Submission of Paper for ESC 2009 to Conference Proceedings Author:

Submission of Paper for ESC 2009 to Conference Proceedings
Author:
Ralph W. Buechler, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of German
Affiliation:
Department of Foreign Languages
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Address:
4505 Maryland Parkway
Las Vegas, NV 89154-5047
Phone:
(702) 895-3546
Fax:
(702) 895-1226
E-mail”
[email protected]
Title of paper:
“The German Enlightenment, Travel and the Road to Paris and the
Revolution: The Anomaly of Georg Forster
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“The German Enlightenment, Travel and the Road to Paris and the Revolution: The
Anomaly of Georg Forster
Of the myriad travels, explorations, and expeditions undertaken in eighteenthcentury European travel, the circumnavigation of the globe by Captain James Cook may
arguably be viewed as the ultimate effort, distance, and duration.1 Already in 1768 on his
first sailing expedition, Cook had set out upon the first South-Sea exploration, officially
to observe the solar eclipse from the island of Tahiti, unofficially to explore the southern
seas for a large land mass, possibly a heretofore unknown southern continent.
However, Cook’s second sea voyage from 1772 to 1775 proved to be far more
significant for German cultural history, because, as the expeditionary fleet’s flagship
Resolution embarked from Plymouth in the summer of 1772, it counted among its crew
2
members the young Georg Forster and his father. Forster had been granted permission to
accompany his father, who recently had been appointed naturalist and scientific advisor
by the English admiralty.
Georg Forster was born in 1754 near Danzig as a German descendant of British
ancestry. His childhood journeys first came about by way of his father Jacob Reinhold
Forster, an autodidact and poly-historian beset with lifelong struggles for riches and
recognition.
Commissioned in 1765 by the Russian government to research and inspect the
regions of the Volga steppes recently populated by Germans, father and son then traveled
to St. Petersburg and, in 1766, to London. These travels were Forster’s first and only
school, and he soon became an accomplished naturalist and translator for his father. Their
difficult economic conditions in England where Forster senior taught at the Dissenters’
College in Lancashire and Georg translated and tutored to put food on the table were
redeemed by one of the great journeys in history Captain Cook’s 1772-75
circumnavigation of the globe. Forster had been granted permission to accompany his
father, who had been appointed naturalist and scientific advisor by the English Admiralty.
Rounding the Cape of Good Hope into the southern polar regions, the Resolution
and the Adventure made ports of call throughout Polynesia and Melanesia, at New
Zealand, Easter Island, Tierra del Fuego, Tahiti, Huahini, Tonga-Tabu, Tanna, Mollicolo,
etc. The extreme duration and ardors of the expedition were underscored by the scurvy
that was suffered by Forster and which undermined his life-long health. Having studied,
collected, classified, and catalogued the myriad flora and fauna, Forster senior was to
submit a final report of his findings, but a conflict with the British Admiralty not only
3
withheld his pay, but even the permission to write the report. As a consequence, the 23year old Georg wrote the Voyage Round the World , 1777 and Reise um die Welt, 1784.
The years following the Cook expedition were years of a perplexing mix of
celebrity and poverty for Forster. Known as the Weltumsegler (world traveler), he visited
Paris in 1777, where he met the naturalist Buffon, as well as Benjamin Franklin. In 1778
he returned to Germany, traveling through Düsseldorf, Kassel where he accepted a
professorship Göttingen where he met Lichtenberg Braunschweig where he met
Lessing and Berlin.
While in Kassel, Forster began to translate Buffon, much influenced by his
natural history and his critique of the obsessive systematizing and classifying of Linné.
Yet the provincial Kleingelehrtentum (petty scholars and academics) of Kassel convinced
Forster to move again, to Polish Wilna, where he had accepted a position to study and
research mining. But before this he traveled again to Leipzig, Halle, Dresden, the Harz,
and Vienna. The outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War of 1787 rendered impossible a
planned Russian naval expedition, and so Foster returned to Göttingen, where he
accepted a position as university bibliographer in Mainz in 1788. But here again the
suffocating provincialism (deutsche Misere) under the Kurfürst Friedrich Karl Joseph
contributed to Forster’s resignation.
Finally, in 1790 Forster undertook an extended journey with Alexander von
Humboldt through the Brabant, Flanders, Holland, England, and France. The resulting
epistolary essays Ansichten vom Niederrhein (Views from the Lower Rhine) 1791 marks
the beginning of Forster’s rapid politicization and radicalization and his ultimate
journey physically and ideologically to Paris and the Revolution.
