a moral institution to a site of imagining the impossible? Instead of defending moral standards, does the utopian emigration indicate that theater should sympathize with the victims of social prejudices, such as “fallen women,” and celebrate human sentiments? The two points of sexual morals and non-​European emigration are immediately related to Moritz’s “strangeness,” which is strongly buttressed by his experience in the Orient. Does Moritz the stranger symbolize a new consciousness or a transformed subjectivity created by the encounters between European and non-​European cultures? Indeed, these specific questions related to Bruder Moritz also pertain to the more general importance of non-​European cultures in Kotzebue’s dramas. To explore these questions, in the ensuing pages I will first investigate Moritz’s relationship with the Arab Omar, a symbolic figure representing a cultural alternative in Moritz’s Germany. Without Omar, it is impossible for Moritz to be “strange” or provocative toward social and cultural norms. Most notably, Moritz challenges sexual morals and dismisses the social contempt

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toward “fallen women.” This is the second point I shall discuss. I will then focus on the emigration to Palau at the end of the drama and argue that the South Pacific offers a refuge away from a tragic finale. A non-​European space evokes a remodeling of bourgeois tragedy and paves the way for the emergence of the genre of melodrama. Moritz travels to the Orient to seek his fortune. On his way to Mecca, Moritz is captured by a group of Arabs. Through his physical abilities (e.g., his shooting skills) and his moral strength, he gains respect from the Arabs, especially the friendship of Omar, the son of the head of this group. To fulfill Omar’s wish to see European societies, Moritz takes him to the seaport where his aunt and two sisters live in poverty. Moritz’s wealth has dramatically changed his family’s quality of life. Unlike many other relationships in Bruder Moritz, the one between Moritz and Omar is anything but easy to identify. Moritz calls Omar his friend. Yet other people consider Omar his servant. Omar himself neither denies nor confirms either of these appellations. He is portrayed as shy and quiet. The ambiguity in Omar and Moritz’s relationship intrinsically constitutes Moritz’s paradoxical self-​perception: on the one hand, he feels himself superior to Omar because of his more “developed” European culture; on the other hand, Moritz considers Omar his equal because of Omar’s moral uprightness and selflessness—­again, the nature of a “noble savage.” Moritz strongly identifies himself with Omar. The two sides in their relationship reflect not merely an Orientalist fantasy of control and colonization. Similar to Krusoe Robinson and Freitag in chapter 3, they also disclose a consciousness searching for a global cultural identity during a time of intensified colonial and intercultural encounters and transformations. Moritz feels himself so closely affiliated with Omar that he cannot imagine living without Omar. When one of Moritz’s sisters Nettchen calls Omar the black boy (der schwarze Bube) and is unhappy with the way in which Moritz treats this servant, Moritz emotionally explains that Omar has saved his life twice and emphatically claims: If Omar wishes it, then I will be his servant, you [Moritz’s aunt] his cook, Nettchen his laundress and Julchen his maid. . . . He is my only heir. Everything that was once mine is now his. I give him my sister, too, and if after my death he wishes to be your brother, then you will not have lost a brother. . . . Honor me in him, he is my brother. I will not suffer any snobbishly turned-​up noses from any of you.55

Nettchen is moved to tears and even marries Omar later in the drama. Influenced by the sentimental friendship cult in eighteenth-​century German culture, Kotzebue celebrates this deeply committed friendship between Moritz and Omar, which defines Moritz’s outsider position in his blood-​and race-​bound

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community. Omar’s cultural and physical otherness essentially symbolizes the causes that enable the transformation of Moritz’s existence from poverty to wealth, from prejudices to relativized sociocultural values. Moritz’s existence as a stranger, its justification, and its further development depend on Omar’s presence. Omar is Moritz’s alter ego. Moritz, or better Moritz/ Omar, is a hybrid being par excellence and represents Kotzebue’s conception of a new transcultural consciousness in German and European cultures, then it.56 The marriage of Nettchen and Omar shows that social and racial prejudices yield to human sentiments and moral uprightness. Moritz’s enormous respect for Omar not only pushes Nettchen to change her mind but also challenges German and European cultural norms. Meanwhile, Omar’s marriage to the white woman Nettchen strengthens and perpetuates this familial and intercultural association through heterosexual union and its possible procreation. The inseparable friendship or twinship, however, is only part of the interesting double life of Moritz/Omar. In addition to praising Omar, Moritz also emphasizes that he educates and transforms Omar into a more “civilized” and “enlightened” person. Omar then decides to accompany Moritz to Europe to see “civilized societies” (gesittete Völkerschaften). Even though Moritz is taken captive by the Arabs, he still uses expressions such as “savagery” (Wildheit) or “raw human beings” (rohe Menschen) to describe them. Moritz also mentions that he uses fairy tales (Märchen), which the Arabs especially favor, to teach them moral principles (Sittenlehre). These expressions reflect Moritz’s historicist attitude that the Arabs are still in a childhood stage of history and thus lower than the Europeans in historical development. The huge popularity of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments in eighteenth-​ century Europe, however, indicates that it is not the Arabs who are “childlike.” It was rather the Germans, the French, and other Europeans who were hungry for this kind of “Oriental” tale.57 The statement of the Arabs’ love for fairy tales epitomizes an orientalization of the Orient. The drama makes clear that Omar’s good heart does not qualify him as “civilized”—­he still needs to train himself in a European way to finally become Moritz, a man of both civilization and virtue. Moritz’s praise of Omar’s moral integrity is also partially a praise of his own pedagogical product and his own culture. The portrayal of the disciple Omar suggests a kind of mimicry, which Homi K. Bhabha theorizes as “a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.”58 Omar’s adaptation of Moritz’s culture means subservience (or “resemblance,” Bhabha’s term) but also creates uncertainty (or menace) toward the normalized and disciplinary knowledge and power that Moritz refers to as European high civilization. Although Arabian culture in the drama is clichéd, twisted, and Orientalized, the identity of Moritz can be perceived, recognized, and expressed only through the inclusion of cultural and geographical otherness: the Arab Omar. Omar’s presence determines and enables Moritz’s being different and “strange” for German culture

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and provokes internal uncertainties for the master narrative. From this perspective, Moritz is no longer Omar’s patron but his dependent. Hegel’s master-​slave dialectic is at work here. The existence of the master is valid only when the slave recognizes his authority. Otherwise it is utterly impossible for the master to be master. The coexistence of Moritz and Omar demarcates a border zone between two distinctive cultures and creates a new consciousness of cultural entanglement in an ongoing dialogue between the relatively stable collective identities of Germans, Europeans, and their “others.” Sexuality and family ideals are significant probing terrains in this process. Moritz’s “strangeness” finds its full-​fledged expression by way of dealing with sexual ethics in his society. Moritz and Omar are related to each other through this ambiguous mutuality. In the eighteenth century, a respectable life of a woman is understood as the path from a chaste youth to a successful wife and mother. Many pedagogues, theologians, and physicians, such as Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, Joachim Heinrich Campe, Johann Bernhard Basedow, and Sophie von la Roche, gave advice on how to achieve this goal and prevent pregnancy out of wedlock.59 Sexual education emerged as a crucial social project.60 Campe’s advice book Väterlicher Rath für meine Tochter (A Father’s Advice for My Daughter, 1789), similar to his Robinson der Jüngere (see chapter 3), was among the most widely read texts on this topic in Germany until the first half of the nineteenth century. Against this backdrop, Moritz’s happy union with Marie demonstrates a counterproject to the male-​dominant discourse of female chastity and happiness. Moritz once tells Marie that he has been fighting against prejudices (Vorurteile) all his life. On Marie’s self-​critical response that female virtue (weibliche Tugend) is not a prejudice, Moritz affirmatively claims that female virtue is merely a prejudice. Marie then feels liberated and claims, “I am now starting to respect myself again.”61 Clearly Kotzebue uses Moritz to criticize the moral tutelage toward women and points out the positive psychological effects when one frees oneself from the control of such social construction. Notably, sexuality is also the lens through which we can see how cultural difference determines and endorses Moritz’s disparity. At the beginning of the drama, Moritz randomly proposes marriage to his sisters because he needs a wife by some means. He justifies his proposal by referring to other non-​ Christian cultures in which incest is supposedly not a taboo. The severity of breaking the incest taboo here is lessened through the humorous attitudes of Moritz’s sisters. The fact that Moritz immediately falls in love with Marie smooths away any unease the audience might have felt regarding the possible incest. This coup de théâtre intends to poke fun at existing sexual morals more than seriously endorse breaking the incest taboo. Although Moritz, by referring to other cultures in which incest is considered normal, cannot successfully persuade his sisters to marry him—­an idea he spontaneously takes

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up and also immediately abandons—­this cultural difference does shake the absoluteness of Christian authority and question the distinction between Christians and pagans.62 Only when buttressed by non-​European cultures is Moritz able to call the incest taboo a prejudice, the same word he applies to female virtue. Only because Moritz has experienced different cultures can he call his aunt a fool when she suggests that he should marry someone from a decent Christian and aristocratic family. Moritz’s claim that a good girl on a manure heap (Misthaufen) can be a queen for him clearly paves the way for his marriage with Marie. As a matter of fact, reshaping and reorganizing sexuality is a central theme in the course of social and political transformations in the eighteenth century. Sexual mores and values from the non-​European world, especially from the South Seas, have an enormous impact on eighteenth-​century intellectuals in their efforts to reconsider and reconceptualize the self and the other. As discussed in the chapter on Forster, travel narratives about the insular societies, particularly the island of Tahiti, aroused euphoric longing for the allegedly “free” sexuality in Oceania. One of the most eminent voices in this context, Denis Diderot’s “libertine” Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville (Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage, written 1771, published 1796) envisages a radically new erotic order to unsettle the self-​ascribed centrality and universal validity of French and European social and political customs.63 Diderot also mentions the incest motif in his dialogue-​styled text. Orou, a Tahitian man, treats a French chaplain to a great meal and then asks him for a favor: to sleep with his daughters and his wife. This sparked a conversation between the chaplain and Orou about Tahitian sexual standards: the chaplain: May a father sleep with his daughter, a mother with her son, a brother with his sister, a husband with someone else’s wife? orou: Why not? the chaplain: Well! To say nothing of the fornication, what about the incest, the adultery? orou: What do you mean by those words, “fornication,” “incest,” and “adultery”? the chaplain: They are crimes, horrible crimes for which people are burned at the stake in my country. orou: Well, whether they burn or don’t burn in your country means nothing to me. But you cannot condemn the ways of Europe for not being those of Tahiti, nor our ways for not being those of Europe. You need a more dependable rule of judgment than that. . . . the chaplain: As for unions between brothers and sisters, I imagine they are very common. orou: Yes, and very strongly approved of.

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the chaplain: According to you, the same passion that gives rise to so many evils and crimes in our countries is completely innocent here.64

Orou then reminds the chaplain that there are also strict rules of sexuality in Tahiti, but they are just different from those in Europe. Similar to Kotzebue, Diderot uses the contentious issue of incest to challenge eighteenth-​century European readers, destabilize their “commonplace” understandings, and force them to imagine and recognize the validity of other ways of life. The fact that Moritz does not insist on marrying one of his sisters, and their joking attitude, reveal that it is not incest itself that is taken seriously here. What matters, instead, is the challenging of social conventions and the demonstration of alterity. At the end of the drama, the emigration to the Pelew Islands, the modern-​day Republic of Palau, approximately five hundred miles east of the Philippines, effectively avoids a possible tragic ending and enables a realistic provocation to the social and racial prejudices toward Marie and Omar. The British ship Antelope shipwrecked off its shores in 1783. The popular travelogue by George Keate, An Account of the Pelew Islands (1788), based on the diaries of the ship’s captain Henry Wilson, praises the islands as a utopia of human innocence. The Pacific Islands were seen as the earthly paradise in eighteenth-​ century European imaginations.65 In addition to the biblical tradition of paradise and Thomas More’s utopian isle, Immanuel Kant mentions in his Physical Geography that Carl Linnaeus, the famous progenitor of natural history in the eighteenth century, once calculated “that Paradise might have been situated on an island in the tropics while all other land was covered by the primæval ocean.”66 Generations of naturalists including Georg Forster, Adelbert von Chamisso, and Charles Darwin followed Linnaeus’s blueprint of natural history and studied the Pacific Islands as the original model of the natural and cultural worlds. Obviously, the vision of paradise does not merely rest within the realm of mythical fantasy but is also taken seriously and inextricably connected to the emerging modern sciences in the eighteenth century. The Pacific Islands are imbued with the quality of being both utopia and reality. This double quality of the Pacific Islands in eighteenth-​century European cultural history is also reflected in Bruder Moritz. Early in the drama, Moritz mentions the German translation of Keate’s travel account by Georg Forster to Omar and his plan of emigration. Possibly Kotzebue was inspired by a story in the travelogue that a British seaman successfully integrates into the indigenous society and enjoys the hospitality and openness of the islanders. When Captain Wilson was departing from Palau, a sailor, Madan Blanchard, asked permission of the king of Palau to stay for good. “Captain Wilson desired him not to send any such idle message, and to go about his business, and forbad Tome Rose [the translator] to deliver it;

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upon which, Blanchard very seriously desired it might be delivered, assuring the Captain, that it was his settled determination to remain at Pelew, if the King would permit him.”67 The king of Pelew welcomed Blanchard and took him under his protection. Since Blanchard was not able to read and write, as Keate comments, we can learn no more about his motivations and do not know the outcome of his life on Palau. His decision to stay, however, strongly proves the impact of the South Pacific on the Europeans in the eighteenth century. The scarcely realistic decision of deserting “civilization” and especially its fulfillment are irredeemably encouraging and enticing for the readers of Keate’s beautiful prose. The fabulous story of Robinson Crusoe now has a realistic and intentional imitator. Utopia is no longer a matter of desire but has also become a matter of will—­a realistic access to greater freedom in a remote geographical location. Hence Moritz’s idea of fleeing to Palau seems surprising but also practical. The popularity of the drama reflects a collective desire to escape from German and European social reality and its regulations in order to establish something completely different and new. This apparently unrealistic ending has an aesthetic or symbolic value in real life, which, as Fredric Jameson interprets Thomas More’s Utopia, “would correspond to something like an activity in daily life, and would constitute a rehearsal of [utopian mechanisms] on the purely symbolic level, offering a kind of supplementary pleasure.”68 Moritz’s colonial plan does not so much articulate the German desire of possessing non-​European land and people. Rather, his plan articulates the impact of Oceania on the daily reality in Germany and promises a supplemental pleasure in contrast to the straitjacket of social and cultural conventions. The geographical externality of Palau is an imaginative utopia and, at the same time, a realistic challenge to the existing order of Euro-​German sexuality and social conventions. There is no doubt that Moritz is the leading figure throughout the dramatic unfolding. He breaks the rules, justifies his deeds with human sentiments, and convinces other people to follow him. He represents the ideal man; and his family epitomizes the ideal community. Again, what enables and demarcates Moritz’s exceptionality is the foreigner Omar. Moritz, the invented ideal German, is thus constructed by Kotzebue to be an integrated outsider, one whose identity is strongly determined by the non-​European culture and space. If the character Omar and his culture should be counted under the category of an imagined Orient by the European master narrative, as Edward Said points out in Orientalism, Palau refers to a real-​world place that geographically lies outside Europe. This external geographical location serves as a spatial rupture in the genealogy of Moritz’s noble ancestry, which has a great significance for the cultural and political identity of German and European societies in the eighteenth century. The real-​world location of Palau, which offers “socially unacceptable” wishes and deeds a refuge, directly challenges the authority of the social order in German-​speaking culture.

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Heroic Peruvians and Melancholic Spaniard: Die Sonnenjungfrau and Die Spanier in Peru, oder Rollas Tod Kotzebue’s drama Die Sonnenjungfrau (Virgin of the Sun, 1789) and its sequel, Die Spanier in Peru, oder Rollas Tod (Spaniards in Peru, or Rolla’s Death, 1795), draw on the Spanish colonial conquest of the Inca Empires in sixteenth-​ century Peru. These dramas reflect the resurgent intellectual and public interest in the violent encounters between the Spaniards and the Native Americans in the eighteenth century.69 Very influential on Kotzebue’s Peru dramas, Jean-​François Marmontel’s romance Les Incas, ou La Destruction de l’empire du Pérou (The Incas, or The Destruction of the Empire of Peru, 1777), one of the most powerful literary adaptations and imaginations of the Spanish colonization in the Americas, tells of a love story between a Peruvian woman named Cora and a Spaniard named Alonzo during the time of Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca Empire in Quito. Marmontel’s romance sets the basic plot and characters for Kotzebue’s dramas and twelve other German adaptations on stage.70 Besides the vogue of Marmontel’s romance, Kotzebue’s Peru dramas also extraordinarily contribute to the dissemination and popularization of this material.71 Die Sonnenjungfrau was translated into French, Dutch, English, Italian, Danish, Czech, and Spanish and was performed in Europe and America season after season.72 Die Spanier in Peru formed the basis for the British playwright Richard Sheridan’s extremely successful drama Pizarro (1799), which was translated back into German and repeatedly performed. Kotzebue’s dramas, particularly Die Spanier in Peru, harshly critique the brutality of the Spanish conquest.73 In the preface to Spanier in Peru, Kotzebue reports that his friend and dramatist Friedrich Ludwig Schröder advised him to change the critical tone toward Spanish colonial violence in this drama to accommodate his audience. Kotzebue rejects this advice, though, and states: “I, for example, don’t understand why we shouldn’t say it out loud: that our Father Pope gave America to Spain in a bull; that he, in another bull, claimed the Indians as human, not as monkeys; that they hung thirteen Indians in honor of Jesus Christ and the twelve Apostles; and there are many more things of this kind. Why should we remain silent about historical facts on the stage?”74 Clearly, Kotzebue aims to use the institution of theater to denounce colonial cruelty. His disapproving attitude corresponds to that of Marmontel and the Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas. In his influential critique of Spanish colonial ruthlessness, Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542), las Casas forcefully reports and rebukes the Spaniards’ colonial atrocities and their enslavement of the native people, even though he does not question the superiority of Christianity and European culture.75 Following las Casas’s indictment, Marmontel sees a religious fanaticism and a spirit of intolerance and persecution in the Spanish conquest, and his work should “contribute . . . to bring this destructive fanaticism into still deeper and deeper detestation.”76 As with las

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Casas, Marmontel’s reprimand does not prevent him from believing in the natural inferiority of the Native Americans.77 In Marmontel’s romance, the Spaniard Alonzo urges the Peruvians to abolish their “barbaric” sun cult, which forbids him to marry a Peruvian virgin consecrated to the sun god. Kotzebue’s Die Sonnenjungfrau, however, stages the story in a fairly different fashion. It is not Alonzo the Spaniard but Cora the Peruvian sun virgin who bravely expresses her love to Alonzo and persuades the Inca to change the law of virginity. In Die Spanier in Peru, a Peruvian warrior, Rolla, is portrayed as a fearless hero fighting against the colonial conquest of Pizarro. Alonzo, the Spanish protagonist in Marmontel’s romance, is indecisive and melancholic in Kotzebue’s dramas. Then why does Kotzebue assign such positive characteristics to the Peruvians instead of the Spaniards? What impact does the New World exert on German and European perceptions? Instead of communicating the appropriation and control of the Americas, does Kotzebue employ the remoteness and foreignness of the Inca Empire to project certain idealized human values and morals or other positive social and cultural alternatives? Zantop interprets Alonzo as the Spanish colonizer who intends to possess both land and people in the New World. Yet based on the plot, I argue that Cora and Rolla challenge moral values in eighteenth-​ century Europe, project utopian humanity, and critique colonial debauchery. Even if the Inca Empire is represented in a twisted and altered way to serve Kotzebue’s purposes, German values are also challenged and transformed by the New World. Cora, the Ideal Woman Die Sonnenjungfrau stages a love story between the virgin Cora, consecrated to the sun cult, and the Spaniard Alonzo Molina. When the drama begins, a series of background stories has already taken place. In an expedition to Peru sponsored by the Spanish Crown, Alonzo strongly disagrees with the team leader Pizarro’s cruel plan to plunder the Inca Empire. Hence Alonzo opts to stay with these good-​natured people and teach them useful skills. The Inca Ataliba and his people welcome Alonzo. In a battle against another kingdom, Alonzo rescues the life of Ataliba and thus gains the trust and friendship of the Inca. One day at a sun feast, Alonzo meets the sun virgin Cora, who has to abide by the sun cult and the law of virginity. A violation of this law will entail a death penalty for the virgin, her lover, and her entire family. An unexpected earthquake, however, breaks the wall of the sun temple and makes it possible for Cora and Alonzo to come together. Being aware of the dangers they face and, at the same time, ashamed of his behavior, Alonzo becomes melancholic and hopeless. Meanwhile, Rolla, a brave commander in Ataliba’s service, has fervently loved Cora for years, yet before Cora meets Alonzo, she rejects Rolla’s love and decides to become a sun virgin. When the drama sets off, all of this has already happened. The breaking news now is

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that Cora is pregnant, which adumbrates an inevitable disaster. Yet the plot does not develop into a tragic ending but turns around to produce a miracle-​ like happy reunion: when Ataliba is about to announce the death sentence to Cora and Alonzo, Rolla and Alonzo’s friend Juan Velasquez lead a revolt to the sun temple and demand that the king forgive the lovers. Cora persuades Rolla to surrender and let the king judge. Ataliba, who has already sympathized with Cora and Alonzo and only feels compelled by convention, now finally decides to absolve them and abrogate the law: “The law be abolished! Cora and Alonzo pardoned!”78 Throughout the drama, love and human sentiments are held higher than any other values such as religion and cultural belongings. Yet can the story remain the same if Alonzo, the Spaniard, is not involved? Why did Kotzebue not simply write a drama set entirely within the Inca Empire or within Germany? In other words, if there had been no Spanish invasion, could the law be changed at all? What impact, then, does Cora exert upon German and European theater spectators in the eighteenth century? What is the function of gender with respect to cultural belongings?—­that is, why is the man from Spain and the woman from Peru? Does this drama reflect a utopian wish of the dramatist to change his own society, which could imitate the Incas and the courageous Peruvians? Let’s first discuss Cora’s law of love. Cora is the center of the conflict. Despite the law of virginity, Cora does not see her devotion to the divinity of the sun as contradicting her love and sexuality. When Cora tells Alonzo that she is pregnant, Alonzo feels desperate about their future. To his surprise, Cora remains happy and quiet. She asks him: “Of what are you afraid? Is it a crime to become a mother? Impossible! My aged father always taught me: he who has committed a crime feels restless and uneasy,—­but I,—­I feel so content—­so happy!”79 Alonzo reminds her of the divine consecration of the temple of the sun. Cora disagrees and argues: “He who loves virtue, needs no law, he fulfils every duty without knowing it: and I love virtue.”80 In Cora’s statement, the external laws are valid only if the internal conscience approves of them. The divinity of the sun cult is not an institutional authority for her but depends on the individual’s moral sense. The law of virginity is not an absolute value but rather a connection between her emotion and an abstract humanity. Her individualized sense of divinity transforms the biological restriction of the quality of the virgin into a realm of subjective acknowledgment. The law of virginity transforms into the law of love. Religious differences are also subject to Cora’s new law. Throughout the drama, cultural differences are articulated through the religious differences between Alonzo’s Christianity and the sun cult. When Cora asks Alonzo to kneel down with her and pray to the sun, Alonzo hesitates and says that the sun is not his god. Yet Cora answers: “O yes! He is thy God also. He shines upon us all.—­He bestows on us all his cheering influence. . . . Ungrateful Alonzo! who gave thee thy Cora?—­In the very sight of

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my God shall I be ashamed of thee?—­Dearest Alonzo! if thou lov’st me.”81 Alonzo then gives in and prays to the sun. Religious differences now appear unessential. Strict religious principles become dispensable from the perspective of interpersonal intimacy and sexuality. Love represents intrinsic purity and humanity. In contrast to Cora’s determination, Alonzo is rather melancholic and passive. Alonzo is often referred to as the foreigner (Fremdling) in the drama. On the one hand, his foreignness could prevent him from being punished as severely as Cora. His friend Juan persuades him to end this relationship and points out that Cora is much more endangered than him. The Inca Ataliba also reminds Alonzo of his special status as a foreigner in order to exempt him from punishment. Yet Alonzo refuses to use his foreignness as an excuse and demonstrates his love and sincerity in spite of death. On the other hand, Alonzo’s foreignness also means cultural “superiority” in the drama. As mentioned above, Alonzo intends to teach the Peruvians useful skills (nützliche Künste). His intention meets with gratitude from the most powerful people of the Inca Empire. When a senior priest, Xaira, refuses to allow Alonzo to attend the sun feast, the chief priest argues that they should not forget that Alonzo has saved the life of their king, disciplined their troops to make them more successful, and taught them useful skills.82 It is definitely true that there are moments in the drama that suggest European superiority. Yet if we put this aspect in the context of the entire drama, we notice that, in contrast to Cora, Alonzo’s passivity and melancholy do not push the drama’s plot forward. Hence we need to switch our critical perspective from the ideological critique of European colonialism and focus more on the non-​European impact on the German and European discourse. Cora is the driving force behind the abrogation of the law of virginity. A connection between Cora’s function and the symbolic meaning of earthquakes in the cultural history of the eighteenth century illustrates the radicalism of the changes introduced by Cora’s story. Kotzebue uses an earthquake to break the walls in order to make Alonzo and Cora’s love real. For a learned person in the eighteenth century, an earthquake symbolizes an unexpected catastrophe beyond human imagination. The earthquake that destroyed Lisbon in 1755 provoked enormous intellectual debates on geography and seismology. In Voltaire’s novel Candide (1759), the protagonist shouts amid the earthquake in Lisbon: “The end of the world is here.”83 Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Das Erdbeben in Chili (The Earthquake in Chile, 1807) registers the devastating power of an earthquake on human heart and sentiment. Kant reflects on the cathartic impact of an earthquake: “We have to gather everything terrible that our power of imagination allows us to imagine so that we could fairly envisage the horror, which humans perceive when the earth under their feet trembles, when everything around them collapses.”84 Kant believes that such a natural disaster must be moving and must exert a huge impact on the improvement of the human

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heart. Clearly, Kotzebue is also influenced by the discourse on earthquake and strives to use its revolutionizing effects to convey the message of the love story of Cora and Alonzo: to imagine something unimaginable that radically challenges social customs and norms, to break the boundaries of religious and cultural differences, and to celebrate love and human sentiment. Although Cora is committed to her passion to Alonzo and challenges the authority of the law of virginity, she persuades Rolla to put down his arms to accept the sovereignty of the Inca. Cora’s disagreement with Rolla’s rebellion and her approval of the benevolent rule of the Inca betray Kotzebue’s attitude toward the French Revolution. Die Sonnenjungfrau was first performed in Reval on December 8, 1789, only five months after the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. Shortly thereafter, Kotzebue went to Paris and disapproved of the chaotic situation in France. Cora’s success in persuading Rolla to obey the Inca demonstrates Kotzebue’s position toward political authority. It implies that it is not the regime or the political authority per se that needs to be changed but, rather, structural regulations—­in the drama’s case, the law of virginity. This scene prepares Ataliba’s absolution of the lovers and shows once again Cora’s steadfast character and her faith in the purity of her love. Cora is neither a devotional virgin with a pure body. Nor is she a fallen woman who would have the strength to face death, like Lessing’s Emilia Galotti or Goethe’s Stella. Rather, she is a woman who violates the law of virginity, praises the power of passionate love, and compels authority to change the law and social norms. This new image of an ideal woman, however, is hardly imaginable if she were German and European. The recognition of this radically different image of woman, in a story with a happy ending, is possible only through Cora’s cultural difference. In his study Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, Robert Young shows with ample evidence that in the nineteenth century, love stories involving different non-​European cultures usually imagine a relationship between a powerful white man and a beautiful non-​European woman. Young sees in this type of relationship construction the colonial desire, which projects male fantasy onto virgin lands and showcases how colonialism and capitalism work hand in hand as a desiring machine.85 At first glance, Die Sonnenjungfrau seems to fit the model of colonial desire—­a white man is with an exotic woman. Yet Cora’s active role and Alonzo’s melancholy make this application more complicated. In Marmontel’s romance, it is Alonzo who delivers a powerful speech to the Inca king and persuades him to abrogate the law of virginity.86 In Kotzebue’s conception, however, Cora insists on her love and endeavors to break the boundaries of cultural differences and change the standard of legal punishment, whereas Alonzo never suggests anything to improve their situation. By giving the active role to Cora, the drama demonstrates the imagination of an intercultural order determined by a Peruvian woman, not the Spanish

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man. Male fantasy reflected in colonial desire is displaced by a euphoric vision of an ideal woman from a non-​European culture. Die Sonnenjungfrau powerfully rejects narratives by Kotzebue’s contemporaries who dismiss Native Americans as effeminate and inferior, including Cornelius de Pauw and others.87 The love story of Cora and Alonzo demonstrates less Alonzo’s education of the Peruvians than the impact of Cora’s love and Ataliba’s benevolence on Alonzo’s fate. The vogue of Cora and Alonzo’s story in the eighteenth century reveals the penetration of the New World into the consciousness of German and European intellectuals and induced them to recodify and reimagine religion, sexuality, and authority. Rolla, the Ideal Man After the happy union of Alonzo and Cora, Die Spanier in Peru, oder Rollas Tod stages the war between Pizarro’s Spanish troops and the Inca in Quito. Whereas Die Sonnenjungfrau portrays the ideal woman, this drama depicts the ideal man: the Peruvian Rolla. Different from Marmontel’s original story and other adaptations, in which Alonzo is the brave hero, Kotzebue’s Rolla surpasses him in heroism. Like in Die Sonnenjungfrau, Alonzo remains melancholic and lacks resolution and action in Die Spanier in Peru. Rolla’s heroism as utopian humanity is shaped by the clash between the Inca Empire and the Spanish intruders. Die Spanier in Peru articulates a harsh critique of colonial brutality, praises benevolence and tolerance, and even imagines a peaceful coexistence of the Peruvians and the Spaniards. When the drama starts, the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro plans to attack the Inca’s camp as the Peruvians are busy with the sacrificial ceremony for the sun god. When Pizzaro discusses his plans with other leaders in his troops, the priest las Casas reproaches his rapaciousness and cruelty. Las Casas’s humanistic ideals strongly appeal to Elvira, Pizarro’s mistress. Although she knows that Pizarro intends to marry the princess of the Inca after the conquest so that he can guarantee his control over Peru, she still admires Pizarro’s spirit of adventure and courage. She tries to persuade Pizarro to give up his plans of violent conquest. Yet Pizarro repeatedly rejects her suggestions with the scornful remark that she, a woman (Weib), does not understand the real essence of the conquest. In the Peruvian camp, Alonzo and Cora now have a baby. The minute before Alonzo departs for the battlefield, he asks Rolla to be his heir and to take care of Cora and their son. Rolla promises to do so. Although the Peruvians win the battle because of Rolla’s insurmountable courage and fighting abilities, Alonzo is caught by the Spaniards. Pizarro sees Alonzo as a traitor and demands his death. After Elvira fails to convince Pizarro to set Alonzo free, she decides to kill Pizarro and rescues Alonzo for the sake of humanity. When Cora learns that Alonzo is captured, she irrationally decides to go to the Spanish camp to rescue him. Rolla tries to comfort her and tells her of

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Alonzo’s wish that he, Rolla, should take care of her. Cora then accuses him of intentionally not helping Alonzo on the battleground because he wants to possess her. Rolla decides to sacrifice his life to rescue Alonzo and show Cora his innocence and love. He sneaks into Alonzo’s prison, disguised under a monk’s robe, and enables Alonzo to flee in the same way. Elvira, who aims to let Alonzo kill Pizarro while sleeping, now leads Rolla to Pizarro’s bedroom. Rolla, instead of killing him, tells Pizarro that he, a man with noble virtue, would not kill other people in their sleep. He also tells Pizarro that he has rescued Alonzo and Pizarro should sentence him to death. Rolla also extends an invitation to Pizarro to live with the Peruvians in peace. Pizarro is impressed with Rolla’s heroism and decides to let him go. At this moment, two soldiers bring Cora’s baby, whom she puts under a tree while looking for Alonzo. Pizarro thus wants to use this child to suppress the Inca into surrendering. Rolla, however, takes the child away by force and flees to the Peruvian camp. After he hands over the child and claims his innocence to Cora, he dies from severe injury. The ideal man Rolla excels in three respects: first, his love for Cora is completely selfless and altruistic; second, his bravery and combat skills are insurmountable; third, his high-​ mindedness surpasses that of las Casas, Alonzo, Cora, and the Inca Ataliba because he even invites his enemy Pizarro to live peacefully with the Peruvians. These three traits construct a utopian humanity, in stark contrast to Spanish colonial practices. Rolla’s Peruvian cultural belonging is crucial in exemplifying the utopian human qualities. Non-​European culture, even if it is “invented” by European travelers and writers, still powerfully intervenes in the process of projecting and forging cultural and anthropological norms, values, and ideals for the future. In order to understand Rolla’s utopian human qualities, it is indispensable to first demonstrate the differences between Rolla and other characters who also criticize Spanish colonial practices. These characters prepare the audience to appreciate Rolla’s action of ideal humanity. At the beginning of the drama, Bartolomé de las Casas is the leading critical voice of Pizarro’s atrocity in the Spanish camp. He strongly influences Alonzo and Elvira. Disagreeing with Pizarro’s consultant Valverde, who calls las Casas a fantasist (Schwärmer), Elvira admits that las Casas’s ideas of humanity and tolerance directly speak to her heart and she is moved by his sincerity. Like the historical figure who penned A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542), las Casas in Kotzebue’s drama also harshly critiques the brutality of Spanish colonial practice and praises the generosity of the native people. At the same time, las Casas does not propose a complete withdrawal from the Inca Empire. Rather, he suggests: “O send me once again to your enemies! Let me to talk to them in the language of peace. Let me preach our holy religion with gentleness.”88 Of course, las Casas intends to prevent further violent encounters—­but he does not pursue an abandonment

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of colonialism; he does not recognize and respect the cultural idiosyncrasy of the Inca Empire. Rather, he uses a nonviolent way of Christianizing and “civilizing” the Peruvians to achieve colonization. Therefore, in the drama as well as in the historical situation, if we argue that Pizarro uses religion to justify his violent conquest and disguise his greed for power and wealth, then las Casas’s critique bears the ontological limits of Christianity itself, which conceives of the world as monocentric and rarely tolerates different values. Las Casas’s critique based on Christian doctrines proves to be an internal critique that does not recognize the validity of difference and resides in the epistemological framework of Christianity, to which the conquerors also refer.89 Yet in Kotzebue’s drama, the Peruvians go one step further than las Casas: they move beyond religious differences and eulogize universal fraternity. When Elvira asks Alonzo to assassinate Pizarro for the sake of humanity, Alonzo suggests to Elvira: “You don’t belong to these people here. Go over to the so-​called savages. There you will find your home.”90 The phrase “the so-​called savages” (die sogenannten Wilden), echoing Chamisso’s opinion, effectively erases the negative appellation of the Peruvians as “savages” and transcends the established separation between civilization and barbarism. Elvira’s new home—­the Peruvian community—­promises religious tolerance and political benevolence, something Lessing also dreams about in Nathan der Weise. Rolla is the hero who represents, practices, and fights for the ideal universal humanity. Rolla represents the ideal man because his love for Cora is selfless and without any interest of possession. In Die Sonnenjungfrau, as Rolla learns that Cora is pregnant and loves Alonzo, he suggests that he and they flee to a friend of his in a remote region where they can escape the punishment. Rolla is even willing to live with them and help to raise their children. His only goal is to make Cora happy. When Elvira admires Rolla’s deed of rescuing Alonzo as true friendship, Rolla replies that he does it not out of friendship but out of love for Cora. At the end of the drama, Rolla sacrifices his life to demonstrate his love and innocence. Rolla’s love is purely subject to the needs and well-​being of the person of his affections. It is even more radical than Cora’s love, which defies authority but still needs Alonzo’s recognition. Rolla’s love does not demand recognition from Cora and thus does not compete with Alonzo either. His love is self-​sacrificing and self-​contained. It transcends the dependence in a love relationship, embodies a pure existence of this passion, and nearly represents itself as a utopian impulse. Rolla’s love is accompanied by his resolution and brave action. The counterexample of Rolla is Alonzo. Although Alonzo loves Cora, his indecisiveness only brings Cora to desperation and danger. Alonzo’s melancholy prevents him from bravely fighting against Pizarro. At the beginning of the combat, while Alonzo is extremely concerned with being taken prisoner, Rolla’s attention is more concentrated on fighting and winning the battle. Alonzo’s indecisiveness prevents him from immediate actions in the urgent moment

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of the enemy’s attack. Pizarro’s fear of Alonzo teaching the Peruvians the arts of war and thus leading them toward victory does not correspond to the real situation on the battlefield. Instead, Rolla’s significance in the victory of the battle is irreplaceable. Rolla is depicted as a man with superior ability who turns a defeat into triumph.91 At the end of the drama, Rolla rescues Alonzo and Cora’s child to enable a relatively happy ending. At first glance his death is a tragic ending and Kotzebue also calls this drama “a romantic tragedy” (ein romantisches Trauerspiel). Yet on closer examination, Rolla’s death enables the happy reunion of Cora, Alonzo, and their child and keeps Ataliba’s empire independent. Rolla’s high-​mindedness also leads him to another heroic deed: he extends an invitation to Pizarro to live with the Peruvians in peace: rolla: Live peacefully among us, serve your God, like we ours, be a friend of virtue, then you are my friend. pizarro: Only if you grant me the sweet goal of my deeds—­the throne of Quito. rolla: Now it is enough! Farewell!92

Rolla’s invitation indicates his belief in the peaceful coexistence of the Peruvians and the Spaniards despite their religious and cultural differences. Although other characters in the drama also articulate their belief in universal humanity, Rolla is the only one who takes action and extends his hands to Pizarro. The portrayal of the Peruvian Rolla as the ideal man, who selflessly loves, bravely fights, and generously invites his enemy, testifies to the impact of non-​European culture on the German imagination of the ideal man. Even Pizarro admits: “This pagan is indeed a hero.”93 Zantop’s analysis of Die Spanier in Peru reaches the conclusion that this drama reflects Kotzebue’s proposal of “a more peaceful alternative to the ‘rape’ of the land by greedy conquistadors.”94 For her, Rolla’s death symbolizes the exclusion of the native male from the colonial family of Cora and Alonzo and thus enables Alonzo’s perpetual colonial possession of the “Virgin (territory).”95 There is no doubt that, similar to Alonzo’s intention of teaching the Peruvians in Die Sonnenjungfrau, Die Spanier in Peru also praises the Spaniard Alonzo’s good deeds in the Inca Empire. In particular, the phrase “barbaric laws” (barbarische Gesetze) implies that Alonzo has brought the opposite of barbarism to the Peruvians: civilization.96 From this perspective, Zantop’s reading is insightful. However, the detailed depiction of Rolla as the ideal man representing universal humanity, as analyzed above, effectively balances Zantop’s interpretation. Reading this drama merely as the articulation of German colonial fantasy does not do justice to Kotzebue’s critique of Pizarro’s violence, his description of Alonzo’s lack of action, and his celebration of Rolla’s heroism.

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Kotzebue’s drama uses Rolla’s non-​European quality to project an ideal of a human being that reconciles religious and cultural differences. The successful integration of Alonzo in the Peruvian community and the goodhearted Elvira promise a common humanity that connects the Spaniards, the Peruvians, and all human beings. The idealized Inca Empire represents a utopia of such universal humanity in which differences are no longer pertinent. Although Rolla dies, his death also makes the non-​European ideal man even more desirable because death adumbrates the disappearance of his virtue. Thus Rolla’s death cries for imitation and condemns colonial violence. Even if Rolla did not embody the authentic Peruvian culture but rather is an altered and twisted hero designed to serve Kotzebue’s purposes, Rolla would still represent a non-​European utopian ideal that critiques European colonial atrocity and reminds the audience of the common humanity. The non-​European impact in Die Spanier in Peru is evidenced by the drama’s widespread and sustaining popularity. Moreover, the popularity of the material of the Spanish colonialism in the Americas among European intellectuals, as shown in the introductory remarks to Kotzebue’s Peru dramas, makes it clear that the empire is not “writing back” only in the twentieth century, as these eighteenth-​century texts demonstrate; the empire has always been influencing and coconstituting German and European discourses.97 In this chapter, I focus on the functions of the non-​European characters and settings in four dramas by Kotzebue and argue that these dramas represent compelling non-​European alternatives to German and European social and cultural realities in the eighteenth century. Kotzebue creatively draws on widespread colonial materials such as the South Pacific exploration or the Spanish conquest of Peru to give them his own original and complex interpretations. While these dramas sometimes express a condescending attitude toward the non-​Europeans and may help justify European superiority and the logic of colonial control and domination, we can’t neglect the dominant tenor of non-​European impact and its utopian quality. Hence Kotzebue’s dramas are not merely a passive documentation of the geopolitical conditions of his time. Rather, they actively produce knowledge, question current value systems, and imagine the still unstable intercultural and interracial relationships. This is the idiosyncrasy of Kotzebue’s literary imagination, whose vast popularity testifies to a collective desire within the German and European discourses. Kotzebue’s dramas feature emotional excesses and hyperbolic clashes of ethical values: Cora’s violation of the law of virginity and Ataliba’s absolution of the lovers, Rolla’s self-​sacrificing love of Cora and his heroic deeds of saving the lives of Alonzo and his son from Pizarro’s evil plans, Moritz’s marriage to a lower-​class “fallen woman,” and the insular existence of la Peyrouse, Malvina, and Madelaide. The melodramatic good and evil are vividly personified, and most of the dramatis personae are intensively characterized.98 As I

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have shown, the non-​European characters and places play an indispensable role in transforming hopeless moral conflicts into happy unions of families, lovers, and friends. With the help of non-​European otherness, a disturbed or imperfect social order is purged, and nearly utopian ethical imperatives are made clear. Similarly, Kotzebue’s transcultural melodramas enlarge certain moments in everyday life, as Walter Benjamin’s concept of cinematic enlargement (Vergrößerung) illustrates.99 Kotzebue’s dramas wrest the quotidian motifs from the façade of their longer duration, shorten their process and development, and offer the enlargement of their structures in a lurid and shocking way. Kotzebue’s strategy of evoking melodramatic effects resembles the intensification of effects and the reinvention of meaning that cinematic strategy also intends to call forth, according to Benjamin. Cultural and colonial differences such as the sun cult’s law of virginity make operative the exaggerating and thus “enlarging” effects. Enlargement, on the one hand, is an exaggerated, melodramatic representation of reality; on the other hand, it also demonstrates incredible imaginations of another order of things. If the melodramatic mode is a central fact of modern sensibility, as Brooks argues—­ if bourgeois tragedy announces the advent of bourgeois culture in Germany and Europe in the eighteenth century—­then Kotzebue’s transcultural dramas demonstrate that the modern sensibility and bourgeois consciousness are also determined and constituted by non-​European cultures and knowledge during the increasing intercultural and colonial exchanges around 1800. Non-​European cultures are the central locus of the melodramatic clash and exploding enlargement. The formation and transformation of cultural and social identities in the German discourse thus represent not merely an internal struggle but also a negotiation between intra-​European and non-​European forces. While stressing non-​European impact, we notice that the tendency to differentiate cultures by assigning them to higher and lower stages of development is ubiquitous in travel writings, Robinsonades, and Kotzebue’s dramas. This idea of developmental hierarchy finds its most systematic articulation in Herder’s philosophy of history.

