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Book
ReviewMetabiography,
Interestingness and Genuine ComplexityAlexander von Humboldt: a metabiography. Nicolaas
A. Rupke, 2005. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Berne, Brussels, New York, Oxford
and Vienna: Peter Lang; ISBN 3631539320, 320 pp., £22.80, cloth
SAGE Publications, Inc.2007DOI: 10.1177/09675507070140040707
MalcolmWagstaff
University of Southampton
I
had not encountered metabiography before reading Nicholaas Rupke's exemplification,
but I have been impressed by the insights that it has pro- duced. Metabiography
does not set out to reveal the essential person by constructing a chronological
narrative of their life in the conventional way. Rather it looks at the way
the person has been presented, or re- presented, by different biographers
at various periods of time. Rupke reveals that the vast literature on Alexander
von Humboldt (1769–1859), mostly in German, presents a plurality of
representations, each expressing the interests of biographers working during
particular phases of German history. Thus, before the emergence of the German
Empire, Humboldt was presented as a political liberal, sympathetic to the
project of German unification. Under the Empire, however, and into the period
of the Weimar Republic, he was seen as a supreme example of German cultural
genius, whose research in South America not only preceded that of Darwin,
but also prefigured the theory of evolution. It was an easy step for Humboldt's
scientific achievements in botany and geology to be used during the Third
Reich to show the superiority of German intellectual achievement and how the
combination of the national soil (Boden) and racial blood (Blut) produced
great geniuses. His friendship with Goethe (from 1794) was used to link him
to German idealism and the notion that human knowl- edge is a unity, as opposed
to French rationalism and the break-up of knowledge into separate disciplines.
Humboldt's francophilia, and the fact that his major scientific works were
written in French, were a problem to all German nationalists, but the Nazis
dealt with this by stressing the purity of Humboldt's Blut. With the end of
the Second World War and the division of Germany, two distinctive portraits
emerged. In socialist East Germany, Humboldt, the former mining inspector,
was turned into a supporter of the proletariat and his aristocratic connections
were played
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down.
He was also linked to progressive humanism, as represented by the `revolutionary
democrat' J.G.A. Forster, who not only sailed on Cook's second voyage and
published an account but was also an active supporter of revolutionary France.
Humboldt's comments on slavery in the New World were taken to show that he
was not only an abolitionist but opposed to capitalism as well, while remarks
on the governance of Spain's South American colonies proved his anti-imperialist
views. In West Germany, by contrast, Humboldt's long residence in Paris, his
stay on the east coast of the USA and his correspondence with English-speaking
scientists and politicians turned him into the very model of a cosmopolitan
liberal sci- entist. His participation in Jewish salon society, his friendship
with Jewish women and his support for Jewish emancipation helped in the de-
Nazification of the FRG. The de-Nazification programme was also helped by
the claim that Humboldt was one of the founders of modern geography. This
was a historically new claim but could be justified by his travels in South
America and Siberia. Thus, the great scholar-scientist helped to rehabilitate
a subject which had not only been used to justify the Nazi policy of finding
Lebensraum in the East, but had also collaborated in planning German settlement
there. Rupke said that Humboldt the Marxist died with the breaching of the
Berlin wall in November 1989 and the end of the GDR a year later. His cosmopolitanism
was stressed in united Germany, but this time it was connected to the worldwide
flow of infor- mation through his network of correspondents and his belief
in liberty. Although he rapidly became a `Green' idol in Germany for his ecological
insights, an image previously confined to the English-language literature
about him, reunification also brought various attempts to deconstruct Humboldt.
Many cracks emerged in the accepted portraits as scholarly deconstruction
of the old images showed. For example, the evidence did not really support
either the claim that he was the father of independence in South America or
that his abolitionist stance was more than a warning to the Spanish government
about what would happen if slavery was not reformed. Finally, Rupke shows
how the inevitable `outing' came. Humboldt never married and he left most
of his estate to his long-time valet. The metabiographical approach to Alexander
von Humboldt reveals the genuine complexity of the subject, the diversity
of his life and the many facets to his character. A great deal is learnt about
him, but kaleidoscopi- cally, as it were. Well-known pieces of research fall
in a different pattern each time they are shaken. At the same, the metabiographical
approach makes clear the constructed nature of each representation. No single
image is comprehensively true. Taken together, though, they present the subject
in the round. Rupke has also documented how different biographers bring out
different aspects of their subject, and how their choice – whether
conscious
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or not – reflects the wider concerns of the society and the times within which they
write. Other famous men and women might be examined in the same way with great
benefit.