4
Just a few days subsequent to the abdication of the Kurfürst and the French
occupation under General Custine in October, 1792, the Jacobin organization Die
Freunde der Freiheit und Gleichheit (Friends of Freedom and Equality) was formed in
Mainz and soon joined and presided over by Forster. He not only urged Mainz to accept
the republican form of government offered by the French, but was also named vicepresident of the provisional administration of the Rheinland in October, 1792. Amid the
feverish activities demanded of him and amid the growing counter-revolutionary
resistance throughout the Rheinland, Forster agreed to serve as Deputy of the Mainz
Convention and personally carry to Paris the formal petition for French annexation of
Mainz, which was approved in Paris in March, 1793. However, by now Prussian and
coalition forces were on the march, and Mainz capitulated in July, 1793. Not only was
Forster unable to return to Germany, but he became gravely ill, dying in Paris in January,
1794.
I list the many stations in Forster’s peripatetic life, because they prove central to
his social and political evolution. Forster’s road from expeditionary naturalist to Parisian
revolutionary wound through two pivotal transformations: (1) from natural science to
human science, anthropology, and history and (2) from eighteenth-century enlightenment
and enlightened despotism to revolutionary democracy.
From his earliest expeditions, during which he was to study the flora and fauna of
the region, Forster demonstrated great interest in human nature as well. I would postulate
that his ideas on human nature circle around the major eighteenth-century debates of
culture and history. That is, is human nature as Allgemeinmenschlichkeit (universal
humanity) essentially the same always and everywhere, or is it represented by historical
5
difference and diversity? Further, is history the evolution toward higher forms of culture
and civilization, or the devolution away from original perfection (Rousseau)?
Through his journeys particularly the Cook expedition Forster attended a
“school of comparative culture” second to none. In such essays as “O-Tahiti” he
demonstrates a divergence away from the idea of universal history and religion and
toward historical specificity and relativism. He argues that each folk, people, group, or
tribe be judged according to its own qualities and identity.
Although he appears to agree with the idea of historical progress as implied by the
myth of euro-centric superiority, Forster constantly witnesses the corruption such
progress and superiority bring to the South Sea Islanders i.e., he hears almost
simultaneously that on one side of the island some islander have attacked and murdered a
sailor, while on the other side a sailor has shot a native.
Forster overcomes these contradictions by way of a historicist dialectic that
understands progress only relatively and within the context of each individual culture. It
is here that we find the route to Forster’s conception of revolution as political progress,
not as universal idea, but as concrete historical praxis. Thus, while arguing for human
perfectibility as mankind’s greatest freedom and fortune, Forster anchors this high-flying
ideal to attainable reality.
Forster’s dialectical understanding of anthropology and history allows him to
move between the extremes of fatalism and utopianism. It acts as the foundation for his
future political position, in that he sees the French Revolution as a struggle for progress
through individual events not rational universals. It also prepares the way for the
metamorphosis from enlightenment burgher to democratic citizen. Again, Forster’s
6
travels function as a school of comparative politics, as allegory and argument that the
idea of freedom without the political and historical context can only exist as an idea of
the private bourgeoisie, not as a form of political and public freedom of the citoyen, the
citizen of the state.
Whereas the former is still possible within eighteenth-century enlightened
despotism (typified by the famous dictum of Friedrich II: “criticize all you want, as long
as you obey.”2) for Forster, only a democratic republic can develop an identity between
the people and the state through public representation, a process to which the comforts of
bourgeois liberalism must be sacrificed.
Forster’s radically unique and anomalous political position on the French
Revolution is thrown into striking relief by a comparison between him and a more
“typical” late eighteenth-century Enlightenment traveler, scientist, aphorist, and
essayist his friend and physics professor of Göttingen G. C. Lichtenberg.,3 who
represented a position taken as well by the two best-known literary figures in Germany at
the end of the eighteenth century, Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller.
By chance and good fortune Lichtenberg, journalist, editor, physicist, and lifelong professor at the University of Göttingen, where he popularized science and
commented upon various aspects of contemporary German culture, was visiting London
as Forster’s journey with Cook came to an end,4 and his initial meeting with Forster
allowed him first-hand insights into the adventures and discoveries of the oceanic
expedition. Just as significant for the subsequent collegial relationship between the two
men was their co-editorship of the Göttingisches Magazin, in which both men published
several essays on the sea voyages of Captain Cook.