Chapter 5

Johann Gottfried Herder Historicism, Cultural Relativism, and the Iroquois Perpetual Peace

Relativism, Universalism, and Emotion The first companion volume to Johann Gottfried Herder’s work in English laments Herder being “the famous nobody,” a phrase accurately reflecting his critics’ habitual attitude of placing him under the shadow of Immanuel Kant and Kant’s devastating reviews of Herder’s life work—­Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas of a Philosophy of History of Humankind, 1784–­91).1 Yet apart from this companion’s effort to resurrect Herder as a serious thinker in the history of philosophy, his name is well acknowledged as a reference for students of German nationalism and for its correlation with the later xenophobic pan-​German nation. Indeed, Herder’s insistence on the uniqueness of language and literature as the key component of an organic cultural tradition, called either Volk or Nation, has been used to define German cultural identity since the late eighteenth century.2 Beyond Germany, Herder’s idea of cultural uniqueness, developed in the context of German aversion toward French court culture in the eighteenth century, has inspired later nationalist and decolonial movements in Hungary, the Balkans, Russia, and Argentina, which Pascale Casanova calls an international “Herder effect.”3 Ernst Cassirer attributes epoch-​making significance to Herder’s philosophy of history and argues that unlike many other Enlightenment thinkers, such as Voltaire, Baron de Montesquieu, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Marquis de Condorcet, David Hume, and William Robertson, Herder refuses to impose a set of absolute standards of human happiness (Glückseligkeit) on other historical epochs.4 Isaiah Berlin, Hans-​Georg Gadamer, and Frederick Beiser place the notion of cultural uniqueness in a transnational context and read it as Herder’s cultural relativism, a philosophy legitimizing cultural differences and justifying every culture’s uniqueness.5 A phrase in Herder’s Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (Yet Another Philosophy of History toward the Education of Humankind, 1774) is widely

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cited as the epitome of his cultural relativism: “All comparisons are ultimately inappropriate. . . . Every nation has its own center of happiness, like every ball its own center of gravity.”6 Sankar Muthu interprets Herder’s universal philosophy of history as one of the most powerful voices against European imperialism in the eighteenth century.7 And in fact, Herder harshly critiques colonial atrocities and warns European colonialists of the revenge of history by telling them: “Negroes paint their devil white” (Der Neger malt den Teufel weiß).8 Yet if we place this dictum within the larger context of Herder’s philosophy of history, we notice that his relativistic statement is deeply entangled with his concept of historical development, which ranks different cultures, conceived as historical stages, from lower to higher stages. Herder’s universal claims of cultural relativism and universal humanity are accompanied by dismissive descriptions of Africa and China. Herder’s portrayal of northern Europe as the most developed historical society of his time testifies to a Europe-​centeredness in his universal claims and his confirmation of European superiority.9 How should we reconcile Herder’s concept of cultural uniqueness and that of historical development in his thought? Sonia Sikka also recognizes this contradiction between relativism and universalism in her excellent study Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference: Enlightened Relativism and subtly brings to light Herder’s constant oscillation between these two positions in all areas of his thinking.10 Sikka contends that, while Herder’s universal and Eurocentric claims have been highly problematic and used to justify Nazism and Hindu nationalism in the twenty-​first century, we can still learn profoundly different lessons from Herder: he instructs us how to turn away from cultural essentialism, see peoples’ anthropological commonalities and their individual cultural uniqueness at the same time, and encounter and learn from each other on a harmonious nonviolent basis. Herder, Sikka insists, holds a profound but lonely position of humanity and relativism within Western philosophical tradition. I propose to highlight the non-​European impact on Herder’s thinking and explain Herder’s contradictions as resulting from a complex process negotiating with various interactions with non-​European knowledge and culture. It is also a process of constantly defining and redefining one’s own global cultural identity. I consider both Herder’s Eurocentrism and his critique of colonial violence as responses to non-​European challenges. I also argue that Herder’s theory of emotion and empathy enables him to recognize non-​European cultural differences, which in turn prompt him to formulate the idea of cultural relativism and refuse to use European standards to blindly judge others. Miseries in the slave trade and colonial economy induce Herder’s sympathy, which enables him to develop his notion of the revenge of history in his later works. At the same time, he is also deeply rooted in the intellectual tradition of his time. The ideas of historical development and European superiority are common among eighteenth-​century European thinkers.11 Yet Herder’s notion

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of cultural uniqueness disturbs the dominance of the notion of historical development. Hence, instead of pursuing a synthesis of Eurocentric development and cultural uniqueness, I read them as enunciations of both European intellectual tradition and non-​European cultural impact. Herder’s philosophy of history reflects and negotiates with non-​European cultural differences and is a product of transcultural interactions. In the first part of this chapter, I examine two major works of Herder’s philosophy of history: his early essay Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (1774) and his magnum opus, Ideen (1784–­91). I demonstrate that Herder’s philosophy of history is tremendously influenced by non-​European cultures mediated through travel narratives. Then I turn to Herder’s critique of colonial violence in Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität (Letters toward the Advancement of Humanity, 1793–­97), in which his logic of historical development transforms into the ethics of the revenge of history, which predicts that colonial atrocities will be punished. Herder consciously reformulates the notion of cultural uniqueness into an equal authenticity of all cultures and decries the attitude of European superiority. He proposes a project of perpetual peace based on an anecdote of a Native American tribe, the Iroquois, and stresses Nemesis as the natural law of historical revenge on the colonizers. Native American knowledge sustains a determining influence on the configuration of Herder’s ethics of history. The red thread that leads through the genealogy of Herder’s philosophy of history and enables him to critique colonial atrocity and articulate the ethics of revenge is his theory of emotion. Herder criticizes his contemporaries, writing that they are more inclined to shed tears on a dying butterfly in a novel than to sympathize with the massive misery caused by European colonial practice.12 Hence Herder’s sentimental melancholy is not purely confined to disinterested aesthetics; it is a way of actively engaging with real-​world conflicts and problems. Herder defines feeling as the fundamental trait of being human. In his affective anthropology, it is not Europeans but the slaves or the “savages” who represent human emotions. Like Kotzebue and Campe, Herder also believes in the eighteenth-​century image of noble savage and contends that a “savage,” who is closer to the primordial or lower state of human historical development, is more in touch with her feelings than a European is.13 Although Herder invents the image of the non-​Europeans and projects the myth of noble savage onto them, we should also acknowledge this idea as a form of thought that tries, even imaginatively, to integrate non-​European cultures and criticizes European moral corruption. He also invites his readers to “feel into” foreign cultures in order to understand their culture, their ways of life, and their actions.14 He uses the analogy between a text and a culture, which he sometimes calls Nation, to illustrate his method of sympathetic ethnography. To understand a culture means to gain access to it through emotional connections, to immerse oneself into geographical and historical circumstances—­the texture of a cultural form. For Herder, language is the

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intrinsic means through which human sensual forces articulate and manifest themselves. Herder relates literature and aesthetic experience directly to human sentimental capital.15 Herder’s emotive strategy of reading culture is very similar to the twentieth-​century anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s interpretive anthropology. In Balinese Cockfight, Geertz reminds us that “attending cockfights and participating in them is, for the Balinese, a kind of sentimental education.”16 For an ethnographer, “the guiding principle is the same: societies, like lives, contain their own interpretations. One has only to learn how to gain access to them.”17 Geertz elaborates: “Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of ‘constructing a reading of’) a manuscript—­foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior.”18 A comparison between Herder and Geertz makes clear their shared fundamental interest in cultural idiosyncrasy—­the expression of a local microcosm. Geertz contends: “The essential task of theory building here is not to codify abstract regularities but to make thick description possible, not to generalize across cases but to generalize within cases.”19 While Geertz consciously pursues “thick description” to avoid generalization and universal claims, Herder’s philosophy of history manifests an intrinsic passion of identifying and formulating universal laws of history. Herder’s theory of emotion, however, points beyond the limits of the governing universal and makes the sentimental a category that subverts the necessity of the macrocosm and gives rise to his ethics of historical revenge and his critique of colonial violence. Another foundational trait of Herder’s theory of sensibility is the empathetic transgression of others. In his essay Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele (On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul, 1778), Herder values feeling as the cardinal faculty of the human mind, which enables reason to produce knowledge. Drawing on the research of the medical doctor Johann Gottlob Krüger, who found that the body is the physical basis of feeling, Herder insists that our thinking depends on our feelings engendered by the nerves.20 He argues that the different ways in which we feel characterize individual and collective/cultural differences.21 Herder ascribes to feeling the ability to break the boundaries between the self and the other and form a sensual community: “It is and remains true that we love our neighbors just like ourselves. If we are untrue to ourselves, could we be true to others? In the interior of our self-​perception is also the sympathy with others: we can only feel ourselves in others at the same time.”22 Herder claims that love for oneself shares a common source with empathy for others. Only through love for oneself is one able to build a society on the basis of mutual love and sympathy. If there is a shared human feeling, Herder contends, then there must be a common way of thinking and a shared standard of ethics.23 While the sentimentalist Herder sympathizes with the colonized slaves and

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insists on the legitimacy of their equal authenticity, the historicist Herder dismisses non-​European cultures as less developed and less civilized according to universal laws. The face of Janus in Herder’s philosophy of history is a constant ambivalence almost throughout his entire career, from Auch eine Philosophie (1774) to the Humanitätsbriefe (1797). Yet despite this coexistence, Herder’s historicism is more pronounced in his earlier career, whereas his critique of colonial violence and his ethics of historical revenge gained more significant weight than historicism in his late career.

Organic Development and Cultural Relativism in Herder’s Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit The further illumination advances in the investigation of the most ancient world history, its migrations of peoples, its languages, ethics, inventions, and traditions, the more probable becomes, with each new discovery, the origin of the whole species from a single man as well. We are getting closer and closer to the happy clime where a single pair of human beings . . . began spinning the thread that has since drawn itself out further far and wide with such entanglements.24

Herder starts his Auch eine Philosophie by transforming the biblical genesis into a cultural history that can be traced back and proved by anthropological evidence. Like many other thinkers in German Enlightenment and romanticism, including Moses Mendelssohn, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel, Herder converts a religious belief into the founding myth of a world history.25 A footnote to the passage cited above informs us that “the investigations of the most ancient world history” are the most recent travels and research done in Asia.26 An avid reader of travel narratives, Herder studied the Orient travel reports by Laurens d’Arvieus, Frederik Hasselquist, Richard Pococke, Thomas Shaw, and Carsten Niebuhr. He reviewed the German translation of Thomas Shaw’s travel narrative as early as 1764.27 In his Ideen, Herder cites Niebuhr five times.28 Jonathan Hess points out that Niebuhr’s expedition to Yemen (Arabia Felix) from 1761 to 1767 was especially influential on Near Eastern studies at the end of the eighteenth century. It was initiated by the Göttingen Orientalist Johann David Michaelis, whose Mosaic Law (1770–­75), a standard eighteenth-​century work on Jewish law that was also reviewed by Herder, heavily draws on the results of Niebuhr’s expedition.29 In his seminal text on the philosophy of language, Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (Treatise on the Origin of Language, 1771), Herder uses travel reports on Thailand and North America and refers numerous times to the descriptions of indigenous languages in Charles de la Condamine’s Brief Narrative of Travels through the Interior of South America (1745). Condamine (1701–­74), a French geographer, took part in

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Europe’s first major international scientific expedition in 1735 to determine the exact shape of the earth.30 In Ideen, Herder also uses travel narratives about Greenland, Mongolia, Africa, the South Sea, America, China, Tibet, and India to construct his descriptions of these regions.31 Herder is fascinated by non-​European cultures depicted in travel writings and sees them as something that needs to be explained and systematized, something new that has not yet been assigned a proper place in a European-​ style system of knowledge closely related to Christianity. Herder’s method of systemization is history—­a cultural history that organizes different cultures, including that of Europe, into a historical development with the very beginning of “one human couple” (einem Menschenpaar). Already in his Journal of My Travel in the Year of 1769, Herder claims that he will collect data from all historical periods and organize them into a timeline leading toward the present.32 Herder’s historicist logic, as I will show later, betrays a Eurocentrism that places northern Europe or Germany as the most developed stage of history. At the same time, these new cultural materials urge Herder to transform and adjust the European Christian knowledge system into a cultural history with developmental stages. Non-​European cultures transmitted through travel narratives represent a challenging uncertainty for the conventional worldview. Twenty years later, in his Humanitätsbriefe (1793–­ 97), Herder stresses the importance of travel literature for his critique of colonial violence. He considers reliable travel narratives more attuned to the recognition of human nature than theoretical systems because travelers have the chance to adopt the perspectives of foreigners and understand their lives from the inside. Herder sees travel literature as a genre in which, potentially, empathy prevails and mutual understanding succeeds. Sentiment (Empfindung) proves the basis of Herder’s dictum for travelers and researchers of human nature. Therefore Herder argues that travel narratives should not be classified according to the categories of natural history, for which Carl Linnaeus sets the standards in his Systema Naturae (1735), but according to the inherent nature of the travelers: the purity of their eyes and the universal understanding of human and nature in their hearts. Herder names Georg Forster, Johann Reinhold Forster, and le Vaillants as his best examples of travel writers. Building on travel narratives, which contain both facts and fabrications, Herder wrote Auch eine Philosophie, a product manufactured in the nexus of intercultural, colonial, and capitalist power relations. It fosters a Eurocentric geohistorical hierarchy based on the idea of development but also formulates the eruptive notion of cultural relativism. The historical process Herder envisions is an organic ongoing one. He uses the metaphor of age (Lebensalter) to compare the historical process to the biological metamorphosis of a human being from a child to an old man. Each historical stage has its trajectory of germination, flowering, and decay.33 The novelty in Herder’s philosophy of history lies in the universal interrelatedness

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of different historical stages, deeply rooted in a vegetative and organic progression of transformation and growth. Each historical stage is thus based on the achievements of the former and grows out of it in the greater system of a living organism. This process is ongoing because historical development cannot be held back. It is necessary for the historical embryo to develop into a full-​size adult. Herder’s genealogy, however, is not confined to one geographical place and one cultural and linguistic community. Rather, it moves from place to place on a hierarchical scale of historical development. Herder envisions: “Where should the chain between peoples and places lead to? . . . Toward the universal development [Bildung] of humankind.”34 For Herder, a never-​ending historical metamorphosis is the perpetual rule permeating human activities and explaining cultural and, more importantly, historical differences. After the mythical couple in Genesis, Herder proposes the history of humanity begins with its childhood in the Orient. The Orient is portrayed as the antithesis of Enlightenment and is negatively judged as patriarchal despotism by Montesquieu in his influential De l’esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws, 1758). Yet Herder does not adopt this binary construction. Instead he incorporates the Orient into a growing process and sets it as the beginning of a history leading up to eighteenth-​century northern Europe. Herder emphasizes the sensitivity and emotion in the Orient, which, he claims, the rational Europeans do not understand. Even though the feeling (Gefühl) and sensibility (Empfindlichkeit) in the Orient are valuable to Herder, his favorable gesture does not change the Orient’s childhood stage of history, which defines its mental underdevelopment in contrast to Europe. The next stage after the Orient is the stage of boyhood in Egypt and Phoenicia. Although Herder places these two societies on the same stage of development and considers them related, he draws contrasts between them. He praises Phoenicia’s spirit of trade, its openness to foreign impulses, and its capability of transformation, whereas he characterizes Egyptian culture as stiff, obstinate, and unable to develop into the next higher stage. Egypt and Phoenicia thus exemplify for him two fundamental prototypes of Bildung for the first time in the history of humanity: the capability of historical transformation versus historical immobility. The symbols of Egyptian art like the obelisks are useless in Herder’s eyes in comparison to the Phoenician ships of trade. In Herder’s logic, Phoenician openness toward others and ability to achieve historical transformation are based on trade. This dichotomy between Egypt and Phoenicia is later developed into a binary system between immobile Asia, in particular China, and open-​minded eighteenth-​century northern Europe, especially Germany, in his Ideen.35 Corresponding to Adam Smith’s praise of trade and commerce as the characteristics for the most developed societies such as Great Britain, Herder’s preference for a trade-​based “world openness” also justifies European colonial mercantilism and sea trades in the eighteenth century.36

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The next stage, the age of a young man (Jüngling), is ancient Greek culture. Herder holds it as the most beautiful youth in the history of humanity: Greek mythology, poetry, philosophy, religion, and fine arts are the outgrowths of the historical seeds in the most amiable climate. Herder contends, however, that the exceptional achievements of ancient Greece should not be seen as a perpetual phenomenon representing the perfect human society. Disagreeing with Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose enthusiastic praise of Greek art as the eternal perfection was tremendously influential in eighteenth-​century aesthetics, Herder asserts that ancient Greece is merely one historical stage in a long process. It is as ephemeral as the former stages of the Orient, Egypt, and Phoenicia and must give birth to the next stage according to the movement of history-​as-​organism. Herder now presents his view on the quarrels of the ancients and the moderns (querelle des anciens et des modernes), a Europe-​wide intellectual debate originating in France at the end of the seventeenth century.37 In Herder’s chronology, the Roman Empire further develops the achievement of the Greek youth into manhood (Mannesalter). The Greeks, in a provincial form, prepare everything for Rome’s global dominion. Herder interprets the collapse of the Roman Empire as the decline of southern Europe’s significance in universal history. A new world, Herder states, was necessary to heal the downfall of Rome. This new world, the next stage, is northern Europe’s Middle Ages, characterized by Germanic tribes and the Christian religion. Based on the pan-​regional dominion of the Roman Empire, Herder claims, Christianity should be the true religion of humanity, the source of love, and the tie of all peoples to one brotherhood. Herder, however, does not consider Christianity a perpetual divine revelation. He merely sees it as a historical phenomenon: “I am talking about a historical event!”38 The function of this historical event, Herder claims, resides in ordering a secured world for the Germanic tribes in northern Europe, the “barbarians” of northern Europe. Finally, Herder’s historiography turns toward eighteenth-​century Europe. Here his descriptive narration turns into a sharp polemic. He compares eighteenth-​century northern European culture, especially the movement of the Enlightenment represented by French intellectuals, to an old man (Greis) who shows “his true weakness of death and his fatigue of disbelief.”39 Herder vehemently criticizes the self-​glorification of European Enlightenment, its philosophical abstraction, and the concomitant debasement of other ancient and contemporary cultures. For him, the Enlightenment also merely represents a transient period in the flux of history: “We are certainly also purpose and tools of fate during this development.”40 Herder’s metaphor of an old man is double-​edged here: it not only denotes a high level of experience and abstract thinking but also demonstrates the urgent need of rejuvenation through Oriental feelings. Therefore Herder demands: “Go, my readers, and feel still now the long-​preserved pure Oriental nature after thousands of years, enliven it out of the history of the ancient times.”41 His critique of

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the French Enlightenment reveals his dissatisfaction with the contemporary belief in Enlightenment as the perfect standard for every human society, leading to his notion of cultural relativism. At the same time, his description of the organic development from the Orient to eighteenth-​century northern Europe inevitably implies Europe’s highest position in the historical hierarchy, and his historical development implies a movement of geographical locations from east to west—­which construes a geohistorical hierarchy legitimizing the superior position of northern Europe. If we recapitulate Herder’s organic history, we notice that each historical stage has a different geographical location—­a common phenomenon in the eighteenth-​century philosophy of history.42 After one stage grows out of the former one, the geographical location of the former stage also loses the chance of developing into higher stages. Northern Europe, the last stage in Herder’s narrative, represents the ultimate result of this geohistorical development. The geographical locations of Egypt, the Near East, Greece, and Rome are museum-​like earlier stages of northern Europe.43 Herder’s philosophy of history is a historicization of geography.44 Around the mid-​eighteenth century, there was a wave of scientific interest in geography and geology. Scholars at universities in Scotland, France, Germany, and Italy debated on global landscapes and natural diversity.45 Carl Schmitt points out that “the first attempts in international law to divide the earth as a whole according to the new global concept of geography began immediately after 1492. These were also the first adaptations to the new, planetary image of the world.”46 Schmitt calls the model of thought behind this behavior “global linear thinking, which represents a chapter in the historical development of spatial consciousness.”47 In Herder’s case, obviously, this global linear thinking gains the dimension of historicity. In his Ideen, Herder integrates cultural geography as well as geology, botany, and zoology into the whole system of a universal history.48 History itself has a geographical expression. Following this logic, the superiority of eighteenth-​century northern Europe is also intrinsically related to its geographical location. Northern Europe is thus historically legitimized as the unique locus in which the highest historical stage takes place. Herder’s development of historical stages establishes an irreversible geohistorical hierarchy, which in turn constructs a European tradition and justifies its present superiority. Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of the invention of tradition is helpful in this context to illustrate Herder’s endeavor.49 Hobsbawm argues that tradition, which is different from custom, must be understood as a human-​made or invented category with political and ideological importance.50 History and tradition are not natural sediments along the timeline. Rather, they are the product of a political act of selection, documentation, popularization, and institutionalization. Hobsbawm also points out that the invention of tradition happens when the old perspective is deliberately

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discarded and a radical innovation is welcome. It is a human-​made void, indicating a need for a new relation with a specific historical past. Following this logic, Herder’s Auch eine Philosophie offers a vivid example for the invention of tradition. He not only forges a tradition for eighteenth-​century northern Europe. In criticizing the French Enlightenment, he also declares a need for a new conception of universal history in the era of European scientific expeditions that have constantly changed the world map.51 The epistemic challenge presented by the “newfound” lands demands new conceptual work to situate Europe in the global context. Thus Herder uses new materials in travel narratives to reconceive the past of his cultural community. Today it is necessary for us to undo Herder’s geohistorical hierarchy and the historicization of geography and reclaim the independence of geographical and cultural differences from a Eurocentric logic of an all-​ encompassing universal history. In other words, cultures, as forms of life, cannot and should not be reduced to historical stages forming and conforming to a human-​made logic of development. With the ironic formulations of the title, Auch eine Philosophie (Yet Another Philosophy), and the subtitle, Beitrag zu vielen Beiträgen des Jahrhunderts (A Contribution to Many Contributions of the Century), Herder mocks the contemporary philosophy of history, one of the favorite topics for philosophical reflection in the eighteenth century.52 Voltaire, in his influential Essai sur l’histoire générale et les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (1769), sees the whole past of universal history as the deficient pre-​stages of the ideal enlightened conditions based on reason. Kant’s advocacy for the public usage of reason also implies a universal impetus and is not confined to a German or European context. Indeed, Enlightenment is conceptualized as a universal project from the outset. It is designed as the destination of a natural trajectory for every human society in the world.53 Although Kant in his influential essay Was ist Aufklärung? (What Is Enlightenment?, 1784) declares that his own time and place—­eighteenth-​century Europe—­has not yet reached the state of Enlightenment, he and other Enlightenment philosophers still consider the Europeans much closer to Enlightened conditions than many other non-​ European cultures (China was an exception).54 One of the Enlightenment “legacies,” as Denis Diderot declares, rests on the task that the Europeans should “educate” and “elevate” non-​European peoples so that they can recognize and pursue the Enlightenment as well.55 Herder detests this model of Enlightenment generalization.56 He claims that every historical stage has its own legitimacy of existence: “Every nation has its own center of happiness, like every ball its own center of gravity.”57 Herder’s concept of cultural relativism, however, needs to be situated in the geohistorical context. In Herder’s logic, a culture represents a historical stage, a phase in universal history with a particular geographical location. His concept of cultural uniqueness does not demonstrate an

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absolute incomparability; it is embedded in a historicist hierarchy. Historicity, and the geohistorical hierarchy, is intrinsic for all cultures. For example, Herder criticizes his contemporaries for using Enlightenment standards to judge the Orient. He uses the metaphor of a child and an old man to illustrate that the child, symbolizing the Orient, cannot possibly understand the old man’s philosophical Deism (philosophischer Deismus), aesthetic virtue and honor (ästhetische Tugend und Ehre), and universal tolerance (allgemeine Völkerliebe voll toleranter Unterjochung).58 Herder’s critique first legitimizes the Orient and rejects the arrogance of Enlightenment thinkers. Yet his comparison of the Orient to a child inadvertently undermines the neutrality of the concept of cultural uniqueness and deprives the Orient of the ability to be historically and culturally equal to Europe. It also implies that the Orient is intellectually too underdeveloped to understand the Enlightenment’s reasoning, even though Herder maintains that the old man should learn pure sensibility from the child. In other words, a child does not have the ability of abstract thinking, but an old man can learn from a child. Furthermore, Herder’s notion of cultural relativism implies a simultaneity of inconcurrence (Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen).59 Herder refers to this “fact” himself: “Look around! Most peoples in this world are still in childhood, still speak the language, have the custom, and exemplify their degree of development.”60 The imperative phrase “Siehe um dich!” (Look around!) asks Herder’s fellow Europeans to observe the non-​European societies who appear as Europe’s living past.61 Even though Herder praises the Orient’s sensibility, it is still not elevated onto a higher development stage; rather, it proves what Europe has “lost.” In his Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, Herder insists that intellectual powers are European privileges.62 While Herder’s concept of incomparable individuality is deeply embedded in his historicist hierarchy, the notion of cultural relativism still has subversive potential to call the geohistorical hierarchy into question. Herder’s mild cultural relativism can be developed into a more radical cultural relativism that treats cultures as simultaneous and equal phenomena. In Auch eine Philosophie, this concept is related to Herder’s explicit critique of the ruthlessness of European colonial practice. Herder laments: In Europe slavery is abolished . . . , only one thing we still allow, to use and trade three parts of the world as slaves and banish them to silver mines and sugar mills—­but they are not Europeans, not Christians, and therefore we get silver and precious stones, spices, sugar and—­secret illness  .  .  .  ! Three parts of the world devastated and policed by us, and we depopulated, emasculated, and sunk in opulence, drudgery, and death by them.63

In this quote, “we,” the Europeans, the Christians, the colonizers, are set against “you,” the non-​Europeans, the non-​Christians, the colonized. Herder

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clearly shows his humanistic position and critiques the malicious treatment of the colonized by the colonizers. In Herder’s narrative, however, the power relation between these two parties is not stable. Although the Europeans can use mechanical tools and Christianity to subjugate and exclude the non-​Europeans, the colonizers’ control can be reversed one day toward its own destruction. Herder predicts revenge from the colonized: “We hook on chains with which you will pull us . . . !”64 Herder’s critique of colonial violence and his warning of a potential vengeance demonstrate his humanistic understanding, on the one hand. On the other, non-​European cultures and colonial cruelty influence Herder to argue against violent colonial practice. His critique of colonial practices has a subversive power within the structure of the geohistorical hierarchy. In the tenth collection of Humanitätsbriefe, which I will analyze later in this chapter, this tendency gains more weight and develops into the concept of nemesis—­ethics of historical revenge against the colonizers. In Auch eine Philosophie, Herder’s historicism, cultural relativism, and even his ethics of historical revenge find their germinal articulations; later, in Ideen and Humanitätsbriefe, they will be more fully developed. The coexistence of the seemingly contradictory geohistorical hierarchy and cultural relativism betrays a still unstable negotiation with non-​European challenges. I endeavor to hold Herder’s philosophy of history in its inherent multiplicity, so that we can critique Herder’s geohistorical hierarchy and appreciate his instinct of cultural relativism, which can be developed into a more comprehensive recognition and legitimization of cultural differences. Let’s now see how Herder further developed his historicism on a grander scale in his portrayal of Africa, China, and Europe.

Africa, China, and Europe in Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit In the preface to the Ideen (1784–­91), Herder recalls that, ten years before, Auch eine Philosophie was extremely popular and sold out immediately. He was encouraged by the press to publish a new edition. But he hesitated to put out something similar and decided to produce a work with deeper thoughts and a broader frame. Herder claimed that, for this work, he read everything published on the history of humanity from his youth.65 At first glance, Ideen seems the continuation and expansion of his Auch eine Philosophie. On closer examination, we notice that if Auch eine Philosophie articulates young Herder’s strong dissatisfaction with the prevailing Enlightenment conceptions of history, then Ideen takes pains to convey a harmonious unity in accordance with an all-​encompassing historicist development.66 If Auch eine Philosophie strongly ridicules Enlightenment rationality in contrast to Oriental sensibility, Ideen is more focused on constructing northern Europe’s

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historical superiority with little reservation. In Auch eine Philosophie, the revolutionary articulation of cultural uniqueness and the geohistorical hierarchy of an organic development find their initial theoretical articulations. In Ideen, these two ideas are supported by countless details of cultures in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. With around a thousand pages, Ideen demonstrates a comprehensive organization of cultural diversity into a universal history or, in Hobsbawm’s words, an impressive invention of European tradition and world history. Unlike in Auch eine Philosophie, Herder abandons the metaphor of human ages in Ideen. Starting from the position of the earth in the universe, Herder elaborates an evolution of natural and human history from geological, botanical, zoological, and anthropological perspectives in Ideen’s four volumes. While the first volume of Herder’s “speculative metanarrative,” as John Zammito calls it, received rapturous praise from his friend Goethe as the most valuable gospel, this work met with cold censure from Herder’s former teacher Immanuel Kant.67 Kant’s review of the first volume of Ideen, published in the influential journal Allgemeine Litteratur-​Zeitung (General Literature Newspaper) in Jena in January 1785, publicly affirmed the ever-​growing intellectual bifurcation between him and his once splendid student.68 Kant indubitably shows his deep disagreement with Herder’s understanding of history. Kant expects logical precisions of concepts and careful differentiations of basic principles in a philosophy of history. But in Ideen he sees only a loose and meandering perspective (Blick), a pursuit of analogies, and an imagination about remote objects through emotion instead of cold reason of judgment.69 Kant’s bitter criticism of Ideen’s lack of logical rigor and his irony toward its speculative imagination disclose his belief in reason as the indispensable firm ground for philosophizing history. At the end of his review, Kant expresses his hope that the next volume of Herder’s Ideen will contain more well-​defined concepts (bestimmte Begriffe) instead of insinuations, more observed laws instead of conjectures, and more reason instead of imagination.70 Two months before this review, around seven months after the publication of the first volume of Herder’s Ideen, in November 1784, Kant had already published his essay Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte der Menschheit in weltbürgerlicher Absicht (Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim) in the journal Berlinische Monatsschrift (Berlin Monthly), which, a month later, would publish Kant’s famous treatise Was ist Aufklärung? (What Is Enlightenment?). The similarity of the titles between Kant’s idea for a universal history and Herder’s work is as stunning as the difference Kant’s position represents. With his singular Idee, in contrast to Herder’s plural Ideen, Kant claims to expel empirical historiographies through the a priori thread (Leitfaden a priori): the cosmopolitan intent of nature. Reason, Kant contends, is an innate determination, whereas Herder sees it as a result or ability acquired in the process of human evolution and growth. Herder’s concept of the “naturalized” reason is, even if it is not meant to be, at least

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well taken to be “a direct affront to Kant and to all who held reason to be a transcendent differentiation of man from all the rest of creation, a sign of his divine affinity.”71 Not surprisingly, Kant’s review of the second volume of Ideen in 1785 was as devastating as his review of the first. In today’s scholarship on Herder’s Ideen, it is almost imperative to acknowledge and to engage with Kant’s reviews because Kant’s status as the dominant philosophical voice of the German and European late Enlightenment has consigned Herder’s work to oblivion for more than one century.72 Tilman Borsche accurately observes that what was for Kant a small anecdote has become Herder’s doom.73 Indeed, even the recent renaissance of critics’ interest in Herder’s Ideen is still compelled to justify the legitimacy and independence of Herder’s contribution under the shadow of Kant’s dismissive reviews. Critics inadvertently confine the critical debate to whether Herder’s work is an adequate counterbalance to Kant’s vision of cosmopolitanism, a less rigorous philosophy, or a contour-​blurring romance.74 Since Kant’s reviews mainly concentrate on the universal and abstract principles based on reason, we nearly forget that the larger part of Herder’s mammoth work describes concrete cultural phenomena all over the world. Herder represents world cultures in great detail in order to support his ideas that history is human continuity and humanity is the cause of history. He further develops his concepts of cultural uniqueness and geohistorical development in Ideen as situated happiness and inevitable development, two ideas that were based not on reason but on sensibility. While it is valuable to follow Kant’s footsteps and discuss reason and cosmopolitanism in relation to Ideen, it is also reasonable to trace the motivations and methods of Herder’s textual representations of local cultures in Africa, Asia, America, and Europe. The analysis of the concrete and the local is by no means less fundamental than the discussion of the universal, because the former testifies to the viability and limits of the latter at a more existential level. Critics such as Anne Löchte, Daniel Carey, and Sven Trakulhun claim that Herder’s cultural relativism is a universal and thus non-​Eurocentric notion; yet studies on Herder’s depictions of Africa, China, and Europe disclose a quite different picture.75 Hansjakob Werlen, Uta Sadji, Susanne Zantop, and Helmut Peitsch all demonstrate that cultural prejudices toward Africans and Asians abound in Herder’s Ideen. These authors seek to unearth the Eurocentric logic behind Herder’s work as a justification of European colonialism.76 In Ideen, Herder further develops his historicism as inevitable development; at the same time, he emphasizes the historicity of happiness—­a variation on his cultural relativism. As I shall show, the noble savage trope influences Herder’s conception of happiness. Yet concrete examples are also used to underpin the theoretical architecture of Herder’s idea of inevitable development. Among the vast number of cultures Herder’s Ideen covers, the Africans and the Asians, particularly China, are cast in a negative light, while European cultures appear as the last stage of the universal development of

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history. Birgit Tautz uses the two categories of texture and color to describe the modes of perception chiefly related to China and Africa in eighteenth-​ century German discourse.77 In her reading, China is related to texture, Africa to the European racial discourse of skin colors. In the context of Herder’s Ideen, I stress history and climate as the two defining domains for China and Africa. While the representation of China as a historical standstill is contrasted to European dynamics, Herder explains the African black skin color and “inferiority” with the theory of climate as the defining factor affecting human diversity. Both China and Africa contribute to the configuration of a European cultural identity in Ideen. I will also show that Herder’s praise of trade as the essential trait of European identity is connected to eighteenth-​ century colonial expansion. His universal historicism, in the end, inevitably legitimizes Europe’s superiority. I argue that Herder’s Ideen has a stronger Eurocentric and historicist tenor than his Auch eine Philosophie. Nonetheless, we will see, non-​European cultures still exert impact on his argument. Historicity of Happiness and Inevitable Development In Ideen, Herder reformulates his notion of cultural relativism as the historicity of happiness (Glückseligkeit) and further develops his philosophy of history by introducing the idea of inevitable development. Herder poses three questions: What is the happiness of humankind, which has so many differences in culture, custom, climate, and historical circumstances? Is there a connection between these differences? Is providence (Vorsehung) more interested in the welfare of different peoples or more interested in its final purpose (Hauptendzweck)? Consistent with Auch eine Philosophie, Herder refuses an absolute set of values that should determine the universal happiness of humankind and claims that happiness is a deeply idiosyncratic phenomenon and inherently entangled with history and local conditions such as culture, climate, and geography.78 He contends that the term “happiness” already implies that human beings are not able to create happiness themselves; rather, their enjoyment or their sufferings depend on the contingent constellations of space, time, societies, and the circumstances in which they live. Hence Herder considers it extremely arrogant to believe that the whole world ought to become European in order to be happy.79 Herder supports his claim of situated happiness by comparing a “savage” (Wilde) to a European intellectual: The savage, who loves his wife, his child, and himself with peaceful joy and who, though with limited ability, is passionate about his tribe, like his own life, is, I think, a truer creature than the educated shadow who is merely interested in the shadows of his entire species. . . . In his poor shelter, the savage has room for every foreigner whom he accepts as his own brother with the same benevolence; he

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does not even care to ask where the other is from. Yet the confused heart of the idle cosmopolite is a shelter for no one.80

In Herder’s narrative, the non-​European “savage” embodies warm friendship and love based on emotion, while the European cosmopolitan represents cold and abstract concepts. The reference to the cosmopolite can be read as an indirect affront to Kant. For Herder, happiness is connected to feelings and sentiments rather than to reason. He contends that happiness is intrinsically a peaceful feeling instead of a glowing thought; the emotions of our heart can give us more joy and love than the effects of reason and deep thoughts.81 The indestructible happiness that European travelers admire on the faces of non-​European peoples is incomparable to the restlessness (Rastlosigkeit) of the Europeans. Herder ironically comments that the Europeans do not understand the ardent passion and imagination of the Africans, while the Indians cannot grasp the restless greediness that drives the Europeans from one end of the world to the other. Happiness is the inner pleasure and enjoyment of one’s existence (Dasein). Individual happiness is for Herder the foundation of collective political happiness. Therefore Herder rejects the colonial goal and practice of “civilizing” or Europeanizing the non-​Europeans: he contends that this intention is against the law of nature.82 The non-​European “savage” challenges European “high culture” through Herder’s notion of situated happiness. Radically speaking, Herder almost suspends the realm of history as a temporal lineage and could have claimed that fundamental equality among all cultures is connected by emotion. Geography, which provides the basis for the differences between cultures, nearly displaces temporality, the realm in which Herder’s philosophy of history rests. Yet he does not go this far. The coercive logic of development prevents the idea of situated happiness from gaining greater equality and becoming a cultural relativism that focuses on equality among cultures without being subject to historical development. Yet, in Herder’s philosophy of history, the idiosyncratic happiness is not a state of equilibrium. It is subject to history and development. Abandoning the metaphor of human age in Auch eine Philosophie, Herder explains the idea of development from the perspective of a maximum perfection, which not only defies comparison but also denies a culture’s further development at one particular geographical location. In different cultures, Herder contends, organic forces lead to different perfection levels: each culture can only reach a certain maximum and cannot reach beyond that perfection level. For example, the Chinese have perfect political morals, the Phoenicians epitomize the spirit of trade and shipping, and the Greeks create the highest sensuous beauty in the arts. Therefore we cannot compare these ancient peoples to each other because they all reach peaks of perfection but in different realms. These diverse states of perfection, however, merely prove an ephemeral point in the eternal sequence of history. The vicissitude of history is

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always subject to change, transience, and development. Herder comments that if later generations inherit and imitate the states of perfection of the ancients, their descendants will sink and degenerate like the senile cultures in China or Greece. Cultural relativism does not prevent Herder from treating certain cultures as degenerate or backward. Happiness is always subject to historical development. The uniqueness of happiness is only valid when the cultures under comparison are at the same stage of development. The historicity of happiness does not allow it to have its quality in and for itself. The geohistorical hierarchy in Auch eine Philosophie is expanded to all kinds of cultures in the world. Herder devotes three volumes of the Ideen to meticulously describing the development of human history from “primitive” peoples around the North Pole and in Africa and Americas, to cultures with long traditions in Asia, Egypt, and Greece, and finally to European peoples, in particular the Germans and Slavs. Compared to Auch eine Philosophie, Ideen more clearly demonstrates that cultures in different continents, although they exist at the same time, are not at the same stage of historical development. Even if cultures at the same historical stage cannot be compared to each other and have their own centers of gravity, as Herder’s famous dictum claims, cultures of the next stage are comparatively more advanced than the former ones. The Herderian development of history is not confined to one region but wanders from one place to another. In the eighteenth century and after, Herder has no doubt that the European peninsula hosts the most developed historical stage. The idea of situated happiness is confined by the logic of historical development, which determines the tone of Herder’s description of Africa. Yet, as we will also see, Herder’s Europe needs the image of “primitive” Africa to maintain its “higher” status in history. Climate, Race, and the “Pitiful” Africans Herder’s description of the black Africans in Ideen is embedded in eighteenth-​ century discussions about climate and race. He is convinced that climate is an intrinsic reason for human diversity and disputes the viability of skin color as the classificatory method. Even if Herder disagrees with the racial theories of Kant and Blumenbach, he still believes in the natural inferiority of the black Africans. In the second volume of Ideen, Herder contrasts “primitive” peoples in six different geographical places: the North Pole, Asia, Africa, America, Oceania, and the Middle East and Greece. While the descriptions of other primitive peoples remain informational and relatively neutral, Herder makes clear that the black Africans are the least blessed creatures. His measurement is based on their “contributions” to European culture: the black Africans never invented anything for Europe and never thought of conquering Europe or making it happy; the Orient, however, provides Europe with religion, arts, sciences, culture, and humanity.83

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Herder explains the insurmountable gap between the Africans and the Europeans by evoking the prevailing climate theory in the eighteenth century. He attributes to climate the decisive role in determining cultural characters. Climate influences individuals and their communities. Its impact is not confined to short moments but extends over longer periods of time. Its effects are slow and can only be perceived in rare circumstances. Climate does not force; rather, it shapes cultures through unnoticeable inclinations so that travelers often notice the special characteristics of a culture but don’t know how to name them.84 Herder sees his task as a philosopher in observing and explaining the influences of different climatic conditions on cultural diversity. Climate theory plays a decisive role not only in Ideen but also in Herder’s thinking and writing throughout his entire life.85 Herder’s environmental explanation of human diversity is a product of his time. The first eighteenth-​century work to use climate as a matrix for explaining physical and cultural differences was the Frenchman Jean-​Baptiste Du Bos’s Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting, 1719). The most powerful voice of climate theory was raised by Montesquieu in his influential Esprit des lois (Spirit of Laws, 1748). Montesquieu stresses the significance of physical environment and argues that it is important for enlightened government and moral education to recognize climatic impact on human nature and to free human beings from the constraints of their natural environment. Jan Golinski points out that the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, such as David Hume and William Robertson, contradict Montesquieu’s theory because “it failed to articulate an account of social progress.”86 This critique also holds true for Herder. Instead of seeing the possibility of change within one certain climatic zone, Herder understands the progression of history as a move from hot and torrid regions such as Africa to temperate places such as Europe. He is primarily interested in using climatic causes to explain Africans’ physiognomic traits, particularly their black skin color. The heat of the sun, Herder contends, has caused all different kinds of black skins. The sun also shows its effects on the skin color of the Portuguese immigrants who have been living in Africa for centuries. Herder even claims that a newborn in Africa is white—­only the climate turns her or his skin black. He provides some examples: in the regions in which the east wind blows and brings the greatest heat, one finds the most black people; in the regions in which wind from the sea reduces the heat, the blackness fades into yellowness; on the cold highlands, the residents are white or whiter.87 He argues that one should see the black skin color not as a predetermined feature but as a variable result of nature’s ongoing and irresistible powers. Herder goes on to explain that the heat also induces the protruding mouth, the flat and small nose, and the sloping forehead of the Africans—­they resemble an ape skull (Affenschädel). The consequence under these disadvantaged climatic constraints is that the Africans naturally do not have refined mental

