Preface

Daniel Kehlmann’s international bestseller Die Vermessung der Welt (2005; Measuring the World, 2007) narrates the quest for knowledge through the lives of two giants of the nineteenth century: the botanist and geographer Alexander von Humboldt, and the mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss. Gauss’s travels are in a virtual space. His passion for exactitude draws him to work on the law of quadratic reciprocity and the frequency of prime numbers: “At the base of physics were rules, at the base of rules there were laws, at the base of laws there were numbers” (Kehlmann 73). Humboldt’s quest for scientific knowledge would take him to the geographical “new” world. With permission from the offices of the Spanish colonial regime in Madrid, in 1799 Humboldt arrives in New Amsterdam, Trinidad, to begin what will be recorded in history as one of the most important explorations of all times. Soon after his arrival, Humboldt visits a Christian mission, set up to baptize the natives. The monks cannot figure out what Humboldt and his companion Bonpland want of them; the abbot expresses his suspicion thusly: “nobody traveled half way around the world to measure land that didn’t even belong to him” (Kehlmann 58).

Measuring the World captures a historical turning point, when European acquisition of knowledge about the world is undergoing a drastic change. The idea of the “New World,” in its history and contemporaneity, becomes an object of fascination and exploration. What is new is the privileging of a different kind of travel narrative that was not merely about impressions but about knowledge: evaluated, tested, and scientifically “exact” knowledge. The world, be it in its metaphysical, epistemological, ontological, or physical form, was now being accessed through scientific treatises, documents, maps, etc. New developments in sciences and technology—John Campbell’s invention of the sextant (1757), Frederick König’s improvement on the printing press (1810), and George Stephenson’s design of the first locomotive (1814)—exemplify the vital energy that characterized the dawn of a speedier age. The launching of several encyclopedias—Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1751), Encyclopedia Britannica (1768, which expanded to 20 volumes by 1810), Löbel and Franke’s Conversations-Lexicon (1796, which became the Brockhaus Enzyklopedie in 1808)—were part of the collection, collation, classification and organization of knowledge about the world. In other words, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, textual knowledge becomes key to grasping a world beyond one’s physical reach. Accessibility to the world was not merely a function of travel; the world was fast becoming accessible in print.

It would be a fallacy indeed to assume that the growth of knowledge and the support to quench the curiosity about the world happened in a vacuum. The growing trade between Asian and European nations gave birth to the idea of world trade (Welthandel) and a world market (Weltmarkt) to designate international exchange of goods and international traffic of capital. This growing mercantilism, which led eventually to the establishment of colonial regimes, facilitated access to geographical and historical knowledge about distant parts of the world. Added to this was the growing sense of comparative world history. Leading intellectuals and thinkers, especially in Germany, such as Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder, and G.W. Hegel, were all developing their own modalities of Weltgeschichte (world history). It is also in this transformative moment that works of literature, especially from European colonies in Asia and Latin America, start making their way into the European literary space and come to be known under the rubric of Weltliteratur (world literature), most notably discussed by Goethe (1827) and Marx and Engels (1848).

The need to reflect on Germany’s role in determining the parameters for how one measures the world has recently attracted the attention of artists and historians. Perhaps the richest resource for exploring the numerous layers of venturing to measure the world can be found in the history of museums and their centrality during the nineteenth century in the early formation of the Bildungsbürgertum. Museums provide a wealth of evidence about how one conceptualizes various measurements of the world by showing us...