Georg Forster Society
Georg Forster 1754-1794
Circumnavigator - Naturalist - Essayist - Travel Writer - Democrat
His tabooing in the 19th century did not succeed in erasing the memory of one of the most important German polymaths and writers of the late Enlightenment, whose political views remained mostly misunderstood in Germany at the end of the 18th and in the 19th century and beyond and, thanks to their modernity, only found their equivalent in the late 20th century. However, in view of this buried legacy, it is now more important than ever to rediscover Georg Forster's intellectual heritage, whether from the natural sciences, ethnology or anthropology, whether from history or German studies, or from linguistics and cultural studies in general, including art and politics.
Born on November 27, 1754 in Nassenhuben near Danzig as the son of the preacher Johann Reinhold Forster, Georg Forster accompanied his father on an inspection trip on behalf of the Russian government to the Volga in 1765 and from there to London via St. Petersburg in search of employment. After years of hard work and privation, he was allowed to accompany his father on James Cook's second voyage around the world from 1772-75, which established his fame as a naturalist and travel writer. After a trip to Paris, where Georg Forster met Buffon and Franklin, among others, he came to Kassel in 1778, where he was appointed Professor of Natural History at the Collegium Carolinum, of which he became Vice-Rector in 1779. During his five years in Kassel, he was in close scientific contact with the most important scholars in Göttingen, met Goethe, Herder, Wieland and other leading representatives of German intellectual life and cultivated intensive contact with Freemasons. In 1784, Forster accepted a call to the Polish University of Vilnius and married Therese Heyne, the daughter of the important Göttingen classical philologist Christian Gottlob Heyne, the following year.
The plan for a scientific expedition to India lasting several years on behalf of Tsarina Catherine II came to nothing, whereupon Forster accepted the position of librarian at Mainz University Library offered to him at the end of 1788. From Mainz, he undertook a three-and-a-half-month journey via Holland to England with the young Alexander von Humboldt in 1790, making his first direct acquaintance with the French Revolution on the way back via Paris, which he immediately joined when French troops entered Mainz in October 1792. Forster joined the Mainz Jacobin Club and was soon its president. As Vice-President of the "Rhenish-German National Convention", he traveled to Paris on March 25, 1793 to present the Convention's motion to join the Mainz Republic to the French Republic. Due to the reconquest of Mainz by Prussian troops, Forster remained in Paris as a convinced democrat who was not allowed to return to Germany, where he was threatened with imprisonment. He died here at the age of 39 on January 10, 1794, politically embattled in Germany, but admired and respected far beyond that as the author of Reise um die Welt and Ansichten vom Niederrhein as well as a wealth of smaller treatises and often masterful essays on the natural sciences, art and literature, philosophy, contemporary history and politics, in addition to a wealth of translations, including Sakontala, and reviews.
Info
New publication:
Georg-Forster-Studien XXIII: Briefkultur der Spätaufklärung, kassel university press 2022.