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capacities. Yet in agreement with his theory of feeling, Herder calls his readers to sympathize with the “naturally” disadvantaged Africans: one should pity instead of dismissing them because the Africans, in the end, cannot do anything about their horrid natural conditions. Nature, Herder sighs, should not have created Africa; or no human beings should have lived in this cursed continent.88 At this point, climate theory has transformed from a neutral key to explaining human diversity to a tool of establishing a hierarchy between Europeans and Africans and confirming European superiority. Roxann Wheeler points out that climate theory offered an alternative to Christian explanations, representing “the secular rationale for various skin colors, behaviors, and abilities” in eighteenth-​century Europe.89 Wheeler argues that climate theory, “in one form or another, provided the most important rubric for thinking about human differences in the eighteenth century, in regard to both complexion and civil society.”90 Herder’s theory of the Africans’ climatic inferiority, however, differs from the emerging theories of race in eighteenth-​ century Europe. Today Herder’s teacher Kant is considered the inventor of the notion and theory of race.91 As early as 1764, Kant identifies four human races based on skin color in his essay Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime). Emmanuel Eze argues that the division by skin colors in Kant’s essay, as a classificatory tool, functions as an indicator of moral and mental capacity: “While the Americans are completely uneducable because they lack ‘affect and passion,’ the Africans escape such a malheur, but can only be ‘trained’ as slaves and servants.”92 Kant, however, was not the only one who was preoccupied with the concept of race based on skin color. The German anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach complicated Kant’s system from four races to five races with numerous varieties in his De generis humani varietate nativa (On the Natural Varieties of Mankind, 1775). The foundational category in Blumenbach’s system remains the same: skin color remains a result of climatic impact. The physician Samuel Thomas von Sömmering dissected the bodies of deceased black servants in Kassel and concluded that the anatomical structure of the blacks showed closer affinities to monkeys than that of the Europeans. He published the results in Über die körperliche Verschiedenheit des Mohren vom Europäer (On the Bodily Differences of the Blackamoor from the European, 1784) and dedicated the book to his best friend, Georg Forster. Similar to Herder, Sömmering states that the blacks are nonetheless as human as the Europeans and should not be treated as animals.93 A year after the publication of Sömmering’s treatise, Herder published the second volume of Ideen, which contains the section on Africa. In addition to his climatic explanation of skin colors, Herder disputes the viability of the concept of race in Ideen because he believes in one origin of the humankind. Race, Herder contends, divides human beings into separate groups with different origins. In fact, though, human diversity should only be seen as the

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results of exterior influences such as climate. Herder maintains that all skin colors can be merged into each other because all of these racial differences are merely varieties of a holistic picture of the universal that stretches across time and space.94 Kant felt attacked by Herder’s statement and promptly published the essay Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschenrasse (Definition of the Notion of Human Race, 1785) in the same year, to defend and reiterate his concept of race and monogenesis, which entails Georg Forster’s disagreement and the assertion of polygenesis.95 Herder obviously agrees with Kant on monogenesis, but deliberately blurs the categorical boundaries established by the notion of race. Herder conceives of human diversity as climatic and geographical variations of a single original model. This intellectual debate about race, climate, and the “inferiority” of the black Africans in eighteenth-​ century German discourse holds sway over the formation of the science of race and the empirical research of the biological sciences in later centuries.96 Two contemporary critical positions about the German discourse of race deserve our attention. As briefly mentioned above, Eze insists that Kant’s racial deduction from skin color to the mental capability of enjoying higher pleasures such as the beautiful and the sublime is the foundation of Kant’s system of aesthetics, epistemology, and moral philosophy. The seemingly universal reason and the ideal human in the Kantian philosophy are heavily loaded with the racial preference for white European males. Therefore Eze calls Kant’s notion of reason a colored reason—­“for anyone who disagreed with Kant’s compact would be ‘treated as a rebel against fundamental principles of human nature.’ ”97 Unlike Eze, Robert Bernasconi endeavors to disconnect the German discussions of race from European colonialism and slavery. Bernasconi argues: The fact that the scientific concept of race was developed initially in Germany rather than in Britain or America suggests that it was not specifically the interests of the slave owners that led to its introduction, but rather, as Kant’s essays themselves confirm, an interest in classification and above all the attempt to provide a theoretical defense of monogenesis. The appeal of monogenesis in large measure lay in its conformity to the Biblical account, but it also lent itself to discussions of “human fraternity,” so that within the context of the late eighteenth century the idea of race was a resource for those who opposed slavery, just as polygenesis lent itself to the upholders of slavery, without there being any necessary connection between one’s position on the monogenesis-​polygenesis dispute and one’s position on slavery.98

Bernasconi’s argument is valuable in pointing out that the German anthropological-​philosophical endeavor to define the concept of race was not necessarily interested in justifying European slave trade. Bernasconi stresses

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the microspecificities of the intellectual and historical context in which this debate took place. At the same time, even though the purpose of the debate on race is not directed toward economic interest, the cause or the cultural political background that gave rise to this debate was European colonialism and its slave trade.99 As we see in Kotzebue’s dramas, Robinsonades, and Forster’s and Chamisso’s travel writings, colonialism is deeply inscribed in the German discourse in the decades around 1800. The striking similarity in the debasement of black Africans between European colonial practice and the elite discussion that develops race as a stand-​alone philosophical category in the age of Enlightenment is difficult to ignore. Hence Eze’s critique reminds us not to completely dismiss the effect of Herder’s conclusions about the natural inferiority of the black Africans. Against this backdrop, the crucial point now is not to dispute whether Herder’s debasement of the black Africans intends to justify slavery and colonialism. Rather, we are certain that Herder’s idea is a product of his time, which, as a part of German canon, may indirectly support slavery and the ideology of the European cultural and racial superiority. This very specific idea of the Africans’ natural inferiority also testifies to the fact that the radical anthropological difference of the Africans was a vexing issue for German intellectuals in the eighteenth century. The reiteration of African inferiority offers a contrasting image for European superiority, expressed either through climate or biology. At least in Herder’s Ideen, it is important to prove or argue the inferiority of Africa, the Torrid Zone, in order to praise the temperate climate of northern Europe. In contrast to Africa, China was seen as a high culture that comes closest to the Enlightenment’s ideal of perfection, as we shall see in Leibniz’s writings in the ensuing pages. Yet in Herder’s philosophy of history, China becomes a stagnant and dead civilization set against the dynamic picture of Europe. Comparing Herder to Leibniz and to Macartney’s famous diplomatic mission to China, I observe that Herder’s sinophobia is intimately related to Herder’s understanding of history and his design of historicism. I argue that it is not merely (colonial) fantasy that determines the favorable or unfavorable representations of China in European Enlightenment. Rather, the coexistence of sinophilia and sinophobia articulates China’s prominent presence in eighteenth-​ century European intellectual life. Fact and fabrication coexist in the making of China in the German and European discourse. Sinophilia or Sinophobia: China, History, and Recognition In 1697, after engaging with Chinese thought for years, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz published The Latest News from China (Novissima Sinica), a collection of works by European Jesuits, with the intention of promoting mutual exchange of knowledge between Europe and China. He writes in the introduction:

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I consider it a singular plan of the fates that human cultivation and refinement should today be concentrated . . . in the two extremes of our continent, in Europe and in Tschina (as they call it). . . . Perhaps Supreme Providence has ordained such an arrangement, so that as the most cultivated and distant peoples stretch out their arms to each other, those in between may gradually be brought to a better way of life.100

Obviously, Leibniz considers China and Europe to be on the same level of civilization while assigning other cultures to lower levels. If we see Leibniz as an ethnocentric thinker who endorses Europe’s superiority while belittling others, then his admiration for China significantly balances his Eurocentrism by conceiving the globe as having at least two centers, if not many. Leibniz supports those Jesuit missionaries who were inclined to integrate themselves into Chinese society and to gradually introduce Christianity, known as the method of accommodation. Furthermore, Leibniz also suggests that the Europeans “need missionaries from the Chinese who might teach us the use and practice of natural religion, just as we have sent them teachers of revealed theology.”101 Clearly, Leibniz interprets classical Chinese philosophy, in particular Confucianism, as a natural religion. This interpretation betrays, on the one hand, that Leibniz shifts Chinese thought into more familiar forms of knowledge, which could even be described in more radical terms as a distortion of the foreign; on the other hand, Leibniz’s reading also registers his recognition of China and reveals China’s challenges to Christian European discourse. Among the numerous European admirers of classical Chinese philosophy, Leibniz is one of the most significant representatives of sinophilia from the sixteenth century to the mid-​eighteenth. During this time, China played a central role in European intellectual discourse in religion, ethics, art, and technology. Travel literature and other works on China were reprinted and translated into various European vernacular languages.102 Enlightenment rationalists such as Christian Wolff, Voltaire, and François Quesnay believed in Confucianism as the perfect political constitution and advocated European rulers emulating the Chinese model in organizing the state, economy, and agriculture.103 The fashionable chinoiserie style also created an exceedingly positive recognition of this remote culture, which did not seem to have an equal interest in Europe at the same time.104 The first British diplomatic mission to China, led by Lord George Macartney in 1792 to negotiate better conditions for trade and establish diplomatic relations, found that the Qing dynasty showed little interest in conforming to Western norms. During the second half of the eighteenth century, the dominant course of sinophilia shifted toward sinophobia, although both images of China coexisted until the twentieth century.105 Equally radical and intensive, the prevailing sinophobic attitude portrayed China as the prototype of a stagnant

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and despotic society. Herder played the leading role in dismissing the long duration of Chinese history, praised by the sinophiles, as an “embalmed mummy” lacking life and the capability of transformation. Herder’s sinophobia is intrinsically entangled with his philosophy of history, which held a powerful sway over Hegel, Marx, and their followers. Jonathan Spence observes that the sinophile Voltaire started his philosophy of history with China instead of the biblical Genesis and thus “gave a new twist to Western historiography.”106 Then, conversely, it is the European dispute about history that decisively engenders the attribution of historical stagnation to China, particularly in Herder’s work. The rise of historicism in the latter half of the eighteenth century, inextricably connected to Herder’s contribution, played a significant part in the long-​lasting negative connotation of China.107 Two main tendencies explain the shift from sinophilia to sinophobia. First, this radical turn had little to do with Chinese reality; instead it reflected inner European intellectual debates.108 David Mungello rightly points out that Leibniz and his contemporaries seriously studied Chinese language and culture and thus showed a more neutral and objective judgment of China, while the later generation of Enlightenment thinkers and their critics employed either a positive or a negative China to promote their own intellectual programs.109 Second, this shift is ascribed to the rise of European imperialism and the growing number of negative travel accounts about China. From the perspective of postcolonial criticism of imperialism and Orientalism, intellectual sinophobia is thus seen as the needed justification and ideology for the rising European colonial hegemony in the second half of the eighteenth century.110 Neither of these explanations, however, should be taken in absolute terms. Even if the shift from sinophilia to sinophobia merely reflected European thinkers’ own obsessions, we still have to admit that Leibniz’s sinophilia was supported by his correspondence with Jesuits in China. Moreover, even if the missionaries did not see China in its entirety, they at least transmitted part of its so-​called reality. Furthermore, European imperial encroachment on China did not start until the 1840s, with the first Opium War. In the eighteenth century, European trade with China was almost exclusively conducted on China’s terms.111 Negative descriptions and perceptions of China had existed well before Leibniz’s time, but they had never had such a dominant position until the mid-​eighteenth century.112 In other words, the cases of sinophilia and sinophobia in eighteenth-​century Europe, as seen through the works of Leibniz and Herder, still deserve more comprehensive observation and explanation. The concept of recognition, originating from Hegel’s dialectic model of master and slave, is helpful for my understanding and analysis because changing representations of China in European discourse can be synthesized and explained through a discussion of the Hegelian notion of recognition

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and its critique by Frantz Fanon. Hegel employs the interaction between master and slave to illustrate the independence and dependence of self-​ consciousness in his influential Phenomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807). While Hegel states that “the lord achieves his recognition through another consciousness”—­the bondsman—­and this recognition “is one-​sided and unequal,” he also stresses that the lordship is not “an independent consciousness, but a dependent one.”113 Hegel contends, “The truth of the independent consciousness is accordingly the servile consciousness of the bondsman.”114 The master exists only through recognition by the slave. Dialectically, the Hegelian tale of master and slave emphasizes a fundamental reciprocity. Hegel’s notion of recognition met censure from the Martinican decolonial thinker Frantz Fanon in the 1950s. Fanon argues in Black Skin, White Masks that, in social and colonial reality, the white master does not need recognition from the black slave, while the slave strives to adopt the values of the master. Master remains master and slave remains slave. Fanon contends: “The Negro wants to be like the master. Therefore he is less independent than the Hegelian slave. In Hegel the slave turns away from the master and turns toward the object. Here the slave turns toward the master and abandons the object.”115 Fanon thus claims that in order to gain an equal recognition, the colonized blacks need to maintain their difference or alterity from the white European colonizers and fight for the recognition from the master on this ground. In the case of sinophilia and sinophobia, the encounter between Europe and China prior to 1800 is marked less by China’s effort to gain Europe’s recognition than by Europe’s reaction to the challenge posed by Chinese thought. Sinophilia, according to Hegel, betrays a one-​sided recognition. Sinophobia, following Fanon, is both a refusal to imitate China and a cry for European alterity. The Chinese disinterest, however, compels us to see that the European representations of China in the eighteenth century are less the results of struggle and collision than phenomena produced both by Europe’s encounter with the towering figure of the Chinese Empire and inner European intellectual dynamics. Facts and fabrications coexist in European representations of China. In the following pages, a more detailed perusal of Leibniz’s and Herder’s writings and an account of the historical background of European Chinese trade around 1800 will help us reimagine sinophilia and sinophobia through the notion of recognition. Leibniz’s admiring interpretation of classical Chinese philosophy, particularly Confucianism, is best articulated in his argument with the party of Jesuits such as Father Longobardi and Father Sainte-​Marie, who consider Confucian doctrines erroneous and thus claim that the Chinese need to abandon their own philosophy and become completely Christianized. Leibniz disagrees in his Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese (1716):

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China is a great Empire, no less in area than cultivated Europe, and indeed surpasses it in population and orderly government. Moreover, there is in China a public morality admirable in certain regards, conjoined to a philosophical doctrine, or rather a natural theology, venerable by its antiquity, established and authorized for about 3,000 years, long before the Greeks whose works nevertheless are the earliest which the rest of the world possess, except of course for our Sacred Writings. It would be highly foolish and presumptuous on our part, having newly arrived compared with them, and scarcely out of barbarism, to want to condemn such an ancient doctrine simply because it does not appear to agree at first glance with our ordinary scholastic notions.116

Leibniz advocates that more Chinese classics should be accurately translated: “Indeed, it would even be desirable that all the classics be translated together.”117 Obviously, Leibniz’s recognition of China stresses the antiquity of Chinese thought and its practical effects in society. Leibniz even believes that the ancient Chinese learned part of their thought from the tradition of the Christian patriarchs such as Abraham and Jacob. This endeavor to identify the shared root of both Chinese and Christian philosophy is reflected throughout Leibniz’s reading of Confucian classics. In fact, Leibniz does not strive to find out the differences but to identify the similarities between Chinese and Christian thought. He contends that “Chinese philosophy more closely approaches Christian theology than the philosophy of the ancient Greeks.”118 By bringing Christianity into accordance with Confucianism or vice versa, Leibniz aims to establish universal truths. For example, Leibniz understands the Confucian notion of Li (理) as “reason, or the foundation of all nature, the most universal reason and substance.” Li is for Leibniz the “pure, motionless, rarified” universal cause, “without body and shape, and can be comprehended only through the understanding.”119 Leibniz rejects Father Longobardi’s interpretation of Li as the Christian prime matter and contends that this Chinese notion should be equated with the notion of prime form “as the Soul of the World, of which the individual souls would only be modifications.”120 Leibniz’s central thesis about Chinese philosophy is that it is a natural theology, which contains profound and accurate understanding of moral truths comprehended through human reason or Li and exists before the divine revelation by Jesus Christ. For Leibniz, “Jesus adds nothing new to what reason shows, but only converts this knowledge to a surer footing, overcoming the inconstancy of human reason.”121 Leibniz’s interpretation of Li as the prime form reminds us of his monadology, according to which each monad is a variation of the same universe and an expression of the same whole. Each monad contains and reflects the whole universe and the temporality of past, present, and future in a different

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way. The British historian of science Joseph Needham argues in his influential Science and Civilization in China (1956) that Leibniz’s theory of monads, one of his life achievements, is essentially influenced by Confucian philosophy. In other words, through Leibniz, Chinese thought enters European intellectual history. It is debatable whether Chinese philosophy is germinal to Leibniz’s monadology—­David Mungello, for one, doubts this—­but at least we can be sure that Confucianism is germane to and supportive of Leibniz’s own theory.122 Leibniz, with the Jesuit Bouvet, also made one of the most remarkable discoveries in Europe’s encounter with China: they realized that the binary system of arithmetic, which Leibniz developed, astoundingly corresponds with the central diagram of the Book of Changes (易经), one of the ancient Chinese classics. Leibniz thus comments: “Now this shows also that the ancient Chinese have surpassed the modern ones in the extreme, not only in piety (which is the basis of the most perfect morality) but in science as well.”123 Furthermore, Leibniz is interested in the Chinese language and believes that it contains structures of the universal Primitive Language given by God to Adam prior to the confusion of languages in Babel. This attempt at introducing a nonphonetic language into the phonocentric and logocentric system in Europe, as Jacques Derrida comments, “had opened a breach within the logocentric security” of the West.124 Now if we go back to our question of recognition, then there does not seem to be a master and a slave in Leibniz’s narrative. Rather, Leibniz places Chinese culture on a higher or at least an equal level to Europe and shows his willingness to adopt the assumed Chinese perspective to connect or integrate his world with the other.125 Yet it is also inappropriate to completely ignore the aspect of subsuming and encompassing the Chinese philosophy or language into European knowledge system in Leibniz’s approach. The Leibnizian search for a universal language, as Derrida points out, is immediately connected with the search for a universal logic, which may in turn confirm European logocentrism.126 Especially when China becomes the prototypical example of Herder’s historical stagnation, the aspect of logocentrism becomes more consolidated and the master-​slave model emerges in the European representation of China. In 1791, almost a century after the publication of Leibniz’s The Latest News from China, Herder published the fourth part of his Ideen and turned the image of China into a hopeless stagnation of history. Herder’s sinophobia emerged through his dispute with Voltaire’s influential treatise Philosophie de l’histoire (1766), in which Voltaire expresses his high esteem for China.127 Voltaire stresses the longevity of Chinese historiography and, similar to Leibniz, the imperfection and underdevelopment of European culture in comparison to China. Furthermore, under Leibniz’s sway, Voltaire also maintains that the ancient Chinese have developed social morality to perfection:

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Let us constantly remember, that five hundred years ago, scarce any one knew how to write, either in the North, in Germany or France.  .  .  . There are no people in Europe, who have not latterly made more progress within half a century in all the arts, than they had made from the time of the invasions of the Barbarians, till the fourteenth century. I shall not here examine why the Chinese, who were arrived at the knowledge and practice of everything that was useful in society, did not go as far as we do at present in the sciences; they are, I allow, as bad physicians as we were two hundred years ago, and as the Greeks and Romans; but they brought morality to perfection, which is the first of the sciences.128

Herder strongly disagrees with Voltaire’s approach to history, especially the idea of an absolute perfection in the past, because for him history is not an imitation of certain ancient models but should rather be conceived as an ongoing process of unique transformations toward the future. Herder’s dispute with Voltaire also reminds us of the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns (querelle des Ancients et des Modernes) in the early French Enlightenment. “Motionless,” the word Leibniz used to describe the unchangeable law of the notion of Li, is now used by Herder to characterize a condition that is forgotten by the flow of history. The universal law for Herder now is not motionless perpetuity, but constant regeneration and progression. Therefore the ancient high culture of China, along with Egypt, does not deserve awe and respect any longer. It merely resembles museum-​like dead objects and curiosities. Herder portrays China as the biggest failure in the course of the history of humanity.129 We can summarize Herder’s depiction of China with a metaphor he uses: an embalmed mummy (eine balsamierte Mumie). First, China is embalmed because it achieved a high degree of refinement in many aspects of its culture, such as porcelain, silk, gunpowder, the compass, printing, bridge building, and shipbuilding long before the Europeans could.130 Second, it is a mummy because the Chinese are not seen to have the organic drive and ability to innovate and improve these arts.131 Against Leibniz’s high regard for the Chinese language, Herder holds it as the epitome of the artificial way of thinking and the lack of scientific spirit among the Chinese. Herder comments that the Chinese language lacks the energy of invention (Erfindungskraft) and is merely a forced music of syllables (hervorgezwungene Sylbenmusik), which is extremely difficult for European ears and tongues.132 Hence, for Herder, Chinese people are also not talented enough to develop sciences in their tradition according to European standards.133 Herder sees Confucian moral philosophy as the hindrance that prevents China from growing into the next historical stage and restricts Chinese civilization to the childhood phase (Knabenalter) of the history of humanity. Herder

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compares Confucianism to a mechanical engine (mechanisches Triebwerk) that does not have the ability to produce any new ideas.134 He comments that there is little taste for true nature and feeling of inner peace, beauty, and dignity in Chinese cultural customs. Echoing the popular climate theory that some climatic environments are better than others for enabling humans to develop their potential, Herder ascribes the negative features of Chinese culture to China’s geographical location.135 He even states that the Chinese are doomed to be a degenerated slave culture because, like the Jews, they avoid contacts and exchange with other nations.136 It is clear so far that Herder use European standards to judge China and that, more importantly, he is doing so intentionally. Well informed and erudite as Herder is, he knows the high reputation of the Chinese Empire among Enlightenment thinkers.137 Although he claims that he is dedicated to finding a middle course and delivering a realistic picture of China, his completely negative portrayal makes it clear that he is not primarily interested in drawing up a balance sheet of Chinese mores and customs, but rather bears other intentions: First, as a critic of Enlightenment, as Isaiah Berlin calls him, he shows his discontent with the Enlightenment philosophy of history represented by Voltaire by destroying the positive image of China. Second—­and this aim is more far-​reaching and influential—­Herder constructs an image of China in order to establish and promote an image of European dynamism of trade and sciences, which is set against the backdrop of the so-​called Chinese stagnation. In other words, Herder’s endeavor to find out the logic of universal history bears the task of constituting a new identity and historical missions for Europe; thus he uses China here to produce the binary between the modern and the ancient, East and West, historical stagnation and development. Herder’s account of the historical stagnation of China is later reflected in Hegel and Marx’s image of China. For Hegel, China does not have a real history or historicity. The spirit of world history, which finds its home in northern Europe, has never been to the other part of the world.138 Karl Marx also takes on the concept of Chinese changelessness and considers the Asian economic form a nonprogressive one. Colin Mackerras comments: “It followed for Marx that outside intervention was necessary to force change upon a resistant and miserable Asia.”139 If Hegel’s and, in particular, Marx’s image of China accompanies and also is accompanied by China’s subjugation to Western powers in the second half of the nineteenth century, in Leibniz’s and Herder’s time, there was little diplomatic relationship between the Chinese Empire and European nations. In 1793, two years after the publication of Herder’s Ideen, Lord George Macartney, Great Britain’s first envoy to China, was commissioned to negotiate better conditions for trade and to establish diplomatic relationships with the Qing dynasty.

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At the end of his mission, Macartney was deeply disappointed because his requests to the Huang Di (皇帝, emperor) Qianlong were rejected, and he was courteously dispatched back to his ships in the South. Qianlong’s edict to George III, which appears to have been drafted well before Macartney’s arrival, treats Great Britain as one of China’s tribute countries: We, by the Grace of Heaven, Emperor, instruct the King of England to take note of our charge. Although your country, O King, lies in the far oceans, yet inclining your heart towards civilization you have specially sent an envoy respectfully to present a state message, and sailing the seas he has come to our Court to kotow and to present congratulations for the Imperial birthday, and also to present local products, thereby showing your sincerity. . . . As to what you have requested in your message, O King, namely to be allowed to send one of your subjects to reside in the Celestial Empire to look after your country’s trade, this does not conform to the Celestial Empire’s ceremonial system, and definitely cannot be done.140

The edict further shows that China does not want to privilege the British over other European countries and considers the purpose of a long-​term ambassador unpractical and illogical: If it is said that your object, O King, is to take care of trade, men from your country have been trading at Macao for some time, and have always been treated favourably. . . . Why, then, do foreign countries need to send someone to remain at the capital? This is a request for which there is no precedent and it definitely cannot be granted. Moreover, the distance between Macao . . . and the capital is nearly ten thousand li [a Chinese li is equal to five hundred meters], and if he were to remain at the capital how could he look after it? If it is said that because you look up with admiration to the Celestial Empire you desire him to study our culture, yet the Celestial Empire has its own codes of ritual which are different from your country’s in each case. Even if the person from your country who remained here was able to learn them it would be of no use since your country has its own customs and regulations, and you would certainly not copy Chinese ones.141

This document not only makes it clear that the Qing leaders are ignorant of the British and European practice of diplomacy, but also tells us that they are not at all interested in expanding trade and maintaining a sustained relationship with Britain—­a tribute country of no danger and significance from their perspective. For the British, however, the Macartney embassy is meant to save the British East India Company from bankruptcy, due to the highly restricted

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trade conducted solely on China’s terms, and to further open up the potentially greatest market in the world for British products. In fact, before and long after Macartney’s embassy, European trade with China was restricted to the small area around Macau and Canton in the south. Foreign trade was seen not as a natural right, but rather a gracious concession by the Qing Empire. China exported a great amount of tea to Europe each year, but refused to allow European goods to circulate extensively on their domestic market: “The East India Company had been unable to sell sufficient goods to finance its large purchases of tea, and as a result had been forced to send great quantities of silver dollars to China to pay for its yearly purchases.”142 Foreigners were not allowed to buy books on Chinese history, and ordinary Chinese people were not allowed to teach them Chinese. Only merchants with special licenses could do business with the people from the so-​called Western Oceans. Recent research has shown that the gross domestic product of China in 1820 was $199 billion, whereas six advanced Western countries (United Kingdom, United States, France, Germany, Italy, and Austria) altogether had $128 billion.143 Hence China played, culturally and economically, a far more important role for Britain and other European countries than vice versa. The Macartney embassy has been seen as the defining moment in Sino-​European history because China was seen for the first time through the eyes of a shrewd diplomat. The travel writings by Macartney and his companion John Barrow are the first accounts on China from a British colonial and capitalist point of view.144 This embassy also poses clear challenges to China and demystifies the dominant European perception of China as a country of grand power. When Herder published his Ideen, however, China remained an enigmatic country respected for its political and economic powers by European nations. The letter from George III which Macartney presented to the Chinese emperor still reflected a strong sinophile tendency. Against this background, it is difficult to see Herder’s sinophobia merely as the rhetoric of the powerful or the justification of subjugation and exploitation, because Europe was still observing and exploring the real strength of the Chinese Empire. In addition to criticizing the arbitrary debasement of China in Herder’s work, we can also see that Herder’s philosophy of history actually produces the need of recognition that an assumed inferior China should have toward a self-​ascribed superior Europe. If Leibniz’s willingness to adopt Confucianism shows his one-​ sided recognition toward China, then Herder’s exaggerated negative depiction of China discloses its negative recognition of China and a call for European distinction. The existence of the Chinese Empire, with its economic, cultural, and territorial achievements, and the euphoric accounts of the Jesuits throughout the eighteenth century compel European and German intellectuals to react in such radical manners. This invention of the need of recognition for China, in fact, betrays a desire for Europe’s self-​assertion and self-​acknowledgment.

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It is to some extent true, if we follow Edward Said’s argument in Orientalism, that the West imposes images of the Orient onto it which have less to do with reality than with the rhetoric of control and subjugation. Yet in the case of the representation of China in the eighteenth century, reality and projection are both at work to produce the Leibnizian Chinese utopia and the Herderian Chinese dystopia. Furthermore, we also perceive the anxiety of defining oneself against an imagined giant. Surely we must keep in mind that Herder’s representation of China as historical stagnation has had disastrous consequences until our time. The need of recognition Herder produces for China becomes reality in the end. The Idea of Europe and the Spirit of Trade After pitying Africa’s climatic inferiority and ridiculing China’s dead civilization, Herder attributes the birth of arts and sciences to the beautiful peoples living in the temperate climate of the Middle East and Greece. He contends that while the northern Europeans (nordischen Europäer) still lived in barbarism, the Orient had already invented everything necessary for the improvement and education of the human body and mind. While Herder humbly admits that northern Europeans did not achieve a similar standard of civilization until centuries later, he calls them the future “northern conquerors” (nordische Überwinder) who inherited the achievements of the Orient and ancient Greece and brought them to a new height.145 For Herder, the northern European cultural achievements surpass all cultures in the world. In the fourth volume of the Ideen, devoted to northern European culture from the nomadic time to the Middle Ages, Herder meticulously depicts different ethnic groups in Europe and their historical development as a collective community. The representative group is the Germanic people. Three aspects are important for Europe’s rise as the most developed stage in world history: the climatic and geographical location; the contribution by the northern Europeans, mostly the Germanic peoples, to cultivate a general spirit of Europe (Allgemeingeist Europas); and the spirit of trade and commerce, an essential trait of European colonialism. Through these three aspects, Herder constructs the idea of Europe against the backdrop of eighteenth-​century colonial expansion. Europe is first and foremost a climatic and geographical entity defined by the mountain chains in the east and the south. These mountains, according to Herder, sever northern Europe from Italy and Spain in the south and from Asia in the east. The mountains shape the characteristics and fates of northern European peoples.146 In Herder’s argument, this unique geographical location and its climate “naturally” give rise to the privileged northern European culture.147 He also establishes a contrast between the old and the new in world history. Unlike in Auch eine Philosophie, in which Herder compares European culture of his own time to an old man lacking organic energy,

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European culture here is portrayed as a fresh newcomer in world history. Asia has become the spatial and historical other to northern Europe in Herder’s philosophy of history. This view is taken up by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in his influential philosophy of history.148 Herder further divides the inhabitants of northern Europe into “natives” and “foreigners.” He differentiates four groups of “natives”: the peoples living in the areas of Spain and France, the peoples from the coast of the Baltic Sea, the Germanic peoples, and the Slavs. The foreigners to northern Europe are the Arabs, the Turks, the Jews, and the Gypsies. These peoples intermingle with each other and constitute the ethnic diversity of northern Europe. Although Herder did not explicitly argue that the Arabs, the Turks, the Jews, and the Gypsies are foreigners to northern Europe, it is obvious that religion, not race or skin color, is the differentiating criterion in this case. In the seventeenth book of the fourth volume, Herder states the necessity of Christianity for the development of a unified northern European culture. The “native” northern Europeans later become Christians, whereas the “foreigners” retain their own religions of Islam or Judaism. Before Herder states the leading role of the German people in Europe’s achievements, he first stresses that amalgamation characterizes the European ethnic landscape. He contends that in no other part of the world are peoples mixed with each other as much as in Europe; in no other part have they changed their places and ways of living as often and as much as in Europe. Herder observes that in many European countries people, or families, would have difficulty specifying their ethnicity or genealogy. Thus Europeans of different descents have already grown together into one big cultural family and nurtured one general European spirit (Allgemeingeist Europas).149 Herder argues that no single group was able to elevate Europe into civilization; the growth of Roman, Greek, and Arabian seeds of civilization is possible only through the European community.150 Herder argues that Europe is able to synthesize human achievements from various sources and produce the next height of history as a nondividable unity. The phrase “the general spirit of Europe” tells us that Herder is less interested in stressing the multifaceted composition of the present Europeanness than in conceiving of an ontogenetic entity of Europe. Arabian arts and sciences, Herder emphasizes, have exerted a tremendous impact on European language and thinking through the Arabian occupation in southern Europe and via the Crusades. Since the southern European regions under Arabian influence have now become Christian, Arabian culture is also an inseparable part of European culture.151 Although Herder endeavors to represent northern European culture as an independent entity in its present moment, he does not portray its past as purely confined to Europe’s geography. Instead, he recognizes the influences that shaped European culture. The exclusion of the Arabian world from Europe in turn results in its inclusion in the idea of northern Europe as such. Only through its exclusion is its inclusion possible. Even though Herder

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admits Arabian and other non-​European influences, he still argues that the foreign influences are no longer helpful for the present. Europe now develops toward a new historical stage on its own. Within the European community, Herder attributes to the Germanic peoples (Deutsche Völker) the leading role in Europe’s development. In the eighteenth book of the fourth volume he studiously describes the northern Germanic conquerors of the Roman Empire. In his eyes, the Germanic peoples (die deutschen Völker) have conquered, governed, cultivated, and protected Europe; their characteristics, their strategies, and their position among other peoples provide the basis for Europe’s freedom, security, and growth.152 Without the Germanic people, Europe’s entire community could not have reached its current stage of history. The most important aspect of the Germanic spirit is the drive toward trade and commerce. Trade enables northern Europeans to recognize mutual interest, to build a large network, to secure a peaceful political order, and to promote competition and general welfare.153 After the fall of Italian trades during the Renaissance, northern Europe as a unified state of trade (Handelsstaat) now takes up the leading role of world trade. While Italian trades and travels are confined to the Mediterranean, the northern Europeans trade all over the world; their geographical proximity to rivers and oceans give them natural privileges.154 Herder intentionally emphasizes the importance of the trading cities in northern continental countries such as Holland, Prussia, Poland, Russia, and Latvia and attributes to France, Britain, Italy, Spain, and Portugal only secondary meanings in the entire trading system. In particular, he names the German city Lübeck as the queen (Fürstin) of all trading ports in Europe.155 Different from Hegel’s opinion that England, France, and Germany were the centers of Europe, Herder’s division enhances the significance of the northeastern countries in Europe.156 Trade is for Herder of fundamental importance for the development of arts and sciences.157 He contends that, without the economic success of the cities through world trade, it is impossible for gothic art to reach its peak.158 Without trade, modern universities, which criticize the church and aristocracy to promote the spirit of scientific investigation, cannot emerge.159 Trade also brings Europeans into contact with the Arabs and other peoples, through which Europe gains access to technical inventions, including the compass, glass, gunpowder, and paper.160 Herder makes clear that these achievements of the non-​European world, however, are not sufficient for reaching the highest stage of history—­it is the European spirit of trade that properly uses and further develops these technical innovations. Herder’s eulogy of the northern European spirit of world trade echoes with his contemporary Adam Smith’s treatise An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776, first German translation 1776–­ 78), in which Smith stresses the economic importance of European colonial trade. Herder possessed a translation of Smith’s work in his private library

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and paid great homage to the Scottish Enlightenment thinker.161 In Wealth of Nations, Smith, similar to Herder, considers Europe a unity and points out the importance of trade with the colonies for all of Europe: “The general advantages which Europe, considered as one great country, has derived from the discovery and colonization of America, consist, first, in the increase of its enjoyments; and secondly, in the augmentation of its industry.”162 Smith observes that not only countries with colonies (England, France, and Spain) but also those without actual colonies (Germany, Hungary, and Poland) have benefited greatly from world trade. Similar to Herder’s praise of the role of cities in the network of trade, Smith argues that the economic form of commerce in cities immensely benefits from colonial trade. Smith also underscores that colonial trade with America, Africa, and Asia elevates Europe from a small corner on the world map to the chief production and commercial center of the globe.163 Although Herder does not explicitly refer to the colonial context as the background of world trade in his Ideen, his enthusiastic praise of Smith’s work leaves little doubt that Herder’s narrative is heavily informed and influenced by European commercial colonialism. While the economist Smith observes how European countries benefit from the colonies, the philosopher of history Herder stresses the leading role of northern Europeans in this process. While Smith points out the colonial process and its material results, Herder focuses on the entrepreneurs and their historical superiority. It is true that Herder criticizes colonial ruthlessness in Auch eine Philosophie and Humanitätsbriefe. Yet his nearly idealistic belief in the superiority of the European spirit of trade also legitimizes European colonialism as a natural advantage and a historical necessity. Herder’s Universalism or Eurocentrism At the end of Ideen, Herder stresses a European identity and argues that even if neither Athens nor Sparta should be built, Europe still should be. Europe also carries the universal task of spreading humanity and reason (Humanität und Vernunft) around the world.164 It is the final destination of Herderian development at which the historical universal and the geographical and anthropological particulars are harmoniously united. Herder’s historicism contains an undeniable Eurocentric nature. It is not time but geography, in the form of climatic zones, that plays a significant role in Herder’s construction of historical development. Yet even in the bulwark of such a gigantic philosophy of history as Ideen, non-​European cultures and knowledge still at times challenge the leading logic of European superiority. Herder’s praise of the honorable and warm-​hearted “savages” and his emphasis of the Arabian roots of European culture all demonstrate that non-​European cultures pluralize the idea of Europe and receive recognition in his construction of northern European superiority. From the perspective of non-​European impact, Herder’s idea of Europe also reflects the process of finding and defining oneself in

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the increasing dynamics of transcultural interactions and challenges. Later in his career, non-​European cultures even induce Herder to change his view of history. He turns the inevitable development into an ethics of revenge in his Humanitätsbriefe. He condemns the cruelty of European colonial practice and highlights the act of keeping perpetual peace by the Native American Iroquois tribe.

