Metropolitan Scurvy in the Shadow of the Cook Voyages

Recent scholarship on scurvy in 18th-century Britain has focused on the disease in the context of voyages of exploration, especially those bound for the Pacific Ocean. Using materials from quack physicians, print culture and popular song, this essay contends that the problem of scurvy was just as acute in metropolitan London and elsewhere in Britain. By studying representations of the disease and its markets at home in Britain, it aims to shed new light on the treatment and perception of the disease at sea, particularly during the voyages of James Cook (1768?79).     

Captain Cook upon Changing Seas: Indigenous Voices and Reimagining at the British Museum

ABSTRACT

This article reviews the British Museum exhibition, Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives, 29 November 2018–4 August 2019. It situates the exhibition within a global context of exhibitions held around the 250th anniversary of Cook’s first voyage, and critically considers its attempt to reframe dominant narratives surrounding Cook, his voyages and more broadly the colonization of the Pacific through a focus on Pacific Islander perspectives within a changing museum sector.     

A Case of Identity: The Artefacts of the 1770 Kamay (Botany Bay) Encounter*

Collections of Indigenous artefacts made during the voyages of Captain James Cook have been extensively researched, but significant issues around the provenance and identification of artefacts remain complex and unresolved. This article considers the case of a shield in the British Museum, said for fifty years to have been appropriated by Cook at the time of first contacts with Gweagal in April 1770, and other artefacts associated with the same encounters.     

Transcending Gender Roles,Crossing Racial and Political Boundaries: Agnes Hill’s Fight for her Inheritance in German Southwest Africa

ABSTRACT

Agnes Hill, the unmarried daughter of a British landowner and farmer and his mixed-race wife, was living a ‘white’ farmer’s life in the colony German South West Africa. In 1908, she was suddenly classified as ‘native’, due to the enforcement of radical racial legislation in the German colony degrading the offspring of mixed-race people as ‘bastards’. The new classification would have had dire consequences for the whole family, especially in respect to their landownership. However, Agnes fought for her family, with the support of solicitors and – as a daughter of a British father coming from the Cape Colony – with the help of the British consul residing in the German colony. She finally succeeded in securing the estate for the family, even if she was an unmarried woman in a predominantly patriarchal settler society. Using mainly material from the court cases, the article traces Agnes Hill’s fight for the Hill inheritance, thereby investigating various crucial issues of colonial societies. It points at the changing boundaries between ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ and the ambiguity of racial classifications. The article argues that women such as Agnes Hill could play a significant role in colonial settler societies and were able to transcend gender-role boundaries.     

Vico: Past and present

In 1935, the British scholar Eliza M. Butler published The Tyranny of Greece Over Germany, in which she explored the appeal of Greek art and poetry to modern German writers. She argued that Hellenism had exerted a baleful influence on German literature and culture, and that Germans were especially—even dangerously—susceptible to the power of ideas. In her view, the most dangerous Hellenic concept to German culture and society was the daimon, which had reached Germany via the work of Winckelmann. Butler's thesis and methods may be problematic, as some reviewers of Tyranny pointed out, but her work is noteworthy as the product of a scholar who had lived in Germany and was a witness to history, familiar with German language, literature, and culture, writing on Germany during difficult times. As a British scholar who began studying German just before World War I and ended her career after World War II, Butler had an ambivalent relationship with Germany and Germans. But in addition to political factors, she was also influenced by her family, her educational and research experiences in Germany, and her preference for 18th- and 19th-century over 20th-century Germans. Moreover, her perception of Germans and Germanness was consistently posed against her perception of England and Englishness, and she defined the two cultural identities in terms of their relation to each other. Writing Tyranny as the National Socialists came to power in Germany, Butler judged Germans and their relationship to the daimon harshly. In 1956, Butler reconsidered the daimonic in a study of Byron and Goethe, and in this work it received a more sympathetic and nuanced analysis. A comparison of these two works is useful for understanding the evolution of Butler's thought in the 20-year interval between their publication.     

