Georg Forster

Portrait of Georg Forster at age 26, by J. H. W. Tischbein, 1781.

Johann Georg Adam Forster (November 26, 1754 – January 10, 1794) was a German naturalist, ethnologist, travel writer, journalist, and revolutionary. As a young man, he took part in James Cook's second expedition to the Pacific, and contributed to the ethnology of the peoples of Polynesia encountered during that journey. He is one of the founders of modern scientific travel literature.

Forster was a main figure of the Enlightenment in Germany. He was one of the founders of the Jacobin club in Mainz and played a leading role in the Mainz Republic, the earliest republican state in Germany.

Biography

Childhood and first journeys

Georg Forster was born in the small village of Mokry Dwór (German Nassenhuben), near Gdańsk (Danzig) in the Polish province of Royal Prussia. He was the first child of Johann Reinhold Forster and Justina Elisabeth (née Nicolai). His father was a naturalist, scientist and a Lutheran pastor. In 1765, the Russian tsarina gave the pastor an assignment to travel in Russia on a research journey and investigate the situation of a German colony at the Volga River. Georg, then ten years old, joined him. They reached the Kirghiz steppe at the lower Volga. The young Forster learned there how to conduct scientific research and how to practise cartography. He also became fluent in Russian. The critical report from this journey was not accepted by the tsar, so the Forsters did not obtain fair payment for their work and had to move house. They chose to settle in England in 1766. The father took up teaching and translation work there. The young Forster, only thirteen years old, published his first book: an English translation of Lomonosov's history of Russia, which was well-received in scientific circles.

Around the World with Captain Cook

In 1772, his father Johann became a member of the Royal Society. This resulted in his invitation by the British admiralty to join James Cook's second expedition to the Pacific (1772–1775). Georg Forster joined his father in the expedition again. He was appointed as a draughtsman of his father. The task of Johann Forster was to work on a scientific report from the journey that was to be published after the return.

James Cook, portrait by Nathaniel Dance, c. 1775, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

They embarked on the HMS Resolution on July 13, 1772 in Plymouth. The route led first to the South Atlantic, then through the Indian Ocean and the Southern Ocean to the island of Polynesia and finally around Cape Horn back to England, where the expedition arrived on July 30, 1775. During the three year long journey, the explorers visited New Zealand, the Tonga islands, New Caledonia, Tahiti, the Marquesas Islands and the Easter Island. They went further south than anybody before them, almost discovering Antarctica. The journey disproved conclusively the Terra Australis theory, which claimed there was a big, habitable continent in the South.

Supervised by his father, Georg Forster took up first the studies of the world of animals and the world of vegetation in the southern seas, mostly by drawing animals and plants. However, Georg also pursued his own interests which led to completely independent explorations in comparative geography and ethnology. He quickly learned the languages of the Polynesia islands. His reports on people of Polynesia are approved even to this day, as they show Forster's endeavours to describe the habitants of southern islands with empathy, sympathy and largely without Western or Christian prejudices. However, he carefully avoided an idealisation of the noble savage. Forster, with this kind of attitude, was much ahead of the other ethnologists of his times.

Unlike Louis Antoine de Bougainville, whose reports from a journey to Tahiti a few years earlier had initiated uncritical noble savage romanticism, Forster had a very differentiated picture of the societies of the south Pacific islands. He described various social structures and religions that he encountered on the Society Islands, the Easter Island and in Tonga and New Zealand, and ascribed this diversity on the difference in living conditions of these people. At the same time he also observed that the languages of these rather widely scattered islands are quite similar. About the habitants of the Nomuka islands (in the Ha'apai island group of present-day Tonga), he wrote:

"Their languages, vehicles, weapons, furniture, clothes, tattoos, style of beard; in short all of their being matched perfectly with what we had already seen studying tribes on Tongatapu. However, we (...) could not find any kind of subordination among them, which in contrast had been very conspicuous among Tongatapu tribes, and had bordered on extreme slavery in their honoring of the king."

The ethnographical items that were collected by Georg and Reinhold Forster are currently presented as Cook-Forster-Sammlung (Cook-Forster-Collection) in Sammlung für Völkerkunde in Göttingen.

The journey was rich in scientific results. However, the relations between the Forsters and Captain Cook and his officers were problematic. This was a result of both the Prussian pride of the Forsters and their justifiable feeling of independence on one hand, and Cook's need to warrant an orderly course of the journey on the other hand.