Ethics of Revenge and Iroquois Perpetual Peace in Herder’s Letters on Humanität In letter 114 of his Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität (Letters toward Advancement of Humanity, 1793–­97), Herder comments on the antagonistic relationships between slaves and slaveholders: “The Negroes paint their devils white and the Latvians will not go to Heaven if the Germans are there. ‘Why do you pour water on my head?’ the dying slave asked the missionary.—­‘So that you go to Heaven.’ ‘I don’t like the Heaven in which the Whites are,’ said he, turned his face away, and died. Sorrowful history of humanity.”165 Sympathizing with the dying slave, Herder calls into question European Christian missions and illustrates the irreconcilable hatred engendered by European colonial atrocity. By claiming that the blacks paint their devils white, Herder adopts the perspectives of the colonized and represents colonial reality from their views. The Christian projection of heaven and peace after death loses its divine promise due to “earthly” oppressions. Christianity no longer promises universal love but adopts a racial character of the religion of the white colonizers. If Herder’s critique of colonial violence merely sporadically appears in Auch eine Philosophie, his critique now develops into the powerful ethics of history displayed in the Humanität letters.166 Herder devotes eleven letters (114–­24), making up the tenth and the last collection of his mammoth epistolary collection, to the issues of European colonial practice and the ethical dimension of universal history. Michael Zaremba, one of Herder’s biographers, calls the tenth collection the credo of Herder’s political theory. Indeed, European colonialism compels Herder to seriously connect history to ethics and humanistic values. He states in letter 121 that if humanistic reflections should govern one academic field, then this field is history, because history narrates human actions and decides human values.167 History is for Herder an organism in which human beings function not only as critics and commentators but also as practitioners of moral laws (moralisches Naturgesetz).168 In short, history embodies ethics. Or history is ethics. After fiercely critiquing colonial atrocity, Herder develops the notion of historical Nemesis, the Greek goddess of resentment and his ideal model of perpetual peace based on a story of a Native American tribe, the Iroquois. In the very first letter in the tenth collection, Herder asks, Why are peoples and cultures destined to influence each other?169 Rejecting the naive and

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abstract idea that intercultural encounters enhance culture and civility, he highlights violence and death. Moving swiftly through the Romans, the Christian crusade, and other ancient examples, Herder scathingly criticizes contemporary European colonial practice of the Germans in the Baltic regions and that of Spain, Portugal, Britain, and Holland in Africa and the East and West Indies. Although in Ideen Herder had praised European open-​mindedness and the spirit of world trade, here he comments that the colonized regions cry for revenge because European colonialism continuously devastates their living conditions.170 Travel writings inform Herder about the European slave trade—­for him, the greatest misery in the history of humanity.171 Europe and the colonized part of the world are juxtaposed through contrasting qualities, such as good and evil, injustice and candor, war and vulnerability, oppression and suffering. In Herder’s eyes, slavery is the greatest crime of European colonialism. In letter 114, Herder presents disturbing stories of colonial slavery in the form of idyllic poems titled Neger-​Idyllen.172 York Gothart Mix and Gerhard Sauder accurately point out that Herder intentionally and ironically deploys the genre of idyllic poetry, conventionally associated with the beautiful nature and the peaceful life of a shepherd in primeval times, to demonstrate the deep rupture between utopia and reality.173 Herder injects a heavy dose of colonial truth into the world of idyllic poetry to ironically comment on the Rousseauian idea of noble savage, which compares numerous non-​European cultures to Europe’s past and Arcadian peace and innocence. To some extent, this is also Herder’s ironic response to his own philosophy of history.174 “Die Frucht am Baume” (“Fruit on the Tree”) powerfully condemns the excess and cruelty of a white master who takes away the bride of a black slave and imprisons him in a cage hanging on a tree. “Die rechte Hand” (“The Right Hand”) and “Die Brüder” (“The Brothers”) tragically eulogize the noble characteristics of the black slaves because they sacrifice their bodies and their lives to follow the dictate of their hearts and the principle of justice. As a matter of fact, these poems portray nothing idyllic. What the poems evoke is a strong abhorrence for the white colonizers and a moral indictment of colonial atrocity. Yet it is precisely this detestation that prompts an even stronger desire for an idyllic state, one where white and black people live together following noble moral principles. Herder endeavors to elaborate this dream with his vision of perpetual peace and his concepts of historical revenge and equal authenticity of cultures. The Iroquois’ story of peacemaking shapes Herder’s idea of perpetual peace, which contrasts with Immanuel Kant’s vision of the same topic based on a priori principles and pure reason. Herder conceives of Nemesis, the goddess of revenge, to call for a global justice and human dignity that defies the protean nature of time. While Herder’s early concept of cultural relativism stresses the aspect of individuality, now he places more weight on the notion of equal authenticity in the context of his colonial critique. Herder

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also predicts Europe’s crisis and decadence based on the continuation of slavery and cruel colonialism. Reading Herder’s Humanitätsbriefe, I am not merely concerned with showing Herder as a German philosopher with a good conscience; more importantly, I aim to demonstrate that non-​European knowledge and reality significantly challenge Eurocentrism and coconstruct the ethical dimension of Herder’s philosophy of history. In letters 118 and 119, Herder illustrates his vision of perpetual peace with a story of the Iroquois, a Native American tribe documented in the travel narrative Missionsgeschichte in Nordamerika (History of the Missions in North America). As many critics point out, his vision of perpetual peace is situated in the European intellectual project of perpetual peace initiated by Abbé Saint Pierre in 1713 and further discussed by Jean-​Jacques Rousseau and others.175 The most famous treatise is certainly Immanuel Kant’s Zum ewigen Frieden (On Perpetual Peace, 1795). Pheng Cheah comments that Kant’s cosmopolitanism marks a turning point of political theory from intrastate to interstate concerns, a point “at which the ‘political’ becomes, by moral necessity, ‘cosmopolitical.’ ”176 Cheah is also aware, however, that Kant’s vision was formulated prior to the rise of nationalism as a political movement in Europe. Therefore “it is more a philosophical republicanism and federalism designed to reform the absolutist dynastic state than a theory of opposing the modern theory of nationality.”177 Unlike Kant’s project, Herder’s discussion of perpetual peace does not prove a merely philosophical project. Herder’s vision is richly informed by colonial realities and discloses the enormous impact of non-​European culture and knowledge on his thinking through the Iroquois story. Moreover, Herder’s project of perpetual peace endeavors to reach beyond the geographical borders of Europe and incorporate the entire world. Its primary interest is not only a European peace, as Kant’s intended to be, but also peaceful relations between Europe and the non-​European world, between the colonizers and the colonized. The Iroquois story goes like this: As the result of constant intertribe conflicts caused by a strong tribe (the Delaware), a weak tribe (the Iroquois) suggests how to keep peace with the stronger tribes: one tribe should be the woman, around whom the warring tribes live as men. No one should harm and attack the woman. If one tribe does so, then all other tribes together should punish the lawbreaker. The woman should not get involved in war, however, but should endeavor to maintain peace. If the male tribes fight against each other, the female tribe should warn them that their women and children may be killed and in the end the whole tribe will be extinguished. The Delaware agrees to be the woman tribe. The Iroquois thus perform a ceremony and hang oil and medicine on the arm of the woman. Oil symbolizes that the woman of peace should tell good things to all the tribes. Medicine symbolizes that the woman of peace should persuade warring tribes to maintain peace

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and thus cure their diseases. The Delaware should solely devote themselves to agriculture. Herder laments that European colonizers destroy the peace created by Iroquois wisdom because all tribes, even the woman of peace, are now forced to take up arms. Herder suggests that the Iroquois peace treaty should be rooted and grow like a tree everywhere in the world.178 Inspired by the Iroquois story, he maps out his own vision of perpetual peace to maintain peace and curb warfare and colonialism. Herder postulates that his woman of peace equals universal justice (allgemeine Billigkeit), humanity (Menschlichkeit), and practical reason (tätige Vernunft). He supports these three theorems through seven doctrines (Gesinnung). The first three of the seven doctrines are revulsion against war (Abscheu gegen den Krieg), reduced respect for heroism (verminderte Achtung gegen den Heldentum), and revulsion against inappropriate governance (Abscheu der falschen Staatskunst). Herder argues that warfare poisons the well of history and human rights and that violence will not alter the principles of justice in history.179 Herder also uses stories from other non-​European cultures to illustrate his doctrines against war, heroism, and wrong governance. Der Hunnenfürst (The Hun King), for example, praises a Hun king who gives away his best horse and his most beautiful woman to keep peace with his enemies while his generals want wars. Yet as the enemies request him to give away land and people, the king, unlike his generals, bravely enters the battle: he contends that it is necessary to fight for the well-​being of his people and the territory of his country, though not for his own horse and woman. In Der betrogne Unterhändler (The Cheated Peacemaker), the French troops invite the chiefs of the Iroquois to come over to negotiate peace. A French missionary persuades the Iroquois to go to the French headquarters with a positive attitude, but the French insult the Iroquois and send them back in chains. While the whole Iroquois tribe is trembling with rage, the oldest Iroquois tells the missionary to flee because he believes that the missionary has not meant any evil. Der Hunnenfürst evinces how the king as the head of a state disregards personal predilections but cares for the safety and welfare of the collective being. This king is an ideal ruler for Herder because the head of the state should not be a dictator, following his personal preferences, but should follow the laws of history, because a king is also a human being, equally facing the flux of history. In letter 120 Herder includes the Arabic poem “Der Fürst,” which reads in part: “You are a human being! O king, you are also dust! / Be worth your throne, be good and be great! / Be good, then you are great.”180 Most likely taken from a travelogue, this Arabic poem helps Herder articulate his ideal governance. If the Hun king functions as a fable or a fairy tale, far away from social and historical reality, then the story of the Iroquois is immediately related to French colonialism in the eighteenth century. The Iroquois story critiques the arrogance and the falsehood of the French colonial officers. At the same time, the advice of the old Iroquois transcends hatred and conflict with

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his wise recognition of the missionary’s good intention. The old Iroquois’s power of acknowledging the goodwill of the foreigner and his strategy of preventing further conflicts compel Herder to formulate the fourth and the fifth doctrine of perpetual peace: purified patriotism (geläuterter Patriotismus) and the sentiment of justice toward other nations (Gefühl der Billigkeit gegen andre Nationen). Herder stresses love for oneself and compassion for others.181 It is ridiculous and despicable, Herder argues, for one country to pretentiously interfere with other countries’ affairs, which it neither knows nor understands. Herder’s notion of cultural relativism now develops into a compassionate respect for the values of others. Herder’s purified patriotism is a love of oneself that supports and includes compassion for others. The task of the Delaware, the woman of peace, is defined by respect and love for others, which, in the end, becomes the passion for world peace. Herder insists that there should be a shared sentiment (gemeines Gefühl) of solidarity toward other countries and peoples if they are being unfairly treated. Herder criticizes European colonial practices as unfair deeds: the appropriation of land, cruel treatment of indigenous peoples, coercive Christianization, and the plundering of treasures.182 Herder’s endorsement of purified patriotism is directly linked to the Iroquois’ compassion for others. Empathy or shared sentiment is for Herder the most powerful tool for fighting unethical colonial practices. Following the example of Iroquois peace, Herder proposes an alliance of all “civilized” cultures (Allianz aller gebildeten Nationen) to cultivate self-​love and compassion and to curb arrogant powers.183 In Herder’s universal vision, it is not commerce, custom, or even language that hold transnational bonds, but the shared sentiment of justice in the Iroquois fashion that ties peoples and cultures together and unites them into a firm alliance. This shared sentiment should also serve as the basis for Herder’s sixth doctrine of fair trade and peaceful commerce.184 According to Herder, trade and commerce should unite peoples, not separate them. The ocean is an element connecting different cultures. When one country, because of greed, dares to declare the ocean for itself and forbids others to trade on equal terms, Herder argues, then all other nations have the right to feel the displeasure toward this subjugator. All other trading powers should try to restrict such unfair motivations and keep a peaceful commerce. In the seventh doctrine of work and activity (Tätigkeit), Herder subsumes all six doctrines. For him, the Iroquois’ suggestion that the woman of peace—­ the Delaware—­ should devote herself to agriculture is the most effective weapon against war because war causes only disaster, but work brings harvest and peace. Herder compares his seven doctrines to the oil and medicine hanging on the arms of the woman of peace and describes his own vision: The medicine unnoticeably works. The oil softly flows down. Quietly, she steps to this and that people and speaks the language of

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the Indians: “Brother, grandchild, father, I brought you a symbol of union, oil, and medicine. I will clean your eyes with them so that you can see sharply. I will refresh your ears with them so that you can hear rightly. I will smooth your neck with them so that my words go down silkily. Because I did not come here without purpose, I brought words of peace.”185

With these words, the words of peace, Herder projects a vision for the future, an ideal development of history. At the same time, Herder is aware of the difficulties of such a task, such a dream. His project of perpetual peace may sound somehow silly and unpractical to us today, but his wish at least says no to colonial atrocity and yes to love for oneself and compassion for others. As is evident, the Iroquois story of peacemaking powerfully influences Herder’s vision of perpetual peace, an important topic in eighteenth-​century political philosophy. Yet what if the nations are not interested in keeping peace? What if an Iroquois peace treaty is impossible? Herder’s answer is Nemesis, the revenge of history. Nemesis, the goddess of revenge, Herder contends, is the eternal norm in the entire history of humanity.186 Nemesis is also a principle of history based on mutuality. If the fifth doctrine of Herder’s perpetual peace—­sentiment of justice toward other nations—­is grounded in mutual respect, then the principle of Nemesis is based on mutual revenge. Furthermore, as Herder makes clear in his essay Nemesis: Ein lehrendes Sinnbild (Nemesis: A Moral Symbol, 1786), Nemesis does not merely symbolize the inevitability of revenge. It also functions as the protector against excess and the guardian of human values, represented by the seven doctrines of perpetual peace.187 Herder argues that European colonial cruelty toward other peoples will receive its revenge because this practice ignores the Nemesis of history.188 Therefore Herder warns: If you don’t like something, don’t do it to others, because revenge will be returned for all the evil deeds and overconfident mistakes.189 Herder’s principle of historical revenge demands universal validity. The encompassing universal history, which holds the human species in its entirety, is guided and guarded by reciprocal respect, mutual tolerance, and inevitable Nemesis. Herder calls the ideas of reciprocity and entirety the spirit of history (Geist der Menschengeschichte). The Herderian spirit of history is an overarching and almost divine omnipresence, through which his vision of perpetual peace, self-​love, empathetic compassion, and Nemesis are represented and guaranteed. In Herder’s eyes, this spirit of history is the intrinsic embodiment of the ethics of history. European colonialism is judged and condemned according to Herder’s ethics of history, which, unlike history itself, defies the protean nature of time. Insisting on peace and revenge, Herder reformulates his idea of cultural relativism now as equal authenticity and refuses the colonial imposition of European standards on non-​European cultures.

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Herder insists on the notion of equal authenticity among all cultures as the fundamental principle of history.190 He contends that the task of a researcher of human nature (Naturforscher der Menschheit) does not lie in establishing hierarchy among cultures; rather, it rests upon observing and cherishing every nation defined by its uniqueness.191 His concept of cultural relativism, first formulated in Auch eine Philosophie in 1774, is now used to debunk Eurocentric ideology and justify cultural diversity. While cultural relativism stresses the aspect of individuality, equal authenticity highlights commonality. Herder explains that external forces (Kräfte) and climates, not innate gifts or seeds (Keime), bring forth a wide array of cultural diversity. Obviously, Herder’s equal authenticity negates his own geohistorical hierarchy in Ideen. Herder argues that the ideal type of human being should not and cannot be reduced to one particular community in the world, such as European culture; rather, the prototype of humanity ought to be conceived as an idea based on all kinds of cultures on earth. Herder contends that Native Americans or Mongols are as much a letter in the great book of humanity as the best educated in England or France.192 He rejects the idea that European culture is the standard for all other cultures in the world and argues that European culture is the least appropriate measuring stick for general human goodness and human values. For him, European culture has many insufficiencies, weaknesses, and horrors. Herder asks: “Where does European culture exist? In which people? In which historical periods?”193 He answers that Europe is merely an abstract idea, an empty name. Herder especially stresses the impossibility of comparison between cultures and of measuring one culture according to Europe. He contends that Europeans, like other nations, are variations of the general and essential quality of being human. This quality—­ the genius of history (der Genius der Menschen-​Naturgeschichte), in Herder’s terminology—­serves as the connection between different cultures because he believes that everything is linked at a small number of connecting points, that only the simplest order exists in the greatest diversity.194 The Enlightenment’s ideal of perfection and utopia now transforms into the incommensurability of cultural identity and equal authenticity. Apparently Herder now deconstructs the idea of Europe which he took so much pain to construct in Ideen. In letter 122, however, he shortly returns to his hierarchical thinking and states that Europe should not disturb or even destroy cultures in the child or boyhood stages. Europe, Herder warns, should be careful not to follow the path of China and Egypt—­two dead ancient cultures. Europe should combine its intellectual achievements with the animalistic energy (animalische Kräfte) from other still underdeveloped cultures to reach beyond its current historical stage.195 Although his concept of equal authenticity is not completely severed from his logic of historical development regarding Europe’s historical destiny, we also notice a sense of crisis or European decadence in Herder’s view. Even though he does not entirely abandon his historical hierarchy, non-​European cultures, especially

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the Iroquois, decisively shape his ethics of history, consisting of Nemesis, perpetual peace, and equal authenticity. From Auch eine Philosophie over Ideen to Humanitätsbriefe, traversing Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, Herder’s construction of Europe in his philosophy of history is a multilateral project. While Herder’s universal claims of geohistorical hierarchy and historical development construe and justify the logic of northern European superiority, his sentimental instinct allows him to perceive the influence from the non-​European world and to use the Iroquois peace project to formulate his ethics of historical revenge and his peace doctrines. His philosophy of history is situated between geohistorical development and ethics of revenge. Herder portrays Africa from an environmental perspective in an extremely negative way and debases China from a historicist view, yet Africa and China as real-​world presences challenge Herder and his contemporaries to construct a European cultural and historical identity to meet the challenge of cultural and geographical alterity. Sankar Muthu points out that Herder’s “account of international justice . . . made clear Europe’s moral obligations toward the non-​European world in light of the history of violent conquest and imperial rule.”196 While Europe’s “moral obligations” make sense in our postcolonial era, situated in the circumstances of the eighteenth century, I stress non-​European influence and Herder’s perception of European crisis and decadence, which push him to further develop the concept of cultural relativism to equal authenticity and envision his doctrine of perpetual peace and his idea of Nemesis. Precisely because Herder recognizes emotional connections between all human beings as the basis of community, he is able to formulate the idea of equal authenticity among all cultures. In comparison to Herder’s notion of history, his idea of sentimental linkage, another universal bond between human beings, is marked less by hierarchy than by equality, less by development than by commonality, and less by the faith in European superiority than by the call for human dignity. Non-​European culture and knowledge sustain a determining influence on the configuration of Herder’s ethics of history. Not only is his philosophy of history a product of intra-​European dynamics, but it also proves intellectual reflections engendered by both European and non-​European circumstances. Eurocentrism, the Europe-​centered knowledge production and formation of subjectivity, turns out to be not so much a European phenomenon. Eurocentrism in Herder’s philosophy of history is a product of constant and intensive exchanges between cultures on a larger global scale, heavily loaded with power, violence, economic interests, and intellectual engagement. In the same vein yet with a different approach, Kant’s lectures on physical geography understand space as the foundation of history.

Chapter 6

Immanuel Kant’s Physische Geographie Authorship and the Geographical Order of Things

When Immanuel Kant announced his “Physische Geographie” [Physical Geography] lectures in Königsberg, there was not only a quest for critical reason but also a trust in a widespread cosmopolitan curiosity: The rational taste of our enlightened times has presumably become so general that one can assume that one will find only a few persons who are indifferent to the Earth’s natural peculiarities in regions outside their own. Nor should it be regarded as a lesser advantage that credulous admiration, the source of endless fantasies, has yielded to careful examination, which allows us to draw reliable conclusions from verified reports without the risk of becoming lost in a world of fables instead of attaining a proper science of noteworthy natural phenomena.1

Kant firmly considers rationality the indispensable path toward making sense of the ever-​changing world and nature’s diversity revealed to the Europeans in the eighteenth century. Geography provides the rational foundation and the organizing principle for the natural and cultural differences that should attract almost everyone’s attention. Kant divides geography into three types—­mathematical, political, and physical—­and considers physical geography the worthiest branch for his intellectual and pedagogical endeavor. While mathematical geography treats the earth as a spherical body devoid of creatures and political geography focuses too much on peoples, governments, and their interactions, physical geography encompasses the entire globe with everything in nature: mountains, rivers, minerals, plants, animals, and human beings. In today’s terminology, Kant’s physical geography includes geology, natural history, geography, ethnography, and anthropology. This cosmopolitan completeness and encyclopedic comprehensiveness is propelled by the thirty-​three-​year-​old scholar’s fervent pursuit of thoroughness and precision.

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From 1756 to 1796—­almost his entire teaching career—­Kant taught physical geography forty-​nine times, only a little less than logic (fifty-​six times) and metaphysics (fifty-​three). Despite the high frequency of this course in his career, Kant never intended, or possibly never realized a mature moment, to publish a single-​authored book on this subject. Only after Johann Jakob Wilhelm and Gottfried Vollmer published a work entitled Physische Geographie (Physical Geography) in Kant’s name without his permission in 1801 did Kant commission his friend and former student Friedrich Theodor Rink (1770–­1811) to publish an authorized edition based on his teaching notes. In addition to Kant’s notes, Rink drew on two other sets of student lecture notes from the summer semesters of 1775 and 1778, and he published Physische Geographie in 1802. For a variety of reasons, though, Rink could not finish editing the entire manuscript with the same standards. Even though Kant intended to lecture on his “physical geography” in a systematic manner, Rink’s edition of Physische Geographie, compared to other works Kant published in his own name, retains a relatively loose structure and a random appearance. The work looks like a conglomeration of assorted notes and disorganized information instead of a logically coherent composition of ideas.2 Hence, compared to Kant’s other works, Rink’s edition of Physische Geographie, which is included in the major collections of Kant’s works published in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and which also serves as the original for the most recent English translation in the Cambridge 2012 edition of Kant’s works, has not engaged much scholarly attention.3 The geographer David Harvey considers Physische Geographie (Rink’s version) a huge disappointment for its readers in terms of Kant’s goals of a cosmopolitan and critical system. For Harvey, “[Physical Geography’s] content is nothing short of an intellectual and political embarrassment.”4 Harvey considers Kant’s way of selecting materials from his sources inadequate: “To be sure, Kant seeks to sift the sillier and obviously false tales from those that have some factual credibility, but we are still left with a mix of materials more likely to generate hilarity than scientific credibility.”5 For example, we read in Rink’s edition that in China the “scholars never cut the nails of their left hand, as a sign of their profession,” or in Sierra Leone the inhabitants “have a very evil smell.”6 Moreover, some statements about skin colors and non-​European cultures are deeply troubling. Phrases such as “humanity has its highest degree of perfection in the white race,” according to Harvey, reveal Kant’s racism and a “more sinister side” in his thinking.7 Harvey’s critique resonates with scholars such as Emmanuel Eze, Ronald Judy, and Robert Bernasconi, who excavate Kant’s concept of race and the tension between his universalism and his racism, his moral theory and his natural history, in not only Physische Geographie but also his other substantive publications, particularly Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 1798) and Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, 1764).8

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Physische Geographie thus seems hardly convincing as a well-​ grounded foundation for philosophical and theoretical discussions because, as Harvey puts it, Kant completely failed to bring geographical knowledge out of its “precritical state” and place it on a rational, scientific basis.9 Moreover, the loose structure and randomness of Physische Geographie defy theoretical abstraction and fail to convey the importance of geographical knowledge from a more impartial viewpoint. Yet no matter how stringently Harvey critiques Kant’s racism and Eurocentric limits, he strongly endorses Kant’s effort to envision a geographical cosmopolitanism. Harvey still considers Kant’s question of “how to understand the metabolic relation between human evolution and environmental transformations . . . as vital now as ever.”10 Harvey believes that Kant got it wrong because Kant’s universal principles of ethics, which insist on human being’s innate teleology toward enlightenment and cosmopolitanism, conflict with his racism and cultural prejudices in his geographical and anthropological writings. The racist remarks in Physische Geographie, which have had tremendous negative political and social ramifications throughout centuries, sound like a note of discord in the optimistic symphony of pure reason and its development toward cosmopolitan perfection. Therefore we need to revisit Kant’s question of the human species as a being within nature and to integrate a proper knowledge of geography as an indispensable part of human understandings of the world. Harvey proposes that we should by no means abandon the Kantian optimistic belief in an enlightened and cosmopolitan future, but we ought to first enlighten the still darker side of the racist and cultural prejudices.11 Although Harvey follows Kant’s critical optimism and advances Kant’s cosmopolitan ethics, his critique of Physische Geographie does not demonstrate a sufficient engagement with the document itself and ascribes the prejudices expressed in Physische Geographie to Kant’s personal limits. Yet if we pay more attention to the process of composition and publication of Physische Geographie, we first discover a much more complicated issue of authorship. Since Kant composes his lecture notes from a vast variety of sources such as travel writings and scientific reports over a period of forty years and since Rink edited Kant’s lecture notes with two other sets of students’ notes, it is precarious for us to assume that Kant is the sole author responsible for the content of Rink’s edition of Physische Geographie. Rather, we need to probe into the issue of authorship and read Physische Geographie as a collective product reflecting German readers’ fervent interest in global geographical and cultural diversities. To a certain degree, Physische Geographie is similar to today’s Wikipedia, an online compendium of knowledge constantly updated by global input. The multitude of authorship certainly does not excuse Kant and his contemporaries from their deeply problematic racist remarks and cultural prejudices, as Harvey and other scholars remind us. The multiauthorship, however, shows that Physische Geographie

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contains, represents, and disseminates a transcultural consciousness of the German intellectuals and educated populations toward non-​European cultures in the global eighteenth century. It also registers a non-​European impact on German and European intellectual thinking in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, Rink’s version explains the notion of geography as the foundation of history. This idea of geography resisted the historicism that began emerging in the eighteenth century and became more and more dominant in German and European intellectual traditions, as I discussed in the chapter on Herder. The form of Physische Geographie, which appears random, incomplete, and less stringent, also deserves more scholarly attention. The amorphous structure also reflects the constantly changing and expanding archive of knowledge about the earth’s geography and its inhabitants and thus houses the German transcultural consciousness and the impact of non-​ European cultures. The fact that Kant never felt ready to publish his lecture notes and that he constantly updated his notes tellingly shows that physical geography, a work-​in-​progress for forty years, provides a space in which he professes but never ends his lifelong pursuit of approaching the goal of geographical cosmopolitanism. In this chapter I first discuss the multiplicity of Physische Geographie’s authorship. Then I argue that the geographical order of things and the amorphous structure of the work offer an alternative, probably inadvertently, to the emerging logic of historicism in which cultural differences are evaluated based on a primitive-​to-​modern trajectory of historical development. In the third section, in order to render visible the impact of non-​European spaces and cultures, I focus on two aspects of the transcultural consciousness in Physische Geographie: the global positioning of Königsberg; and the critical comments that question the veracity of the negative and racist statements on Asian and African cultures.

Multiauthorship Announcing his lecture in 1757, Kant also reports that he uses a body of multifarious resources to construct his physical geography: I have used all sources, sought out all information, and, in addition to what the works of Varenius, Buffon, and Lulof contain in the way of the general fundaments of physical geography, I have gone through the most thorough descriptions of individual countries by capable travelers, the Allgemeine Historie der Reisen, the Göttingische Sammlung neuer und merkwürdiger Reisen, the Hamburg and the Leipzig Magazines, the Proceedings of the Académie des Sciences in Paris and the Stockholm Academy and so forth, and I have constructed a system out of everything relevant to my purpose.12

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At this stage, Kant’s self-​designed textbook is by no means the final one. His initial attempt at this subject matter, which he started at the outset of his academic teaching career, became a lifelong open-​ended project. Since travel accounts and natural histories drastically enlarged and incessantly introduced new knowledge to the European readership during Kant’s lifetime, he also changed and adjusted his course materials accordingly.13 One major change happened after the summer semester of 1772, when Kant carved out a significant portion of “Physical Geography” to develop a course on anthropology. In addition to the sources Kant himself mentioned, Charles Withers also informs us that Kant drew widely on others, including the late seventeenth-​ century physic-​theologists and geographers John Woodward, Thomas Burnet, William Whiston, and Bernhard Varenius; classical authors such as Aristotle and Strabo; and numerous contemporary natural philosophers and thinkers, including Buffon, Linnaeus, Charles Marie de La Condamine, Pierre Louis Maupertuis, Johann Friedrich Gmelin, Peter Simon Pallas, Georg Wolfgang Kraft, Anton Friedrich Büsching, Horace-​Bénédict de Saussure, and others. Withers thus calls Kant “a compiler of others’ geographical facts.”14 Indeed, Werner Stark carefully calculates that 80 percent of the Holstein manuscript (1757–­59), the earliest handwritten copy of Kant’s lecture notes available to us today, can be traced back to numerous well-​known eighteenth-​century textbooks, travel writings, and research results of others, while the remaining 20 percent is probably compiled from magazines and other sources.15 Stark provocatively argues that it is utterly impossible for us to identify one text that can be safely referred to as “Kant’s Physical Geography.” Stark details that there are altogether twenty-​seven versions of Physische Geographie known to us today, of which only seventeen are still available. According to Erich Adickes, even the Holstein manuscript, which most closely adheres to Kant’s earliest concept of the lecture, consists of hand-​copied chapters by different people between 1757 and 1759.16 The two historical publications of Physische Geographie in Kant’s name, respectively by Vollmer in 1801 and Rink in 1802, are compilations of Kant’s own and various students’ notes. Stark thus reasonably urges us to abandon the idea “of being able to produce the Physical Geography of Immanuel Kant.”17 In other words, the most commonly printed edition incorporates conceptions, ideas, and interpretations by different people and also demonstrates a fluidity of thoughts reflecting the transformations of geographical and anthropological knowledge in Europe during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Kant, as Stark points out, to a great extent saw himself not much more than a reporter of the research of others. This multiauthorship may also explain why Kant would have found it impossible to publish this work in a strictly logical style that was more common in his other publications. From this perspective, Physische Geographie, even in its published forms, is still truly a work-​in-​progress. Instead of a finalized and fixed text, it offers a platform for Kant and Rink to practice thought experiments, collect information, change

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and exchange ideas, and adjust their idea of the world according to the knowledge gained from the European and the non-​European worlds. Indeed, geography in the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries was a subject under constant adjustment as travelers, surveyors, international merchants, and scientific explorers made and remade changes. The political state and its commerce were the major driving forces behind the collection and the perfection of geographical knowledge. In the same vein, Stark demonstrates that a troubling statement in Rink’s edition about the perfection of white people and the racial inferiority of black Africans and Native Americans can be discerned as travelers’ tales and students’ misrepresentations. We read in Rink’s edition: In the torrid zones, humans mature more quickly in all aspects than in the temperate zones, but they fail to reach the same [degree of] perfection. Humanity has its highest degree of perfection in the white race. The yellow Indians have a somewhat lesser talent. The Negroes are much lower, and lowest of all is part of the American races.18

Stark demonstrates that, in another version, this passage in a similar formulation refers explicitly to the French traveler François Le Vaillant’s writing on his journey in Africa. This passage also resonates with comments in reports by other travelers, including Georg Forster, James Cook, John Hawkesworth, and Louis Antoine de Bougainville. Stark also discusses the two words “perfection” (Vollkommenheit) and “talent” in the passage cited above. Stark claims that Kant only uses the term “perfection” a very limited number of times and that the word “talent” does not denote an intrinsic nature of being human; it describes a mental faculty rather than physical characteristics. Hence, after pointing out the complexity in the making of Physische Geographie, Stark concludes that Kant’s oral lectures may not have included the idea of a racial hierarchy among different human groups differentiated by skin color. At least, Stark argues, the idea of a racial hierarchy “has a certain, admittedly ‘narrow’ place of its own in Kant’s work.”19 Indeed, scholars including Sankar Muthu, Pauline Kleingeld, Peter Fenves, and Susan Shell have recently endeavored to prove that Kant, especially late Kant, should have abandoned the idea of race and racial hierarchy.20 While Stark and other scholars meticulously demonstrate that we need to carefully approach the problem of racism in Kant’s Physische Geographie and his entire oeuvre, the problem is not how much we can or should “excuse” Kant for such a problematic remark in a highly complicated textual body. Bernasconi insightfully suggests that, due to the multiplicity of authorship, we can use Physische Geographie only “for discussions of Kant’s influence,” and we should avoid using it “to understand Kant’s own thought on the subject.”21 I push this argument one step further: I argue that the multiplicity of sources and voices beneath the textual surface(s) of this work reveals

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that it contains, represents, and disseminates the general attitude of the German educated populace toward non-​European cultures in the global context. In its textual fluidity and multiauthorship, Physische Geographie is attuned to the polycentric local order around 1800. The work is not reflective of Kant’s single-​authored view, but is instead a collective effort that reveals the impact of the non-​European world and helps shape a transcultural German discourse around 1800. Even though Kant’s status as a significant thinker makes it hard for us to ignore his racist limitations, Physische Geographie’s multiauthorship provides a unique opportunity to redirect our critical attention toward a different reading strategy. This new reading strategy does not focus on interpreting what Kant as a single author could have meant, nor does it aim to reveal the Eurocentric and racist side of Kant’s universal cosmopolitanism, which other scholars have already shown. Rather, this reading strategy endeavors to understand Physische Geographie, with its implicit paradoxical statements, as a document registering a multifaceted process in which Kant and educated Germans are challenged by the global cultural and geographical differences and try to engage different disciplines of knowledge to make sense of the changing landscape of earth and its inhabitants. Instead of a document with a logical coherence of cause and effect moving necessarily from beginning to end, Physische Geographie resembles a Foucauldian archaeological site containing objects that constitute a meaningful order by their spatial coexistence. Kant and his coauthors offer and imagine a geographical order of things rather than the type of historical hierarchy and development found in Herder’s thinking. This view of Physische Geographie compels us to read the text from a spatial perspective, which corresponds to the idea in Rink’s edition that geography should serve as the foundation of history and as the fundamental organizing principle. In the next section, I shall show that the geographical foundation and the loose structure in Physische Geographie resist the emerging logic of historical hierarchy. I refer to Kant as the author of Physische Geographie only for the sake of convenience and brevity; in each case I mean Kant and his coauthors.

Geography, History, and the Form of Physical Geography In Physische Geographie, geography is understood as the foundation of history: History concerns the events that have taken place one after another in time. Geography concerns phenomena that occur simultaneously in space. The latter has several names, depending on the different objects with which it is concerned.  .  .  . The history of occurrences at different times, which is true history, is nothing other than a

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consecutive geography, and thus it is a great limitation on history if one does not know where something happened, or what it was like.22

Although time and space appear as equal a priori concepts in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, geography is considered the prerequisite for history in Physische Geographie. While history in its narrative form necessarily needs geography to take place, geography encompasses and contains history in its plurality and diversity and is a description “concerning events contiguous in space.”23 Hence, Kant considers it possible to have a description of nature as geography, but he doubts that it is possible to have a historical account of nature like a “natural history,” which was a common project pursued by Linnaeus, Buffon, and numerous other traveling naturalists in the eighteenth century. Kant elaborates that the “history of nature comprehends the diversity of geography, as it has been at different times, but not how it is now, at a single moment; for the latter would be a description of nature.”24 However, since he and his contemporaries were not able to acquire a complete set of accurate and trustworthy knowledge about the natural historical events without conjectures and experiments, it would be meaningless to attempt such a gigantic project as natural history, especially in the eighteenth century, when geographical knowledge was constantly changing. For Kant, “natural history is not one whit shorter than the world itself.”25 Obviously Kant’s well-​known review of Herder’s Ideen as being imaginary and conjectural, as discussed in the chapter on Herder, corresponds to his notion of geography here. Thus geography, according to Kant, provides a more reliable conceptual foundation for understanding the earth’s geographical and cultural diversity. Geography not only provides a solid spatial order of things but also integrates historical changes within its parameter. Geography in its consecutiveness is the foundation for a solid understanding of history. Without the geographical mapping of things at a particular time, there is no history. Kant’s trust in geography transforms it into a platform registering and reflecting the changing experience of the heterogeneity of the earth and its inhabitants. Global history in this sense becomes a thread weaving through a series of world maps. This concept of geography connecting both space and time resembles the notion of “space-​time,” a neologism Harvey endorses. Harvey borrows the concept of space-​time from Leibniz to highlight the entanglement between history, space, and related human experience. Space-​time transcends the absolute separation between space and time in the physical world and emphasizes the inseparable relations between the sensual, conceptual, material, and lived dimensions in the psychic realm. Space-​time thus represents individual and collective memory and human experience related to particular places and times in the past. Space-​time also reminds us of the spatial connections one space has to the rest of the world. Harvey draws our attention to the site of 9/11 and comments:

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The site is and will have a relational presence in the world, no matter what is built there, and it is important to reflect on how this “presencing” works: will it be lived as a symbol of U.S. arrogance or as a sign of global compassion, reconciliation, and understanding? Taking up such matters requires that we embrace a relational conception of what the absolute space of Ground Zero is all about. And that, it turns out, is where the most interesting and contested meanings lie.26

The concept of space-​time incorporates human action and experience in the production of space. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre, Harvey stresses the transformative force of space-​time and critiques the reified understanding of space strictly separated from time, such as in Critique of Pure Reason, and the romanticized idea of place as a culturally unique entity, such as in Heidegger’s writing, because they tend to define spatiality as fixed and unique and thus lose sight of spatial fluidity. Margaret Kohn aptly observes that space is also “lived and experienced. It has a corporeal as well as a symbolic or cognitive dimension. Space affects how individuals and groups perceive their place in the order of things.  .  .  . By providing a shared background, spatial forms serve the function of integrating individuals into a shared conception of reality.”27 Kohn further elaborates that space in its political, social, symbolic, and experiential dimensions can create and encourage contacts; separate, juxtapose, and recombine relations; induce changes; imagine and reimagine shared future possibilities. Hence I argue that Physische Geographie as a body of texts, and “Physical Geography” as an educational project, an event in intellectual history, and a lecture delivered for over forty years in a classroom at the University of Königsberg, also create and offer “a shared conception of reality”: a transcultural consciousness of global interconnectedness in the space-​time around 1800. This transcultural space-​time retains a special place in the intellectual history and leaves a trace in our collective memory. While Harvey sees in Physische Geographie an embarrassment to theoretical reflection and abstraction, which would actually reify the notion of geography just as Harvey criticizes Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, I see precisely in this lack of a systematic form the true attempt at an unfinished project of describing the earth and its inhabitants, a genuine intellectual curiosity in cultural and geographical diversity, and the reflection of the impact from the non-​European world. To borrow a spatial metaphor of the eighteenth century, the course of physical geography over forty years resembles an expedition ship on which Kant professes his rational curiosity and objective observation. Kant claims his Proposal for and Announcement of a College of Physical Geography (1757): Not with that completeness and philosophical exactitude in each part which is a matter for physics and natural history, but with the rational curiosity of a traveler who everywhere seeks out what is noteworthy,

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peculiar, and beautiful, collates his collection of observations, and reflects on its design.28

Precisely this traveler’s method of random observation gives rise to the amorphous structure of the text. The randomness and the absence of the typical strict Kantian argumentation render it possible for Kant’s lecture audience and the readers and coauthors of Physische Geographie to combine and recombine, juxtapose and rejuxtapose, form and transform their knowledge about the self and the world, the town of Königsberg and the places of their own existence, in a global context. Physische Geographie does not display a totality or a system of facts. Rather, it constructs a network of interrelations. Michael Church points out that, by differentiating history from geography, Kant is the progenitor of a descriptive and systematic geography—­a tradition carried on and expanded by Alexander von Humboldt.29 After Charles Darwin, however, history has become the leading force in understanding geographical and cultural diversity. Admittedly, Harvey’s usage of space-​ time also weighs more heavily on the side of history in order to show the fluidity and the transformative power of memory, but he neglects space’s resistance to the problematic logic of developmental teleology and historical hierarchy. From this perspective, it is even more urgent for us to highlight the value of geography as the foundation of history in Physische Geographie. Only then can we recognize Physische Geographie’s function as a resistance and an alternative to the emerging logic of historicism that subjects cultural diversity to the logic of development. If, according to Henri Lefebvre, space reflects the sedimentation of social interactions and processes and thus articulates human desire and creativity, then Kant’s pedagogical project of physical geography is an intellectual space that registers transcultural interactions and a spatial understanding of German global cultural identity.30 If anomalous and borderline places such as a prison or psychiatry, which Michel Foucault theorizes as heterotopia, bear the potential of resisting the dominating, hegemonic, and sanctioning structure, as Kohn shows, then Kant’s activity of lecturing in physical geography functions as a resisting alternative to the overarching order of historicism and as an instituting force toward a geographical cosmopolitanism with a potential liberation from historical hierarchy. Physical geography is the spatial response to the challenges posed by non-​European knowledge in the eighteenth century. In sum, both the amorphous form of Physische Geographie and the notion of geography as the foundation of history suggest a transcultural consciousness that cannot be properly incorporated in systematic thinking. I do not argue that Kant or Rink deliberately left Physische Geographie the way we have it today. What I intend to do is to empower this “embarrassing” text as a perhaps inadvertent resistance to the emerging historicism and an anomaly within the corpus of Kant’s systematic works. The transcultural

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consciousness is housed inside this nonconventional locus. Notably, the examples of the global positioning of Königsberg and the discussions on the negative statements about Asian and African cultures demonstrate how the amorphous structure and the multiauthorship enable and, at the same time, are the results of the impact of non-​European cultures and the process of transculturation.

Global Positioning and the Limits of Knowledge The tiny town of Königsberg, by no means economically and politically significant in the global eighteenth century, acquires global connections in Physische Geographie. When Kant elaborates the idea of the meridian and the equator in the section of mathematical concepts, he at once switches his abstract language to more concrete examples and states: “Many places, however, have the same meridian, as for example Königsberg and the Cape of Good Hope.”31 Kant imaginatively explains: “If now I want to know the difference between the positions of two places, for example Königsberg and Moscow, in respect of their situation from west to east, I draw a meridian through both towns and both intersect with the equator.”32 These simple lines on a world map connect the small northern European town to the southern tip of Africa and to a major Russian city on the eastern edge of Europe. Much simpler than the GPS devices we use today, these transversals not only create a global positioning system through mathematic measurements but also, more importantly, embody a consciousness of global interconnectedness, in which the Germans, the Europeans, and the non-​Europeans are inextricably situated in dynamic interactions. Kant also compares the ethnic diversity in North Africa with Europe, explaining that the inhabitants of the northern coast of Africa are “a mixture of autochthones, Arabs, and Vandals, and thus are not particularly different from the Europeans.”33 This kind of parallel comparison between Europe and non-​European places abounds in Physische Geographie and also practices an anthropological global positioning. Interestingly enough, while Europe was still a section in the anthropological and ethnographical part of the lecture in the 1750s, it disappeared in the lecture notes after 1775.34 This change indicates a disciplinary and conceptual shift that separates the European and the non-​European cultural realms. If this change was related to Kant’s separation of the lecture on anthropology from physical geography in 1772, then physical geography focuses even more on non-​European cultures and recognizes their global significance. At the same time, Kant is also conscious of his own and his contemporaries’ lack of knowledge about the world. He thus categorizes different parts of the world according to the degree of knowledge:

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But on the mainland there are: 1. Lands whose extent and interior are known to us. 2. Lands which we know only in part. 3. Lands of which only the coasts are known. 4. Lands that have genuinely been seen but not found again. 5. Lands that were known to the ancients but which now appear to be lost. 6. Finally, lands the existence of which is only conjectured.35

Kant considers Europe the mainland best known to him and his audience. Asia is ascribed to the second group of lands. Interestingly, Kant not only mentions geographical locations but also names a series of cultures in Asia that people should know more about. In particular, Kant considers that a more precise knowledge of Tibet in Asia would be one of the most important [things to obtain]. Through this we would acquire the key to all history. It is the highest country, it was probably inhabited earlier than any other and may even be the ancestral seat of all culture and sciences.  .  .  . Such an original home of the arts and sciences, indeed, I would like to say, of humanity, certainly warrants a more careful investigation.36

Apparently, the fascination with the Tibetan plateau betrays not only a geographical interest but also a historical curiosity. The question of human origin in this passage definitely relates to the indophilia among German and European intellectuals around 1800, like Friedrich Schlegel, Herder, and Goethe, who considered northern India the birthplace of the human species and Sanskrit the oldest and original human language.37 Especially when geography serves as the foundation of history, the interest in Tibet shows the impact of a non-​European culture and space on German and European historical and geographical identity. Physische Geographie not only contains “sinister” racist remarks, borrowing Harvey’s words; it also offers a complicated picture portraying non-​European cultures. Problematic statements about non-​European places and cultures are sometimes accompanied by comments admitting the limits of knowledge and the possibility of prejudice. When Kant discusses Africa and America, which he also places within the second group of lesser-​known lands, he recounts that according to the Portuguese reports, “the most beautiful interior regions of Africa are peopled with cannibals or eaters of human flesh, who are even said to fatten people for the slaughter.”38 Kant or probably Rink, however, immediately doubts the veracity of this account and warns readers that “fables of this type” should not deserve any credence. The author then explains: “These people only slaughter prisoners of war who have been captured alive, and even then only with the greatest ceremony.”39 Kant clearly demonstrates his anthropological understanding of cultural differences and

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distances himself from unfavorable accounts about a particular type of African culture. Kant also critiques: The reason why the interior of Africa is as little known to us as the lands of the moon is more the fault of us Europeans than of the Africans, since we have allowed ourselves to be intimidated by the Negro [slave] trade. It is true that the coast of Africa is visited by Europeans, but their voyages thither are most brutal, since sixty to eighty thousand Negroes are abducted from there to America each year. So it has come about that, until fairly recent times, this continent was hardly known to Europeans beyond thirty miles into the interior from the coast.40

Kant clearly sees the slave trade as a hindrance to the further exploration of Africa and the advancement of human knowledge. It is true that Kant and his coauthors express the idea of the perfect white race and dismiss black Africans and Native Americans as lesser human beings. At the same time, Kant indicts the brutality of European colonial practice. Bernasconi points out that, although Kant speaks out against the slave trade, he does not explicitly repudiate the legitimacy of slavery in his many other works concerned with race.41 This dualism is true for Physische Geographie: while we critique the racist comments, we also notice the doubts, uncertainties, and critical comments toward racism and Eurocentrism in Kant’s influential lecture. Sometimes we also notice that it is probably Rink, the editor, who articulates doubts about the negative remarks on non-​European cultures. For example, in the section on China, the last passage is in parenthesis and mentions George Macartney’s diplomatic mission to China (1792–­94). The official report about Macartney’s embassy was published in 1797, a year after Kant stopped lecturing on physical geography.42 Most plausibly, this remark was inserted by Rink. Commenting on the section on China more generally, the passage in parenthesis resembles a reader’s annotation: “(The most recent reports of the English since Macartney’s Embassy have taught us to know China in many ways from a different side to that of the previous missionary reports. But even in these reports there are doubtless great exaggerations, though without fault [on the part] of the Englishmen.)”43 This passage also does not exist in the Holstein manuscript. The commentator, most probably Rink, with or without Kant’s permission, is well aware that the cultural reality in China can be quite different from the report in Physische Geographie. The commentator probably knows that not all Chinese “are uncommonly artful at deception,” that not “everything is eaten, including dogs, cats, snakes,” and that it is doubtful “no one in China swears or curses.”44 In the same vein, when Physische Geographie reports that a missionary was surprised to see that Chinese people enjoyed the smell of a rat, the commentator immediately chimes in: “But by the same token, I ask: Why

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do we now find the smell of musk obnoxious, when everyone thought it smelt so good fifty years ago? How much does the judgement of others do to alter our tastes in accordance with the times!”45 This kind of comment relativizes the negative impression the readers would obtain and thus transforms cultural prejudice into self-​inspection and a meaningful comparison. Hence, building on this particular case, the commentator further discusses taste: “By taste, I mean here the judgement as to what is generally pleasing to the senses: the perfection or imperfection of what moves our senses. From the variations in taste among people, it will be seen that an enormous amount is based on prejudice.”46 If we take this generalization as a dictum on how to understand the content of Physische Geographie, then we can read it as an experimental storage of knowledge, which invokes and welcomes further investigations, verifications, and interactions between European and non-​European cultures. In a logically coherent and structurally stringent single-​authored document, these types of conflictive comments would not surface. Readers would not have the opportunity to observe and reflect on the multidimensions of the project of physical geography and, more importantly, on the German transcultural discourse, the impact of non-​European cultures, and the vivid process of negotiations with this impact. The multiplicity of authorship of Physische Geographie, the geographical foundation of history, the loose form, and the critical comments in Rink’s edition reveal a multidimensional space-​time in the German transcultural discourse around 1800. Physische Geographie contains ideas and opinions that are not necessarily in a logical coherence and sometimes even conflict with each other. But the diversity of ideas in their conflictive coexistence, even those with deeply problematic and racist ramifications for the later centuries, reflects the impact of non-​European cultures and the multiple voices of the German educated public, which actively makes sense of and negotiates with non-​European differences. Hence, unlike Harvey, we do not need to regret the lack of the common Kantian logic and conceptual strength. Rather, we should acknowledge the lecture course on physical geography and the document titled Physische Geographie as collective intellectual projects that realize the purpose Kant had in mind: to establish “an extensive mental picture of the whole surface of the earth” for as many people as possible.47 Indeed, Kant saw one of his lecture’s major goals as simply to enable the German public to read newspapers with better geographical knowledge. Kant laments: “For many people, newspaper reports are a matter of complete indifference. The reason for this, however, is that they are not able to situate the news in its proper context. They have no conception of the land, the sea or the surface of the earth as a whole.”48 Kant sincerely hopes that, better educated in geography, the public could, for example, appreciate the news about the expedition to the Arctic Ocean and its possible changes to the whole of Europe. The English people, Kant concedes, are best equipped

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with the general knowledge of geography in Europe. Hence Kant’s determination to lecture on physical geography for forty years aims to enhance the German public’s attention toward the global context. Kant’s relentless effort in geographical education reminds me of a scene in Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere: the father narrator tells his young listeners that Robinson observes the shade of a stick to determine the time of the day. The results, however, are quite different from the ones in Europe. The stick does not have any shade around noon. When one of the children, Diderich, comes up with the explanation that this is because Robinson’s island lies between the tropics, the father praises Diderich and tells the other children that they will learn more details in their geography lessons in four weeks. Indeed, geography permeates both Kant’s lecture hall and children’s story time, transcends cultural boundaries, and connects the Germans to the world of differences from the mid-​eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries.