7
On the whole, Forster’s and Lichtenberg’s travel essays share the same theme of
enlightenment and illustrate their common understanding of enlightenment as intellectual
emancipation, as freedom from ignorance. Such freedom is derived from observation,
experience, and reason and is predicated upon the ideal of human perfectibility. What is
more, both writers initially herald the events of 1789 in France as a Sieg der Vernunft
(Victory of Reason) and as a Werk der Philosophie (work of philosophy).
However, after the fall of the Bastille, Lichtenberg’s letters and published essays
speak rarely and then only guardedly of the events unfolding in France. Yet, his entries in
his private Sudelbücher, never intended for publication, portray an intense interest in
these events. What is more, Lichtenberg’s reaction to the storming of the Tuileries and
the imprisonment of the King of France in August, 1792 exemplifies a response that later
evoked Forster’s blanket accusation of the German intelligentsia for not seeing the forest
for the trees, for being able only think free, but unable to act free.
Given Forster’s and Lichtenberg’s initial common point of departure, one must
search for their divergent responses to the French Revolution after 1792 primarily in
Forster’s unique social and political experiences and, I would argue, his travels.
In this and all subsequent discourse that sought to reconcile the revolutionary
reality with the enlightenment ideals of revolution. Forster predicates his understanding
of human perfectibility upon the principle of public opinion. As medium of social
perfectibility and as agent of the Revolution, Forster’s notion of public opinion is
premised upon the faith in the will and reason of the masses, in Volkswille and
Volksvernunft, a faith that functions for him as an antidote to the revolutionary
pessimism triggered by the Reign of Terror.
8
Forster’s—for German conditions—truly unique political development—
materialistic, historical, cosmopolitan—convinces him of the futility of Enlightenment
and Bildung within the social context of a feudal-absolutist state and of the necessity for a
revolution from below through radical change of the socio-historical context and
conditions. Such a leap from enlightenment to political practice was not possible for
Lichtenberg, who feared radicalism existentially and understood it intellectually as
unreason, chaos, and the equivalent of Sturm und Drang enthusiasm or Schwärmerei.
The contradictions of the French Revolution brought about by the Reign of
Terror—from the collapse of the monarchy in August of 1792 to the establishment of the
Jacobin dictatorship in June of 1793—in turn brought with them a contradictory set of
reactions from a majority of German intellectuals, represented here by Lichtenberg, in
their attempt to reconcile idea and reality. In view of the paucity of political practice, the
economic backwardness, and the political regionalism, such attempts at reconciliation
would prove for the most part unsuccessful.
Notably, the geographic journeys of Forster are always accompanied by his
journeys of words his journals, letters, but most importantly, his essays, a literary form
broadly understood as language organized into a non-fictional, expository prose discourse
that articulates the author’s perceptions through a free-associative and open-ended
synthesis of science and imaginative literature. The essay form “essays” to articulate the
truth without esthetic illusion, while yet sharing with imaginative literature autonomy and
esthetic play. Whether “true essays’ or essayistic prototypes that anticipate the German
essays of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the German essay is the product of the
9
German Enlightenment, made possible by the development of eighteenth-century German
prose and the ascent of bourgeois culture and ideology.
Forster’s travel essays represent non-fictional, multidimensional, subjectively
associate, yet critical exposition ideally suited to both generate and transport Foster’s
dialectical strategies. A life-long letter writer and journal keeper, Foster wrote essays that
were formed by his critical and editorial work. He wrote over 90 reviews for the
Göttinger Gelehrten Anzeigen, published his essay “O-Tahiti” in the Göttingishes
Magazin which he co-published with Lichtenberg from 1780-85, and used his essay
“Cook der Entdecker” as the introduction to his translation of the account of Cook’s final
expedition. Forster’s first lengthy travel account Voyage round the World, was to be a
report or Bericht, and indeed it is filled with such passages as “We saw the volcano in the
evening blazing up, with an explosion once in five minutes or thereabouts.” However,
already here we see his penchant for commentary and reflection.
Forster’s essays weave objective and subjective components into
dramatic arguments reminiscent of Lessing. Eschewing ultimate truths and final
conclusions, they remain rhetorical and dialectical searches whose significance lies in
their strategies of movement from the author’s world of travel to his world of politics.