A founder of the modern travel literature

These conflicts continued after the journey when the problem of who should write the official account of the travel arised. Lord Sandwich, although willing to pay the promised money, was dissatisfied with the senior Forster's English and tried to establish an editor over him. However, this was interpreted by Forster as censorship, and therefore refused any compromise in this direction. As a result, the official account was written by Cook, and the Forsters were deprived of the right to compile the account and did not obtain payment for their work. During the negotiations, the younger Forster decided to release an unofficial account of the travel. In 1777, the book A Voyage round the World in His Britannic Majesty's Sloop Resolution, Commanded by Capt. James Cook, during the Years, 1772, 3, 4, and 5 (from which the expression "a voyage round the world" stems) was published. This report was the first account of Cook's second voyage (it appeared six weeks before the official revelation) and was intended for the general public. The English version and his own translation to German (published 1778-1780) earned the young author real fame. The poet Christoph Martin Wieland praised the book as the most important one of his time, and even today it remains one of the most important journey descriptions ever written. The book had also significant impact on German literature, culture and science. For instance, Alexander von Humboldt was under its great influence and it inspired many ethnologists of later times.

Forster wrote a well-polished German prose, which was not only scientifically accurate and objective, but also enthralling and readable. His work was distinguished from conventional travel literature in so far as it did not just present a mere collection of data, demonstrating instead coherent, colourful and reliable ethnographical facts that had resulted from detailed and sympathetic observation. He often interrupted the description to enrich it with philosophical remarks about the observations.

His main focus was always on the people he encountered: their behaviour, their customs, habits, religions and forms of social organisation. In A Voyage round the World he even presented the songs sung by the people of Polynesia, complete with lyrics and notation. Even today, the book is one of the most important sources concerning the societies of the Southern Pacific, especially since the book comes from the times before European influence had become significant there.

Both Forsters also published descriptions of their South Pacific travels in the Magazin von merkwürdigen neuen Reisebeschreibungen ("Magazine of strange new travel accounts") in Berlin, and Georg published a translation of "A Voyage to the South Sea, by Lieutenant William Bligh, London 1792" in 1791-1793.

Forster as a professor

The publication of A Voyage round the World brought Forster scientific recognition all over Europe. The respectable Royal Society nominated him as a member although he was not even 23 years old. He was granted similar titles from Academies ranging from Berlin to Madrid. These achievements did not give him money though. In 1778, he went to Germany to take a teaching position of a Natural History professor at the Collegium Carolinum in Kassel, where he met Therese Heyne, a classical philologist's daughter. She later became one of the first independent female writers in Germany. They got married in 1785 (which was after he left Kassel) and had three children, but their marriage was not happy. Since the Kassel times, Forster was in active correspondence with important figures of the Enlightenment, including Lessing, Herder, Wieland and Goethe. He also initiated cooperation between the Kassel University and University of Göttingen in Hannover where Georg Christoph Lichtenberg worked.

The job in Kassel was poorly paid. That is why Forster accepted the proposal of the Polish Komisja Edukacji Narodowej and became Chair of Natural History at Wilno University in 1784. Initially, he was accepted well in Wilno, but he felt more and more isolated with time as his ambitions to build a real natural history scientific centre could not get appropriate financial support of the Polish authorities. Moreover, his famous speech on natural history from 1785 went rather unnoticed and was not printed before 1843. These events led to strong tensions between him and the local community. At last, he broke the contract six years short of its completion, after Catherine II of Russia had given him an offer to take part in a journey around the world for a high honorarium and a position of a professor in Saint Petersburg. This resulted in a conflict between Forster and the influential Polish scientist Jędrzej Śniadecki. However, the Russian proposal was withdrawn and Forster left Wilno. He then settled in Mainz, where he worked as librarian of the University of Mainz.

He regularly published essays on the scientific and discovery expeditions of his times — for instance, he wrote about Cook's third journey to the South Pacific, and about the Bounty expedition. Forster had been in contact with the private scholar Sir Joseph Banks, the initiator of the Bounty expedition and a participant of the Cook's first journey, since his London years.

Another field of his interest was indology (One of the main goals of his failed expedition that was to be financed by Catherine II had been to reach India). He translated, using a Latin version provided by Sir William Jones, the Sanskrit play Shakuntala, which strongly influenced Herder and triggered German interest in the culture of India.