德国占领青岛时期的文化政策及其实施

文化政策是德国在青岛殖民统治政策的重要组成部分,也是稳定其殖民统治的重要手段。德占青岛时期的文化政策虽经过一系列调整,但总目标是致力于将青岛建设成一个展示、传播德国文化的中心,以扩大德国文化在中国的影响。这一文化政策又是通过依靠教会组织,鼓励和利用其为德国的文化政策服务以及兴办各级各类学校、展示德国文化的优越性等途径加以实施的。     

魏玛共和国犹太人的德国认同

魏玛共和国犹太人在政治、文化和宗教生活方式上都表现出高度的德国认同。德国犹太人的这种国家认同既有重要的历史基础,也是现实的需要和客观环境压力的结果。魏玛共和国犹太人的德国认同突出表现在两个方面:一是将犹太教、犹太文化限定于宗教和文化的而非民族的层面,从而减少其与"德国国家认同"的冲突;二是强调犹太人与德国主流民族、语言、文化和历史的紧密关系。犹太人的德国认同对其族群产生了重要影响:犹太族群中发展出了对东方犹太人的歧视;排斥犹太复国主义;低估反犹主义的危害,以致对大规模地迫害、屠杀犹太人缺乏预见性等。     

‘Un engin de torture,une baïonnette à crochets; une arme blanche déshonorée’: an historical-archaeological evaluation of the Sawback bayonets of the Deutsches Heer

ABSTRACT

The Imperial German Army (Deutsches Herr) was unique among the combatants in World War One (WW1) in issuing to a proportion of its soldiers a bayonet whose blade back was fashioned as a saw. A common belief developed quickly among the Allies that these sawback bayonets were weapons specifically intended to inflict a particularly vicious type of wound. After setting out the origins of this class of weapon and explaining their real purpose, the two main types of sawback bayonet available to the Deutsches Heer during WW1 are then concisely described. Its reputation as a weapon of especial barbarity is outlined, along with an overview of bayonet use in combat between the mid-nineteenth century and 1918, as evidenced by official sources, highlighting the lack of any specific contemporary references to the use of or the wounds caused by sawback bayonets. The article concludes by detailing the contemporary German sources relevant to its withdrawal from service use in 1917.     

L'europe sans illusions

In his doctoral dissertation—The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, finished in 1919 and published as a book in 1920—Walter Benjamin explores the epistemological and aesthetic foundations of the concept of criticism expounded by the early German Romantics Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. Many of the themes in the dissertation recur in his later work, which has led scholars to believe that much of Benjamin's thought is directly influenced by the Romantics. However, a detailed investigation of the origins and development of the dissertation reveals that the picture is much more complicated. Reading the dissertation alongside the biographical material now available, this article argues that the major themes which preoccupy Benjamin in The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, including his theories of language and knowledge as well as his messianic philosophy of history, in fact predate his study of the Romantics. As well as being a potential entry ticket to an academic career, the dissertation constitutes Benjamin's first sustained attempt to develop and consolidate his own epistemology and aesthetics in a more or less systematic way. He does so through a series of ‘judicious interpretations’ of the Romantics, whose work he reads selectively, anachronistically and creatively to provide a vehicle for his own thought.     

Nazi Leaks and Intrigues in Second World War Ankara: the Plot to Send Herbert Melzig to a Concentration Camp

This article excavates one of the stranger episodes that took place in the transnational microcosm of the German expatriate world in Ankara and Istanbul during the Second World War. ‘Professor’ Herbert Melzig's story, the ‘Melzig affair’, illustrates how this microcosm, with its very different constituent members - Jewish and non-Jewish refugees from Nazism, German pro-Nazi expatriates, and an extensive embassy and Nazi Party network - acted as a conduit in German–Turkish relations, albeit one that produced unexpected results. This ‘Melzig affair’ sheds new light on the German presence in Second World War Turkey as well as the so-called German ‘exile on the Bosporus’ as it has been (re-)constructed and used in recent years; it also contributes to our understanding of Turkish foreign policy during the Second World War, especially regarding Turkey's reluctance to join the war on Hitler's side. At the end of the Melzig affair stood the ‘leaking’ of an internal Ministry of Propaganda memorandum. It prepared the ground for further leaks of this nature and was one of the turning points of public opinion in Turkey against the Third Reich.     

