By Frank Holl and Kai Reschke
Probably no scholar in the 19th century was portrayed more frequently, no scientist fired the imagination of his contemporaries as much as he, and none were the subject of such admiration. He travelled the Rio Negro, the Casiquiare and the Orinoco in Indian boats, and claimed to have set the human altitude record after climbing the Chimborazo, then considered the world's highest mountain. Humboldt not only took great delight in the countless portraits made of him, and which circulated in great number as engravings and lithographs, he even participated in this vanity fair with signed lithographs of himself, which he had made at his own expense and distributed amongst friends, visitors and admirers. In the twentieth century, only one scientist has been portrayed so often and met with comparable public interest: Albert Einstein. Both of them tolerated, encouraged and enjoyed the star-cult that ultimately also served the democratisation of knowledge and science. Einstein attached great importance to having his theories printed in popular publications. And Humboldt himself took steps to popularise his findings by holding his famous "Cosmos lectures" at the Singakademie in Berlin, before an audience comprising all social classes: from the king to the hackney coachman. When the second volume of Cosmos - Humboldt's life's work - appeared, buyers fought "veritable battles" over the book, as his publisher, Cotta, noted. Humboldt wrote: "The pursuit of knowledge and discovery are the joy and right of humanity, they are part of our national wealth, and frequently a substitute for the goods that nature has distributed so very scantily. Those peoples […] in which the respect for such activities has not penetrated all classes will inevitably witness their prosperity decline."
Guided by the notion of the "unity of nature", which he conceived as "a totality moved and animated by inner forces", Humboldt saw the phenomena of nature as comprising a network that linked all the elements, "not in a single, linear direction, but as a web-like entwined fabric." "Nothing stands for itself alone", he wrote: "a common bond entwines the whole of organic nature". Of the mosquitoes that tormented him and his fellow travellers on the rivers of the tropical rainforest, he even said that they played "an important role in nature's household in the hot zone, despite their minuteness".
Humboldt saw the countryside as a space of interaction, both within nature and between nature and man. "Everything is interaction", he wrote in his Travel Diary. At many of the places he visited in Latin America he noted, usually in connection with climatological observations, the influence of human beings in changing nature. Thus, for example, he criticised the ill-conceived drainage of Mexico City. "The Spanish have treated the water as if it were their enemy. It seems as if they want this New Spain to be just as dry as the interior regions of their old Spain. They want nature to become rather like their morals, and they are having no small success at this enterprise. […] They have not understood how to combine both goals: the security and safety of Mexico City and the irrigation of the estates. A water shortage makes a valley infertile, unhealthy, salt accumulates, the air becomes drier and drier."
"My true and only goal is to analyse the growing-together and interweaving of all the forces of nature", wrote Humboldt, more than sixty years before the term ecology was invented. With his conception of human beings as a part of nature, and dependent on nature, both changing it and intervening in a disruptive manner in its interrelations, Alexander von Humboldt shows himself to be one of the most important precursors of what is probably the most consistent conception of ecology, the Gaia theory of the geophysicist James Lovelock. According to Lovelock, planet earth is a single entity, a totality, a living organism with self-regulating functional mechanisms. Lovelock's and Humboldt's perspectives reveal astonishing parallels. Both see the earth as part of a greater natural whole and observe it from the perspective of the universe. The first volume of Humboldt's Cosmos is a "painting of nature in general", which "descends from the most remote nebula and revolving double stars to the tellurian phenomena of the geography of organisms (flora, fauna, human races) […] From the realm of the celestial forms, from the children of Uranus," writes Humboldt, "we then descend to the more confined seat of the earthly forces, to the children of Gaia". As a child of Gaia, says Lovelock, man may well be an element of nature, but not a necessary part of her. Lovelock advances the thesis that planet earth will expel man from its organism if he continues to prove himself a pathogen. If man fails to grasp the basic interrelations he will eliminate himself from the system of nature. On the "uninhabited, faceless, jungle-covered bank of the river Casiquiare", Humboldt remarked: "Here, in the interior of the New Continent, one almost becomes accustomed to viewing man as a thing unnecessary for the order of nature". The climatological study of Lake Valencia is one of the countless examples of Humboldt's grasp of ecological interconnections. He traced the fall in the water level back to the clearing of the surrounding forests, which changed the water balance in the countryside and, consequently, the regional microclimate. He made it quite clear that the climate outside this area would also be affected as a result of reciprocal changes.
Despite his ecological sensibility, Humboldt shared the 19th-century belief in progress, according to which man was inexorably developing in a positive direction, driven on by knowledge, science and technological change. His book, Aspects of Nature and his literary Naturgemälde are descriptions and analyses of nature that include man as well as repeatedly drawing attention to the exploitability of nature, especially for agriculture and canal construction. Hence in his Travel Diary, Humboldt suggested, for example, making the Casiquiare available as a canal for intensive shipping to allow trade between the province of Quito and the Viceroyalty of Peru as well as the Orinoco delta. The idea of the Panama Canal also dates back to Humboldt. Humboldt's thinking thus reflects the ambivalence of modern man as both preserver and exploiter of nature.
Humboldt's Travel Diary has been had a contradictory reception. Hans Magnus Enzensberger referred to Humboldt as a "messenger who did not know that he had come to report the destruction of everything that he went on lovingly painting in his landscape paintings until he was ninety years old." Egon Erwin Kisch spoke of a "scientific conquista", and noted that the greed of European investors had been partly inspired by Humboldt himself. "What, there are still such vast areas with an undeveloped economy and fabulous mineral resources, with such passive and modest-living labourers? Come on, […] let's try and develop our methods of exploitation there" Some Mexicans still reproach Humboldt with having voluntarily given the US government his research results and maps and thus drawing the North Americans' attention to the land in the south, a land rich in mineral and agricultural resources. He was therefore partly responsible for the conquest of a large part of Mexican state territory by the United States of American in 1847.
