Wie verzweifelnd die Indianer pflegen": American Indians in Chamisso's Poetry

Abstract

The outstanding success of Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (1814), his best known work, has obscured the fact that in his lifetime Adelbert von Chamisso was one of the most prolific and respected lyric poets writing in German. Peter Schlemihl, whose eponymous fairy-tale hero becomes in the end a globe-trotting natural scientist by means of a pair of Seven League Boots, has frequently been regarded as a literary prefiguration of its author's life after 1815. In this year Chamisso embarked on a three-year voyage as naturalist on board the Russian brig Runk, visiting and exploring in particular the South Sea islands, the Pacific seaboard of No rth and South America, and the Bering Strait area, and circumnavigating the globe from east to west by returning to Europe via the Cape of Good Hope. On this voyage he acquired first-hand knowledge of many peoples who had only recently become known to Europeans through the discoveries of explorer-navigators such as Bougainville, Cook, Vancouver, and La Perouse. Chamisso observed the lives, customs, and languages particularly of South Sea islanders, Chilean and Californian Indians, and Aleuts, enlarged his knowledge of them through reading, and set down his views on them in his twopart account of his voyage, Reise um die Welt – comprising his Bemerkungen