The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (review)

Gathering momentum ever since the end of World War II, the tidal wave of the German Humboldt revival has reached the American shores at last. A recent biographer has claimed in a book that revealed the many faces of Humboldt that have appeared over time that "post-war Anglo-American Humboldt scholarship developed in virtually complete and blissful ignorance of the many hundreds of German publications on Humboldt [ … ]" (Nicolaas A. Rupke, Alexander von Humboldt: A Meta biography. Frankfurt am Main 2005, 191). Anything but blissfully ignorant of German scholarship, Laura Dassow Walls's well-informed and deeply probing volume joins the recent contributions by Aaron Sachs (The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism, London 2006) and Chenxi Tang (The Geographic Imagination of Modernity: Geography, Literature, and Philosophy in German Romanticism, Stanford, CA 2008) as an equivalent component of the American scholarship that has been reinforcing the German revival alluded to by Rupke. Whereas both Sachs and Tang, owing to the specific focus of their volumes as expressed in their subtitles, discuss Alexander von Humboldt in the company of other figures, Dassow Walls's attention is focused entirely on Humboldt and devoted mainly to his impact on America. Though a bit apprehensive about the audacity of an Americanist to venture into the thickets of German Humboldt studies, Dassow Walls actually renders a long-overdue and significant service to the wider field of Humboldt studies that goes beyond her findings regarding his impact on "the shaping of America."

By immersing herself in the details of Humboldt's Germany as well as Humboldt's America, she ties into the venerable traditions of American intellectual life in the nineteenth century when commanding figures—from Edward Everett, Bancroft, Emerson, Fuller, Ripley, and Parker, up to Royce and William James—added German to their facility in French and thrived in the transatlantic intellectual currents that were eventually to be curtailed by the upheavals of the twentieth century. Rather than plowing through the nine decades of Humboldt's life in chronological sequence, Dassow Walls challenges her readers by means of a brilliantly planned shuffling of key elements in her daring depiction of what, to her, amounts to the Humboldtian transformation of America. In a tour de force, her "Preface" (vii–xi), "Prologue" (1–11), and Chapter 1 ("Confluences" 12–48) manage to highlight some of the German sources of and American challenges to the Humboldtian spirit. After mastering the physical obstacles of the great American exploration—it was that spirit that delayed, as Dassow Walls puts it, the "tectonic shift that was splitting the world of knowledge under his feet even as he wrote and lived [ … ]" (4–5)—Dassow Walls here sets the tone that pervades the entire volume, the lament over the ineluctably evolving "two cultures" and the resounding call for a renewal of the Humboldtian spirit in the academic settings of our day.

The author evidently is on a mission and the courage of her convictions allows her to come forth with some strong statements and to risk some notable omissions. The magnitude of her undertaking and her boundless admiration of her subject may have led her to exaggerate the scope and originality of his impact on America, and forced her to downplay the debt he owed to antecedents and contemporaries. Nevertheless, there is a rich treasure of information and much food for thought in her text.

For American readers unfamiliar with Humboldt's American journey of exploration (1799–1804), Dassow Walls's Chapter 2, "Passage to America, 1799–1804" (49–98), presents a concise overview. Staying on message by stressing the lasting negative impact of the Hispanic conquerors and their descendants on the land and its native peoples, she effectively conveys the magnitude of Humboldt's achievements both as a meticulous scientific explorer and as a deeply caring historian of culture. The author makes clear that Humboldt's journey was not the...