Like all other scientists, Humboldt was also a seeker of truth. He placed his trust in unrestricted scientific discourse involving the publication of all insights, and in the victory of reason. As early as 1793, Wilhelm von Humboldt had said of his twenty-four-year-old brother that nobody else was able to "combine the study of physical nature with that of moral nature, and to really introduce true harmony into the universe as we know it". Nature and morals - two concepts that were to be important for Alexander's life, as much as the ideals of the French Revolution: liberty, fraternity, equality. Proceeding from the "unity of the human race", he resolutely opposed the "disagreeable assumption of higher and lower races". Humboldt's guiding principle was: "Everyone is equally destined for freedom". And he did what he could to "remove the barriers that prejudices and one-sided views of all kinds have erected with such hostility between human beings, and to treat the entire human race, regardless of religion, nation and colour, as one great single race, as an entity striving to attain a purpose, the development of its innermost forces." It is with this thought that he concluded the first volume of the Cosmos.
Even at the age of twenty, he stated that he found nothing "more unbearable than the clever princes who want to tell others what to think". Later, in his Travel Diary, he remarked that "the idea of the colony is itself an immoral idea, the idea of a country obliged … [to pay] … duties to others" And he also sharply criticised the missionary work performed among the natives: "Monkish discipline […] transplanted into the wilderness of the New World […] must be all the more corrupting the longer it persists. It stifles intellectual development from generation to generation, it inhibits any exchange among the peoples, it repels everything that elevates the soul and broadens the powers of conception". Humboldt referred to slavery as "the greatest of all the evils that have tormented the human race". He always showed diplomatic caution, however, in the way he expressed his political views. He stood by his liberal opinions and was proud of the fact that he had never let down any of his political friends. Nevertheless, Humboldt was not a revolutionary like his friend and fellow traveller Carlos Motúfar or his colleague José Francisco Caldas, both of whom were executed for their ideals by Spain, the colonial power.
Humboldt's work itself is a network. He did not only see nature as a "web-like entwined fabric", his own communications resembled a widely branching network too. He endeavoured to find suitable partners for his various goals, such as the botanist Aimé Bonpland, the only person to accompany him from the beginning to the end of his American expedition, and without whom Alexander's enterprise would scarcely have been conceivable on the same geographical scale and with such an impact. Yet the preparation and evaluation of the expedition demanded a great deal of communication - which Humboldt had had opportunity to practice since his youth. It is unlikely that anyone has ever written more letters - reliable estimates put the number at around 50,000. His communications network extended across all continents. Rather like an early Internet, it served to exchange measurements and scientific information. The remarkable feature of Humboldt's thinking and activity is that he consistently established his networks to serve his personal and scientific interests, but he also carefully maintained them and frequently used them for completely unselfish purposes.
"The author of Cosmos belongs to the world, the enlightened scholar belongs to Germany, the author of the Politische Essays über die Insel Kuba, however, belongs to our Cuban mother country", noted the Cuban ethnologist, Fernando Ortiz, in 1930. In 1997, the Humboldt National Park was opened on the eastern side of the island; and in the historical part of Havana, the "Casa Alejandro de Humboldt" - a museum and centre for an international scientific exchange - was recently opened. In a survey carried out by a newspaper in Caracas last year to find out who was the most popular Venezuelan, the naturalist and explorer from the Berlin district of Tegel came third - after a pop singer and the national hero, Simón Bolivar. Not so long ago, the satire Humboldt und Bonpland - Tierpräparatoren (Humboldt und Bonpland - Animal Dissectors), a parable on the problems of Europeans in and with the New World was performed. Recently, the leading article in a respected Mexican newspaper dealt with the question: "Was Humboldt a US spy?" In Latin America, the contemporary relevance and presence of Alexander von Humboldt seems to be taken for granted in large parts of society. Even some of the slums bear his name. In Europe, on the other hand, he is still waiting to be rediscovered. The exhibition Networks of Knowledge and this book aim to encourage people to think about a scientist who receives little attention in Germany, a scientist who, in Latin America, is now considered to be one of the most important guiding intellectual forces of the 21st century.
The exhibition consists of twelve theme rooms defined by aspects of Alexander von Humboldt's work and activities, and formally linked by their historical chronology.
"A matter of public interest" - The name Humboldt
"My room was an open grave"
- Schloß Langweil, Jewish Salons and his first journeys
"In its extent and in its inner being, being is only ever perceived as that which has become" - Empirical scientist and 'modern manager'
"The truth in itself is precious. Even more precious, however, is the ability to find it" - Neptunism, vitality and nervous impulses
"How easy it is to cross the Atlantic by ship thanks to the great progress we have made" - On travelling
"I will be able to make observations with excellent instruments" - One who set out to understand the world
"A strange feeling, one as yet unknown" - The American expedition
"Loneliness and splendour"… On the exploration of the rivers and tropical forests
"How inhospitable European cruelty has made the world" - On immorality and oppression
"We analysed the plants with indescribable pleasure" - Botanical studies
"Searching for gold is a European sickness bordering on madness" - El Dorado
"The avenue of volcanoes" -vulcanology and phytogeography
"The prosperity of the whites is intimately linked with the copper-coloured race" - Incas and Chimú
"This current was known to all fishermen from the Chili River to Payta three hundred years before my time!" - The Humboldt Current
"… a fairytale land, the likes of which one cannot see in Spain" the Viceroyalty of New Spain
"A people that appreciates the gift of liberty" - Humboldt in the USA
"… a complete, travelling academy" - The Paris period