Epilogue

On a dreary Sunday in January 2015, I went to see the exhibition Gottfried Lindauer—­die Māori-​Portraits in Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie. This show marked the first time that portraits of the Maori in New Zealand by the Czech-​ born and ethnic-​ German painter Gottfried Lindauer (1839–­ 1926) had traveled to Germany.1 It was also the first large-​scale exhibition of these remarkable paintings outside New Zealand. Some of Lindauer’s Maori portraits first came to Europe in 1886, to appear in the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London. In the heyday of the British Empire, the paintings served to satisfy the European curiosity for “other” creatures and show off the empire’s extensive reach. Yet this time, in the twenty-​first century, as Udo Kittelmann, the director of Alte Nationalgalerie, claims, the exhibition of Maori portraits aimed to pluralize the canon of art history dominated by European and American art and expand and reorient the perspective for observing European art and culture beyond Europe.2 In the gallery, the Maori portraits were integrated next to the paintings by Caspar David Friedrich and Karl Friedrich Schinkel, well-​known in the Western tradition. In 2015, the Pacific Islanders were no longer the exotic outsiders that they had been in London around a century before. Now they coconstitute and enrich the visual and discursive archive of German and European genealogy of knowledge. The visual constellation of this exhibition vividly illustrates the purpose of my book: to highlight the non-​European impact on German-​speaking culture and its heterogeneity from the perspective of non-​European knowledge. Like this exhibition, my book’s historical focus is inextricably connected to today’s effort and concern of tracing and exhibiting the transcultural genealogy of German-​language European culture within the global context. A nationalist and Eurocentric German tradition in the twentieth century is deeply entangled with Nazism. Yet the curious open-​mindedness to the non-​European world and the profound sense of justice and common humanity are also pronounced in the German transcultural discourse around 1800, which could be useful for today’s discussion on international conflicts and transnational citizenship. My primary concern, however, is not to establish a better German past. The German discourse around 1800 serves as an example demonstrating non-​European influence and global entanglement at the dawn of global modernity. It is almost a question of political correctness on whose behalf one argues. The ideological critique of Eurocentrism seemingly prevents us from recognizing transcultural moments and non-​European impact in the

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Figure 4. Pare Watene, 1878. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of Mr. H. E. Partridge, 1915.

colonial context. Historical investigation reminds us of a less-​emphasized transcultural past, which, I hope, would provide us some insights in building a more balanced future. Lindauer and his Maori portraits connect my book’s focus on the eighteenth century to the twenty-​first century, as some of the painted Maori also lived in the eighteenth century and even experienced Forster’s visits. Trained in Vienna’s Academy of Art in the mid-​ nineteenth century, Lindauer emigrated to New Zealand at a time when many prominent Maori believed that their people were facing extinction. It was no longer the time when Forster admired Tahitian nature and sentimentally desired Tahitian way of life but critically considered Tahiti a less-​developed society according to Enlightenment standards of civilization. It was no longer the time when Forster showed understanding for Maori cannibalism and Tannese mistrust and blamed European sailors’ rude and violent behaviors. Lindauer’s time was also different from the imagination of Krusoe Robinson’s adventures, filled with the anxiety for survival and the fear of the cannibalistic islanders. However, British colonialism in Lindauer’s time recalled the way Krusoe adapts European technologies to the non-​European natural world in order to construct a new colonial self—­ Lindauer used his painting techniques to survive on the island of the Maori. His Maori portraits, similar to the

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double consciousness in the relationship of Krusoe and Freitag, betray the hybrid combination of the style of idealization, which was typical of European academy portrait paintings, and the prominent Maori figures’ tattoos, ornaments, clothes, and physical features. The colors, postures, perspectives, and light management, characteristic of European portrait paintings, are now used to represent the dignity and spirituality of the Maori ancestors in the nineteenth century (fig. 4). Lindauer adapted the European style of portraiture to the Maori’s physical appearance. In particular, the facial tattoos and the indigenous costumes challenge and expand the European expectation and perception of portrait. Lindauer’s Maori portraits are a unique transcultural art historical phenomenon. This is similar to the way in which the non-​European characters in Kotzebue’s dramas influence the plot and contest the established German European cultural conventions of love, family, and sexuality. Either the Pacific Islander Malvina in La Peyrouse, the Arab Omar and the Pelew Islands in Bruder Moritz, Cora in Die Sonnenjungfrau, or Rolla in Spanier in Peru resembles the tattoos in Lindauer’s portraits that evoke ruptures and create a new order of perceptions. The Maori today hold Lindauer’s portraits as part of their own cultural heritage. They see the paintings as spiritual emblems that mediate the modern living with the lost past before European imperialism dominated the scene and radically transformed their way of life. While the Maori gradually stopped tattooing in the course of the nineteenth century due to European colonial and missionary pressures, as Chamisso reports, they have proudly revived this idiosyncratic tradition today and claim that they go into their future backward.3 This transformation is a stark negation of Herder’s geo-​ historicism, which places non-​European cultures, in particular Africa and China, on lower stages of development and justifies northern Europe’s historical superiority. At the same time, the Maoris’ pride in their tattoos testifies to Herder’s ethics of Nemesis and supports his notion of cultural relativism. The tattoos, exquisitely painted with round and harmonious lines revealing Lindauer’s admiration and respect, recall the impact of the Iroquois perpetual peace on Herder’s critique of colonial violence. Maoris’ pride in their cultural heritage strongly advocates a geographical order of things, as envisaged in the multiauthored Physical Geography attributed to Kant, so that the logic of historical development would no longer serve the rhetoric of Eurocentric colonialism and imperialism. The living space of the Maori in New Zealand constantly reminds us of the heterogeneity of the world, while challenging historicism’s encompassing and Eurocentric gesture. Like Chamisso’s strong identification with Kadu and his longing for Oceania, Maoris’ acceptance of Lindauer’s portraits as part of their cultural heritage tells us a moving story of inextricable entanglements and mutual influences in European Oceanic relations. Reading the German travel writings, literature, and philosophy, I have tried to reveal the essential role of non-​European cultures in transcultural German discourse and unearth the border zones of

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epistemic collisions and amalgamations so that we can reread our shared cultural memory and envision an alternative global future. These German texts at the inception of global modernity around 1800, like Lindauer’s pictorial documentations of Maori in the nineteenth century, are not merely an archival elegy for a long-​lost triste tropique. Rather, the non-​European elements in these historical texts and images still articulate a passionate cry for global diversity and epistemic alterity in the twenty-​first century.

Notes

Introduction 1. Adelbert von Chamisso, Reise um die Welt (Halle, Germany: Projekte-​Verlag Cornelius, 2008), 214. 2. See Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–­ 1804 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Susan Buck-​Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009); Greg Dening, Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures, and Self (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–­1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Felicity Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Felicity A. Nussbaum, ed., The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Wendy Laura Belcher, Abyssinia’s Samuel Johnson: Ethiopian Thought in the Making of an English Author (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992); Nicholas Thomas, Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010); Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). 3. See Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism: A Short History, trans. Sorcha O’Hagan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 15–­16. 4. See Peter H. Wilson, ed., A Companion to Eighteenth-​Century Europe (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008). 5. Russell Berman’s emphasis on European internal conflicts and the German Sonderweg (special way) and his doubt about the validity of the term “Eurocentrism” are thus debatable in this context. See Russell A. Berman, Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 15–­16. 6. In a similar vein, scholars like Vanessa Agnew also point out that eighteenth-​ and nineteenth-​century German musicologists and travelers debase non-​European musical and cultural achievements in order to justify European superiority and colonialism. See Vanessa Agnew, Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of Music in Other Worlds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 7. Katherine Arens’s critique of the reception of Said’s Orientalism in German studies warns us not to “import” theoretical models developed in a totally different context without carefully differentiating concrete historical conditions.

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She trenchantly points out that the reified colonizer-​ versus-​ colonized model, based on the Hegelian “ubiquitous Master-​Slave dialectic,” in fact others and marginalizes eighteenth-​century “germanophone cultures in a Europe where a unified Germany did not exist.” In other words, studies of eighteenth-​century German colonial imaginary and cultural differences, which uncritically draw on Said, ignore alternate historical particularities. Katherine Arens, “Said’s Colonial Fantasies: How Orientalism Marginalizes Eighteenth-​Century Germans,” Herder Yearbook 7 (2004). Peter Wilson also points out the limits of the projecting the pattern of the unified Germany onto its fragmented past: “As a result, central European history has generally been viewed from a national perspective, imposing the frontiers of later states onto the past and writing about parts of the empire as if these were already independent countries.” Peter H. Wilson, “The Empire, Austria, and Prussia,” in A Companion to Eighteenth-​Century Europe, ed. Peter H. Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), www​.blackwellreference​.com/subscriber/ tocnode?id=g9781405139472_chunk_g978140513947218. 8. Nussbaum, The Global Eighteenth Century, 3. 9. See Berman, Enlightenment or Empire; Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). 10. Ibid., 7. 11. Ibid., 8. 12. See Gabriele Dürbeck, Stereotype Paradiese: Ozeanismus in der deutschen Südseeliteratur 1815–­1914 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2007), 5–­64. 13. Susan Buck-​Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry 26 (Summer 2000). 14. As Nussbaum aptly comments: “To confine one’s understanding to imperial history may commit a disservice to local epistemologies worldwide.  .  .  . Imperial eighteenth-​century histories often fail to consider that Russia, China, the Levant, or the Maghreb might better be constructed under a rubric other than the colonial because Europe did not rule them during that century.” Nussbaum, The Global Eighteenth Century, 7–­8. 15. Pomeranz contends that “western European land, labor, and product markets, even as late as 1789, were on the whole probably further from perfect competition—­that is  .  .  . than those in most of China and thus less suited to the growth process envisioned by Adam Smith.” Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 17. 16. Ibid. 17. Kaoru Sugihara, “The East Asian Path of Economic Development: A Long-​Term Perspective,” in The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 Year Perspectives, ed. Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita, and Mark Selden (London: Routledge, 2003), 79. 18. Pomeranz claims, however, that the colonies did not provide Europe with capital accumulation, financial profits, and the demand for manufactures, as is commonly believed; rather, the colonies relieved Europe’s urgent need for land and energy. While both Europe and East Asia faced crises in fuel, building materials, and increased population and poverty, Europe’s technological advances in manufacturing, reformed institutional structures, and, most importantly, its non-​ European colonies provided Western Europe an edge of space and resource over East Asia.

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19. See also Arrighi, Hamashita, and Selden, The Resurgence of East Asia. This socioeconomic study supports Pomeranz’s position and also offers detailed data analysis of East Asian (in particular Chinese) economic predominance in world history until the early nineteenth century. 20.  S.v. “trans-​,” OED Online, www​.oed​.com/view/Entry/204575?rskey=dBU Pwy&result=3#eid, accessed September 13, 2016. 21.  S.v. “trans-​,” Duden Online, www​.duden​.de/rechtschreibung/trans_, accessed September 13, 2016. 22. Dussel thus argues: “Postmodernity’s critique of modernity . . . critiques it as ‘modern’ and not as ‘European’ or ‘North American.’ . . . Postmodernity’s ‘post’ does not eliminate its Eurocentrism since postmodernity assumes that future humanity obviously will reach the same ‘cultural’ situation as postmodern Europe and the United States to the degree that humanity modernizes by the process of ‘globalization’ (which is considered irreversible and inevitable). This belief in modernizing ‘inevitability’ makes postmodernity profoundly Eurocentric.” Enrique Dussel, “World-​System and ‘Trans’-​Modernity,” Nepantla: Views from South 3, no. 2 (2002): 233. Dussel’s attempt is different than Dipesh Chakrabarty’s project of provincializing Europe. While Chakrabarty profoundly points out that European thought from the Enlightenment onward is indispensable but also inadequate for historical studies, like Wallerstein, he still holds on to the centrality of the European intellectual heritage because the postcolonial history of India is already inextricably inscribed in a European-​styled modernity. Even though Chakrabarty uses the case of Bengali modernization to illustrate that histories in different cultures and societies do not necessarily have to follow the trajectory of the European model, Dussel’s point accounts for the specificity of the eighteenth century and thus powerfully enhances the visibility of non-​European cultures and their values in the making of world history. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). 23. In a transmodern world, the European Industrial Revolution “was Europe’s response to a ‘vacuum’ in the East Asian market, especially China and Hindustan. . . . This ‘vacuum’ attracted the ‘possibility’ of being ‘filled’ by a European production that had been growing since the fifteenth century.” Dussel, “World-​ System and ‘Trans’-​Modernity,” 231. 24. See Wolfgang Welsch, “Was ist eigentlich Transkulturalität?,” in Hochschule als transkultureller Raum? Beiträge zu Kultur, Bildung und Differenz, ed. Lucina Darowska and Claudia Machold (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2010). 25. “Jede Nation hat ihren Mittelpunkt der Glückseligkeit in sich, wie jede Kugel ihren Schwerpunkt.” Johann Gottfried Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990). 35. This sentence is cited in Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 189; Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 143; Ernst Cassirer, Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2007), 244; Hans-​Georg Gadamer, “Herder und die geschichtliche Welt,” in Gesammelte Werke (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1987), 325; Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire, 223.

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26. See Welsch, “Was ist eigentlich Transkulturalität?” 27. See Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, eds., Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Text, Context, and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 19–­20. 28. For a more detailed discussion on multiculturalism, see David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 29. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, 7. 30. In Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jakob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm, Nation means “das (eingeborne) volk eines landes, einer groszen staatsgesamtheit; seit dem 16. jahrh. aus dem franz. nation, ital. nazione (vom lat. natio) aufgenommen: er (Mithridates) kund mit ietlicher nation ân ein tulmäz für sich selbs reden.” S.v. “Nation,” Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jakob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm, http:// woerterbuchnetz​.de/DWB/?sigle=DWB&mode=Vernetzung&lemid=GN03121# XGN03121, accessed August 15, 2016. 31. Published in 1972, Archaeology is a theoretical reflection on Foucault’s three previous eighteenth-​century studies, Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972). 32. Foucault aims instead to reorganize and recategorize history according to discursive formations and the dispersions of ideas—­which he calls the archaeological inquiry. According to Foucault, the history of a concept is not that of “its progressive refinement, its continuously increasing rationality, its abstraction gradient, but that of its various fields of constitution and validity, that of its successive rules of use, that of the many theoretical contexts in which it developed and matured.” Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 4. 33. Ibid., 23. 34. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 118–­19. 35. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 144–­45. As Foucault puts it, the purpose of doing such an analysis “is not to draw up a list of founding saints; it is to uncover the regularity of a discursive practice.” 36. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 279. 37. Ibid., 284. 38. Bakhtin contends: “A conversation with an internally persuasive word that one has begun to resist may continue, but it takes on another character: it is questioned, it is put in a new situation in order to expose its weak sides, to get a feel for its boundaries, to experience it physically as an object. For this reason stylizing discourse by attributing it to a person often becomes parodic. . . . Novelistic images, profoundly double-​voiced and double-​languaged, are born in such a soil, seek to objectivize the struggle with all types of internally persuasive alien discourse that had at one time held sway over the author.” Ibid., 348. 39. Emphasis in the 39. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 138–­ original. 40. Ibid., 109. 41. Ibid., 149. 42. Foucault ascertains: “Contradiction, then, functions throughout discourse, as the principle of its historicity. . . . For archaeological analysis, contradictions

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are neither appearances to be overcome, nor secret principles to be uncovered. They are objects to be described for themselves, without any attempt being made to discover from what point of view they can be dissipated, or at what level they can be radicalized and effects become causes. . . . By deriving . . . the contradiction between two theses from a certain domain of objects, from its delimitations and divisions, one does not discover a point of conciliation. But neither does one transfer it to a more fundamental level; one defines the locus in which it takes place; it reveals the place where the two branches of the alternative join; it localizes the divergence and the place where the two discourses are juxtaposed.” Ibid., 151–­52. 43. Two theoretical positions have inspired me toward this connection between genre and cultural activity. Fredric Jameson’s definition of the novel as a genre that contains and emits “its ideological message long after the extinction of its host” makes clear the deep connections between historical conditions and ideological and literary expressions. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 151. In The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger’s emphasis on action as the fundamental way that materials or objects are connected to being has helped me to see that the form of art can register and contain a particular mode of practice. Genre is thus the mediation between practice and culture. 44. See Jonathan Culler, “Toward a Theory of Non-​Genre Literature,” in Theory of the Novel, ed. Michael McKeon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Foucault also contends that, although the textual divisions or genres articulate different discourses in different times, they “are always themselves reflexive categories, principles of classification, normative rules, institutionalized types: they, in turn, are facts of discourse that deserve to be analyzed beside others; of course, they also have complex relations with each other, but they are not intrinsic, autochthonous, and universally recognizable characteristics.” Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 22. 45. See Pratt, Imperial Eyes. 46. See Chakrabarty’s detailed discussion of historicism and its Eurocentric logic. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. 47. See David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom, Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). Chapter 1 1. Approximately 456 travelogues were published in the sixteenth century, 1,566 in the seventeenth, and 3,520 in the eighteenth century. Two-​thirds of the travelogues (2,049) published in the eighteenth century are about Europe, 561 about Asia, and 505 about the Americas. See Hans-​Jürgen Lüsebrink, “Faszination und Wissensdurst: Zu den Grenzen und Möglichkeiten interkulturellen )Verstehens in den Werken Georg Forsters und seiner Zeitgenossen,” (Miss-​ Georg-​Forster-​Studien 12 (2007): 78. 2. See Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–­1840: “From an Antique Land” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 41. 3. Larry Wolff points out the speculative nature of Rousseau and Voltaire’s anthropological thoughts. Ludwig Uhlig indicates that Forster here debunks

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the “theoretical or conjectural history” of the school of Scottish Enlightenment, to which his travel observations are actually deeply indebted. See Larry Wolff, “Discovering Cultural Perspective: The Intellectual History of Anthropological Thought in the Age of Enlightenment,” in The Anthropology of the Enlightenment, ed. Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 12–­13; Ludwig Uhlig, Georg Forster: Lebensabenteuer eines gelehrten Weltbürgers (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 86–­87. 4. Forster’s essay Noch etwas über die Menschenraßen (1786) criticizes the conjectures in Kant’s Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschenrasse (1785) and Mutmaßlicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte (1786). Kant responds with the essay Über den Gebrauch teleologischer Prinzipien in der Philosophie (1788). Kant’s essay and the debate with Forster mark the starting point of Kant’s occupation with teleology in nature, which culminates later in Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790). See John H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s “Critique of Judgment” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 207–­9; Uhlig, Georg Forster, 201–­4. 5. See Neil Rennie, “The Point Venus ‘Scene,’ Tahiti, 14 May 1769,” in The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity A. Nussbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); George Forster, A Voyage Round the World, 2 vols. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), 430–­31n. Rennie notes that Hawkesworth died because of his describing the scandalous Point Venus scene of sexual intercourse and granting it a religious and ritual atmosphere. Thomas and Berghof comment that Hawkesworth’s book was not received completely negatively. But it incurred censure because Hawkesworth denied the divine intervention for the survival of Cook’s ship Endeavour after running onto the Great Barrier Reef. Forster mentions in the preface of his Voyage that Hawkesworth’s book is received with great contempt for his inaccurate observation and unnecessary digressions. 6. Forster, A Voyage Round the World, 9. “Ein Reisender, der nach meinem Begriff alle Erwartungen erfüllen wollte, müßte Rechtschaffenheit genug haben, einzelne Gegenstände richtig und in ihrem wahren Lichte zu beobachten, aber auch Scharfsinn genug, dieselben zu verbinden, allgemeine Folgerungen daraus zu ziehen, um dadurch sich und seinen Lesern den Weg zu neuen Entdeckungen und künftigen Untersuchungen zu bahnen.” Georg Forster, Reise um die Welt (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1983), 17. 7. The French philosophe Marquis de Condorcet asks in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Human Mind: “Will man approach a condition in which everyone will have the knowledge necessary to conduct himself in the ordinary affairs of life, according to the light of his own reason?” Isaac Kramnick, ed., The Portable Enlightenment Reader (New York: Penguin, 1995), 27. 8. Georges-​Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, Rousseau’s two discourses, Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society, and Adam Smith’s Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations are all significant expressions of eighteenth-​century European endeavor to systemize and historicize the natural and human world. See Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni, eds., The Anthropology of the Enlightenment (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007); Pratt, Imperial Eyes; Uhlig, Georg Forster.

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9. See Wolff, “Discovering Cultural Perspective,” 15–­17. 10. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002), 24. 11. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 7. 12. Ibid. 13. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 59. 14. Ibid., 61. 15. See Agnew, Enlightenment Orpheus. 16. Yomb May, for example, reads Forster’s travelogue completely in the light of imperial violence and ideological colonization and subjugation. Yomb May, “Kultur im Zeichen des Geschlechts: Eine genderorientierte und postkoloniale Lektüre von Georg Forsters Reise um die Welt,” Georg-​Forster-​Studien 13 (2008). 17. As Helmut Peitsch observes, Forster does not consistently justify a special German humanism, as Horst Dippel argues; rather, Forster’s writings disclose a critique of racist prejudices and a support of European colonialism at the same time—­a contradiction that can’t be ignored. See Peitsch, “Georg Forsters ‘deutsche’ Kommentierung englischer Reisebeschreibungen über den Pazifik.” Also see Horst Dippel, “Revolutionäre Anthropologie? Oder der Versuch, Georg Forster neu zu lesen,” Historische Zeitschriften 291 (2010). 18. See Nicholas Thomas, In Oceania: Visions, Artifacts, Histories (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997). 19. Thomas, Entangled Objects, 5. 20. James Cook, The Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure 1772–­1775, vol. 2 of The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), clxviii. 21. Uhlig, Georg Forster, 52. 22. “Demand from the Officers & Petty Officers the Log Books & Journals they may have kept, & to seal them up for our inspection, and enjoining Them & the whole Crew, not to divulge where they have been, until they shall have permission so to do.” Cook, The Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure 1772–­ 1775, 2:9–­10. 23. See Forster, Reise um die Welt, 954–­55. 24. Forster, A Voyage Round the World, 9–­10. “Zuweilen folgte ich meinem Herzen und ließ meine Empfindungen reden; denn da ich von menschlichen Schwachheiten nicht frey bin, so mußten meine Leser doch wissen, wie das Glas gefärbt ist, durch welches ich gesehen habe. Wenigstens bin ich mir bewußt, daß es nicht finster und trübe vor meinen Augen gewesen ist. Alle Völker der Erde haben gleiche Ansprüche auf meinen guten Willen. So zu denken war ich immer gewohnt. . . . Mein Lob und mein Tadel sind unabhängig von National-​ Vorurtheilen, wie sie auch Namen haben mögen.” Forster, Reise um die Welt, 18. 25. Uhlig, Georg Forster, 77–­78. 26. See Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–­1840, 42. 27. David Marshall, The Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750–­ 1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 8. 28. See Forster, Reise um die Welt, 304–­5. Forster writes: “Captain Cook stand auf dem Bord des Schiffs und bat Se. Majestät herauf zu kommen; Dieselben blieben aber unverrückt sitzen, bis sich der Capitain, der Tahitischen Etiquette

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gemäß, in eine unglaubliche Menge des besten hiesigen Zeuges hatte einkleiden lassen, und auf die Art zu einer ungeheuer dicken Figur geworden war. . . . Capitain Cook war hiebey am übelsten dran, denn dem wards unter der Last seines Tahitischen Ceremonien-​Kleides, ohnehin schon zu warm.” 29. Harriet Guest wisely points out: “The fractures or discontinuities these historically specific encounters expose may be characteristic of the modern self, and of the self-​reflexive enlightenment historiography that contributes to its production and generation, and they may help us to analyse the ‘limits that are imposed on us,’ and to ‘experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.’ ” Harriet Guest, Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation: James Cook, William Hodges, and the Return to the Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 26–­27. 30. One may assume that the elder Forster is the “real” author behind this travel account. Although the work of Georg is much indebted to his father’s instruction, Johann Forster’s journal differs greatly from the travel account published in Georg’s name in terms of style, details, especially sentimental reflections, and comments on natural history. Furthermore, it is not the father’s work in English but the German version of Georg’s book that sustains tremendous impact on the transcultural German discourse around 1800. 31. See John Gascoigne, “The German Enlightenment and the Pacific,” in The Anthropology of the Enlightenment, ed. Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007); Dirk Sangmeister, “Das Feenland der Phantasie: Die Südsee in der deutschen Literatur zwischen 1780 und 1820,” Georg-​Forster-​Studien 2 (1998); Justus Fetscher, “Die Pazifik-​Reisen der 1760er und 1770er Jahre in der deutschen Literatur,” in Cross-​Cultural Encounters and Constructions of Knowledge in the 18th and 19th Century: Non-​European and European Travel of Exploration in Comparative Perspective, ed. Philippe Despoix and Justus Fetscher (Kassel: Kassel University Press, 2004). 32. John Gascoigne points out: “The German response to the ‘new world of the Pacific’ in the late eighteenth century was very closely linked to that particularly German institution, the university—­and especially to one particular university, that of Göttingen.” Gascoigne, “The German Enlightenment and the Pacific,” 144. 33. All three quotes in this paragraph are from Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, vol. 2 (London: H. G. Bohn, 1849–­58), 436–­37. 34. Hugh West, “The Limits of Enlightenment Anthropology: Georg Forster and the Tahitians,” History of European Ideas 10, no. 2 (1989). West argues that the contradiction in Forster’s Tahiti perception shows that Forster does not know how to come up with better ideas, such as cultural relativism, to fix the fundamental flaw of the eighteenth-​century European concept of cultural otherness. The fact, however, that Forster admits at least twice that happiness is a relative notion testifies to his relativism. For more details see the section on Forster’s relativism later in this chapter. 35. Forster, A Voyage Round the World, 379.“Wenn man erwägt, wie groß der Unterschied ist, der zwischen der Lebensart eines gemeinen Matrosen am Bord unsers Schiffes, und dem Zustande eines Bewohners dieser Insel statt findet; so läßt sich leicht einsehen, daß es jenem nicht zu verdenken war, wenn er einen

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Versuch wagte, den unzählbaren Mühseligkeiten einer Reise um die Welt zu entgehen, und wenn er, statt der mancherley Unglücksfälle die ihm zur See droheten, ein gemächliches, sorgenfreyes Leben in dem herrlichsten Clima von der Welt, zu ergreifen wünschte. Das höchste Glück, welches er vielleicht in Engelland hätte erreichen können, versprach ihm lange nicht so viel Annehmlichkeiten, als er, bey der bescheidenen Hoffnung, nur so glücklich als ein ganz gemeiner Tahitier zu leben, vor sich sahe.” Forster, Reise um die Welt, 596. 36. Cook, The Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure 1772–­1775, 2:404. 37. Rod Edmond, “The Pacific/Tahiti: Queen of the South Sea Isles,” in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 143. 38. For a detailed source of the German reception of Tahiti and the South Seas see Sangmeister, “Das Feenland der Phantasie.” 39. Jill Casid, “Inhuming Empire: Islands as Colonial Nurseries and Graves,” in The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity A. Nussbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 280. 40. See Christian Cajus Lorenz Hirschfeld, Theory of Garden Art, trans. Linda B. Parshall (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 101–­13. 41. See Sangmeister, “Das Feenland der Phantasie,” 136. The members of the Arcadian colony contain prominent figures of German literature in the eighteenth century: Mathias Claudius, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Johann Martin Miller, Friedrich von Stolberg, Johann Heinrich Voß. 42. Dirk Sangmeister points out the seriousness of this secret society by demonstrating that three officers and sixty soldiers were commissioned to arrest the only six members. See ibid., 137. 43. Bougainville writes: “It was very difficult, amidst such a sight, to keep at their work four hundred young French sailors, who had seen no women for six months. In spite of all our precautions, a young girl came on board, and placed herself upon the quarter-​deck, near one of the hatchways.  .  .  . The girl carelessly dropt a cloth, which covered her, and appeared to the eyes of all beholders, such as Venus shewed herself to the Phrygian shepherd, having, indeed, the celestial form of that goddess.” Louis de Bougainville, A Voyage Round the World (Amsterdam, New York, and London: N. Israel, Da Capo Press, and Frank Cass & Company Ltd., 1967), 218–­19. 44. Forster’s description seems to portray himself as a pure observer of the sexual encounters between Tahitian women and the travelers. For example, see Forster, Reise um die Welt, 207, 250, 284, 310. 45. Forster, A Voyage Round the World, 380–­81. “Ein solches Clima und die gesunden Früchte verschaffen den Einwohnern Stärke und Schönheit des Cörpers. Sie sind alle wohlgestaltet und von so schönem Wuchs, daß Phidias und Praxiteles manchen zum Modell männlicher Schönheit würden gewählt haben. Ihre Gesichtsbildungen sind angenehm und heiter, frey von allem Eindruck irgend einer heftigen Leidenschaft. Große Augen, gewölbte Augenbraunen und eine hervorstehende Stirn geben ihnen ein edles Ansehen, welches durch einen starken Bart und Haarwuchs noch mehr erhöhet wird. Alles das, und die Schönheit ihrer Zähne, sind redende Kennzeichen ihrer Gesundheit und Stärke. Das andere Geschlecht ist nicht minder wohl gebildet. Man kann zwar die hiesigen Weiber nicht regelmäßige Schönheiten nennen, sie wissen aber doch das Herz der

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Männer zu gewinnen, und erwerben sich durch ungezwungne, natürliche Freundlichkeit, und durch ihr stetes Bestreben zu gefallen, die Zuneigung und Liebe unseres Geschlechts.” Forster, Reise um die Welt, 281. 46. Lee Wallace’s insightful study of the (European) male body as the central locus for the Europacific discourse inspires this interpretation. See Lee Wallace, Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003). 47. Forster, A Voyage Round the World, 184. “Eine so zärtliche Empfindlichkeit zeugt offenbar von der ursprünglichen Güte des menschlichen Herzens.” Forster, Reise um die Welt, 306. 48. Forster, A Voyage Round the World, 168. “Es ist würklich im Ernste zu wünschen, daß der Umgang der Europäer mit den Einwohnern der Süd-​See-​Inseln in Zeiten abgebrochen werden möge, ehe die verderbten Sitten der civilisirtern Völker diese unschuldigen Leute anstecken können, die hier in ihrer Unwissenheit und Einfalt so glücklich leben. Aber es ist eine traurige Wahrheit, daß Menschenliebe und die politischen Systeme von Europa nicht mit einander harmoniren!” Forster, Reise um die Welt, 281. 49. Wolff, “Discovering Cultural Perspective,” 10. 50. Ibid. 51. See Jean Starobinski, Jean-​Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Maurice Cranston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 52. Forster, A Voyage Round the World, 200. “Warlich! wenn die Wissenschaft und Gelehrsamkeit einzelner Menschen auf Kosten der Glückseligkeit ganzer Nationen erkauft werden muß; so wär’ es, für die Entdecker und Entdeckten, besser, daß die Südsee den unruhigen Europäern ewig unbekannt geblieben wäre!” Forster, Reise um die Welt, 332. 53. Georg Forster, Streitschriften und Fragmente zur Weltreise, ed. Robert L. Kahn, Gerhard Steiner, Horst Fiedler, Klaus-​Georg Popp, and Siegfried Scheibe, vol. 4 of Georg Forsters Werke: Sämtliche Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe (Berlin: Akademie-​Verlag, 1972), 117. 54. On Rousseau’s historical pessimism, see Robert Wokler, “Rousseau’s Reading of the Book of Genesis and the Theology of Commercial Society,” Modern Intellectual History 3, no. 1 (2006). Forster is strongly influenced by Adam Smith’s theory of historical development from the stage of hunter and collector to the advanced stage of commerce and trade. For more details see Christian Marouby, “Adam Smith and the Anthropology of the Enlightenment: The ‘Ethnographic’ Sources of Economic Progress,” in The Anthropology of the Enlightenment, ed. Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007); Ulrich Kronauer, “Rousseaus Kulturkritik aus der Sicht Georg Forsters,” in Georg Forster in interdisziplinärer Perspektive, ed. Claus-​Volker Klenke (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994), 151–­56; Annette Meyer, “Von der Science of Man zur Naturgeschichte der Menschheit: Einflüsse angelsächsischer Wissenschaft im Werk Georg Forsters,” in Natur—­Mensch—­Kultur: Georg Forster im Wissenschaftsfeld seiner Zeit, ed. Jörn Garber and Tanja van Hoorn (Hanover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2006). 55. Forster, A Voyage Round the World, 200. “Endlich wird das gemeine Volk diesen Druck empfinden, und die Ursachen desselben gewahr worden, alsdenn aber wird auch das Gefühl der gekränkten Rechte der Menschheit in ihnen

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erwachen, und eine Revolution veranlassen. Dies ist der gewöhnliche Cirkel aller Staaten.” Forster, Reise um die Welt, 332. 56. Forster, A Voyage Round the World, 381. “Daß ein Mensch . . . , der zu einem thätigen Leben gebohren, mit tausend Gegenständen bekannt, wovon die Tahitier nichts wissen, und gewohnt ist, an das Vergangne und Zukünftige zu denken, daß der, einer so ununterbrochnen Ruhe und eines beständigen Einerley, bald überdrüssig werden müsse, und daß eine solche Lage nur einem Volk erträglich seyn könne, dessen Begriffe so einfach und eingeschränkt sind, als wir sie bey den Tahitiern fanden.” Forster, Reise um die Welt, 599. 57. See Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–­1840, 1–­53. 58. See Uwe Japp, “Aufgeklärtes Europa und natürliche Südsee: Georg Forsters Reise um die Welt,” in Reise und Utopie: Zur Literatur der Spätaufklärung, ed. Hans Joachim Piechotta (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1976). 59. Forster, A Voyage Round the World, 381. “Indessen sind die Vorstellungen, die man sich von Glückseligkeit macht, bey unterschiednen Völkern eben so sehr verschieden, als die Grundsätze, Cultur und Sitten derselben; und da die Natur, in den verschiednen Gegenden der Welt, ihre Güter bald freygebig, bald sparsam ausgetheilt hat; so ist jene Verschiedenheit in den Begriffen vom Glück ein überzeugender Beweis von der erhabenen Weisheit und Vaterliebe des Schöpfers, der in dem Entwurf des Ganzen, zugleich auf das Glück aller einzelnen Geschöpfe, sowohl in den heißen als kalten Himmelsstrichen, Rücksicht nahm.” Forster, Reise um die Welt, 599–­600. 60. More radically, Forster’s reflection on different cultural attitudes toward female virginity completely eliminates the traces of historical teleology and demonstrates the impact of cultural differences. See Forster, Reise um die Welt, 401. 61. See Tim Youngs, “Africa / The Congo: the Politics of Darkness,” in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 62. See ibid., 163; Mary Baine Campbell, “Travel Writing and Its Theory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 272; Jonathan Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–­1840 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 103, 172. 63. See the excellent study by Cătălin Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009). 64. See Forster, Reise um die Welt, 893. 65. Forster, A Voyage Round the World, 281. “Allein, es giebt ja leyder Beispiele genug, daß Leute von civilisirten Nationen, die, gleich verschiednen unsrer Matrosen, den bloßen Gedanken von Menschenfleisch-​ Essen nicht ertragen und gleichwohl Barbareyen begehen können, die selbst unter Cannibalen nicht erhört sind! Was ist der Neu-​Seeländer, der seinen Feind im Kriege umbringt und frisst, gegen den Europäer, der, zum Zeitvertreib, einer Mutter ihren Säugling, mit kaltem Blut, von der Brust reißen und seinen Hunden vorwerfen kann? Die Neu-​ Seeländer fressen ihre Feinde nicht anders als wenn sie solche im Gefecht und in der größten Wuth erlegt haben. . . . noch weniger bringen sie ihre Verwandten in der Absicht um, sie zu fressen: . . . vielmehr essen sie solche nicht einmal wenn sie natürlichen todes gestorben sind.” Forster, Reise um die Welt, 448.

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Notes to Pages 38–42

66. Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism, 262. 67. Forster, A Voyage Round the World, 280. “Denn, so sehr es auch unsrer Erziehung zuwider seyn mag, so ist es doch an und für sich weder unnatürlich noch strafbar, Menschenfleisch zu essen. Nur um deswillen ist es zu verbannen, weil die geselligen Empfindungen der Menschenliebe und des Mitleids dabey so leicht verloren gehen können. Da nun aber ohne diese keine menschliche Gesellschaft bestehen kann; so hat der erste Schritt zur Cultur bey allen Völkern dieser seyn müssen, daß man dem Menschenfressen entsagt und Abscheu dafür zu erregen gesucht hat.” Forster, Reise um die Welt, 447–­48. 68. Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle (London: Penguin, 1989), 322. 69. See Forster, Reise um die Welt, 734. 70. Klaus R. Scherpe rightly points out that the frontiers of foreign encounters are always loaded with extremity, danger, and sensitivity in both physical and mental terms and challenge the secure distance of the dominating, in this case Forster’s, narrative and culture. See Klaus R. Scherpe, “Die Gewalt des Fremden: Über Representation,” in Der schöne Schein der Kunst und seine Schatten, ed. Hans Richard Brittnacher and Fabian Stoermer (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2000). 71. See Forster, Reise um die Welt, 772, 775, 784. 72. Forster contends: “Selbsterhaltung ist ohnläugbar das erste Gesetz der Natur.” Ibid., 772. 73. Forster comments: “Vielleicht würde der Umgang, mit uns Europäern, Nutzen stiften, und den Wachstum der Sittlichkeit befördert haben.” Ibid., 812. 74.  Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin, 1984), 125. 75. See Forster, Reise um die Welt, 800–­801. 76. See ibid., 802. 77. See ibid., 801. 78. Ibid., 296. 79. Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–­1840. 80. See Harry Liebersohn, The Travelers’ World: Europe to the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 41–­42. 81. Later in his career, this impact of the South Seas also gives rise to Forster’s methodology of empirical observation and comparison, which insists on the acknowledgment of differences in the representation of reality instead of being dictated by theoretical necessity or following a priori principles to guarantee logical uniformity. Manuela Ribeiro Sanches points out Forster’s differences from the Kantian method of theoretical and methodological dogmatism. She legitimates Forster: “Wahrheit gründet sich nicht nur auf Identität, sondern muß auch die Differenz berücksichtigen. Der Dialog bildet in diesem Prozeß eine entscheidende Rolle.” Manuela Ribeiro Sanches, “Diese zarten, fast unsichtbaren Fäden der Arachne: Das wahrnehmende Subjekt und die Konstituierung von Wahrheit bei Forster,” in Georg Forster in interdisziplinärer Perspektive, ed. Claus-​Volker Klenke (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994), 143. 82. Forster, A Voyage Round the World, 184. “Es gieng also heute Abend zwischen den Verdecken vollkommen so ausschweifend lustig zu, als ob wir nicht zu Tahiti, sondern zu Spithead [in England] vor Anker gelegen hätten.” Forster, “Reise um die Welt,” 307.