Remembering the German Past in the Czech Lands: A Key Moment Between Communicative and Cultural Memory

The objective of this paper is to document the ongoing shift from communicative to cultural memory of war and post-war events in the Czech Republic by using an example of a local struggle about a memorial for German inhabitants of a Czech town killed in June 1945. Thanks to an anthropological and social geographical approach based on interviews, family memory research, observations, and analysis of archive materials, it is possible to reconstruct the local and international sources of the post-1989 collective memory of the German past in Central Europe. This memory is still in constant conflict with the pre-1989 version of Czech national history which had contemptuously marginalized its German component. The communicative memory of the German past has entered the public space and tries to become a permanent part of the Czech cultural memory, but it is not a straightforward process, mainly due to the continuously strengthening nationalistic framing of memory within Central Europe.     

A missing link in the history of historiography: scholarly personae in the world of Alfred Dove

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the case of Alfred Dove (1844–1916), this article contributes to an emerging line of research on scholarly personae in the history of historiography. It does so by addressing the important but so far neglected question: What exactly does the prism of scholarly personae add to existing historiographical perspectives? The German historian Alfred Dove is an appropriate case study for this exercise, because historical scholarship in Wilhelmine Germany has been relatively well studied, from various angles. Most notably, it has been studied (1) through biographical lenses, (2) from institutional points of view, (3) as the cradle of ‘scientific history’, with special attention to historical methods of the sort codified by Ernst Bernheim, and (4) in relation to religious and political fault lines that divided the German Empire shortly after the Franco-Prussian War and the Kulturkampf. The thesis advanced in this article is that scholarly personae are a missing link between these four dimensions and therefore a theme of key importance for anyone trying to understand German historical studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.     

Fichte and the German Idiom: the Metaphysics of the Addresses to the German Nation

This article argues against the dominant Anglophone and Francophone interpretation of Fichte, which reads him as advancing either a form of ethnic or cultural nationalism. It claims that what is missing from the current reception of Fichte is the essentially philosophical and cosmopolitan character of his nationalism – the fact that the Addresses to the German Nation uses non‐empirical and cosmopolitical concepts to develop and articulate its nationalistic viewpoint. It therefore claims that the notion of a national philosophical idiom that the Addresses present, far from being a screen for its nationalism, is its driving engine. It does this by considering the problems of translating the German locution ist unsers Geschlechts. Consequently, it is claimed that the cosmo‐nationalism of Fichte is not reducible to a set of claims regarding ethnicity or even the empirical world, even if a discourse on the organismic, on what counts as life, irreducibly haunts the Addresses.     

德意志之名:德国国名的起源与国号的演变

现代德语中,德国国名“Deutschland”一词起源于中世纪早期日耳曼民族语言的名称“theodiscus”“diutisk”等词,具有语言、民族、地理和政治等多个层面的含义。国号中通常会包含国名的地理或民族因素,但长期以来,德国特殊的政治体制和政治形态导致中世纪时期大部分德国国号与自身的地理和民族名称相分离。直到1871年,“德意志”(Deutsch)才成为德国国号的主要部分;1949年,“德国”(Deutschland)才成为国号的组成部分。德国的国号根据历代统治者政治理念的改变而不断变化。通过考察德国国名的起源与国号的演变,可以更为深刻地理解德国历史的特殊性和延续性。     

‘Caught’ between foreign cultural and development policies: perspectives of German Studies and German as a foreign language in Africa

The promotion of the German language abroad and of German Studies plays a central role in German Foreign Cultural Policy. With regard to Sub-Saharan Africa, otherwise a peripheral region for foreign policy, German as foreign language is firmly established as second language after English. Learners especially in Francophone West and Central Africa have increased over the past decade. Numerous funding programmes and actions are supported by German nongovernmental organizations at college/university levels. But bilateral cooperation between German and African academic institutions are challenged both by negative perceptions of the ‘Global South’ among Western colleagues and by an infrastructure adverse to research and to career development in most African countries. Additionally, North/South relations are traditionally seen in terms of (under-)development by German institutions, effecting cooperation. The paper develops a differentiated picture of African Studies in Africa, and outlines benefits that can be attained through collaboration ‘at eye-level’.     

