Profilgewinn. Karten der Atlantischen Expedition (1925–1927) der Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft

Abstract

One of the prestigious projects of the “Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft”, the German association promoting the sciences after World War I, was the “German Atlantic Expedition” aboard theMeteor (1925–1927), which became famous for systematically sounding and charting a large part of the South Atlantic Ocean’s floor. Focussing on two examples of theMeteor’s depth charts, the profile and the map, the paper claims that these visualizations of ocean depth not only gave evidence of Germany’s unbroken scientific excellence: they also acquired symbolic meaning within the German after-war struggles to regain lost colonial territory. The charts created public space for the revaluation of the German nation by visually constituting a new spatial realm of German influence. The paper investigates the production and function of visual depth evidence by tracing how the depth profile and map developed from single depth measurements into coherent and authentic pictures, which allowed for conceptualizing the abstract data volume of acceanographic space in terms of newly procured national grounds.