Notes to Pages 43–47

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Chapter 2 1. Adelbert von Chamisso, “Remarks and Opinions of the Naturalist of the Expedition,” in A Voyage of Discovery into the South Sea and Bering’s Straits, ed. Otto von Kotzebue (Amsterdam and New York: N. Israel and Da Capo, 1967), 96–­97. Chamisso’s original German version reads: “Er war nicht regelmäßig tatuiert wie die Radacker, sondern trug undeutliche Figuren von Fischen und Vögeln, einzeln und in Reihen um die Kniee, an den Armen und auf den Schultern. Er war gedrungenern Wuchses, hellerer Farbe, krauseren Haares, als sie.” Adelbert von Chamisso, “Bemerkungen und Ansichten,” in Adelbert von Chamisso: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Volker Hoffmann (Munich: Winkler Verlag, 1975), 365. 2. Adelbert von Chamisso, A Voyage around the World with the Romanzov Exploring Expedition in the Years 1815–­1818 in the Brig Rurik, Captain Otto von Kotzebbue, trans. Henry Kratz (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986), 130. “Habt Nachsicht, Freunde, wenn ich mich vielleicht manchmal wiederhole, hier spreche ich ja von meiner Liebe.” Chamisso, Reise um die Welt, 189. 3. Chamisso, A Voyage around the World, 129. “Ich fand bei ihnen reine, unverderbte Sitten, Anmut, Zierlichkeit und die holde Blüte der Schamhaftigkeit.” Chamisso, Reise um die Welt, 189. 4. “Und die Erinnerung erwärmt mein Herz und befeuchtet meine Augen.” Chamisso, Reise um die Welt, 223. 5. Beatrix Langner, Der wilde Europäer: Adelbert von Chamisso (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2008), 294. 6. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-​Network-​ Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 204. 7. Ibid., 180, 262. 8. Ibid., 131. 9. See Liebersohn, The Travelers’ World. 10. See Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–­1840. 11. Dening, Beach Crossings, 17. 12. Thomas, Islanders, 3. 13. Ahutoru was the first Tahitian and Pacific Islander to visit Europe. He journeyed with Bougainville to Paris from 1768 to 1769 and became a sensation in Parisian high society. Mai, or Omai, was the second islander to visit Europe. A native from the Society Islands, Mai traveled on board Adventure to England and was hosted by Joseph Banks from 1774 to 1776 before he sailed back to the South Pacific. Tupaia, a native of the Society Islands and a learned high priest, traveled with Cook on his first Pacific voyage and helped make important contacts between the islanders and the Europeans. Patu, a native of the Marquesas Islands, traveled to Boston in 1823 and became a member of the Foreign Mission School. For more details about Tupaia and Patu, see Glyndwr Williams, “Tupaia: Polynesian Warrior, Navigator, High Priest—­and Artist,” in The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity A. Nussbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Dening, Beach Crossings, 316–­24, 167–­83. 14. Williams, “Tupaia,” 50. 15. See Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002).

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Notes to Pages 48–53

16. Chamisso, A Voyage around the World, 129–­30. “Nach dem, was ich in meinen ‘Bemerkungen und Ansichten’ gesagt, bleibt mir hier nur die Geschichte unserer Erscheinung zwischen jenen Riffen zu erzählen und zu berichten, wie wir Bekanntschaft mit einem Volke machten, welches ich unter allen Söhnen der Erde lieb gewonnen habe.  .  .  . Mein Freund Kadu, .  .  .  , einer der schönsten Charaktere, den ich im Leben getroffen habe, einer der Menschen, den ich am meisten geliebt, ward später mein Lehrer über Radack und die Karolinen-​Inseln. In meinem Aufsatz ‘Über unsere Kenntnis der ersten Provinz des Großen Ozeans’ habe ich seiner als einer wissenschaflichen Autorität zu erwähnen gehabt und habe dort aus den zerstreuten Zügen unsers Zusammenlebens sein Bild und seine Geschichte zusammengestellt.” Chamisso, Reise um die Welt, 189. 17. See Vanessa Smith, Intimate Strangers: Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 18. Chamisso, A Voyage around the World, 10. “Wer mich teilnehmend auf der weiten Reise begleiten will, muss zuvörderst erfahren, wer ich bin, wie das Schicksal mit mir spielte und wie es geschah, dass ich als Titulargelehrter an Bord des ‘Ruriks’ stieg.” Chamisso, Reise um die Welt, 11. 19. Dening, Beach Crossings, 44. 20. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpreting Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 20. 21. Chamisso, Reise um die Welt, 214. 22. For a brief and lucid account of early Russian settlements in Alaska please see James R. Gibson, Imperial Russia in Frontier America: The Changing Geography of Supply of Russian America, 1784–­1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). The sale of Alaska in 1867 to the United States signaled the decline of the maritime fur trade. Sea otters and fur seals were nearly exterminated after being hunted for almost two centuries. 23. For a more detailed discussion about Germans in Russia, see Elena Govor, Twelve Days at Nuku Hiva: Russian Encounters and Mutiny in the South Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010). 24. The German title is Entdeckungs-​Reise in die Süd-​See und nach der Berings-​ Straße zur Erforschung einer nordöstlichen Durchfahrt in den Jahren 1815 bis 1818, auf Kosten Sr. Erlaucht des Herrn Reichs-​Kanzlers Grafen Rumanzoff auf dem Schiffe Rurick unter dem Befehle des Lieutenants der Russisch-​Kaiserlichen Marine Otto von Kotzebue (Weimar: Gebrüder Hoffmann, 1821). 25. Chamisso, “Remarks and Opinions of the Naturalist of the Expedition,” 351. The German original reads: “Er erkennt übrigens nur den deutschen Text für sein an. Er hat bei manchen der fremdartigen Gegenstände, die er zu behandeln hatte, zu wohl gefühlt, wie schwer es sei, der Kürze beflissen die Dunkelheit zu vermeiden, um für Übersetzungen, die er nicht beurteilen kann, sich verbürgen zu können.” Chamisso, “Bemerkungen und Ansichten,” 259. 26. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 217. 27. Chamisso, “Remarks and Opinions of the Naturalist of the Expedition,” 101. “Kadu hatte Gemüt, Verstand, Witz; je näher wir einander kennen lernten, je lieber gewannen wir ihn.” Chamisso, “Bemerkungen und Ansichten,” 367–­68. 28. Chamisso, “Remarks and Opinions of the Naturalist of the Expedition,” 101. “Er ging in sich, und studierte die Verhältnisse und den Geist unsrer Sitten, worein er sich bald und leicht zu versetzen und zu finden lernte, wie er eben

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unsern äußern Anstand im Leben und bei der Tafel sich anzueignen gewußt.” Chamisso, “Bemerkungen und Ansichten,” 367. 29. See Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). 30. Chamisso, “Remarks and Opinions of the Naturalist of the Expedition,” 107. “Von dem Augenblicke an war Kadu unermüdlich auf das emsigste beschäftigt, beim Pflanzen, Säen und der Besorgung der Tiere uns mit Rat und Tat an die Hand zu gehen, und den Eingebornen das Erforderliche zu erklären und einzuschärfen.” Chamisso, “Bemerkungen und Ansichten,” 371. These philanthropic activities by the Europeans are not always successful. For example, the travelers once noticed that rats were destroying the garden and eating up the seeds they planted. When the travelers came back to Radack from Alaska, Otto von Kotzebue thus brought cats to deal with the rats. However, when Kotzebue traveled to the Radack islands on his second voyage around the world in 1824, about ten years later, he saw that the cats had rapidly proliferated but the rat population had not decreased. 31. Chamisso, A Voyage around the World, 195. “Kadu, von dem Moment an, wo er die Riffe von Otdia erschaut und erkannt, der Gegenwart angehörend und mächtig sie erfassend, war ganz ein Radacker unter den Radackern. Geschenke, Geschichten, Märchen, Freude brachte er ihnen und jubelte mit ihnen vor Entzücken und Lust. Aber besonnen, wo es zu handeln galt, war er unablässig tätig und hatte schon Hand angelegt, wo andere noch zögerten. Er tat’s aus eigenem Herzen in unserm Geiste. Er war unsre Hand unter den Radackern und bis an den letzten Tag ohne Nebengedanken einer der Unsern.” Chamisso, Reise um die Welt, 286–­87. 32. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 208. 33. Chamisso, “Remarks and Opinions of the Naturalist of the Expedition,” 118. “Wir werden, was uns die eigene Anschauung gelehrt hat, durch Kadus Berichte ergänzen, deren Zuverläsßigkeit zu bewähren der letzte Besuch, den wir unsern Freunden abgestattet, uns die Gelegenheit gegeben hat.” Chamisso, “Bemerkungen und Ansichten,” 378. 34. Dening, Beach Crossings, 178. 35. Ibid., 182. 36. Chamisso, A Voyage around the World, 195. “Ich selbst, nachdem ich mit redlichem Bemühen Kadu über Radack zu reden veranlasst, seine Aussagen zusammengetragen, verglichen und studiert hatte und mir nur die abstrakteren Kapitel der Glaubenslehre, der Sprachlehre usw. abzuhandeln übrig blieben, nachdem ich mit den Sitten und Bräuchen und mit den Zuständen dieses Volkes vertrauter geworden war, hatte jetzt einen klareren Blick über dasselbe gewonnen und konnte übersichtlich lesen, wo ich sonst nur mit Mühe buchstabiert hatte.” Chamisso, Reise um die Welt, 287. 37. Chamisso, A Voyage around the World, 195–­96. “Auch die Radacker standen uns dieses Mal um vieles näher. Kadus Genossenschaft mit ihnen und mit uns war das Band, das uns vereinigte. Unser Freund war in Hinsicht unser leichter und schneller für sie, was er in Hinsicht ihrer für uns gewesen war. Wir waren jetzt eine Familie.” Chamisso, Reise um die Welt, 287. 38. See Chamisso, A Voyage around the World, 69. “Ich ergreife diese Gelegenheit, auch hier gegen die Benennung ‘Wilde’ in ihrer Anwendung auf die

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Notes to Pages 56–60

Südsee-​Insulaner feierlichen Protest einzulegen.” Chamisso, Reise um die Welt, 99. 39. Chamisso, A Voyage around the World, 157; Chamisso, Reise um die Welt, 232. 40. Chamisso, A Voyage around the World, 132. “Und siehe! Ich habe selber verwundert sehen müssen, dass, während wir schwerfällig lavierten und wenig über den Wind gewannen, sie auf ihren kunstreichen Fahrzeugen den graden Strich hielten, den wir auf krummen Wegen verfolgten, uns voraneilten und das Segel fallen ließen, um uns zu erwarten.” Chamisso, Reise um die Welt, 193. 41. See Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). 42.  Claude Lévi-​Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 13, 15, 16. 43. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 213. 44. Ibid., 218. 45. Marilyn Strathern, “Eating (and Feeding),” Cambridge Anthropology 30, no. 2 (Autumn 2012): 11–­12. 46. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3. 47. See Chamisso, “Remarks and Opinions of the Naturalist of the Expedition,” 117–­18; Chamisso, “Bemerkungen und Ansichten,” 377–­78. 48. See Chamisso, “Bemerkungen und Ansichten,” 407–­8. 49. Chamisso, A Voyage around the World, 153. “Ich hätte damals gern das schöne Kleid mit allen den Schmerzen, die es bekanntlich kostet, erkauft.” Chamisso, Reise um die Welt, 225. 50. Chamisso, A Voyage around the World, 193. “Die Tätowierung . . . bildet auf Radack ein kunstmäßiges Ganzes. Sie verhüllt und verunstaltet die Formen nicht, sie schlißt sich ihnen an mit anmutiger Verzierung und scheint deren Schönheit zu erhöhen.” Chamisso, Reise um die Welt, 284. 51. See Joanna White, “Marks of Transgression: The Tattooing of Europeans in the Pacific Islands,” in Tattoo: Bodies, Art and Exchange in the Pacific and the West, ed. Anna Cole, Douglas Bronwen, and Nicholas Thomas (London: Reaktion Books, 2005). White examines numerous sources about European travelers’ tattoos in the Pacific from the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century and concludes that there were a variety of reasons for the Europeans to get tattooed. One of the major reasons for European beachcombers getting tattooed is that they tried to become assimilated into the local social and cultural environment. In individual cases, however, becoming tattooed demonstrates the process of a mutual constitution of human agency. 52. Chamisso, A Voyage around the World, 193. “Indem wir uns in unsere hässlichen Kleider einzwängen, verzichten wir auf den Ausdruck des Körpers und der Arme, die Mimik tritt bei uns Nordeuropäern ganz zurück und wir schauen kaum dem Redenden ins Antlitz.” Chamisso, Reise um die Welt, 284. 53. Chamisso, A Voyage around the World, 193. “Der bewegliche, gesprächige Polynesier redet mit Mund, Antlitz und Armen und zwar mit der größten Sparsamkeit der Worte und der Gebärden, so dass zweckmäßig der kürzeste Ausdruck

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un der schnellste gewählt wird und ein Wink an die Stelle einer Rede tritt.” Chamisso, Reise um die Welt, 284. 54. Chamisso, A Voyage around the World, 194. “Er hält und sichert mit den Füßen den Gegenstand, woran er mit den Händen arbeitet, die Matte, die er flechtet, die Schnur, die er dreht, das Stück Holz, worauf er durch Reibung Feuer hervorbringen will.” Chamisso, Reise um die Welt, 284. 55. Forster writes: “Durch die Betrachtung dieser verschiedenen Völker, müssen jedem Unpartheyischen die Vorteile und Wohlthaten, welche Sittlichkeit und Religion über unsern Welttheil verbreitet haben, immer deutlicher und einleuchtender werden.” Forster, Reise um die Welt, 998. 56. Chamisso, A Voyage around the World, 190. “Dass ich aber der der Mann des Fortschrittes bin und höher mir der Geist des Christentums mit seinen Segnungen gilt, glaub ich in meinem Gedichte ‘Ein Gerichtstag auf Huahine’ an den Tag gelegt zu haben.” Chamisso, Reise um die Welt, 279–­81. 57. William Ellis, Polynesian Researches, during a Residence of Nearly Six Years in the South Sea Islands, vol. 2 (London: Fisher, Son, & Jackson, New Gate Street, 1829), 457. 58. Chamisso, A Voyage around the World, 190–­91. “Selbst an dem frommen Ellis . . . habe ich zwei Sachen vermisst: Er hätte, meine ich, selber O-​Taheitier werden sollen, bevor er O-​Taheitier umzuschaffen unternahm, und hätte sein heiliges Geschäft geistiger auffassen und betreiben können. . . . Die stille Feier des Sabbats und der erzwungene Besuch der Kirche und der Schule sind noch das Christentum nicht.” Chamisso, Reise um die Welt, 280. 59. Chamisso, A Voyage around the World, 190–­91. “Zu einer Parteifrage sind die Missionen geworden, die erst nach meiner Zeit auf diesen Inseln Fuß gefasst haben, und ich gehöre keiner Partei an. Lasse dir die Akten vorlegen und höre auf die nicht, die, ohne selbst geschaut zu haben, verwirrend ihre Stimmen in dem Streit erhoben. Ich selber habe sie nicht vollständig gelesen. Die Volkstümlichkeit, die vor dem aufgehenden Christentum untergehen muss, habe ich geschaut und sie ist mir wert geworden, dass ich um sie traure, spreche ich unumwunden aus.  .  .  . Dem sei, wie ihm wolle—­früher oder später werden, dem Fortschritt der Geschichte angemessen, die Hauptinseln des Großen Ozeans sich der Welt unserer Gesittung anschließen, und schon erscheint in Landessprache und meist von Eingebornen geschrieben eine Zeitung auf O-​Taheiti!” Chamisso, Reise um die Welt, 279–­80. 60. Chamisso, A Voyage around the World, 125. “Wir Barbaren! Wir nennen jene mit Schönheitssinn begabten Menschen ‘Wilde,’ und wir lassen das Ballet den beschämten Dichter und den trauernden Mimen aus den Hallen verdrängen, die wir der Kunst geweiht zu haben uns rühmen.” Chamisso, Reise um die Welt, 183. 61. Chamisso, A Voyage around the World, 125. “Auf O-​Taheiti, auf O-​Waihi verhüllen Missionshemden die schönen Leiber, alles Kunstspiel verstummt und der Tabu des Sabbats senkt sich still und traurig über die Kinder der Freude.” Chamisso, Reise um die Welt, 184. 62. Epeli Hau‘ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” in We Are the Ocean (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008), 31. 63. Chamisso, A Voyage around the World, 190. “Ist einmal eine recht handgreifliche Abgeschmacktheit zu Papier gebracht, so rollt selbige unablässig von

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Notes to Pages 63–66

Buch zu Buch, und es ist das erste, wonach die Büchermacher greifen. Solange noch Bücher geschrieben werden, wird in jedem, wo sie nur Platz finden kann, die Albernheit zu lesen sein, dass die Eingebornen der Marianen-​oder Ladronen-​ Inseln den Gebrauch des Feuers erst durch die Europäer kennen gelernt.” Chamisso, Reise um die Welt, 279. Chapter 3 1. “Das Land war noch so weit entfernt, und der Sturm so heftig, daß Jederman es für unmöglich hielt, die Küste zu erreichen. Indeß thaten sie doch ihr möglichstes durch Rudern, und der Wind trieb sie glücklicher Weise Landwärts. Plötzlich sahen sie eine berghohe Welle dem Bote nachrauschen. Alle erstarten vor dem schrecklichen Anblikke, und liessen die Ruder fallen. Jezt, jezt nahete der schrekliche Augenblick heran! Die ungeheure Welle erreichte das Boot; das Boot schlug um, und—­alle versanken im wüthenden Meere!” Joachim Heinrich Campe, Robinson der Jüngere, zur angenehmen und nützlichen Unterhaltung für Kinder (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), 45. All of the English translations in this chapter are mine. 2. “Es gab einst eine Periode in der deutschen Literatur, wo das nie ruhende Bedürfniß der literarischen Unterhaltung und die Thätigkeit der Schriftsteller sich über diese Dichtungsart mit eben der unermüdlichen Emsigkeit herwarf, als späterhin die Sündfluthen der empfindsamen Geschichten der Ritter-​, Geister-​ und Räuber-​Romane auf eine Zeit lang über alle Uferdämme empor zu schwellen drohten. Durch das Vorbild von Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in Bewegung gesetzt, regnete es mehrere Decennien des verfloßenen Jahrhunderts hindurch Robinsone ohne Zahl.” Johann Christian Ludwig Haken, Bibliothek der Robinsone: In zweckmässigen Auszügen vom Verfasser der Grauen Mappe, 4 vols. (Berlin: J. F. Unger, 1805–­8), i–­ii. 3. See Wilhelm Retchir, Der sächsische Robinson, oder Wilhelm Retchirs, eines gebohrnen Sachsens, wahrhafftige Beschreibung seiner in die acht und zwantzig Jahr von Leipzig aus, durch Holland, Engeland, Franckreich, Spanien, Portugall, die Barbarey, Griechenland, Servien, und Ungarn gethanen Reisen (Leipzig: Friedrich Lanckischens Erben, 1748), 2. 4. Ullrich differentiates three types of Robinsonades—­new editions of Robinson Crusoe (Bearbeitung), real and false Robinsonades. Ullrich argues that the false Robinsonades have nothing to do with Defoe’s novel but merely put Robinson in their title in order to sell well. But the editions sometimes involve significant changes of Defoe’s original. Therefore, it is difficult to draw a fine line between these three categories. According to Ullrich’s statistics, there were fifty-​seven editions of Robinson Crusoe by 1895. By 1900, Robinson Crusoe was translated numerous times into Dutch, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Polish, Spanish, Arabic, Greek, Hungarian, Hebrew, Persian; it was translated forty-​nine times into French, and twenty-​two into German. See Hermann Ullrich, Robinson und Robinsonaden: Bibliographie, Geschichte, Kritik (Weimar: Verlag von Emil Felber, 1898). Also see Jürgen Fohrmann, Abenteuer und Bürgertum: Zur Geschichte der deutschen Robinsonaden im 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1981). 5. As Bethany Wiggin observes, in the history of the European novel, the German Roman turned from the French romance to the English novel, especially Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, as its primary generic model after 1720. Robinsonades

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are thus also an important development in the history of the German Roman. See Bethany Wiggin, Novel Translations: The European Novel and the German Book, 1680–­1730, Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library, 2011). 6. See August Kippenberg, Robinson in Deutschland bis zur Insel Felsenburg (Hanover: Th. Schäfer, 1892). 7. See Srinivas Aravamudan, “East-​West Fiction as World Literature: The Hayy Problem Reconfigured,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies 47, no. 2 (2014). Also see Samar Attar, The Vital Roots of European Enlightenment: Ibn Tufayl’s Influence on Modern Western Thought (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2007). 8. Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, 36–­39. 9. See Eberhard Werner Happel, Der insulanische Mandorell ist eine geographische historische und politische Beschreibung aller und jeder Insulen auff dem gantzen Erd-​Boden; vorgestellt in einer anmühtigen und wohlerfundenen Liebes-​ und Helden-​Geschichte: Worbey auch sonsten allerhand schöne Discurse und Materien, insonderheit der Uhrsprung der so genanten Romanen, gründlich und in einer guten teutschen Redens-​Arth an und außgeführet werden (Hamburg and Frankfurt: Zacharias Hertel und Marthes Weyrauchs Erben, 1682), Dedicatio. 10. See Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010). 11. Like Kippenberg, the Goethe biographer Nicholas Boyle reads Johann Gottfried Schnabel’s Wunderliche Fata einiger See-​Fahrer, absonderlich Alberti Julii . . . (Wonderful Stories of Some Seamen, especially Albert Julius . . . , 1731–­ 43) as a metaphor for the German social order in the eighteenth century. Also known as Insel Felsenburg (Fastness Island) after Ludwig Tieck’s editing in the early nineteenth century, literary historians generally consider Schnabel’s novel the most significant example of German Robinsonades. This novel, often compared to Thomas More’s Utopia, describes an island state as an alternative community to the religious, social, and political constraints in common European principalities. Boyle argues: “The fastness Felsenburg, like Prussia, opens its arms to the persecuted from every corner of Germany, and beyond, and incorporates them into a rationally ordered Lutheran patriarchy. That this is situated on an island in the South Seas might seem no more than a poetic convenience. But we are indeed dealing with a genuine local variant of the Robinson Crusoe theme.” Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, vol. 1 of The Poetry of Desire (1749–­1790) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 16. 12. See Fohrmann, Abenteuer und Bürgertum, 37, 210, 216. 13. Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–­1870 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 105–­6. 14. Zantop is right to point out that Campe’s education project prepares the Germans to become colonizers. It is also true that Robinson claims the island as his own. The father’s idea that people can claim lands as their own where no others live also ignores the culture of the islanders. This idea certainly served as an effective justification for European colonization, like the order of British Admiralty for Cook discussed in chapter 1. However, we also notice that Robinson in the end abandons the island and returns to Hamburg with his best friend. The aspect of colonization does not play an essential role in the novel. Since Campe’s novel consults with travel writings, this work also registers the general European

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colonial practice in the eighteenth century. Hence I would not give greater weight to this element of colonization, which was mentioned in passing, than the long passages on handicrafts, survival, and friendship. Robinson der Jüngere makes clear Freitag’s indispensable contributions to Robinson’s survival. 15. Cohen, The Novel and the Sea, 76. 16. Cohen quotes Jacques Rivière to illustrate that the quintessential poetics of adventure stories, in contrast to historical novels that recount events in the past, lie in the movement toward the future. The temporality in adventure stories always implies future prospects, even if the future is related to an imagined past. Cohen argues that this narrative futurity illuminates why Robinson Crusoe “has been hospitable to sequels, both by Defoe and by subsequent writers—­as is adventure fiction more generally.” This statement of futurity helps explain the huge quantity of German Robinsonades. Ibid., 74. 17. After adapting Robinson Crusoe, Campe further engaged in appropriating three adventure stories of “discovering” the Americas for pedagogical purposes. The trilogy Die Entdeckung von Amerika (The Discovery of the Americas, 1782), containing Columbus; or The Discovery of America, Cortez; or the Conquest of Mexico and Pizarro; or the Conquest of Peru, is “related by a father to his children, and designed for the instruction of youth.” Campe explicitly claims in his foreword to the America trilogy that travel narratives perform the function of “forming the character of a young man, enlarging without fatigue or disgust the sphere of his observation upon men and manners, and of arming him betimes against those romantic reveries which the fashionable books of the present age appear solicitous to inculcate.” Apparently, Krusoe Robinson’s journey equips him with handicraft skills and a transcultural consciousness, which are necessary for construing the subjectivity of generations to come. The German transcultural consciousness in Campe’s case has a strong emphasis on practical knowledge as the means of self-​assertion in the ever enlarging and changing world in the eighteenth century. Robinson’s shipwreck is not the dreadful ending but the hopeful beginning of a new double consciousness. For the German original text, see Joachim Heinrich Campe, Columbus; or, The Discovery of America: As Related by a Father to his Children, and Designed for the Instruction of Youth [Entdeckung von Amerika: Kolumbus], trans. Elizabeth Helme, 2 vols., vol. 1 (London: Sampson Low, 1799), xii. Joachim Heinrich Campe, “Die Entdeckung von Amerika,” in Sämmtliche Kinder-​und Jugendschriften (Braunschweig: Verlag der Schulbuchhandlung, 1831), v. 18. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 171. 19. Ibid., 171–­72. 20. “Fundamentale Wandlung im Verstehen der Welt und in den darin implizierten Erwartungen, Einschätzungen und Sinngebungen.” Hans Blumenberg, Geistesgeschichte der Technik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009), 103. 21. See ibid., 102–­3. 22. See ibid., 133. 23. See ibid., 106. 24. Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, “Emile or On Education,” in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2010), 332.

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25. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches, 8th ed. (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1909), 3–­4. 26. See Michelle H. Phillips, “Children of Double Consciousness: From The Souls of Black Folk to the Brownies’ Book,” PMLA 128, no. 3 (2013): 591. 27. Ibid., 604, 605. 28. “Er dachte sich bei dieser Spur keinen gesitteten Europäer; sondern einen wilden menschenfressenden Kannibalen, deren es damahls, wie ihr schon wißt, auf den Karibischen Inseln sol gegeben haben.” Campe, Robinson der Jüngere, 185. 29. “Zu seiner eigenen Sicherheit must’ er’s thun.” Ibid., 201. 30. “Wild oder gesittet thut hier nichts zur Sache.” Ibid., 200. 31. “Es ward also beschlossen, daß Allen ohne Ausnahme, eine freie Religionsübung zugestanden werden solte, fals sie, nach erhaltenem Unterrichte, nicht selbst für gut finden solten, einen und eben denselben Glauben anzunehmen.” Ibid., 309. 32. “In Afrika also, wo die Mohren wohnen, sind die meisten Menschen noch so roh und ungesittet, wie das liebe Vieh. Ihre Anführer oder Könige, die selbst nicht viel klüger sind, gehen dan auch mit ihnen um, als wenn sie wirkliches Vieh wären. Wenn nun die Europäer dahin kommen, so bietet man ihnen ganze Heerden solcher schwarzen Menschen zum Verkauf an, recht so wie man hier die Ochsen zu Markte bringt. Viele Väter führen auch wohl ihre eigene Kinder herbei, um sie für eine Kleinigkeit los zu werden; und da kaufen denn die Europäer alle Jahr eine Menge derselben und führen sie nach Amerika, wo sie die härteste Arbeit verrichten müssen und dabei recht jämmerlich gehalten werden. Ein solcher Sklav (so nennt man sie) ist dan recht schlim daran, und wünschte oft lieber zu sterben, als so zu leben.” Ibid., 281. 33. “Robinson wusste gar nicht, was er vor Freude alles angeben solte. Bald sprang er, bald jauchzt’ er, bald fiel er seinem Freitag in die Arme und bat hin, mit hellen Freudentränen in den Augen, daß er sich doch auch freuen mögte! Nun ging’ es nach Europa; nun nach Hamburg! Da solt’ er einmahl sehen, wie man in Hamburg lebte! Was für Häuser da die Menschen bauen könten! Wie bequem, wie ruhig, wie angenehm man da sein Leben hinbrächte!” Ibid., 259–­60. 34. “Er hob den zitternden Freitag liebreich auf, umarmte ihn, bat ihn, sich nicht zu fürchten.” Ibid., 273. 35. “In meinen Armen, lieber Herr!” Ibid., 284. 36. “Und nun gab es eine rührende Scene, indem Robinson seinem Erretter dankte, und dieser nicht wuste, was er vor Freuden über die Wiederkehr seines geliebten Herrn ins Leben alles vornehmen solte.” Ibid. 37. “Er fiel Freitag, welcher schlummernd auf einer Grasbank saß, um den Hals, drückte ihn, und benetzte, ohne ein Wort hervor bringen zu können, sein Gesicht mit vielen Tränen. ‘Was is dir, lieber Herr?’ fragte Freitag, indem er sich ermunterte, und über die ungestümen Liebkosungen, die ihm widerfuhren, ganz erschrekt war. Aber Robinson konte im Uebermaaß seiner Freude weiter nichts hervorbringen, als: ach, Freitag!” Ibid., 335. 38. Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 83. 39. Ibid.

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Chapter 4 1. For more details about Kotzebue’s dramas, see Johannes Birgfeld, Julia Bohnengel, and Alexander Košenina, ed. Kotzebues Dramen: Ein Lexikon (Hanover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2011). 2. See Jörg F. Meyer, Verehrt. Verdammt. Vergessen: August von Kotzebue, Werk und Wirkung (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2005), 9–­10. 3. See L. F. Thompson, Kotzebue: A Survey of his Progress in France, and England, Preceded by a Consideration of the Critical Attitude to Him in Germany (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1928); Jenny Broekman de Vries, “Kotzebue on the American Stage 1798–­1840” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1972); Arthur Eloesser, Das bürgerliche Drama: Seine Geschichte im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Verlag von Wilhelm Hertz, 1898). 4. See Charles Brockden Brown, “Kotzebue,” Monthly Magazine and American Review 1, no. 1 (April 1799): 76, 78. I am grateful that Michelle Burnham pointed out Brown’s review to me. 5. See August von Kotzebue, Selbstbiographie (Vienna: Im Verlag bey Catharina Gräffer und Comp., 1811), 3–­4. Kotzebue describes his predilection for Defoe’s novel and the Robinsonades: “Bis Robinson Crusoe mir aufstieß, dieser Wundermann, der mich, wie jeden Knaben, mit unwiderstehlicher Gewalt an sich riß, den ich geiziger verwahrte, als mein bestes Spielzeug; mit dem ich oft den sogenannten rothen Gang, auf die Schwelle des Pferdestalles floh, um fern von der Trommel meiner Gespielen, ungestört mit ihm auf die Ziegenjagd zu gehen. . . . Die Insel Felsenburg galt freylich viel bey mir . . . . Insel, und besonders wüste Insel, war damahls ein Zauberwort für mich, an welches sich eine Reihe lieblicher Bilder knüpfte.” 6. George Williamson, “What Killed August von Kotzebue? The Temptations of Virtue and the Political Theology of German Nationalism 1789–­1819,” Journal of Modern History 72 (December 2000). 7. See Peter Kaeding, August von Kotzebue: Auch ein deutsches Dichterleben (Berlin: Union Verlag, 1985). The biography offers an elegantly written account of Kotzebue’s turbulent life in literature and politics. 8. See Frithjof Stock, Kotzebue im literarischen Leben der Goethezeit (Düsseldorf: Bertelsmann Universitätsverlag, 1971), 9–­14; Peter Nusser, Trivialliteratur 91; Karl S. Guthke, Das deutsche bürgerliche (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991), 88–­ Trauerspiel, 6th ed. (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2006), 120–­21; Markus Krause, “Trivialdramatik,” in Zwischen Revolution und Restauration: Klassik, Romantik, 1786–­1815, ed. Horst Albert Glaser (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980), 313–­26; Lothar Fietz, “Zur Genese des englischen Melodramas aus der Tradition der bürgerlichen Tragödie und des Rührstücks: Lillo-​Schröder-​Kotzebue-​Sheridan-​Thompson-​Jerrold,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 65 (1991). 9. See Eloesser, Das bürgerliche Drama; Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel 121; Thomas Koebner, der Öffentlichkeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1962), 90–­ “Zum Streit für und wider die Schaubühne im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Festschrift für Rainer Gruenter, ed. Bernhard Fabian (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1978); Rüdi Graf, Das Theater im Literaturstaat: Literarisches Theater auf dem Weg zur Bildungsmacht (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992). Indeed, the problem with the audience, the effects of theater and literature at large in the newly

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established bourgeois public sphere in eighteenth-​century Europe, proves to be one of the core concerns in the intellectual debate of that time. Simply speaking, there are two parties: one party, including Jean-​Jacques Rousseau in his Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur les spectacles (1758) and the Church Fathers, condemns theater as a dangerous institution that leads to moral corruptions and social unrest; the other party, represented by Gottsched, Diderot, and Lessing, defends theater as a special realm that is able to present a model of civil society, to criticize the corrupted morals, and to educate the public. Theater, and works of art at large, is conceptualized as an instrument and evaluated by its effects on the audience. Wirkungsästhetik is the key word to summarize this trend. The two parties claim authority either from Plato’s antitheatricalism or from Aristotle’s promotion of theater with its effect of catharsis, the cleansing of the soul. 10. See Christa Bürger, “Literarischer Markt und Öffentlichkeit am Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland,” in Aufklärung und literarische Öffentlichkeit, ed. Peter Bürger Christa Bürger, and Jochen Schulte-​ Sasse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980). 11. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1986), 678. 12. Stock, Kotzebue im literarischen Leben der Goethezeit, 133–­70. 13. See Leif Ludwig Albertsen, “Internationaler Zeitfaktor Kotzebue: Trivialisierung oder sinnvolle Entliterarisierung und Entmoralisierung des strebenden Bürgers im Frühliberalismus,” Sprachkunst 9 (1978); Rolf Haubl, “Trivialität Kotzebues: Psychohistorische Anmerkungen,” Sprachkunst 13 (1982); Gert Ueding, Klassik und Romantik: Deutsche Literatur im Zeitalter der französischen Revolution 1789–­1815 (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1987), 313–­16. Martha Woodmansee argues that Schiller’s program of aesthetic education (ästhetische Bildung) has a condescending attitude toward the large body of readers and audiences, which, Haubl shows, was questioned and criticized by the generation of Junges Deutschland. Woodmansee considers Schiller’s economic unsuccessfulness on the literary market a major cause for the Schillerian exclusive “art of the ideal.” Kotzebue’s and other writers’ orientation toward the people is rewarded with material wealth. Therefore the high ideal of the literary elites proves to be a self-​justifying reaction to the mass orientation and financial success of popular writers like Kotzebue, August Wilhelm Iffland, or Gottfried August Bürger. See Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 57–­86. 14. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977); Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993); Robert S. Leventhal, ed., Reading after Foucault: Institutions, Disciplines, and Technologies of the Self in Germany, 1750–­1830 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993); Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1995); Aníbal Quijano, “The Coloniality of Power and Social Classification,” Journal of World-​Systems Research 2 (2000): 343. Quijano argues: “Since the 18th century, and above all with the Enlightenment, the mythological idea that Europe predated this model of power has been continuously affirmed—­i.e., that it was already the global center of capitalism, and that it colonized the rest of the world and elaborated modernity and rationality on its own initiative and from within. Hence, Europe

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and the Europeans represented the highest level and the most advanced moment of the linear, unidirectional, and continuous progress of the species.” 15. For similar approaches, see Belcher, Abyssinia’s Samuel Johnson: Belcher proposes a new model of transcultural intertextuality and demonstrates how Habesha culture in Africa coconstitutes British literature, in particular the fictional works of Samuel Johnson. 16. August von Kotzebue, Die Negersklaven: Ein historisch-​ dramatisches Gemälde, vol. 5 of Theater von August von Kotzebue (Vienna and Leipzig: Verlag von Ignaz Klang and Eduard Kummer, 1840), 157. Also see Christian Degn, Die Schimmelmanns im atlantischen Dreieckshandel: Gewinn und Gewissen (Neumünster: Karl Wachholtz Verlag, 1974); Catharina Lüden, Sklavenfahrt mit Seeleuten aus Schleswig-​Holstein, Hamburg und Lübeck im 18. Jahrhundert (Heide: Westholsteinische Verlagsanstalt Boyens & Co., 1983). 17. Garlieb Merkel, “Die Letten, vorzüglich in Liefland, am Ende des philosophischen Jahrhunderts,” in Freimütiges aus den Schriften Garlieb Merkels, ed. Horst Adameck (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1959). Merkel’s polemic (1796), which made him well known among German-​speaking intellectuals, describes in detail the living hell of the Latvian peasants and calls for an improvement of the bondage system in Latvia according to Enlightenment standards. 18. See Horst Albert Glaser, Das bürgerliche Rührstück: Analekten zum Zusammenhang von Sentimentalität mit Autorität in der trivialen Dramatik Schröders, Ifflands, Kotzebues und anderer Autoren am Ende des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1969); Fietz, “Zur Genese des englischen Melodramas.” 19. “Trauerspiele, die einen höheren Grad hervorbringen, wie es deren wohl Einige giebt, werden nur von Wenigen besucht, zum Beweis, daß der Dichter nicht den besten Weg wählt, der unsere Herzen durch Sturm erobern will.” August von Kotzebue, Fragmente über Recensenten-​Unfug (Leipzig: Paul Gotthelf Kummer, 1797), 128. 20. “Es ist hohe Zeit, dass die deutsche Bühne wieder ein neues Geschenk aus den Händen der dramatischen Muse empfange, denn die Quelle der brauchbaren Schauspiele, besonders der Trauerspiele, fängt an ganz zu versiechen, und die Theater-​Direktionen sind darum sehr in Verlegenheit. Ihr neuestes Produkt wird wieder aufhelfen, lassen Sie mich also nicht länger darauf warten, verehrungswürdiger Mann!” Wilhelm von Kotzebue, August von Kotzebue: Urtheile der Zeitgenossen und der Gegenwart (Dresden: Wilhelm Baensch Verlagshandlung, 1881), 90–­91 (my italics). 21. “Ein Schauspiel würkt entweder auf die Sinne, durch äußern Prunk, Feereyen, Turniere, Gespenster, Soldaten, Decorationen, Gesang und Musik; oder auf den Verstand, durch Lebensphilosophie, Sentenzen und Reflexionen; oder auf das Herz, durch Schilderung edler Züge, rührender Situationen, häuslichen Glücks, unterdrückter Rechtschaffenheit u. s. w. Eine vierte Art der Würkung kenne ich nicht. . . . Erfahre ich hingegen: das Stück wird gespielt ohne Sang und Klang; es kommen weder Ritter noch Geister darin vor; so schließe ich daraus, und nie mit Unrecht, es müsse auf den Verstand, mehr aber noch auf das Herz würken. (Denn den blos verständigen oder geistreichen Stücken geht es wie Goethes Iphigenie, Hubers heimlichen Gericht u. s. w., man erkennt ihren Werth, aber man sieht sie nicht oft, weil die Genüsse der Vernunft weniger reizend sind, als die des Gefühls, und weil Bewunderung immer kalt bleibt.) In solchen Fällen

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also ist mir der Enthusiasmus des Publikums ehrwürdig.” Kotzebue, Fragmente über Recensenten-​Unfug, 53–­54. 22. The notion of theatricality accurately reflects the splendorous performativity of Kotzebue’s plays. Theatricality, meaning conscious beholding and referring to a beholder’s “dislocation and estrangement” rather than “absorption, sympathy, and self-​transcendence,” is heavily charged with reproaches and disapproval by Diderot, Lessing, and Goethe. Absorption, according to Michael Fried’s study on Diderot’s critique of paintings, is the counterpower of this distractive theatricality and conceptualizes a state of natural performance, as if the spectators were not there. It denotes concentration, a natural expression of the self, and a modest and ordinary humanity. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 104. 23. See Vries, “Kotzebue on the American Stage 1798–­1840,” 70–­72; Kotzebue, August von Kotzebue, 91. 24. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 15. 25. Ibid., 35–­36. 26. See Fietz, “Zur Genese des englischen Melodramas.” Sigrid Köhler also points out the strong emotion and melodramatic traits in Kotzebue’s Die Negersklaven. See Sigrid Köhler, “Beautiful Black Soul? The Racial Matrix of White Aesthetics (Reading Kotzebue against Kleist),” Image and Narrative 14, no. 3 (2013). See also Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou, eds., Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996); Frank Kelleter, Barbara Krah, and Ruth Mayer, eds., Melodrama! The Mode of Excess from Early America to Hollywood (Heidelberg: Winter, 2007). 27. For a detailed account of sentimentalism, see Gerhard Sauder, Empfindsamkeit (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1974). 28. Catherine J. Minter points out that the criticism of Empfindsamkeit is immediately connected to mental illness: the emotional excess is seen as a symptom of nervous sickliness. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (The Sandman, 1817) can be read in this context as a destructing critique of the subjective self-​ indulgence of emotions toward a cold and manipulated robot through the optical, i.e., cheating, attraction. See Catherine J. Minter, “Literary ‘Empfindsamkeit’ and Nervous Sensibility in Eighteenth-​Century Germany,” Modern Language Review 96 (2001). 29. Williamson, “What Killed August von Kotzebue?,” 901. 30. Ibid., 911. 31. See Vanessa Smith, “Performance Anxieties: Grief and Theatre in European Writing on Tahiti,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies 41, no. 2 (Winter 2008). 32. See Friedrich Schiller, Über die tragische Kunst, Friedrich Schiller: Theoretische Schriften (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992). 33. See Friedrich Schiller, Gedanken über den Gebrauch des Gemeinen und Niedrigen in der Kunst, Friedrich Schiller: Theoretische Schriften (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992). In Lessing’s Emilia Galotti (1772), the seduced heroine lets her father drive a dagger through her heart in order to die with honor and a pure reputation. The act of killing transcends the morally low seduction.