Finally, to understand the anomaly of Georg Forster, his sojourns to the South
Pacific and Paris during the Terror and his embrace of the French Revolution, we must
turn to a third journey undertaken by him in 1790, a journey from the Brabant, Flanders,
Holland, England and finally to Paris, just prior to the anniversary celebrations of July
14, the beginning of the Revolution a year before. The resulting book-length epistolary
travel essay Ansichten vom Niederrhein (Views of the Lower Rhine), 1791 implies both
10
the empirical and the critical views, synthesized in description, narrative and
commentary. This journey and its essayistic travelogue prove to be the bridge between
Forster’s travels as expedition and observation of the external world and his travels as
subjective experience that changes his personality and his politics.
Suggested by Wilhelm Humboldt and undertaken with Wilhelm’s brother, the
natural scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, Forster’s voyage down the Rhine
from Germany to England and Paris evoke the aristocratic grand tour of earlier times. But
not only is this voyage more a political-cultural journey of discovery, its account is also
the heir of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, 1768 and Goethe’s Italienische Reise (Italian
Journey), 1788, in which not the external realities, but the subjective experience of those
realities and its effect upon the traveler’s personality and emotions constitute the central
raison du voyage. Consequently, the reader “hears” Forster “think aloud” and is privy to
the development of Forster’s opinions and refusal to accept those of others.
One example of Forster’s subjective, sentimental and critical experience of the
world he meets on his travels must suffice here to illustrate his methodology throughout
the Ansichten. Upon entering the Cathedral of Cologne he is awestruck by the masterful
architecture and the spirit from the far past that gave birth to it:
We entered the cathedral and stayed until the darkness enveloped us. As
often as I visit Cologne, I always return to this glorious temple to be moved by its
sublimity. The mind is rendered speechless before the daring of such masterful
works, then it soars again. . . . Still centuries later we feel the presence of the artist
and imagine the images of his fantasy while we wander through this structure.5
(64)
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No writing of Forster witnesses his political transformation more clearly than the
Ansichten vom Niederrhein, in which the author moves from events such as 1) the
collapse of the Guild and Magistrates constitution in Aachen or 2) the revolt of the
middle-class in Lüttich toward a blueprint for political action. Here, the justification of
the Revolution and its Terror is prepared, a preparation that would allow Forster to
conceive of the Terror dialectically, as a necessary antidote to the utopian freedom and a
necessary conduit through which would come the historical progress toward democracy.
As early as the year the publication of the Voyage, Forsters notes in the journal of
his journey to Paris not only his strategy to not only write what he sees, but also what it
means, yet in almost the same breath he complains of the difficulties of melting the two
dimensions into a continuous, seamless discourse. Indeed, in his own essay on Georg
Forster, the romantic German literary critic Friedrich Schlegel characterizes the essays of
the former as “geschriebene Gespräche (written conversations)”.
Notes
1
See Klaus Laermann, “Raumerfahrung und Erfahrungsraum. Einige
Überlegungen zu Reiseberichten aus Deutschland vom Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in
Reise und Utopie. Zur Literatur der Spätaufklärung.
2
“Kritisiert so viel ihr wollt, nur gehorcht!” (All translations mine.)
3
For an in-depth comparative treatment of the role played by the French
Revolution for the intellectual development of Lichtenberg and Forster, see Wolfgang
Rödel, Forster und Lichtenberg: Ein Beitrag zum Problem deutscher Intelligenz und
französischer Revolution.
12
4
The unique relationship of the Hanoverian university at Göttingen to England
and the English court made possible Lichtenberg’s two journeys to England. In the spring
of 1770 he visited England for a month—as tutor to the sons of Lord Boston and Admiral
Swanton, Lichtenberg accepted the invitation of Lord Boston to accompany his two
charges to England and reside with Boston while in London— and his longer stay is
dated from September, 1774 to December, 1775.
5
“Wir gingen in den Dom, und blieben darin, bis wir im tiefen Dunkel nichts mehr
unterscheiden konnten. Sooft ich Köln besuche, geh ich immer wieder in diesen
herrlichen Tempel, um die Schauer des Erhabenen zu fühlen. Vor der Kühnheit der
Meisterwerke stürzt der Geist voll Erstaunen und Bewunderung zur Erde; dann hebt er
sich wieder mit stolzem Flug über das Vollbringen hinweg . . . Wir fühlen, Jahrhunderte
später, dem Künstler nach und ahnen die Bilder seiner Phantasie, indem wir diesen Bau
durchwandern.“
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