Ordering the World: The Scientist and the Search for German Identity in Literature

Abstract

Having only unified in 1871, German narratives of national identity are beset by questions of what role the idea of “Germany” could possibly play in a global context dominated by its more established European neighbors. A proliferation of writings throughout the 19th Century emerged which attempted to cast Germany as being a scholarly nation, a nation defined by its scientific achievement, concurrently with the publication of numerous scientific writings that systematized and organized the world according to classificatory schemes. The present project analyzes the means by which fictional narratives in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century blended the construction of fantasies about the world with ostensibly scientific descriptions in order to construct a role for the previously ill-defined nation-state of Germany. My research focuses on a series of literary texts, including the adventure novels of Carl Falkenhorst, early German science fiction, and Robert Müller’s expressionist novels, supplemented by nonfiction and filmic works, that depict scientifically adept Germans attempting to understand their own place in the world by observing and measuring the world itself. By narrativizing the scientific process of discovering the world, these works construct their own visions of a world in which German identity is well-defined and prominent on the world stage. I analyze the manifold methods that these writers use in order to construct these worlds, as well as the wildly divergent conclusions at which they arrive about how Germany, and the natural world in which it exists, ought to be defined. The notion that Germany had a particularly strong relationship to scientific inquiry was widespread and used to distinguish Germany from its neighbors, but was hardly uniform, being used to advocate for everything from educational mandates to proto-fascist notions of scientifically justified racial superiority.