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The strength of a powerful will conquers the weakness of the human heart. Kant also confirms in his Lectures on Ethics that death is better than living with disgrace after a discreditable action. 34. See Schiller’s essays Vom Erhabenen (1793); Über die tragische Kunst (1792); and Gedanken über den Gebrauch des Gemeinen und Niedrigen in der Kunst (1802). Schiller’s concept of tragedy draws on Kant’s concept of the sublime in his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). According to Kant, sublimity is not a quality of an object but a subjective feeling (Gemüt) empowered by reason (Ideen der Vernunft). Schiller stresses the function of imagination (Einbildungskraft) in arousing the feeling of sublimity. He explains that a real disaster is actually beyond aesthetic pleasure (ästhetischem Genuß). If we know the catastrophe is fictional or illusory, only then is the tragic able to ignite the imagination and arouse the feeling of the sublime. 35. See Schiller, Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne wirken, in Friedrich Schiller: Theoretische Schriften, ed. Rolf-​Peter Janz (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992), 275. 36. “Das ist gesund, .  .  .  das müßt ihr essen.” Kotzebue, Fragmente über Recensenten-​Unfug, 17. 37. See Schiller, Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne wirken, 190. 38. See ibid., 193. 39. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 16. 40. “Meine Einbildungskraft ging mit ihr zur See, schuf interessante Situationen, und verlor sich in das Gebiet der Möglichkeiten.” August von Kotzebue, Vorbericht zu Der Graf von Burgund, vol. 6 of Theater (Vienna and Leipzig: Verlag von Ignaz Klang and Eduard Kummer, 1840), 138. 41. “Dich täuschen wäre Niederträchtigkeit, du kannst in Europa mein Weib nicht sein.” August von Kotzebue, La Peyrouse, in Schauspiele (Frankfurt: Athenäum Verlag, 1972), 311. 42. “Gesundheit, Kraft, Lust zu arbeiten, und ein Stück Land, das die Sonne bescheint und der Regen netzt—­ich denke, wir sind noch immer reich.” Ibid., 322. 43. “Ueberall enthalten sie [Kotzebues Dramen] ein wahres Lebens-​und Sittensystem! So lehrte mich anfangs Benjowski einem einzigen Weibe treu zu sein; darauf zeigte mir La Peyrouse, daß es so böse nicht sey, allenfalls mit zweien sich einzulassen.” Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann, Freimüthigkeiten: Ein Seitenstück zu den Expektorazionen und zugleich ein blöder Mitbewerber um den vom Herrn v. Kotzebue ausgesetzten Preis für das best Lustspiel (Lüneburg: Abdera, 1803), 16–­17. Cited from Stock, Kotzebue im literarischen Leben der Goethezeit, 77. 44. Kotzebue, August von Kotzebue, 95. 45. “Allein bei aufmerksamer Betrachtung kam zur Sprache, daß nach unsern Sitten, die ganz eigentlich auf Monogamie gegründet sind, das Verhältnis eines Mannes zu zwei Frauen, besonders wie es hier zur Erscheinung kommt, nicht zu vermitteln sei und sich daher vollkommen zur Tragödie qualifiziere.” Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Über das deutsche Theater, vol. 6 of Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Werke (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), 1207. 46. “Das Stück nahm eine tragische Wendung und endigte auf eine Weise, die das Gefühl befriedigt und die Rührung erhöht.” Ibid. (my italics).

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47. Frank Kelleter and Ruth Mayer, “The Melodramatic Mode Revisited: An Introduction,” in Melodrama! The Mode of Excess from Early America to Hollywood, ed. Barbara Krah, Frank Kelleter, and Ruth Mayer (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007), 10. 48. See Isabel V. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–­ 1815 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996). 49. Toril Moi points out the close correlation between the representation of human sexuality and the ideal of a pure woman: “For thinkers like Kant and Schiller, women incarnate human sexuality. In order to lift them above the mere animal stage, poetry and painting need to idealize them far more intensively than they do men; they need, in short, to create the figure of the pure woman, which will become an icon of idealist aesthetics.” Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 80. 50. “Bruder Moritz, oder der Sonderling, ist, als Charakterstück betrachtet, nicht treffend und ausgezeichnet genug; . . . Viel Romanhaftes ist in dem Stück, und daher befremdet denn freylich, am Ende der romanhafte Entschluß der spielenden Personen weniger, Abentheurer zu werden, und nach den Pelewinseln zu schiffen.” Anonymous, “Bruder Moritz, der Sonderling, oder die Colonie für die Pelewinseln; ein Lustspiel,” Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek 111 (1792): 111. 51. The first sentence of C. H. Schmid’s review of Bruder Moritz reads: “Das Hauptsujet dieses Stücks ist ein Kammermädchen von niedriger Abkunft, in das sich Graf Moritz von Eldingen verliebt, und das er heirathet, ohnerachtet sie ihm selbst gesteht, ein Kind ausser der Ehe erzeugt zu haben.” C. H. Schmid, “Ueber die Moralität von den Schauspielen des Herrn von Kotzebue,” Journal von und für Deutschland 8, no. 11 (1791): 930. 52. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–­1815, 101. 53. See ibid., 30–­31. 54. “Wunder dulden wir da nur in der physikalischen Welt; in der moralischen muß alles seinen ordentlichen Lauf behalten, weil das Theater die Schule der moralischen Welt sein soll.” Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, vol. 6 of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Werke 1767–­1769 (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), 191–­92. 55. “Wenn er’s [Omar] verlangt, so bin ich sein Knecht, du seine Köchin, Nettchen seine Wäscherin und Julchen seine Magd. . . . Er ist mein einziger Erbe. Sein ist alles was mein war. Auch meine Schwester vermach ich ihm, und will er nach meinem Tode euer Bruder sein, so habt ihr keinen Bruder verloren. . . . Ehrt mich in ihm, er ist mein Bruder, und ich leide kein Vornehmtun auf irgendeiner Nase.” August von Kotzebue, Bruder Moritz, der Sonderling, oder: Die Colonie für die Pelew-​Inseln, vol. 3 of Theater von August von Kotzebue (Vienna and Leipzig: Verlag von Ignaz Klang and Eduard Kummer, 1840), 97–­98. 56. The notion of hybridity in postcolonial scholarship critiques the conception of a stable and pure cultural identity. Homi K. Bhabha promotes the notion of hybridity as a “Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same sign can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew.” Homi K. Bhabha, “The

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Commitment to Theory,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 54–­55. 57. The books of Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (or Thousand and One Nights) were one of the most popular works in the print culture in eighteenth-​ century Europe. “The Nights was published in 445 installments over three years. As late as 1785, Novelist magazine again serialized Robinson Crusoe and the complete Galland translation of the Nights. General Magazine, Lady’s Magazine and Monthly Extracts continued to feed the demand by publishing extracts from the Nights.” Srinivas Aravamudan sees the Nights as the text that enables us to redefine national literature and reconsider the boundaries between different genres because it functions as a socioliterary shifter. See Srinivas Aravamudan, “In the Wake of the Novel: The Oriental Tale as National Allegory,” Novel: A Forum for Fiction 33, no. 1 (1999): 11; Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism. 58. Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 122. 59. See Irene Hardach-​Pinke, “Managing Girls’ Sexuality among the German Upper Classes,” in Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills: Placing Girls in European History, 1750–­1960, ed. Birgitte Søland, Mary Jo Maynes, and Christina Benninghaus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). 60. Lutz D. H. Sauerteig, “Sex Education in Germany From the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century,” in Sexual Cultures in Europe: Themes in Sexuality, ed. Lesley Hall, Franz X. Eder, and Gert Hekma (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1999). 61. “Ich fange an, mich selbst wieder hochzuachten.” Kotzebue, Bruder Moritz, der Sonderling, 3:149–­50. 62. Tomoko Masuzawa argues convincingly that the European taxonomy of four basic religious beliefs in the world, established in the late eighteenth century, actually reflects the partition of cultural spheres. It is a classification of peoples based on the differences of social customs the Europeans define as religions. The various discussions on world religions or what is the true religion from the late eighteenth century to the nineteenth century indicate European intellectuals’ search for their own cultural identity between the legacy of Christianity, the discourse of modernity and rationality, and the existence of cultural or religious otherness. See Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 63. While Diderot’s text has been celebrated either as one of the seminal works of Enlightenment political legacy or as an eloquent critique against colonial exploitations, Kotzebue’s drama with a similar message should also deserve more scholarly attention. See Denis Diderot, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), xv–­xxi; Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire; David Fausett, Images of the Antipodes in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Stereotyping (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), 136–­48; Dena Goodman, Criticism in Action: Enlightenment Experiments in Political Writing (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). Muthu interestingly argues that Diderot’s depiction of Tahiti subverts the basic idea of the “noble savage” forged by Montaigne, Lahontan, and Rousseau and embraces the European and non-​European human beings into one ideal society.

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64. Denis Diderot, “Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage,” in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-​Century France, ed. Michel Feher (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 98–­99. 65. See Ralph Rainer Wuthenow, “Inselglück: Reise und Utopie in der Literatur des XVIII. Jahrhunderts,” in Utopieforschung, ed. Wilhelm Voßkamp (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985). In this article, Wuthenow has shown the influence of travel literature on literary imagination in the eighteenth century. Holberg’s Nicolai Klims unterirdische Reise (1741) and Knigge’s Traum des Herrn Brick are important examples here. 66. Immanuel Kant, “Physical Geography,” in Natural Science, ed. Eric Watkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 522. 67. George Keate and Henry Wilson, An Account of the Pelew Islands Situated in the Great South Sea: Composed from the Journals of Capt. Henry Wilson, and his officers; who, in August, 1783, were there ship-​wrecked in the Antelope packet (New York: Printed by Tiebout & O’Brien, for Evert Duyckinck, and Co. booksellers and stationers, no. 110, Pearl-​Street, 1796), 67. 68. Fredric Jameson argues that More’s Utopia functions as a wish fulfillment in everyday life, a deeper unconsciousness saturated among a whole community of people. According to him, utopia does not envision a real social or cultural alternative to the existent one. Rather, “Utopia  .  .  . has a specifically aesthetic level, about which most of the literary critics have been singularly unhelpful, and eager to agree with the stereotypical boredom of the form; but what if there were also a level in which the text proves not only to be what Plekhanov called the ‘social equivalent,’ the correlative namely of ideology and of a class standpoint, but also a kind of gestural equivalent?” Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 34. Axel Dunker discusses the citation from Voltaire’s Candide in the final scene of emigration—­“cultivons notre champs”—­and points out that Moritz’s colonial plan also has a strong utopian quality and an ideological openness. See Axel Dunker, “ ‘Wir stiften eine Colonie’ oder ‘Cultivons notre Champ!’: August von Kotzebue in postkolonialer Sicht,” in Von Kotzebue bis Fleming: Sprach-​, Literatur-​und Kulturkontakt im Baltikum, ed. Mari Tarvas (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012). 69. See Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic 1750–­1900 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973). Along with the rising interests in explaining the natural and anthropological differences between Europe and the other parts of the world, thinkers such as Buffon, Bacon, Hume, Cornelius de Pauw, and others articulated positive or negative opinions on the nature and native peoples in the Americas and induced pan-​European intellectual debates. De Pauw’s Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains ou Mémoires intéressants pour server à l’histoire de l’espèce humaine (1768) influentially justifies the colonial enslavement of the native peoples by categorizing them as neither animal nor “normal” human beings but as degenerated beings. This attribution makes them thus suitable for slavery. 70. See Lawrence Marsden Price, The Vogue of Marmontel on the German Stage, University of California Publications in Modern Philology, vol. 27 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1944), 87–­93. Adaptations include Freiherr von Schilson’s Die Wilden (1778), Wolfgang Heribert

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von Dalberg’s Cora (1780), Franz Joseph Marius von Babo’s Kora und Alonzo (1781), Johannes Heinrich Keerl’s Ataliba oder der Sturz der Incas (1788), and Joachim Perinet’s Kora die Sonnenjungfrau (1813). There are numerous other anonymous adaptations of Singspiel, ballet, and opera. Price also mentions that Kotzebue “attended the opera in the company of a certain lady. At the close of the performance she insisted that he should write on the subject, and this led to the composition of his five-​act Schauspiel, Die Sonnenjungfrau” (91). 71. See John Britton, Sheridan and Kotzebue: The Enterprising Adventures of Pizarro, preceded by a brief sketch of the voyages and discoveries of Columbus and Cortez: With biographical sketches of Sheridan and Kotzebue (London: published by J. Fairburn; sold by Hurst, and by West and Hughes; printed by H. L. Galabin, 1799). 72. See Price, The Vogue of Marmontel on the German Stage, 89, 92. Between 1790 and 1814, Die Sonnenjungfrau was performed thirty-​five times in Berlin; between 1790 and 1804, twenty-​five times in Mannheim; and between 1791 and 1816, fifty-​six times in Vienna. 73. The account of Spanish colonial brutality disseminated among other European communities is often referred to as the Black Legend, a product of inner European power dynamics. See Margaret Rich Greer, Walter Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, eds., Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 74. “Ich sehe zum Beyspiel nicht ein, warum man nicht gerade heraussagen dürfte: daß der Vater Papst den Spaniern Amerika durch eine Bulle geschenkt; daß er durch eine andere Bulle die Indianer für Menschen, und nicht Affen erklärt; daß man zu Ehre Christi und der zwölf Apostel dreyzehn Indianer aufgehangen; und was dergleichen mehr ist. Warum sollte man historische Thatsachen auf der Bühne verschweigen?” August von Kotzebue, Die Spanier in Peru, oder: Rollas Tod, vol. 4 of Theater von August von Kotzebue (Vienna and Leipzig: Ignaz Klang and Eduard Kummer, 1840), 208. 75. Las Casas’s critical account also strives to disseminate “true” Christianity and condemns the conquistadors’ “non-​Christian” deeds. Gonzalo Lamana argues that las Casas’s rebuke actually proves to be a critique that is limited by the assumption of the superiority of Christianity and its symbols. It thus does not “alter the basis of the argument in a fundamental way.” Although the Spanish Crown approved of las Casas’s rebukes, the justification of slavery and colonialism rebutting Las Casas, e.g., by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, was actually followed and put into practice in the Spanish colonies. See Bartolomé de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (London: Penguin, 1992); Gonzalo Lamana, “Of Books, Popes, and Huacas; or, The Dilemmas of Being Christian,” in Mignolo, Greer, and Quilligan, Rereading the Black Legend, 128. 76. Marmontel directly refers to las Casas’s book as the resource and inspiration for his romance: “’Tis in him [las Casas] that I have endeavoured to display the fruits of a lively faith, an exalted piety, a pure and tender zeal, in a word, of the true Christian spirit in its genuine simplicity” (xxx). The antagonism of this true Christian spirit is called by Marmontel fanaticism: “a spirit of intolerance and persecution, a spirit of hatred and vengeance, entertained on behalf of a Deity whom men suppose to be incensed, and whose ministers they pretend to

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make themselves” (xxi). Jean François Marmontel, The Incas or, the Destruction of the Empire of Peru, vol. 1 (Dublin: Printed for Messrs. Price, Whitestone, W. Watson, R. Cross, Sleater [and eighteen others in Dublin], 1777), xxix. 77. Marmontel himself agrees: “The Indians, weak by constitution, and temperate by habit, exempt from passions, almost without wants, relaxed by inactivity, looked upon the labours that were enjoined them as intolerable; their patience wore out, and became exhausted with their strength: Flight, their only safeguard, stole them from oppression.” Ibid., xii. 78. “Vernichtet sei das Gesetz! Cora frei!” August von Kotzebue, Die Sonnenjungfrau, vol. 2 of Theater von August von Kotzebue (Vienna and Leipzig: Ignaz Klang and Eduard Kummer, 1840), 117. The English translation is from August von Kotzebue, The Virgin of the Sun, a Play in Five Acts, trans. James Lawrence (London: R. Faulder, 1799), 112. 79. “Was fürchtest du? Ist Mutter werden ein Verbrechen? Gewiß nicht! Mein alter Vater hat mich immer gelehrt: wer ein Verbrechen begeht, dem ist nicht wohl zu Muthe! Und mir—­mir ist wohl!” Kotzebue, Die Sonnenjungfrau, 2:25; Kotzebue, The Virgin of the Sun, 20. 80. “Wem die Tugend heilig ist, der bedarf keines Gesetzes, er erfüllt ein jedes, ohne es zu wissen.—­Mir ist die Tugend heilig.” Kotzebue, Die Sonnenjungfrau, 2:25; Kotzebue, The Virgin of the Sun, 20. 81. “O ja! ja! sie ist auch dein Gott! sie scheint über uns alle! Sie gibt uns Nahrung und Licht und Wärme. . . . Undankbarer! wer gab dir Cora?—­Soll ich im Angesichte meines Gottes mich deiner schämen? Guter Alonzo, wenn du mich liebst.” Kotzebue, Die Sonnenjungfrau, 2:34; Kotzebue, The Virgin of the Sun, 29. 82. “Hast du vergessen, daß unser König ihm sein Leben verdankt? Daß er die Völker von Quito zum Schrecken ihrer Feinde machte, indem er sie in geschlossenen Gliedern fechten lehrte? daß er uns auch in mancher nützlichen Kunst des Friedens unterwiesen hat?” Kotzebue, Die Sonnenjungfrau, 2:65; Kotzebue, The Virgin of the Sun, 62. 83. Voltaire, Candide, or, Optimism, trans. Theo Cuffe (New York: Penguin, 2005), 14. 84. “Alles, was die Einbildungskraft sich Schreckliches vorstellen kann, muß man zusammen nehmen, um das Entsetzen sich einigermaßen vorzubilden, darin sich die Menschen befinden müssen, wenn die Erde unter ihren Füßen bewegt wird, wenn alles um sie her einstürzt.  .  .  . Eine solche Erzählung würde rührend sein, sie würde, weil sie eine Wirkung auf das Herz hat, vielleicht auch eine auf die Besserung desselben haben können. Allein ich überlasse diese Geschichte geschickteren Händen.” Immanuel Kant, Geschichte und Naturbeschreibung der merkwürdigsten Vorfälle des Erdbebens, welches an dem Ende des 1755sten Jahres einen großen Theil der Erde erschüttert hat, in Vorkritische Schriften I: 1747–­1756 (Berlin: Reimer, 1910), 434. 85. See Young, Colonial Desire. 86. Jean François Marmontel, The Incas or, the Destruction of the Empire of Peru, vol. 2 (Dublin: Printed for Messrs. Price, Whitestone, W. Watson, R. Cross, Sleater [and eighteen others in Dublin], 1777), 129–­40. 87. Cornelius de Pauw, Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains, ou Mémoires intéressants pour servir à l’histoire de l’espèce humaine, 2 vols. (Berlin: G. J. Decker, Imp. du roi, 1770).

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88. “O sendet mich vorher noch einmal zu den Feinden! läßt mich Worte des Friedens reden, unsere heilige Religion mit Sanftmuth predigen.” Kotzebue, Die Spanier in Peru, 4:223. 89. In a conversation between Valverde and a Peruvian, Valverde claims: “Wir bringen euch die einzige wahre Religion.” Ibid., 227. Studying the historical conditions and comparing the Spanish and the Peruvian accounts of the conquest, Gonzalo Lamana contends that “Peru’s conquerors’ way of self-​identifying was clearly a choice, not just the natural way of doing it. It did not respond to the Indians they were interacting with but was an attempt to shape the way in which they were perceived back home; their audiences were Spanish and European” See Lamana, “Of Books, Popes, and Huacas,” 123. 90. “Du taugst nicht unter diesen Menschen. Geh’ zu den sogenannten Wilden, dort wirst du deine Heimath finden.” Kotzebue, Die Spanier in Peru, 4:267. 91. A soldier reports that, while the Spaniards have almost won the battle, Rolla bravely and miraculously turns the defeat into triumph. See ibid., 248–­49. 92. “rolla: Lebe friedlich unter uns, diene deinem Gott, wie wir dem uns’rigen, sei der Tugend Freund, und du bist der Meinige. pizarro: Wenn ihr das schöne Ziel meiner Thaten, den Thron von Quito mir einräumt. rolla: Nun ist’s genug! Leb wohl!” Ibid., 297. 93. “Aber dieser Heide ist ein Held.” Ibid., 298. 94. Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 129. 95. See ibid., 132–­34. 96. Alonzo claims: “Sieh’, wie alles grünt und blüht, wie hier die Pflugschar unbebaute Felder durchwühlt, und dort eine reiche Saat unserer Hoffnung entgegenreift, das ist mein Werk. Sieh’, wie Zufriedenheit auf jeder Wange lächelt, weil Gerechtigkeit und Milde barbarische Gesetze tilgten, das ist mein Werk. Sieh’, wie schon hier und dort Einer und der Andere Blicke voll hoher Andacht emporhebt nach dem einzigen wahren Gott! das ist mein Werk. Und Las Casas würde mich in seine Arme schließen, und eine Thräne, sanfter Wehmuth voll, würde Segen auf mich herabträufeln. Begreifst du nun, wie man dem Tode lächelnd trotzen kann?” Kotzebue, Die Spanier in Peru, 4:266. 97. This refers to the memorable title of a coauthored book, The Empire Writes Back, a groundbreaking study in postcolonial criticism. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-​Colonial Literature (London: Routledge, 1989). 98. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 16. 99. Walter Benjamin’s concept of Vergrößerung (enlargement) is helpful in illustrating how Kotzebue’s dramas produce the melodramatic effects. Benjamin argues: “With the close-​up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. And just as enlargement not merely clarifies what we see indistinctly ‘in any case,’ but brings to light entirely new structures of matter, slow motion not only reveals familiar aspects of movements, but discloses quite unknown aspects within them—­aspects‚ which do not appear as the retarding of natural movements but have a curious gliding, floating character of their own.’ . . . It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.” Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings

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on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 37. Chapter 5 1. See the introduction in Hans Adler and Wulf Köpke, eds., A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2009). 2. Herder’s essays on the origin of language and the impact of literature on cultural identity clearly articulate the ideas, which are later taken to be nationalistic. Herder’s philosophy of history synthesizes all these nationalistic ideas within the realm of history. See Johann Gottfried Herder, Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache: Frühe Schriften 1764–­1772 (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985); Johann Gottfried Herder, Über die Wirkung der Dichtkunst auf die Sitten der Völker in alten und neuen Zeiten, vol. 4 of Johann Gottfried Herder: Schriften zu Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst und Altertum 1774–­1787 (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994). 3. See Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 77–­79. 4. See Cassirer, Die Philosophie der Aufklärung, 206–­44. 5. See Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 143; Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment; Gadamer, “Herder und die geschichtliche Welt,” 318–­35; Young, Colonial Desire, 36–­43. See also Renate Stauff, “Johann Gottfried Herder: Europäische Kulturtheorie zwischen historischer Eigenart und globaler Perspektive,” Germanisch-​Romanische Monatsschrift 57 (2007). 6. “Im Grunde also wird alle Vergleichung mißlich. . . . Jede Nation hat ihren Mittelpunkt der Glückseligkeit in sich, wie jede Kugel ihren Schwerpunkt.” Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, 35. This sentence is cited in Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, 189; Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 143; Cassirer, Die Philosophie der Aufklärung, 244; Gadamer, “Herder und die geschichtliche Welt,” 325; Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire, 223. 7. See Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire. 8. See Johann Gottfried Herder, Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, vol. 7 (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1991), 674. 9. See Immanuel Wallerstein, European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power (New York: New Press, 2006). 10. Sonia Sikka, Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference: Enlightened Relativism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 11. See Boris Barth and Jürgen Osterhammel, ed., Zivilisierungsmissionen: Imperiale Weltverbesserung seit dem 18. Jahrhundert (Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2005); Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, “The Color of Reason: The Idea of Race in Kant’s Anthropology,” in Anthropology and the German Enlightenment, ed. Katherine M. Faull (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1995); Denis Diderot, “Encyclopédie,” in The Portable Enlightenment Reader, ed. Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin, 1995). Diderot criticizes some “narrow-​minded” people, who are not willing to share their superior knowledge and enlightenment with others, admits the superior position of France in the earth, but insists that France ought to not only keep itself enlightened but to spread enlightenment all

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over the world. Thus he claims: “What is the good of divulging the knowledge a nation possesses, its private transactions, its inventions, its industrial processes, its resources, its trade secrets, its enlightenment, its arts, and all its wisdom? Are not these the things to which it owes a part of its superiority over the rival nations that surround it? This is what they say; and this is what they might add: would it not be desirable if, instead of enlightening the foreigner, we could spread darkness over him or even plunge all the rest of the world into barbarism so that we could dominate more securely over everyone? These people do not realize that they occupy only a single point on our globe and they will endure only a moment in its existence. To this point and to this moment they would sacrifice the happiness of future ages and that of the entire human race” (19). 12. See Herder, Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, 7:686. 13. See Johann Gottfried Herder, Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele: Bemerkungen und Träume, vol. 4 of Johann Gottfried Herder: Schriften zu Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst und Altertum 1774–­1787 (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994), 374. 14. See Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, 29. 15. Herder elaborates his theory of language and aesthetics in the essays Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache, Viertes Kritisches Wäldchen, and Über die Wirkung der Dichtkunst auf die Sitten der Völker in alten und neuen Zeiten. 16. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 449. 17. Ibid., 453. 18. Ibid., 10. 19. Ibid., 26. 20. Herder contends: “Wir empfinden nur, was unsre Nerven uns geben; darnach und daraus können wir auch nur denken.” Johann Gottfried Herder, “Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele: Bemerkungen und Träume,” in Johann Gottfried Herder: Schriften zu Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst und Altertum 1774–­1787, ed. Jürgen Brummack and Martin Bollacher (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994), 351. See Johann Gottlob Krüger, Naturlehre (Halle im Magdeburgischen: Carl Hermann Hemmerde, 1740), 781. 21. See Herder, Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele, 4:368. 22. “Denn es ist und bleibt wahr, daß wir unsern Nächsten nur wie uns selbst lieben. Sind wir uns untreu, wie werden wir andern treu sein? Im Grad der Tiefe unsres Selbstgefühls liegt auch der Grad des Mitgefühls mit andern: denn nur uns selbst können wir in andre gleichsam hinein fühlen.” Ibid., 361. 23. Herder writes: “Wie es eine allgemeine Menschenempfindung gibt, so muß es auch eine allgemeine Menschendenkart (sensus communis) geben.” Ibid., 371. 24. The translation is from Johann Gottfried Herder, Philosophical Writings, ed. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 272–­73. “Je weiter hin es sich in Untersuchung der ältsten Weltgeschichte, ihrer Völkerwandrungen, Sprachen, Sitten, Erfindungen und Traditionen aufklärt: desto wahrscheinlicher wird mit jeder neuen Entdeckung auch der Ursprung des ganzen Geschlechts von Einem. Man nähert sich immer mehr dem glücklichen Klima, wo ein Menschenpaar . . . rings um sich her den Faden anspann, der sich nachher mit

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solchen Wirrungen weit und lang fortgezogen.” Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, 5. 25. Christoph Bultmann argues in Die biblische Urgeschichte that Herder introduces history as a new category for an anthropological exegesis of biblical tradition as historical records of the origin of humankind. See Christoph Bultmann, Die biblische Urgeschichte in der Aufklärung: Johann Gottfried Herders Interpretation der Genesis als Antwort auf die Religionskritik David Humes (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), esp. 185–­92. In The Enlightenment Bible, Jonathan Sheehan follows the hint given by Bultmann and claims that Herder greatly contributes to the process of converting the religious Bible into a book of national cultural heritage, for example, his endeavor of transposing the Hebrew poetry in the Bible to national literature and claiming it as part of German national literary canon. Herder’s effort can be seen as part of the process of forging a cultural Bible and a universal history of the humanity. See Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 168–­76. 26. Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, 5n. 27. Bernhard Suphan, ed., Herders Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 1 (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1877), 81–­84. 28. See Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989), 50, 71, 82, 225, 452. 29. Jonathan M. Hess, Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), 52. Hess points out that “the most remarkable aspect of the expedition [is] its capacity to subsume experience of the Near East into Michaelis’s categories, its uncanny ability to sustain the worldview that launched it.” Ibid., 73. 30. Herder, Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache, 703, 758, 765, 790, 807. 31. Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 210, 218, 231, 237, 245, 432–­33, 447, 453–­55. 32. “Hierzu will ich in der Geschichte aller Zeiten Data sammlen: jede soll mir das Bild ihrer eignen Sitten, Gebräuche, Tugenden, Laster und Glückseligkeiten liefern, und so will ich alles bis auf unsre Zeit zurückführen, und diese recht nutzen lernen.” Johann Gottfried Herder, ed., Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769: Pädagogische Schriften (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1997), 30. 33. The human-​age theory is not Herder’s own invention. Very early on, Seneca, Florus, and Augustine described the Roman Empire with the analogy of human ages. In Herder’s own time, Giambattista Vico, Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, Justus Möser, Adam Ferguson, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Lessing, and Isaac Iselin et al. all employed the human-​age theory to describe historical development and explain the differences within it. Representative works by these authors are Jean-​Jacques Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755), Isaak Iselin’s Geschichte der Menschheit (1764/1768), Justus Möser’s Osnabrückische Geschichte (1768), Adam Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (1780). For more information, see M. C. Lemon, Philosophy of History: A Guide for Students (London: Routledge, 2003), 49–­57.

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34. “Wohin [sollte] die Kette zwischen Völkern und Erdstrichen . . . leiten . . . ? . . . zur allgemeinen Bildung der Menschheit.” Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, 110. 35. Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 429–­64. 36. See Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 37. The central problematic concerns the attitudes toward ancient Greek literature and culture: one party, represented by Nicolas Boileau-​Despréaux, vows for the perfectibility of ancient Greek literature and demands that its contemporaries only imitate Greek literature; the other party, represented by Charles Perrault, states that the modern period should have its own genius and thus its own modern literature. Herder’s method of historical development fundamentally undermines the validity of this debate and introduces the category of history to separate these two competing models. At the same time, however, Herder’s method clearly positions the ancient Greek on a stage that not only precedes the eighteenth century, but is also less developed than it on the ranking scale of his historiography. Also see Karl Menges, “Herder und die ‘Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’: Eine wirkungsgeschichtliche Replik,” in Ethische contra ästhetische Legitimation von Literatur: Traditionalismus und Modernismus. Kontroversen um den Avantgardismus, ed. Walter Haug and Wilfried Barner (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986). 38. “Ich rede von einem historischen Eräugnisse!” Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, 48. 39. “Seine würkliche Todesschwäche und Ermattung unter Unglauben.” Ibid., 49. 40. “Wir sind bei dieser Fortrückung freilich auch auf unsrer Stelle, Zweck und Werkzeug des Schicksals.” Ibid., 82. 41. “Geh hin, mein Leser, und fühle noch jetzt hinter Jahrtausenden die so lange erhaltne reine morgenländische Natur, belebe sie dir aus der Geschichte der ältesten Zeiten.” Ibid., 14. 42. See Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 38–­41. Reill points out that diachronic and synchronic studies of history are the two most common strategies used by Enlightenment historians. World history is the synthesis of the two methods. Rainer Baasner also points out the importance of space and geography in Herder’s conception of a philosophy of history. He contends that Herder’s notions of culture and nation have deep entanglement with geographical location. See Rainer Baasner, “Geographische Grundlagen von Herders Geschichtsphilosophie—­am Beispiel der Begriffe ‘Kultur’ und ‘Nation,’ ” in Nationen und Kulturen: Zum 250. Geburtstag Johann Gottfried Herders, ed. Regine Otto (Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 1996). 43. The popular Völkerschau (similar phenomena in English are called “Human Zoo” or “Negro Village”), during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in many major cities of Europe, including Vienna, Berlin, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Paris, Milan, Barcelona, and London, is inherently entangled with this logic. 44. Jacques Derrida points out that linearity is a privileged model for logocentric and ethnocentric thinking. He contends: “For over a century, this uneasiness has been evident in philosophy, in science, in literature. All the revolutions in these fields can be interpreted as shocks that are gradually destroying the linear

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model. Which is to say the epic model. . . . The access to pluridimensionality and to a delinearized temporality is not a simple regression toward the ‘mythogram’; on the contrary, it makes all the rationality subjected to the linear model appear as another form and another age of mythography.” Thus, the separation of the linear model of temporality from the consciousness of space opens a new exterior dimension of perception. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 87. 45. See Charles W. J. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 220–­26; John Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 58. 46. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos, 2003), 87. 47. Ibid. 48. At the beginning of the first book of Ideen, Herder claims: “Vom Himmel muß unsre Philosophie der Geschichte des menschlichen Geschlechts anfangen, wenn sie einigermaßen diesen Namen verdienen soll. Denn da unser Wohnplatz, die Erde, nichts durch sich selbst ist, sondern von himmlischen, durch unser ganzes Weltall sich erstreckenden Kräften ihre Beschaffenheit und Gestalt, ihr Vermögen zur Organisation und Erhaltung der Geschöpfe empfängt: so muß man sie zuförderst nicht allein und einsam, sondern im Chor der Welten betrachten, unter die sie gesetzt ist.” Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 21. 49. See Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 50. Hobsbawm defines “invented tradition” as “a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past.” Ibid., 1. 51. See Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, 91. 52. Gadamer also points out the character of irony in this early work of Herder. See Gadamer, “Herder und die geschichtliche Welt.” 53. See Immanuel Kant, Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht, in Was ist Aufklärung? Ausgewählte kleine Schriften (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1999). 54. Kant claims: “Wenn denn nun gefragt wird: Leben wir jetzt in einem aufgeklärten Zeitalter? so ist die Antwort: Nein, aber wohl in einem Zeitalter der Aufklärung.” But Eze points out that Kant’s concept of reason contains a strongly racial connotation besides its universal claim. In other words, the faculty of reason is subtly reserved for European whites. It is a more colored idea of reason than a truly universal one. In his essay Beobachtung über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (1764), Kant deteriorates non-​European peoples, particularly the blacks, and holds Germans to be the most qualified human beings to first reach Enlightenment. Immanuel Kant, Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung, in Was ist Aufklärung? Ausgewählte kleine Schriften, 26. See Eze, “The Color of Reason.”

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55. See Diderot, “Encyclopédie.” 56. “Niemand in der Welt fühlt die Schwäche des allgemeinen Charakterisierens mehr als ich.” Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, 28. 57. “Jede Nation hat ihren Mittelpunkt der Glückseligkeit in sich, wie jede Kugel ihren Schwerpunkt.” Ibid., 35. 58. “Wie tausendmal mehr töricht, wenn du [the Enlightenment philosopher] einem Kinde deinen philosophischen Deismus, deine ästhetische Tugend und Ehre, deine allgemeine Völkerliebe voll toleranter Unterjochung, Aussaugung und Aufklärung nach hohem Geschmack deiner Zeit großmütig gönnen wolltest! Einem Kinde?” Ibid., 13. 59. Wilfried Malsch points out that this belief in Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen entails the consciousness of the European mission of civilization in the non-​European world. See Wilfried Malsch, “Nationen und kulturelle Vielfalt in Herders Geschichtsphilosophie,” in Nationen und Kulturen: Zum 250. Geburtstag Johann Gottfried Herders, ed. Regine Otto (Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 1996). 60. “Siehe um dich! der größte Teil von Nationen der Erde ist noch in Kindheit, reden alle noch die Sprache, haben die Sitten, geben die Vorbilder des Grads der Bildung.” Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, 91. 61. This type of analogy between non-​European societies and Europe’s past is not unique in Herder’s thinking. The historian Jean Lafitau also argued in his Moeurs des sauvages américains comparées aux mœurs des premiers temps (1727) that the indigenous people in America could be seen as living models of Europe’s past. 62. See Herder, Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, 7:740. 63. “In Europa ist die Sklaverei abgeschafft . . . , nur eins haben wir uns noch erlaubt, drei Weltteile als Sklaven zu brauchen, zu verhandeln, in Silbergruben und Zuckermühlen zu verbannen—­aber das sind nicht Europäer, nicht Christen, und dafür bekommen wir Silbe und Edelgesteine, Gewürze, Zucker und—­heimliche Krankheit . . . ! Drei Weltteile durch uns verwüstet und polizieret, und wir durch sie entvölkert, entmannet, in Üppigkeit, Schinderei und Tod versenkt.” Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, 74. 64. “Wir schlagen Ketten an, womit ihr uns ziehen werdet.” Ibid., 103. 65. Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 11–­12. 66. See John Zammito, “Herder and Historical Metanarrative: What’s Philosophical about History?,” in A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder, ed. Hans Adler and Wulf Köpke (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2009), 82–­83. 67. Goethe wrote from Rome to Herder: “Nur ein flüchtig Wort, und zuerst den lebhaftesten Dank für die Ideen! Sie sind mir als das liebenswerteste Evangelium gekommen, und die interessantesten Studien meines Lebens laufen alle da zusammen. Woran man sich so lange geplackt hat, wird einem nun so vollständig vorgeführt. Wie viel Lust zu allem Guten hast du mir durch dieses Buch gegeben und erneut!” Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Italienische Reise (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), 447. 68. See ibid.

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69. “Daher möchte wohl, was ihm Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit heißt, etwas ganz anderes sein, als was man gewöhnlich unter diesem Namen versteht: nicht etwa eine logische Pünktlichkeit in Bestimmung der Begriffe, oder sorgfältige Unterscheidung und Bewährung der Grundsätze, sondern ein sich nicht lange verweilender viel umfassender Blick, eine in Auffindung von Analogien fertige Sagazität, im Gebrauche derselben aber kühne Einbildungskraft, verbunden mit der Geschicklichkeit, für seinen immer in dunkeler Ferne gehaltenen Gegenstand durch Gefühle und Empfindungen einzunehmen, die . . . mehr von sich vermuten lassen, als kalte Beurteilung wohl gerade zu in denselben antreffen würde.” Immanuel Kant, Rezension zu Johann Gottfried Herders Ideen, Immanuel Kant: Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Politik und Pädagogik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 781. 70. At the end of the review, Kant writes: “Desto mehr ist aber zu wünschen, daß unser geistvoller Verfasser in der Fortsetzung des Werks, .  .  .  ihn nicht durch Winke, sondern bestimmte Begriffe, nicht durch gemutmaßte, sondern beobachtete Gesetze, nicht vermittelst einer, es sei durch Metaphysik oder durch Gefühle beflügelten Einbildungskraft, sondern durch eine im Entwurfe ausgebreitete, aber in der Ausübung behutsame Vernunft zur Vollendung seines Unternehmens leiten möge.” Ibid., 794. 71. Zammito, “Herder and Historical Metanarrative,” 79. Zammito also points out that Hamann made clear to Herder, angry with Kant’s review, that many places in Herder’s Ideen sharply contradict Kant’s philosophy, though Herder may not intend to do so. 72. See Wulf Köpke, “Herders Idee der Geschichte in der Sicht des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Johann Gottfried Herder: Geschichte und Kultur, ed. Martin Bollacher (Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 1994). 73. Tilman Borsche, “Vorkritisch oder metakritisch? Die philosophische Aktualität Herders,” in Herder im Spiegel der Zeiten: Verwerfungen der Rezeptionsgeschichte und Chancen einer Relektüre, ed. Tilman Borsche (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006), 126. Borsche calls for a revision of Herder’s position in Enlightenment philosophy in our present-​day discourse. 74. Ulrich Gaier debunks the critique by Kant and his followers and stresses the profoundness of Herder’s epistemological synthesis of historiography, poetry, and philosophy. See Ulrich Gaier, “Poesie oder Geschichtsphilosophie? Herders erkenntnistheoretische Antwort auf Kant,” in Johann Gottfried Herder: Geschichte und Kultur, ed. Martin Bollacher (Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 1994). In a later essay, Gaier stresses that Herder develops an alternative system theory (Systematologie) to Kant’s transcendental philosophy. See Ulrich Gaier, “Hamann und Herder—­eine philosophische Alternative zu Kant,” in Herder im Spiegel der Zeiten: Verwerfungen der Rezeptionsgeschichte und Chancen einer Relektüre, ed. Tilman Borsche (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006). Also see Hans Adler, “Ästhetische und anästhetische Wissenschaft: Kants Herder-​Kritik als Dokument moderner Paradigmenkonkurrenz,” Deutsche Vierteljahrrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 68 (1994). Hans Dieter Irmscher, “Die geschichtsphilosophische Kontroverse zwischen Kant und Herder,” in Hamann-​Kant-​Herder, ed. Bernhard Gajek (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1987). Irmscher’s essay clearly delineates the similarities and differences between Kant and Herder’s philosophies of history on its abstract level.

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75. See Anne Löchte, Johann Gottfried Herder: Kulturtheorie und Humanitätsidee der Ideen, Humanitätsbriefe und Adrastea (Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 2005). Löchte considers it an irretrievable misunderstanding to criticize Herder as a Eurocentric thinker. Also see Daniel Carey and Sven Trakulhun, “Universalism, Diversity, and the Postcolonial Enlightenment,” in The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-​Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Carey and Trakulhun portray Herder as a thinker advocating cultural relativism and diversity in comparison to Kant. Both Löchte and Carey/Trakulhun, however, ignore the teleological aspect in Herder’s philosophy of history and Herder’s dismissive descriptions of the Africans and the Asians in Ideen. 76. See Zantop, Colonial Fantasies; Hansjakob Werlen, “Sprache und (Wirtschafts-​)Wissenschaft im ‘Sina’-​Kapitel von Herders Ideen,” in Vom Selbstdenken: Aufklärung und Aufklärungskritik in Herders “Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit,” ed. John Zammito and Regine Otto (Heidelberg: Synchron, 2001); Uta Sadji, Der Negermythos am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland: Eine Analyse der Rezeption von Reiseliteratur über Schwarzafrika (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1979); Helmut Peitsch, “Deutsche Peripherie und Europäisches Zentrum? Herders Aneignung der außereuropäischen Forschungs-​ und Entdeckungsreisen in den Ideen,” in Vom Selbstdenken: Aufklärung und Aufklärungskritik in Herders “Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit,” ed. Regine Otto and John Zammito (Heidelberg: Synchron, 2001). 77. See Birgit Tautz, Reading and Seeing Ethnic Differences in the Enlightenment: From China to Africa (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 4–­5. 78. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, 340. 79. See Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 327. 80. “Der Wilde, der sich, der sein Weib und Kind mit ruhiger Freude liebt und für seinen Stamm, wie für sein Leben, mit beschränkter Wirksamkeit glühet, ist, wie mich dünkt, ein wahreres Wesen als jener gebildete Schatte, der für den Schatten seines ganzen Geschlechts . . . in Liebe entzückt ist. In seiner armen Hütte hat jener für jeden Fremden Raum, den er mit gleichgültiger Gutmütigkeit als seinen Bruder aufnimmt und ihn nicht einmal, wo er hersei? fraget. Das verschwemmte Herz des müßigen Kosmopoliten ist eine Hütte für Niemand.” Ibid., 333. 81. See ibid., 330. 82. See ibid., 335. 83. See ibid., 227–­28. 84. See ibid., 270. 85. See Gonthie-​Louis Fink, “Von Winckelmann bis Herder: Die deutsche Klimatheorie in europäischer Perspektive,” in Johann Gottfried Herder 1744–­1803, ed. Gerhard Sauder (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1987). 86. Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 177. 87. “Genau in der Gegend, wo der Ostwind über das ganze feste Land hin die größte Hitze bringt, wohnen die schwärzesten Negerstämme, wo die Hitze abnimmt oder wo Seewinde sie kühlen, bleichet sich auch die Schwärze ins Gelbe. Auf kühlen Höhen wohnen weiße oder weißliche Völker.” Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 233.