The Delphine washed ashore at Zandvoort (Holland), 1822, by Johannes Christiaan Schotel

Views from the Lower Rhine

In the spring of 1790, Forster and the young Alexander von Humboldt started from Mainz on a long journey through the Southern Netherlands, Holland, and England, which finished at last in Paris. The impressions from the journey were described in a three volume publication Ansichten vom Niederrhein, von Brabant, Flandern, Holland, England und Frankreich im April, Mai und Juni 1790 (Views of the Lower Rhine, from Brabant, Flanders, Holland, England, and France in April, May and June 1790), published 1791-1794. Goethe said about the book: "One wants, after one has finished reading, to start it over, and wishes to travel with such a good and knowledgeable observer." The book includes considerations in the field of the history of art that were as much influential for the discipline as A Voyage round the world was for ethnology. Forster belongs, for example, to the first writers that gave a fair appreciation of gothic architecture, which was widely perceived as "barbarian" at that time. The book uttered also primordial ideas of Romanticism.

However, he focused his main interests again on the social behaviours of people, as 15 years earlier in the Pacific. The national uprisings in Flanders and Brabant and of course the revolution in France sparked his curiosity. The journey through these regions together with the Netherlands and England, where the freedoms of citizens were equally well developed, allowed him in the end to sort out his own political judgements. Since then he started to be a confident opponent of the ancien régime. Similarly to other German scholars, he welcomed the outbreak of the revolution as a clear consequence of the Enlightenment. Already on July 30, 1789, shortly after he got to know about the Storming of the Bastille, he wrote to his father-in-law, philologist Christian Gottlob Heyne:

"It is beautiful to see what philosophy has ripened in the heads and then accomplished in the state. (...) Thus to educate people about their rights is after all the surest way; the rest will then result as if by itself."

Liberty pole at the border to the Republic of Mainz. Watercolor by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Forster and the French Revolution

Foundation of Mainz Republic

After the French revolutionary army under the command of General Custine had gained control over Mainz on October 21, 1792, two days later Georg Forster joined others in establishing a Jacobin club "Freunde der Freiheit und Gleichheit" ("Friends of Freedom and Equality"). Since the beginning of 1793, he was actively involved in organizing the Mainz Republic. This first republic located on German soil was constituted on the principles of democracy, and encompassed areas on the left bank of Rhine between Landau and Bingen. Forster became vice-president of the republic's temporary administration and a candidate in the elections to the local parliament Rheinisch-Deutscher Nationalkonvent (Rhenish-German National Convent). From January to March of 1793, he was an editor of Die neue Mainzer Zeitung oder Der Volksfreund (The new Mainz newspaper or The people's friend). In his first article he wrote:

"The freedom of the press finally reigns within these walls where the printing press was invented."

The freedom did not last too long, though. The Mainz Republic existed only until the retreat of the French troops in July 1793 after the Siege of Mainz.

Forster was not present in Mainz during the siege. As representatives of the Mainz National Convent, he and Adam Lux had been sent to Paris to apply for Mainz — which was unable to exist as an independent state — to become a part of the French Republic. The application was accepted, but had no effect, since Mainz was conquered by Prussian and Austrian troops, and the old order was restored.

The Pinnacle of liberty, A satire by James Gillray

Death in revolutionary Paris

Based on a decree of Emperor Francis II, which inflicted punishments on the German subjects who collaborated with the French revolutionary government, Forster was subjugated under the Reichsacht and could not return to Germany. Devoid of all means to make a living and without his wife, who had stayed in Mainz with their children, he remained in Paris. At this point the revolution in Paris had entered the stage of the reign of terror introduced by the Committee of Public Safety under the rule of Maximilien Robespierre. Forster had the opportunity to experience the difference between the promises of the revolution of happiness for all and its cruel practice. In contrast to many other German supporters of the revolution, like for instance Friedrich Schiller, Forster did not turn back from the revolutionary ideals under the pressure of the terror regime. He viewed the events in France as a natural phenomenon which could not be slowed down and which had to release its own energies to avoid being even more destructive. Shortly before his death he wrote:

"The revolution is like a hurricane. Who can slow it down? A man who is brought to action by it can commit deeds that posterity will not understand for their dreadfulness."

Yet before the reign of terror reached its climax, Georg Forster died of pneumonia in his small attic apartment at Rue des Moulins in Paris in January 1794, at the age of 39.

Forster and nations

Forster had Scottish roots and was born in Polish Royal Prussia. He worked in Russia, England, Poland and in several German countries of his times. Finally, he finished his life in France. He worked in different milieu and travelled a lot from his young age on. This together with the scientific upbringing based on the principles of the Enlightenment, in his view gave him a wide perspective on different ethnic and national communities:

Johann Reinhold Forster and Georg Forster in Tahiti, by J. F. Rigaud, 1780.