Relegating Nazism to the Past: Expressions of German Guilt in 1945 and Beyond

This article builds on a research thesis that confronting moralfeelings is essential to an understanding of the catastrophicpolitical success of Nazism in Germany and the way Germany developedafter its defeat in 1945. This research into a ‘moralhistory’ of Nazi Germany and its postwar echoes is carriedout through an interdisciplinary approach that, in essence,combines historical with philosophical analysis. In the immediatepostwar period, Germany continued to be stamped by discussionscentred on moral guilt arising from its Nazi past and from theHolocaust in particular. The article analyses the differentways this guilt was discussed in 1945 and how these discussionsechoed what can be described as a form of Nazi morality. Thearticle uses three main sources to explore these issues: first,the writings and interrogations with the Nazi lawyer and Governor-Generalof Nazi-occupied Poland, Hans Frank; second, the memoirs ofHitler's secretary Traudl Junge; and third, the essay The Questionof German Guilt by Karl Jaspers.     

David Meetom: Interpreting,Power and the Risks of Intermediation in the Initial Phase of German Colonial Rule in Cameroon

ABSTRACT

David Meetom, a Duala subchief, was an important interpreter in the coastal region of Cameroon at the beginning of German rule, which was shaped by colonial officials’ lack of language skills, the colonial state’s low level of institutionalisation, its necessity to rely on intermediaries, and tensions within Duala society. In this circumstances, new opportunities opened up to those who had knowledge of a colonial language. The article examines Meetom’s actions as an interpreter, broker and intermediary between colonial and African languages, authorities and interests. It covers his actions from his informal participation in negotiations between African and German authorities, to his work as official government interpreter, to a trial in which he was accused of having exceeded his authority before finally being shot fleeing German authorities. For Meetom, the consequences of his intermediary position veered between being personally advantageous and disadvantageous. His work held potential for conflict, both with the colonial government and with the Duala or other African groups in the region. Meetom’s life serves to illustrate how interpreters facilitated and controlled contact between colonisers and Africans and proves the distinction between the colonisers and the colonised which underlay the concept of colonial rule as having been surprisingly fragile.     

A racial triangle: physical anthropology and race theories between Germans,Jews and Poles

The last decades of the nineteenth century saw a growing prominence of German racial sciences. This article documents how East Central European scholars responded to their potential marginalization within the scientific community due to German racial theories in the field of physical anthropology and the popularization of science. Three personalities represent a sample of this variety: Ludwik Gumplowicz, a Polish-Jewish sociologist; Mateusz Mieses, a Galician Jewish amateur anthropologist; and Jan Czekanowski, professor of anthropology and spiritus rector of the Lwów school of anthropology. All three cases illustrate the contradictions inscribed into the concept of transnationalism. To varying extents, they belonged to the German-speaking scientific community, through which they gained access to international science. Their reactions to anti-Jewish and anti-Slavic positions among the dominant racial theories of their time shines light on the tensions which were present within the academic community, as well as on the tensions that appeared between their own (semi-)professional status, self-perception and their group identities. The international communication and contacts came into conflict with the exclusionary philosophy of racial theories, thus perpetually challenging their transnational position. The responses of these actors sought to redefine spatial and methodological frameworks amid the dominant discourses. Each making attempts in their own way, they aimed at reversing what they perceived as aberrations of racial theories while persistently remaining within this discourse.     

异质文化初次接触的启示——詹姆斯·库克之死个案研究

传统上,库克之死被归咎于夏威夷人的"野蛮",然而该观点却不能解释相关的另一现象:为什么在死后相当长的时间中,库克仍被岛民当做神灵祭拜?从18世纪的夏威夷社会文化本身去解读这一问题,会带给我们更具说服力的解释。在库克与夏威夷人接触的时候,"土著"文化与西方文化的交流还相对平等,夏威夷文化并且还起到更主体化的作用,库克为首的殖民者是被纳入到夏威夷本地文化中理解的。库克的死,可以启发我们去进一步探究异质文化初次碰撞的方式和模式问题。     

Overlapping rivalries: the two Germanys,Israel and the Cold War

The case of early German-Israeli relations offers unique insight into the dynamics of the German Cold War. As this article shows, the two Germanys were ideologically and geopolitically antithetical, but vis-a-vis the question of relations with Israel East and West German representatives faced a situation that was uniquely related to the German past and to the German Cold War competition.