Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany by Andrew Zimmerman (review)

Abstract

250 Reviews though destabilized by his struggle with memory, accepts his bourgeois self along with its enhancement by the internalized other, Velten Andres. Thus the relationship of the two novels is chiastic: failed or successful narrator vs. successful or failed alternative self. Naturally there would be much to debate in this rich, observant study. The charts and tables calculating numerical values for character features suggest a questionable drift into a sociological content analysis that Plett (p. 13) professes to avoid. Antibourgeois conventions result, ironically, in overestimating Velten Andres's heroic stature in Die Akten. But Plett achieves an important result that should be inscribed into literary history: the best of German realism, especially of Spielhagen, Raabe, or Fontane, does not mirror the dominant order but constitutes a counter-culture within the ominously evolving Wilhelmine environment (both Spielhagen and Raabe have passages that appear sorrowfully to foresee the Great War). An awareness of this critical dissidence might help restore the comparative standing of German realism. New Haven Jeffrey L. Sammons Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany. By Andrew Zimmerman. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2002. ix +296 pp. ?16; $25. ISBN 0-226-98342-0 (pbk). At the end of Wilhelm Raabe's chilling reckoning with German Biirgerlichkeit, his latest completed contemporary novel Die Akten des Vogelsangs (1896), a member of a travelling curiosity show is mentioned: 'Herr German Fell, von der Anthropologie genannt "das gefundene Mittelglied", der unubertrefflichste Affendarsteller beider Hemispharen' (Braunschweiger Ausgabe, xix, 376). In Rolf Hochhuth's Der Stellvertreter (1963) a certain Professor Hirt from the Reichsuniversitat StraBburg provides the image of the Nazi scientist who commissions skulls from the soldiers at the Eastern front in his quest to prove 'scientifically' the superiority of the Aryan race through craniometric measurements. The study under review is not about such literary expressions either of the new 'anthropological' problems and methods pro? duced by the nineteenth century, or of the perversions of such approaches in the service of an evil regime and ideology. But by focusing on the development, policies, interests, and methods of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte, particularly its Berlin branch (founded 1869) and its main public showcase, the Berlin Museum of Ethnology (founded 1886), from their beginnings to roughly the end ofthe Wilhelmine Empire, it helps us considerably to understand the origins of such notions and their literary representations as quoted from Raabe and Hochhuth. Indeed, the protagonists of the Gesellschaft attended 'freak shows' and displays of 'exotic' peoples in their quest for 'scientific' evidence on their sub? ject, they also commissioned skulls from all kinds of agents (military, administrative, commercial) from German colonies in Africa and the Pacific region, and they refined and standardized the methodology of craniometric surveying and recording. Zimmermann's accounts of such activities?the anthropologists' attempts to teach the 'exotic' performers 'original' dances, their correspondences on how to scavenge colonial battlefields for 'native' skulls and how to ship the booty to Berlin?make for thoroughly interesting and sometimes uncannily amusing reading in their own right; the illustrations contained in the book are truly remarkable. The scope and interest of the book do not end there. Zimmerman also outlines how the new discipline of anthropology tried to define itself as scientific in demarcation from the traditional historical and humanist school of thought, by constructing a category of 'natural' peoples (Naturvblker) in distinction from the 'cultural' peoples MLRy 99.1, 2004 251 (Kulturvolker) studied by the traditional humanities; he illustrates how this mode of thinking reached wider constituencies through the network of associations of this amateur discipline and through some activities of the society such as a racial survey among schoolchildren (the so-called Schulstatistik) in the 1870s; he thus contributes to an understanding of racism not as an error in general scientific development but its pinnacle, pursued by earnest scholars whose liberal, non-anti-Semitic credentials are beyond doubt. His interests also stretch to mechanisms of association, the male bonding and involvement of amateur fieldworkers at home and in the colonies. All this has interest far beyond the confines of Wissenschaftsgeschichteof one particular discipline. It goes to the core of our understanding of the ideological, social, political, ideological, cultural...