"All peoples of the earth have equal claims to my good will..., and my praise and blame are independent of national prejudice."^[1]

In his opinion all humans have the same abilities with regard to reason, feelings and imagination, but these basic ingredients are used in different ways and in different environments, which gives rise to different cultures and civilisations. According to him it is obvious that the culture on Tierra del Fuego is on a lower level of development than the European culture, but he also admits that the conditions of life there are much more difficult and this gives people very little chance to develop a higher culture. Based on these opinions he was classified as one of the main examples of 18th century German cosmopolitanism.^[2]

In contrast to the attitude expressed in these writings and to his Enlightenment background, he expressed negative stereotypes, insults and prejudice against Poles in his private letters during his stay in Wilno and in a diary from the journey through Poland^[3][4][5], that he never published ^[6]. In them he compared Poles to pigs, and believed that they an inferior nation. Said views only became known after his death, when his private correspondence and diaries were released to the public. Since Forster's published descriptions of other nations were seen as impartial scientific observations, Forster's disparaging description of Poland in his letters and diaries was often taken at face value in Imperial and Nazi Germany, where it was used as a means of science-based support for a purported German superiority^[7]. The spreading of the depreciating term "Polnische Wirtschaft" is likely due to the influence of his letters^[8][9].

Forster's attitude brought him into conflict with people of different nations he encountered and made him nowhere welcome, being too revolutionary and antinational for Germans, proud and quickly angered in his dealings with Englishmen, unhappy with the lack of intellectual stimulation he encountered in Poland, and too insignificant politically and ignored while in France.

Forster's heritage

After the death of Forster his works were almost completely forgotten, except in professional circles. This was partly due to his involvement in the French revolution. However, his reception was changing with the changes in politics, with different times concentrating on different parts of his work.

In the time of nationalism after the Napoleonic times he was regarded in Germany as a "traitor of the nation", overshadowing the perception of his work as author and scientist. This attitude rose even though the philosopher Friedrich Schlegel wrote about Forster at the beginning of 19th century:

"Among all the real writers no one breathes so much the spirit of free progression as Georg Forster."

In the Germany of Wilhelm II, Forster's memory was ostracized. The Third Reich's interest in Forster was limited to his private lettes where he made claims about the alledged inferior and animal status of Polish people. Later, the GDR, in turn, tried to profit from his memory by connecting him as a scientist and revolutionary to its tradition. For instance, the GDR research station on Antarctica was given Forster's name on July 1, 1987. In West Germany, the search for democratic traditions in German history lead also to a more diversified picture of him in the 1970s. His reputation as one of first and one of the most outstanding German ethnologists is indisputable. His works are seen as crucial in the development of ethnology in Germany into a separate branch of science.

In Botanics, the standard botanical author abbreviation G.Forst. is applied to plants described by him.

Works

• A Voyage round the World in His Britannic Majesty's Sloop Resolution, Commanded by Capt. James Cook, during the Years, 1772, 3, 4, and 5 (1777)
• Journal of travels in Poland (August-November, 1784), The Warsaw Voice, 1990 31 8-9
• Dissertatio botanico-medica de plantis esculentis insularum oceani Australis (1785)
• Essays on the moral and natural geography, natural history and phylosophy (1789-1797)
• Views of the Lower Rhine, Brabant, Flanders (three volumes, 1791-1794)
• Letters (posthumous compilation of his correspondence, 1828)
• Werke in vier Bänden, Gerhard Steiner (editor). Leipzig 1971
• Ansichten vom Niederrhein, Gerhard Steiner (editor). Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1989. ISBN 3-458-32836-X
• Reise um die Welt, Gerhard Steiner (editor). Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1983. ISBN 3-458-32457-7
• Über die Beziehung der Staatskunst auf das Glück der Menschheit und andere Schriften, Wolfgang Rödel (editor). Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1966. – A little collection of political essays, notes, and speeches of republican thinkers and writers.
• Georg Forsters Werke, Sämtliche Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe, Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, G. Steiner et al. Berlin: Akademie 1958

