Men of Science and Action: The Celebrity of Explorers and German National Identity, 1870–1895

Abstract

Before the commercialization of colonialism, Germans primarily engaged with the possibility of a German colonial empire through German explorers of Africa. This article examines the discourse about such men with an eye to the ways in which Germans formulated identities around them as celebrities in the earlyKaiserreich. A shift in the discourse is observable around the time of the beginning of formal German colonialism in the mid-1880s. To that point, observers had placed German explorers within an international scientific community defined by its cosmopolitanism. From the mid-1880s, explorers more often appeared as embodiments of a chauvinistic national identity that defined German colonialism as superior to other variants. This discursive shift was indicative, on the one hand, of the erosion of theBildungsbürgertum'scontrol of the meaning of German colonialism and, on the other, of the emergence of alternative colonialist identities through public engagement with the exploration of Africa.