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88. “Lasset uns also den Neger, da ihm in der Organisation seines Klima kein edleres Geschenk werden konnte, bedauern, aber nicht verachten. . . . Was sollte ihm das quälende Gefühl höherer Freuden, für die er nicht gemacht war? Der Stoff dazu war in ihm da; aber die Natur wendete die Hand und erschuf das daraus, was er für sein Land und für die Glückseligkeit seines Lebens nötiger brauchte. Sie hätte kein Afrika schaffen müssen; oder in Afrika mußten auch Neger wohnen.” Ibid., 236. 89. Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-​ Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 21. 90. Ibid., 21–­22. 91. See Robert Bernasconi, “Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the Enlightenment Construction of Race,” in Race, ed. Robert Bersnasconi (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). 92. Eze, “The Color of Reason,” 215. 93. Uhlig, Georg Forster, 197–­98. 94. See Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 255–­56. 95. In Über den Gebrauch teleologischer Principien in der Philosophie (1788, On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy), Kant is concerned with stating nature’s purposiveness in the differences of skin colors. Kant’s discussion of the concept of race culminates in his Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790, Critique of Judgment). See Bernasconi, “Who Invented the Concept of Race?” 96. See ibid., 18. 97. Eze, “The Color of Reason,” 232–­33. 98. Bernasconi, “Who Invented the Concept of Race?,” 21. 99. Unlike Herder and Kant, the Göttingen historian Christoph Meiners employs the common idea of African inferiority to justify slavery. He expands the physical inferiority of the blacks to a whole array of mental, moral, and sexual disadvantages to the Europeans in his essay Ueber die Natur der Afrikanischen Neger, und die davon abhangende Befreyung, oder Einschränkung der Schwarzen (1790, On the Nature of the African Negros and the related Liberation or Limitation of the Blacks). He concludes that, given all these poor qualities of the black species, it is impossible to grant the enslaved blacks equal rights. It is also necessary to keep them enslaved so that they may learn from the Europeans and gain more distance from their inferior status. 100. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Writings on China (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), 45. 101. Ibid., 51. For an excellent description of the method of accommodation and the Jesuits’ “Rites Controversy,” see Franklin Perkins, Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 23–­32, 184–­94. A later Leibniz treatise, Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese (1716), indicates his sustained interest in Chinese philosophy as a natural religion that supposedly shares common ground with Christianity. 102. “So erschienen die von P. Gonzàles Mendoza zusammengestellten Reiseberichte verschiedener Missionare von 1585 bis 1663 in 28 Auflagen in 7 Sprachen; Matteo Riccis Tagebücher von 1615 erfuhren in drei Jahrzehnten 12 Auflagen in 6 Sprachen, Alvarez de Semedos Berichte über die China-​Mission jesuitischer Missionare wurden in etwa der gleichen Zeit bis 1678 in 9 Auflagen

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in 5 Sprachen gedruckt, und Martino Martinis Kriegsbericht über die Eroberung Chinas durch die Manchu von 1654 brachte es in einem halben Jahrhundert bis 1706 auf 21 Auflagen in 9 Sprachen.” Hans Poser, “Leibnizens Novissima Sinica und das europäische Interesse an China,” in Das Neueste über China: G. W. Leibnizens Novissima Sinica von 1697, ed. Wenchao Li and Hans Poser (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000), 12. 103. See David E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–­1800, 2nd ed. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 116–­20. Voltaire claims: “It is true that the constitution of their empire is the best in the world, the only one entirely based on paternal authority.” Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, trans. Theodore Besterman (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1985), 114. 104. For Chinese interest in European culture, see Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–­1800, 15–­76. Chambers’s main contribution to eighteenth-​century chinoiserie is his Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772). 105. See Chunjie Zhang, “Social Disintegration and Chinese Culture: The Reception of China in Die Blendung,” in The Worlds of Elias Canetti, ed. William Donahue and Julian Preece (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2007). 106. Jonathan D. Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), 97. 107. See Tautz, Reading and Seeing Ethnic Differences in the Enlightenment. 108. Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–­1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 640. Israel argues: “Western philosophers strove valiantly to grasp the fundamentals of classical Chinese philosophy but ended up, in the main, merely mirroring their own prior obsessions.” See also Joanna Waley-​Cohen, The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), 127. 109. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–­1800, 122. 110. See Colin Mackerras, Western Images of China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Willy Richard Berger, China-​Bild und China-​Mode im Europa der Aufklärung, Literatur und Leben (Cologne: Böhlau, 1990). 111.  See Waley-​Cohen, The Sextants of Beijing, 96–­102; John S. Gregory, The West and China since 1500 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 29–­72. 112. In the seventeenth century, the anti-​accommodationists in the “Rites Controversy” within the Catholic Church clearly stated the inferiority of Chinese thought and ritual practices and their need to be Christianized. Montesquieu attributes despotism to China in his famous The Spirit of Laws. For more details, see Perkins, Leibniz and China. 113. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 116–­17. 114. Ibid., 117. 115. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967), 221. 116. Leibniz, Writings on China, 78. 117. Ibid. 118. Ibid., 97. 119. Ibid., 79.

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120. Ibid., 96. 121. Perkins, Leibniz and China, 174. 122. See David E. Mungello, “How Central to Leibniz’s Philosophy Was China?,” in Das Neueste über China: G. W. Leibnizens Novissima Sinica von 1697, ed. Wenchao Li and Hans Poser (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000). 123. Leibniz, Writings on China, 134. 124. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 98. 125. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–­1800, 86. Mungello argues that Leibniz’s reception of China deserves to be acknowledged to a certain extent as an expression of “an egalitarianism (but not relativism) among cultures that predates the development of ideas about Europeans’ cultural superiority.” 126. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 79. Derrida argues: “In an original and non-​ ‘relativist’ sense, logocentrism is an ethnocentric metaphysics. It is related to the history of the West. The Chinese model only apparently interrupts it when Leibniz refers to it to teach the Characteristic. Not only does this model remain a domestic representation, but also, it is praised only for the purpose of designating a lack and to define the necessary corrections.” 127. In August 1773, Johann Gottfried Herder wrote to his publisher Hartknoch about his debut work on philosophy of history: “Endlich, mein lieber Hartknoch kann ich Ihnen antworten: denn Eins meiner Bücher ist fertig, dazu ein sehr schönes: heißt ‘auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit: Beitrag zu vielen Beiträgen des Jahrhunderts 1773.’ hat aber mit Voltaire u. Harder zum Glück nichts als Titel gemein, ist würklich meine Philosophie der Geschichte. . . . Es ist Feur darinn u. glühende Kolen auf die Schädel unsres Jahrhunderts.” Harder is Voltaire’s German translator. Herder’s Ideen are in many ways an expansion and further development of the framework he developed in Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit. Johann Gottfried Herder, Briefe: Gesamtausgabe: 1763–­1803, vol. 3 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1977), 35. 128. Voltaire, Philosophy of History (Glasgow: Printed for Robert Urie, 1766), 89. 129. See Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 437. 130. See ibid., 441. 131. See ibid. 132. See ibid., 434–­35. 133. See ibid., 438. 134. See ibid., 441. 135. See ibid., 433. For climate theory and its relationship with race, see Wheeler, The Complexion of Race, 21–­28. 136. See Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 436. 137. See ibid., 432. 138. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 11–­174. 139. Mackerras, Western Images of China, 112. 140. George Macartney, An Embassy to China; being the journal kept by Lord Macartney during his embassy to the Emperor Ch’ien-​lung, 1793–­1794, ed. J. L. Cramer-​Byng (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1963), 337–­38. 141. Ibid., 339–­40.

224

Notes to Pages 148–152

142. Ibid., 14. 143. Sugihara, “The East Asian Path of Economic Development,” 79. 144. See John Barrow, Travels in China (Philadelphia: Printed and sold by W. F. M’Laughlin, 1805). 145. See Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 678. 146. See ibid., 677. 147. Ibid., 704. 148. Hegel also uses the categories of new and old in his Philosophy of History. For Hegel, Europe is the old world, representing a long tradition of civilization, whereas peoples in the so-​called New World are newcomers in world history. Hegel contends: “Die Welt wird in die Alte und Neue geteilt, und zwar ist der Namen der neuen daher gekommen, weil Amerika und Australien uns erst spat bekannt geworden sind. Aber diese Weltteile sind nicht nur relativ neu, sondern überhaupt neu, in Ansehung ihrer ganzen physischen und geistigen Beschaffenheit. Ihr geologisches Altertum geht uns nichts an.” See Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, 107. Also see Stephan Jaeger, “Herders Inszenierung von Europa in den Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit,” Herder Yearbook 9 (2008): 81. 149. See Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 705. 150. Ibid., 707. 151. Herder contends: “Ja da viele derselben in den von ihnen bewohnten Ländern zum Christentum übergetreten sind: so sind sie dadurch, in Spanien, Sicilien und sonst, Europa selbst einverleibt worden.” Ibid., 701. 152. See ibid., 696. 153. See ibid., 892. 154. See ibid., 857. 155. See ibid., 892. 156. See Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, 133. 157. Similarly, Immanuel Kant also attributes to trade a function of keeping peace and promoting welfare in his treatise Zum ewigen Frieden (On Perpetual Peace, 1795): “Es ist der Handelsgeist, der mit dem Kriege nicht zusammen bestehen kann, und der früher oder später sich jedes Volk bemächtigt.” Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984), 33. 158. See Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 893. 159. Ibid., 894. 160. It is, however, highly ironic that Herder shows sarcastic contempt for Chinese technical inventions in the third volume of the Ideen. Herder writes: “Das Porzellan und die Seide, Pulver und Blei, vielleicht auch den Kompaß, die Buchdruckerkunst, den Brückenbau und die Schiffskunst, nebst vielen andern feinen Handtierungen und Künsten kannten sie [die Chinesen], ehe Europa solche kannte; nur daß es ihnen fast in allen Künsten am geistigen Fortgange und am Triebe zur Verbesserung fehlet.” Ibid., 441. 161. Herder writes in his Humanitätsbriefe: “Und wer wäre es, der die Schotten Ferguson, Smith, Stewart, Millar, Blair nicht ehrte?” Herder, Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, 7:656. 162. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 104.

Notes to Pages 152–155

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163. See ibid., 142. 164. See Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 891. 165. “Der Neger malt den Teufel weiß; und der Lette will nicht in den Himmel, sobald Deutsche da sind. ‘Warum gießest du mir Wasser auf den Kopf?’ sagte jener sterbende Sklave zum Missionar.—­‘Daß du in den Himmel kommest.’—­ ‘Ich mag in keinen Himmel, wo Weiße sind’ sprach er, kehrte das Gesicht ab und starb. Traurige Geschichte der Menschheit!” Herder, Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, 7:674. 166. Although Friedrich Meinecke’s resurrection of Herder being the progenitor of German historicism is, as John Zammito calls it, “deeply flawed by a German nationalism,” I still consider Meinecke’s observation insightful that the Humanitätsbriefe pushes Herder’s philosophy of history into the discussion of ethical primacy. Although Meinecke does not pay special attention to Herder’s anticolonial critique, the tendency toward ethics of history proves also true in this case. See Zammito, “Herder and Historical Metanarrative,” 65; Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1936), 387, 474–­75. 167. See Herder, Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, 7:731. 168. See ibid., 7:737. 169. See ibid., 7:671. 170. See ibid., 7:672. 171. Christian Georg Andreas Oldendorps’s book Historie der caribischen Inseln Sanct Thomas, Sanct Crux und Sanct Jan, insbesondere der dasigen Neger und der Mission serves as the standard work on Atlantic triangular slave trade for Herder and the German readership. See York-​Gothart Mix, “ ‘Der Neger malt den Teufel weiß’: J. G. Herders Neger-​Idyllen im Kontext antiker Traditionsgebundenheit und zeitgenössischer Kolonialismuskritik,” in Das Europa der Aufklärung und die außereuropäische koloniale Welt, ed. Hans-​Jürgen Lüsebrink (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 203. 172. The original source of Herder’s Neger-​Idyllen is Saint John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters of an American Farmer, published in London in 1782. Through Johann Ernst Kolb, the anticolonial poems and stories in Crèvecoeur’s book were introduced to German readership in Erzählungen von den Sitten und Schicksalen der Negersklaven (1789). 173. See Mix, “ ‘Der Neger malt den Teufel weiß’ ”; Gerhard Sauder, “Herder’s Poetic Works, Translations, and Views on Poetry,” in A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder, ed. Wulf Köpke and Hans Adler (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2009). 174. Mix argues that Herder’s Negeridyllen represents a new literary model which refers back to a traditional genre and, at the same time, articulates Herder’s critique of civilization and his belief in historical development. See Mix, “ ‘Der Neger malt den Teufel weiß.’ ” 175. See Allen W. Wood, “Kant’s Project for Perpetual Peace,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). See also commentary by Hans Dietrich Irmscher in Herder, Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, 7:1121–­24.

226

Notes to Pages 155–160

176. Pheng Cheah, “Introduction Part II: The Cosmopolitical—­ Today,” in Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics, 23. 177. Ibid., 23–­24. 178. Herder, Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, 7:716. 179. See ibid., 7:708. 180. “Du bist ein Mensch! Auch Du, o Fürst, bist Staub! / Sei Deines Thrones wert, sei groß und gut. / Sei gut: dann bist du groß.” Ibid., 7:728. 181. See ibid., 7:722. 182. See ibid., 7:723. 183. See ibid. 184. See ibid., 7:724. 185. “Unvermerkt wirkt die Arznei, sanft fließt das Öl hinunter. Leise tritt sie zu diesem und jenem Volk und spricht in der Sprache der Indianer: ‘Bruder, Enkel, Vater, hier bringe ich dir ein Bundeszeichen, und Öl und Arznei. Damit will ich deine Augen reinigen, daß sie scharf sehen; ich will damit deine Ohren säubern, daß sie recht hören; ich will deinen Hals glätten, daß meine Worte geschmeidig hinuntergehen: denn ich komme nicht umsonst; ich bringe Worte des Friedens.’ ” Ibid., 7:725–­26. 186. See ibid., 7:735. 187. See Hans Adler, “Herder’s Concept of Humanität,” in A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder, ed. Hans Adler and Wulf Köpke (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2009). 188. See Herder, Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, 7:708. 189. See ibid., 7:735. 190. Isaiah Berlin calls this idea of Herder “pluralism.” Following Charles Taylor’s terminology, I consider “equal authenticity” more accurate to describe both the singularity of each culture and the relationship between different cultures. Berlin’s term emphasizes more the congenial than the individual feature of Herder’s concept. For the sake of my discussion, it is indispensable to stress both the singularity and the commonality of Herder’s revolutionary idea. See Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, 231–­39; Charles Taylor and Amy Gutmann, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). 191. See Herder, Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, 7:700. 192. See ibid., 7:699–­700. 193. “Wo existiert sie ganz? bei welchem Volk? in welchen Zeiten?” Ibid., 7:700. 194. See ibid., 7:701. 195. Herder argues: “Und wer leistet den Europäern Bürgschaft, daß es ihnen nicht an mehreren Enden der Erde, wie in Abessinien, China, Japan ergehen könne und ergehen werde? Je mehr ihre Kräfte und Staaten in Europa altern, je mehr unglückliche Europäer einst diesen Weltteil verlassen, um dort und hier mit den Unterdrückten gemeinschaftliche Sache zu machen; so können intellektuelle und animalische Kräfte sich in einer Weise verbinden, die wir jetzt kaum vermuten. . . . Kultivierte Staaten können entstehen, wo wir sie kaum möglich glauben; kultivierte Staaten können verdorren, die wir für unsterblich hielten.” Ibid., 740. 196. Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire, 255.

Notes to Pages 161–165

227

Chapter 6 1. Immanuel Kant, Natural Science, ed. Eric Watkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 388. 2. In the ensuing pages, I will use “Physical Geography” to refer to the lecture as a pedagogical project and the intellectual project. I will use Physical Geography to refer to the Rink edition. 3. Kant, “Natural Science,” see 437. The major publications are Kants sämtliche Werke (Leipzig, 1839); Gesamtausgabe der Werke Kants (Leipzig, 1868); Immanuel Kant, Physische Geographie, vol. 9 in Philosophische Bibliothek (Leipzig, 1905); and Kant’s gesammelte Schriften (Berlin, 1923). 4. Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom, 26. 5. Ibid. 6. Kant, “Physical Geography,” 629, 660. 7. Ibid., 576. 8. See Eze, “The Color of Reason”; Ronald Judy, “Kant and the Negro,” Surfaces 1 (1991); Bernasconi, “Who Invented the Concept of Race?”; Judy, “Kant and the Negro.” 9. Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom, 29. 10. Ibid., 31. 11. See David Harvey, “Cosmopolitanism in the Anthropology and Geography,” in Reading Kant’s Geography, ed. Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011). This Kantian statement was not clear in Harvey’s earlier book publication on the same topic. Although a large chunk of this essay is identical with the book, the insistence on Kant’s vision of cosmopolitanism is much more clearly articulated in this essay published two years later. 12. Kant, “Natural Science,” 388. 13. According to Erich Adickes’s Untersuchungen zu Kants physischer Geographie, Kant did not change or systematically update his Diktattext—­the earliest lecture notes. Yet Kant evidently did not always adhere to his written notes and often lectured freely. Therefore the actual lectures contain more updated information. Werner Stark also points out that, comparing different editions of students’ lecture notes to Kant’s Diktattext, Kant must have conceptually and structurally changed his lecture several times. See Werner Stark, “Kant’s Lectures on ‘Physical Geography’: A Brief Outline of Its Origins, Transmission, and Development: 1754–­1805,” in Elden and Mendieta, Reading Kant’s Geography, xl–­xlvii; Werner Stark, “Einleitung,” in Kant’s Vorlesungen III, 1, ed. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009). 14. Charles W. J. Withers, “Kant’s Geography in Comparative Perspective,” in Elden and Mendieta, Reading Kant’s Geography, 61. 15. See Stark, “Einleitung,” vi–­xvii. 16. While completely agreeing with Adickes’s finding in Untersuchungen zu Kants physischer Geographie, Werner Stark also claims that Kant also gave his lecture notes to Prince Holstein as part of his private lessons. This statement does not explain how and why the Holstein manuscript is a copy written by several people. Adickes’s conclusion supports my thesis of multiauthorship in this chapter. 17. Stark, “Kant’s Lectures on ‘Physical Geography,’ ” 82.

228

Notes to Pages 166–179

18. Kant, “Physical Geography,” 576. 19. Werner Stark, “Historical and Philological References on the Question of a Possible Hierarchy of Human ‘Races,’ ‘Peoples,’ or ‘Populations’ in Immanuel Kant—­A Supplement,” in Elden and Mendieta, Reading Kant’s Geography, 97. 20. See Robert Bernasconi, “Kant’s Third Thoughts on Race,” in Elden and Mendieta, Reading Kant’s Geography. 21. Ibid., 298. 22. Kant, “Physical Geography,” 448–­49. 23. Ibid., 449. 24. Ibid., 450. 25. Ibid. 26. Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom, 147–­48. 27. Margaret Kohn, Radical Space: Building the House of the People (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 3–­4. 28. Cited from Ernst Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought, trans. James Haden (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 52. 29. See Michael Church, “Immanuel Kant and the Emergence of Modern Geography,” in Elden and Mendieta, Reading Kant’s Geography. 30. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-​Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 31. Kant, “Physical Geography,” 458. 32. Ibid., 459. 33. Ibid., 665. 34. See the chart in Stark, “Kant’s Lectures on ‘Physical Geography,’ ” 78. 35. Kant, “Physical Geography,” 503. 36. Ibid., 504. 37. See Chunjie Zhang, “German Indophilia, Femininity, and Transcultural Symbiosis around 1800,” in Imagining Germany Imagining Asia: Essays in Asian-​German Studies, ed. Veronika Fuechtner and Mary Rhiel (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 2013). 38. Kant, “Physical Geography,” 504. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. See Bernasconi, “Kant’s Third Thoughts on Race.” 42. See Macartney, An Embassy to China. 43. Kant, “Physical Geography,” 633. 44. Ibid., 629–­30. 45. Ibid., 579–­80. 46. Ibid., 579. 47. Ibid., 451. 48. Ibid. Epilogue 1. See the paintings at www​.lindaueronline​.co​.nz. 2. See Udo Kittelmann and Britta Schmitz, eds., Gottfried Lindauer: Die Māori-​Portraits (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 2014), 11–­12. 3. See ibid., 39.

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Index

adventure stories, 17, 65, 66 Africa, 4, 26, 35, 78, 82, 90, 137, 139, 152, 154, 166, 171; and Herder, 18–19, 120, 124, 130–39, 149, 160, 179, 220n75; and Kant, 171–73; and Le Vaillants, 166 Ahutoru (islander), 46–47, 193n13 Alaska, 44, 51, 54, 91 alterity, 41 105; as epistemic, 41, 180; as European, 142; as geographical, 16 America, 43, 51, 78, 82, 88, 93, 107, 123, 124, 132, 135, 138, 173; colonization of, 87, 152 American Revolution, 22 Arabs, 18, 67, 89, 101, 102, 150, 151, 171 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 4, 67–68 authorship, 58, 161, 163, 164, 166, 174; and multiauthorship, 163, 164–67, 171 autobiography, 47–49 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 12 Banks, Joseph, 31, 46, 63, 193n13 Bartolomé de las Casas, 107, 113 Benjamin, Walter, 117, 212n99 Berman, Russell, 6–7, 181n5 Bildung, 85, 95, 125 black Americans, 78–79 Blumenberg, Hans, 17, 75–76; Shipwreck with Spectator, 85 Bougainville, Louis Antoine de, 46, 56, 63, 166 Bounty (ship), 31, 48, 94 bourgeois tragedy, 18, 88, 92, 101, 117 Britain, 4, 6, 26, 28, 29, 125, 138, 147– 48, 151, 154 British colonialism, 31, 178 Brooks, Peter, 91, 94, 94, 117



Campe, Joachim Heinrich, 4, 5, 14, 15, 17–18, 103, 121, 99n14, 200n17; Robinson der Jüngere (Robinson the Younger), 17–18, 36, 64, 65–78, 81–85, 103, 175, 200nn16–17; Über Empfindsamkeit und Empfindelei in pädagogischer Hinsicht (On Sentimentality and Sentimentalism from a Pedagogical Perspective), 71; Väterlicher Rath für meine Tochter (A Father’s Advice for My Daughter), 103 cannibalism, 36–39, 79, 80–81; Forster’s views on, 63; of Maori, 38, 39, 178; in New Zealand, 16, 28, 29, 41 Cape of Good Hope, 39, 51, 171 Caroline Islands, 44, 48, 55 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 18, 183n22 Chamisso, Adelbert von, 3–5, 9, 11, 14, 15–18, 42, 43–64, 81, 84, 91, 105, 114, 139, 179; expedition of, 16; Bemerkungen und Ansichten auf einer Entdeckungsreise (Remarks and Opinions of the Naturalist of the Expedition), 47–50, 52–53; friendship with Kadu, 43–64, 84; Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (Peter Schlemihl’s Miraculous Story), 43; Reise um die Welt (A Voyage Round the World), 3, 14–16, 21, 28, 43, 46–47, 48–50, 58, 61, 63, 81 China, 8, 46, 51, 120, 124, 128, 139– 49, 159–60, 162, 173, 179; gross domestic product of, 8; and Herder, 18–19, 130, 132–33, 135, 145; and Leibniz, 139–49; and Adam Smith, 54; representations of, 133, 139, 141, 142, 144, 149 chinoiserie, 31, 140

247

248 Choris, Louis, 43, 51, 63 Christianity, 47, 60–62, 80, 107, 109, 114, 124, 126, 130, 140, 143, 150,153, 208n62; and Chamisso, 60; and Forster, 60; superiority of, 107, 210n75 Christian missions, 3, 47, 49, 59–61, 64, 81, 153 Cohen, Margaret, 69–70; The Novel and the Sea, 69 colonial fantasy, 11, 89, 115, 139 colonialism, 6, 25, 111, 114, 155, 156, 187n17, 210n75. See also European colonialism colonial violence, 18, 107, 116, 120–23, 124, 130, 153, 179 Confucianism, 140–48 Cook, James, 9, 16, 22–31, 33, 36–37, 39–41, 45–46, 51, 55–56, 63, 79, 166, 193n13, 199n14; Adventure (ship), 36; Endeavour (ship), 47, 186n5; journal of, 23, 28 cultural relativism, 9, 13, 18, 119–20, 123–25, 127–30, 132–35, 154, 157– 60, 179, 188n34, 220n75 Dampier, Willliam, A New Voyage Round the World, 67 Darwin, Charles, 29, 31, 29, 105, 170; Voyage of the Beagle, 38 Defoe, Daniel, 17, 36, 65–73, 74, 77, 82, 83, 88; The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner, 17, 36, 65–74, 77, 88, 106, 198n4 Diderot, Denis, 63, 104, 108, 128; depiction of Tahiti, 208n63; Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, 32, 104 discourse, 11–13 double consciousness, 17, 65–66, 70, 77–79, 84–85, 179, 200n17 Du Bois, W. E. B., 78; The Souls of Black Folk, 78 Dürbeck, Gabriele, 7, 14 Dussel, Enrique, 9, 183n22 Eap (island), 53, 59, 63 earthquake (as symbol), 108, 110, 111; in Lisbon, 110

Index

East Asia, 8, 182n18 Endeavour (ship), 47, 186n5 enlargement (concept of), 117, 212n99 Enlightenment, 5–7, 14, 20, 33–34, 53–54, 91, 95, 100, 119, 126–32, 136, 139–141, 146, 159, 183n22, 217n54; antithesis of, 125; culture of, 34; and Forster, 21–23, 27–28, 30, 35–38, 48; and Herder, 126, 129–30; historians of, 216n42; ideology of, 29, 35, 38, 39, 42; legacy of, 6–7; optimism of, 35; project of, 46, 89; rationality of, 130; and sentiment, 27; standards of, 178; utopia of, 36; values of, 46. See also French Enlightenment, German Enlightenment, Scottish Enlightenment ethnography, 36, 49, 121–22, 161 Eurocentrism, 13, 24, 47, 81, 89, 120, 124, 140, 152, 155, 160, 173, 177, 183n22 European colonialism, 1, 5, 8, 25, 38, 46, 62–63, 77, 90, 110, 132, 138–39, 149, 152–54, 158, 187n17 European imperialism, 14, 17, 63, 77, 120, 141, 179 European superiority, 13, 16–18, 24, 39, 110, 116, 120, 121, 137, 139, 152, 160 exoticism, 13, 74, 90 fallen women (as trope), 15, 88, 92, 99–101, 116 femininity, 87; as Tahitian, 32 Forster, Georg, 14–43, 46, 48, 49, 50, 56, 60–64, 79, 81, 96, 99, 104, 105, 124, 137–39, 166, 178; and cannibalism, 38–39, 41, 63; and Enlightenment, 28, 35, 38, 48; Pacific relativism, 35–36; Reise um die Welt, 16, 21, 28, 81, 186n5; sentimentalism of, 28, 49; travel writing of, 11, 14, 16–18, 22–25, 27–36, 37–43, 96; Vergnügen der Sinnlichkeit, 35 Forster, Johann Reinhold, 28, 30, 63, 124, 188n30 Foucault, Michel, 11–14, 23, 95, 170, 184n32, 185n44; Archaeology of Knowledge, 11; What Is an Author?, 12

Index

France, 4, 6, 8, 9, 29, 50, 91, 94, 96–97, 111, 126, 127, 145, 148, 150, 151, 152, 159 Freitag (character), 17, 66, 69–85, 101, 179, 200n14 French Enlightenment, 126, 127, 128, 145 French colonialism, 5, 156 French Revolution, 9, 43, 45, 50, 97, 111 Geertz, Clifford, 49, 122; Balinese Cockfight, 122 Geiger, Carl Ignaz, Reise eines Erdbewohners in den Mars, 29 George III, King, 31, 147, 148 German discourse, 3–14, 20, 52, 67–68, 70, 79, 95, 117, 133, 138–39, 167, 177, 179 German Enlightenment, 99, 123 German Robinsonades, 12, 17, 20, 64, 66–70, 76, 85, 88, 89, 117, 139, 199n11, 200n16; popularity of, 65–66, 69, 76 German-speaking culture, 5, 28, 87, 106, 177 global positioning, 164, 171 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 29, 77, 87–89, 92–93, 96–98, 131, 172, 205n22, 218n68; Faust, 72, 97; Iphigenie, 93; Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther), 27, 71; Prometheus, 79; Stella, 91, 96–98, 111 Graf von Gleichen, legend of, 96, 98 Happel, Eberhard Werner, 67; Der insulanische Mandorell (The Islander Mandorell), 20 Harvey, David, 19, 162–63, 168–74, 227n11 Hau‘ofa, Epeli, 62–64 Hawaii, 44, 45, 51, 55, 61, 62 Hawkesworth, John, 23, 166, 186n5 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 4, 5, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 29, 34, 54, 60, 99, 117, 119–39, 141–64, 167–68, 172, 179; Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (Treatise on the Origin of Language), 123; Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der

249 Menschheit (Yet Another Philosophy of History toward the Education of Humankind), 18, 119, 121, 123–24, 128, 129–31, 133–35, 149, 152–53, 159–60; Der betrogne Unterhändler (The Cheated Peacemaker), 156; historicism of, 123, 130, 132, 133, 139, 141, 152; Humanitätsbriefe,123, 124, 130, 152, 153, 155, 160; Der Hunnenfürst (The Hun King), 156; Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas of a Philosophy of History of Humankind), 18, 119, 121, 123–25, 127, 130–33, 135–37, 139, 144, 146, 148–49, 152, 154, 159– 60, 168; Journal of My Travel in the Year of 1769, 124; Missionsgeschichte in Nordamerika (History of the Missions in North America), 155; perpetual peace of, 121, 153–58, 160; philosophy of history of, 9, 18–19, 34, 60, 117, 199–124, 127–28, 130–31, 133–34, 139, 146, 148, 150, 152, 154, 160, 213n2, 216n42, 220n75, 223n127, 225n166; and slavery, 139, 154–55; theory of sentiment of, 18, 122; Yet Another Philosophy of History toward the Education of Humankind, 119 historical teleology, 18, 34, 36, 42 historicism, 18, 19, 60, 119, 164, 170; and Herder, 123, 130, 132, 133, 139, 141, 152 Huet, Abbé Pierre Daniel, Treatise on the Origin of Novels, or Romances, 67 Humboldt, Alexander von, 29, 31, 170 Hume, David, 119, 136 ideal man, 106, 112–15 imperial gaze, 16, 28, 42 imperialism, 14, 17, 20, 63, 77, 120, 141, 179 Inca Empire, 92, 107–16; as utopia, 116 incest, 103–5 India, 54, 124, 172, 183 Indies, East and West, 154 Iroquois, 18–19, 119, 121, 153–58, 160, 179; perpetual peace of, 18, 119, 153, 155, 179

250 Jameson, Fredric, 106, 185n43, 209n68 Kadu (islander), 16, 43–64, 179 Kant, Immanuel, 4, 5, 14–15, 19, 29, 94–95, 105, 110, 119, 128, 131–34, 135, 137–38, 161–75, 179, 192n81; and Africa, 172; and America, 172; Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen, 137; Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschenrasse, 138; Critique of Pure Reason, 168–69; and Herder, 9, 14, 119, 131–32, 134, 137–38; Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte der Menschheit in weltbürgerlicher Absicht, 131–32; “Physical Geography,” 161,165, 169; Physische Geographie, 19, 161–75; Proposal for and Announcement of a College of Physical Geography, 169; and race, 135–138; and reviews of Herder’s Ideen, 119–20, 131; and slavery, 173; Zum ewigen Frieden (On Perpetual Peace), 155 Keate, George, 105–6; An Account of the Pelew Islands, 105–6 Kippenberg, August, 66–68 Kleist, Heinrich von, 110; Das Erdbeben in Chili (The Earthquake in Chile), 110 Königsberg, 9, 161, 164, 169, 170, 171 Kotzebue, August von, 4, 5, 9, 15, 17–18, 51, 85, 87–117, 121; antislavery position of, 90; Bruder Moritz, 17, 32, 77, 84, 87, 92, 99–101, 105, 179; and Defoe, 88; Fragmente über Recensenten-Unfug, 91–92; Das Kind der Liebe, 87; Menschenhaß und Reue, 87, 88, 93; Die Negersklaven (The Negro Slaves), 90; La Peyrouse, 17, 32, 88, 91, 96–99, 116, 179; popularity of, 87–89, 91, 93, 99–102, 116; Die Sonnenjungfrau, 87, 89, 92, 93, 107, 108, 111–12, 114–15, 179; Die Spanier in Peru, 17, 88, 92, 93, 107, 112, 115, 116 Kotzebue, Otto von, 16, 46, 50–52, 56, 79, 91 Krusoe Robinson, 17, 65–85, 101, 178, 200n17; sentimentalism of, 84

Index

las Casas, Bartolomé de, 37, 107, 112– 14; Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, 107, 113 Latour, Bruno, 45, 47, 52–53, 55, 58; actor-network theory, 45, 47, 52–53 law of virginity, 108–11, 116, 117 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 77, 84, 139, 140–45, 149, 168; The Latest News from China, 139 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 21, 92, 95, 100, 114, 119, 203n9, 205n22, 215n33; Emilia Gallotti, 89; Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise), 97, 114 Le Vaillants, François, 124, 166 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Tristes Tropiques, 49; The Savage Mind, 57 Lindauer, Gottfried, 177–80 Linnaeus, Carl, 23, 105, 124, 165, 168; Systema Naturae, 24, 124 Macartney, George, 139, 140, 146–48, 173 Maori, 25, 36–39, 177–80; cannibalism of, 37–39, 178 Marmontel, Jean-Françoise, 92, 107–8, 210n76; Les Incas, ou La Destruction de l’empire du Pérou, 107 Marshall Islands, 3, 44, 50, 51, 54 Marx, Karl, 72–73, 141, 146 Melodrama, 85, 92–94, 98, 101 Michaelis, Johann David, 29, 123 Montesquieu, Baron de, 119, 136; De l’esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws), 125 More, Thomas, Utopia, 106 Muthu, Sankar, 7, 14, 120, 160, 166 nation (as concept), 9, 11, 119, 121 Native Americans, 9, 18, 121, 153, 155 Nazism, 4, 120, 177 nemesis, 121, 130, 160; in Herder, 153, 154, 158, 179 Newton, Isaac, Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light, 23 New World, 6, 16, 18, 31, 73, 87, 108, 112, 126, 188n32, 224n148 New Zealand, 36–39, 177–79; cannibalism in, 16, 28, 29

Index

251

noble savage, 7, 33–34, 83, 89, 101, 121, 132, 154, 208n63 non-European cultures, 3–19, 42, 52, 60, 73–74, 81, 111–17, 128, 162–64, 167, 171–74, 179–80, 183n22; achievement of, 13; and Herder, 121–24, 130, 133, 152–60; influence on German thinking, 10; as invented, 113; knowledge of, 74; and Kotzebue, 89–92, 95–96, 100, 104, 106; and nature, 69; representations of, 4; significance of, 16, 42; stories about, 15; and travel narratives, 124 non-European world, 9, 13–15, 17, 19, 74, 76–77, 79, 84, 104, 151, 160, 166–69, 177–78, 218n59

relationality, 47, 52, 58 relativism, 18, 25, 119–20 Retchir, Wilhelm, Der Sächsische Robinson (Robinson of Saxony), 66 Rink, Friedrich Theodor, 162–67, 170, 172, 173–74 Roman empire, 126, 151, 215n33 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 17, 23, 33–34, 40, 77, 84, 89, 94, 155; Discourse on Inequality, 33, 40; Émile, or On Education, 77 Rührung, 93–94, 98 Rurik (ship), 43–44, 46, 48, 51, 52–53, 55–56 Russia, 9, 29, 51, 90, 119, 151

Oceania, 3, 7, 14, 16, 21, 25, 28–30, 41–45, 49, 55–56, 58–64, 92, 97, 99, 104, 106, 135, 179 Oceanic culture, 13, 47, 58–63, 81; influence of, 17, 45, 64, 179 Oceanic Islanders, 25 Omar, Arab, 100–103, 105–6, 179 Orientalism, 87, 141 otherness, 102, 117; 188n34, 208n62; as geographical, 102

Said, Edward, 5, 106, 149; Orientalism, 106, 149 Sandwich, Earl of (Edward Montagu), 23, 28 savage, 40, 56, 62, 69, 79, 80, 114, 121, 133, 134, 152 savagery, 27, 31, 36, 39, 102 Schiller, Friedrich, 4, 18, 29, 87, 89, 91–98; aesthetics of drama, 95; concept of tragedy, 91, 94, 95, 206n34; Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love), 89; Die Räuber (The Robbers), 92; Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken? (What Effects Can a Good, Established Stage Actually Achieve?), 95 Schnabel, Johann Gottfried, 66; Insel Felsenburg, 88, 199n11 Scottish Enlightenment, 22, 136, 152, 186n3 sentiment, 16, 21, 27–29, 30, 33, 35–36, 38–39, 48–49, 70–73, 83, 88, 93–94, 98, 101, 121–122; in Forster, 27, 39, 49; and Herder, 124, 157–58; theory of, 18 sentimentalism, 15, 28, 70, 83, 84, 93, 94 sentimentality, 29, 88, 94, 98 sentimental novels/literature, 65, 72, 94 Seven Years’ War, 22 Sheridan, Richard, 93; Pizarro, 87, 107 shipwreck, 65, 70, 72, 80–82, 96, 200n17; as metaphor, 85 Sinophilia, 139–42

Pacific Islands, 47, 62; as utopia, 105 Pacific Islanders, 3, 18, 25, 38, 42, 46, 49, 56, 62, 89, 177 Pacific relativism, 35–36 Palau, 92, 99–101, 105–6 Patu (islander), 45, 46, 47, 193n13 Pelew Islands, 92, 95, 99, 105–6, 179 perpetual peace, 119, 121, 153–58, 160 Peru, 18, 74, 107–9, 112; conquest of, 116 physical geography, 4, 14–15, 19, 160– 62, 164, 167, 169, 170–71, 173–74 picaresque novels, 66, 68 Pizarro, Francisco, 108, 108, 112–16 Pratt, Mary Louise, 4, 16, 24, 42 Race, 135–39 Radak (island), 44, 48, 53–55, 59 Ratak Chain, 43, 51–52, 55 Raynal, Guillaume Thomas François, L’histoire philosophique des deux Indes (Philosophical History of the Two Indies), 90

252 Sinophobia, 139–42, 144, 148 slavery, 82, 90–91, 129, 138, 209n69, 210n75, 221n99; conditions of, 91 slave trade, 4, 13, 18, 82, 87, 120, 138– 39, 154, 173 Smith, Adam, 23, 54, 94, 125, 151–52, 182n15, 190n54; An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 54, 151–52 South America, 6, 14, 51 South Pacific, 3, 14–16, 25–26, 28–29, 31–32, 36, 51, 55, 87, 101, 106, 116, 193n13; cannibalism in, 36; and Cook, James, 22–23, 26; and Forster, 21–23, 25, 29, 31, 39, 41; and Kotzebue, 96–97; as new world, 16; Russian expedition to, 3, 42–43, 50 South Pacific Islanders, 38, 42 South Seas, 16, 18, 21, 28–29, 31, 35, 47, 96, 104; civilization in, 47; critique of, 35 Spanish colonialism, 107, 116 Sterne, Lawrence, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, 27 subjectivity, 3, 58, 59, 75, 79, 84, 85, 100, 160 Tahiti, 16, 21, 28–36, 38, 41, 42, 48, 55, 60–62, 94, 99, 104–5, 178, 208n63; desertion on, 28, 35, 41; and Forster, 188n34; friendship cult in, 48; and nature, 31; revolution and inequality, 34; social revolution in, 34; sexuality in, 105 Tanna (island), 16, 28, 29, 39, 41 tattoo/s, 43, 59, 61, 64, 179, 196n52 theatricality, 205n22 tragedy, 18, 37, 85, 87–88, 98–99, 101, 115, 117; as bourgeois, 18, 88, 92, 101, 117

Index

transcultural consciousness, 46, 52, 72, 85, 91, 94, 102, 164, 169, 170, 200n17 transcultural discourse, 4–5, 12–15, 17, 19–22, 66, 85, 174, 177 transculturality, 1, 3, 7–14, 16–17, 66, 68, 95 transmodernity, 9 travel writing, 4, 14, 14–16, 21–25, 28, 47–49, 81, 97, 117, 124, 148, 163, 165, 179; and Campe, 199n14; and Chamisso, 16, 45, 47, 52, 54, 58–59, 139; and Darwin, 38; and Forster, 14, 16, 21–22, 24, 25, 29, 35, 63–64, 96; and Herder, 154; and Kotzebue, 18 Tufayl, Ibn, 66–67; Hayy ibn Yaqzan, 66 Tupaia (islander), 45, 46–47, 55, 193n13 United States of America, 8, 148 universalism, 119–20, 152, 162 utopia, 36, 105–6, 154, 159; fantasy of, 31; ideal of, 34; Tahiti as, 35 utopia novels, 66 Volk, 9, 119 Voltaire, 119, 140, 141, 144–46; Candide, 110, 209n68; Essai sur l’histoire générale et les moeurs et l’esprit des nations, 128; Philosophie de l’histoire, 144 Wieland, Martin Christoph, 29 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 126 Wyss, Johann David, Der schweizerische Robinson (The Swiss Family Robinson), 76–77 Zantop, Susanne, 68–69, 78, 89, 108, 132; Colonial Fantasies, 5, 89