References

German sources

• ^ Bömelburg, Hans-Jürgen, Georg Forster und das negative deutsche Polenbild. Ein Kosmopolit als Architekt von nationalen Feindbildern?, in: Mainzer Geschichtsblätter 8 (1993), p. 79-90.
• Georg-Forster-Studien, edited for the Georg-Forster-Gesellschaft by Horst Dippel and Helmut Scheuer. Kassel University Press, Kassel 1997ff., ISSN 14399105
• Ulrich Enzensberger: Georg Forster. Weltumsegler und Revolutionär. Wagenbach, Berlin 1979, ISBN 3-8031-2057-8
• Ulrich Enzensberger: Georg Forster. Ein Leben in Scherben. dtv, München 2004 (copyright: Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt/Main, 1996), ISBN 3-423-13248-5
• Michael Ewert: „Vernunft, Gefühl und Phantasie, im schönsten Tanze vereint“. Die Essayistik Georg Forsters. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1993, ISBN 3884797697
• Rotraut Fischer: Reisen als Erfahrungskunst. Georg Forsters „Ansichten vom Niederrhein“. Die „Wahrheit“ in den „Bildern des Wirklichen“. Anton Hain, Frankfurt am Main 1990
• Jörn Garber (Hrsg.): Wahrnehmung - Konstruktion - Text. Bilder des Wirklichen im Werk Georg Forsters. Niemeyer, Tübingen 2000, ISBN 3484810122
• ^ Forster, Johann Georg, Georg Forsters Werke, 11, 13-14.
• Klaus Harpprecht: Georg Forster oder Die Liebe zur Welt. Eine Biographie. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1990, ISBN 3499126346
• Carola Hilmes: Georg Forster und Therese Huber: Eine Ehe in Briefen, in: Gislinde Seybert (Hrsg.): Das literarische Paar. Le couple littéraire. Intertextualität der Geschlechterdiskurse. Intertextualité et discours des sexes. Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2003, S. 111–135 (full text als PDF)
• Claus-Volker Klenke, Jörn Garber und Dieter Heintze: Georg Forster in interdisziplinärer Perspektive. Beiträge des Internationalen Georg Forster Symposions in Kassel, 1.–4. April 1993. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1994
• ^ Krause, Hans-Thomas, Georg Forster und Polen. In: Georg Forster (1754-1794). Ein Leben für den wissenschaftlichen und politischen Fortschritt, in: Wissenschaftliche Beiträge der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg T 42, Beiträge zur Universitätsgeschichte). Halle/S. 1981, p. 79-85.
• Christian Graf von Krockow: Der grosse Traum von Bildung. Auf den Spuren der grossen Entdeckungsreisenden James Cook und Georg Forster. List-Taschenbuch, 2005, ISBN 3-548-60518-4
• ^ Lawaty, Andreas, „Polnische Wirtschaft“ und „deutsche Ordnung“: Nachbarbilder und ihr Eigenleben, in: Der Fremde, Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zu Aspekten von Fremdheit, Hg. Bernhard Oestreich, Peter Lang Verlag 2003, p. 156–166.
• Helmut Mathy: Georg Forster in Mainz. Von der geistigen Aufklärung zur konkreten Revolution, in: Die Mainzer Republik. Der Rheinisch-Deutsche Nationalkonvent, hg. vom Landtag Rheinland-Pfalz, Mainz 1990, S.185–190
• Johannes Paul: Abenteuerliche Lebensreise - Sieben biographische Essays, in: Georg Forster: Empfindsame Weltumseglung. Wilhelm Köhler, Minden 1954, p. 67-112
• Ina Seidel: Das Labyrinth. Roman. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart u.a. [1922]
• ^ Stasiewski, Bernhard, "Polnische Wirtschaft" und Johann Georg Forster, eine wortgeschichtliche Studie., in: Deutsche Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift im Wartheland 2 (1941), H. 3/4, p. 207-216.
• Ludwig Uhlig: Georg Forster. Lebensabenteuer eines gelehrten Weltbürgers (1754-1794). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 3-525-36731-7

Other sources

• ^ Michael Berleigh, Michael Burleigh, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521398029
• Leslie Bodi, Georg Forster: The >Pacific Expert< of eighteenth-century Germany, in Literatur, Politik, Identität - Literature, Politics, Cultural Identity, pp. 29+54, Röhrig Universitätsverlag, St. Ingbert 2002
• ^ Pauline Kleingeld, Six Varieties of Cosmopolitanism in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany, in Journal of the History of Ideas, 1999 (Text as PDF)
• ^ BOOKS and Periodicals Received (accessed on September 1st, 2005). In the review of: "Czarna legenda Polski: Obraz Polski i Polaków w Prusach 1772-1815" (The black legend of Poland: the image of Poland and Poles in Prussia between 1772-1815), by Dariusz Łukasiewicz. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskiego Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Nauk, 1995. Vol. 51 of the history and social sciences series (English and German summaries). ISBN 8370631487.
• ^ Salmonowicz, Stanisław: Jerzy Forster a narodziny stereotypu Polaka w Niemczech XVIII/XIX wieku. In: Zapiski Historyczne 52 (1987), H. 4, 135-147. - Germ.: Georg Forster und sein Polenbild: Kosmopolitismus und nationales Stereotyp. Medizinhistorisches Journal 23 (1988), 277-290.

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