Engagement and Neutrality in Germany: The Case of Georg Forster, 1754-94

Abstract

Among the intellectual leaders of the German states during the period of the French Revolution, the political geographer and natural philosopher Georg Forster occupies a special place. As one who spent a third of his brief life outside Germany-living in England and traveling through the Russian steppes and the vast reaches of the South Seashe was the least parochial of German thinkers, a fact apparent in every page he wrote. In his political views, he was perhaps the most consistent and certainly the most extreme of his generation, arriving, indeed, in the end at the unfashionable conclusion that thought unaccompanied by action to implement its conclusions is useless. These qualities of mind would in themselves make Forster worthy of attention by students of his period. The reaction of his contemporaries to his political activism, however, makes his case not only interesting but significant, and illuminates characteristic attitudes of the German intelligentsia that have slowed Germany's progress toward liberalism and democracy in the 175 years since Forster's death. In his own country Georg Forster has generally been honor. There is no complete edition of his works, and the nineteen-volume one that has been promised by the Academy of Sciences of the German Democratic Republic has been repeatedly interrupted and delayed. No major biography exists, and most of the shorter works and essays about Forster have been superficial, apologetic, and/or romanticized. In a country that has always venerated its great minds, this is curious, particularly since there is no doubt about Forster's stature as a thinker and a writer. He was a pioneer in the field of political geography and comparative cultural history and must be regarded as the teacher of Alexander von Humboldt; his views on the relationship between social conditions and the arts profoundly influenced the young Hegel; his essays on literature, philosophy, and occasional subjects were read with enthusiasm by Goethe and Georg Lichtenberg and eagerly solicited by Friedrich Schiller for his journal Thalia; and he was described by no less an authority than Friedrich Schlegel as one of Germany's classical writers. It is virtually impossible to lay down any of his writings, Schlegel wrote in 1797, without feeling that one has been not merely