Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany (review)

The existing historiography of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German science in general, and of the history of biology in particular, follows to a large extent a well-established hierarchy. Science is done at universities and then trickles to the "popular" realm. One classical example is natural history. An "avantgarde" science at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it became more and more outdated during the course of the century, when other disciplines based on the theory of evolution and experimental methods took over. In this scenario, natural history was pushed out of the center of university science to more peripheral places like museums, zoos, and amateur natural-history associations. There, collecting and classifying continued without any major impact on the "leading" academic disciplines.

Nyhart already contested that scenario in "Natural History and the 'New' Biology."¹ In Modern Nature, she demonstrates, unfortunately only implicitly, that the traditional picture is mainly due to methodological limitations in the existing historiography. By approaching her subject with a combination of individual biographies, institutional histories, and the history of a scientific concept and embedding it in the general social and cultural history of nineteenth-century Germany, she creates an entirely different picture. The thread that she follows is the emergence and history of what she calls the "biological perspective." The genuine achievement of the book lies in the quasi-archaeological (even though Michel Foucault is never mentioned) reconstruction of this notion, which is hard to grasp with more traditional methods from the history of science, since it falls between a well-formulated concept and a mentality held by people from different social and political backgrounds. Nyhart shows that the "biological perspective," by oscillating between the different arenas, nevertheless had a considerable impact on a broad array of areas, both scientific and nonscientific. Therefore, she not only contributes to a specialist question of nineteenth-century history of biology but also gives a lively account of some overlooked aspects of German history in general.

After an introductory chapter, Nyhart portrays the career and work of taxidermists in their private and public museums and in their quest for more lively displays. In the third chapter, she shows how the zoo movement contributed to this quest. In Chapters 4 and 5, Nyhart introduces Karl Möbius and his concept of Lebensgemeinschaft, which can be seen as a conceptual expression of the previous ideas, and how it became established, not through academia but mainly through classrooms and the school-reform movement. Chapters 6 and 7 are devoted to natural-history museums. With the help of three richly portrayed examples, the author shows how the museum as an institution changed at the end of the nineteenth century and how the ideas of liveliness and Lebensgemeinschaft—the core concepts of the biological perspective—influenced the emergence of the new museums. In Chapters 8 and 9, the biological perspective returns, again via schools, to university, where it had considerable influence on the development of ecology as a research program and an academic discipline in Germany. In her conclusion, Nyhart compares the German to the American situation to show national specificities and general transnational trends.

Modern Nature is well written and nicely illustrated. It offers a fresh approach to both historians of science and a broader readership interested in nineteenth-century German history and popular culture.