Island Life: Natural History in Nineteenth-Century German New Guinea

Bernhard Hagen’s 1899 Unter den Papua's: Beobachtungen und Studien über Land und Leute, Thier- und Pflanzenwelt in Kaiser-Wilhelmsland is one of many pre-1914 memoirs and scientific works focusing on the German protectorate and later colony of German New Guinea. A recurring theme in many of these works is an attempt to reconcile expectations with the realities of life on the island. Hagen had imagined New Guinea as an island shrouded in intense mystery, an island without history, an island of secrets, and one of the last truly remote destinations on the planet. After he arrived, the island also became a place of sickness, work, death, and dread. Charged with addressing hygiene problems in the settlement and caring for sick and dying workers, Hagen's fantasies of were replaced with new realities, while he pursued a consuming interest in studying the natural historical and cultural features of the German territory.

In this presentation, I will examine several early accounts of the natural history of German New Guinea, and in particular studies of insects and birds, to show how popular ideas in Germany were changed by the experiences and difficulties faced by those on the island. While those experiences were importantly framed by both the preconceptions of the authors and the fact that the accounts were generally written looking back to New Guinea after the authors had returned to Germany, I will show why certain aspects of the natural historical landscape of New Guinea became so closely connected to popular understandings of the island long after the Germans had left.