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Article in German,Abstracts in English, German and Spanish. Focussing Alexander von Humboldt's Vues des Cordillères et Monumens des peuples indigènes de l'Amérique (1810 - 1813) in the context of his monumental work, this essay tries to highlight not only the creation of a new discourse on the Americas but, at the same time, the project(ion) of a new order of world cultures. From a transregional perspective, Humboldt's aesthetically most radical book can be fully understood as a musée imaginaire of world cultures whose spatial, temporal, social, literary, frictional, architextual and cultural dimensions allow new insights in one of the most fascinating texts of the early 19th century. Alexander von Humboldt's Vues are creating a transmedial kaleidoscope within a fractal vision of the cultures of the world in the second period of accelerated globalization.

Article in German, Abstracts in English and German.The perception that regional climate might be influenced by deforestation started early in Europe. The first to consider human influence on regional temperature and air quality was Theophrastus (372-288 AD). He started a discourse that intensified when Europeans discovered and colonized America, peaked at the end of the 19th century and then fell into oblivion at the beginning of the 20th century. In his case study on the Valencia Lake in Venezuela (1799) Alexander von Humboldt laid the scientific foundations to systematically examine the question whether changes in climate could be human induced. The follow-up studies undertaken by Jean Baptist Boussingault on the same lake and on others in Latin America caused a sensation world-wide and his arguments were taken up by the early environmental movement (e.g. George Marsh) in defence of forests in Europe, the U.S. and in the colonies. The positive influence on climate ascribed to forests reached mythical dimention, leading to extensive reforestation programs to increase rainfall in areas with low precipitation. When these programs failed, the fear that the destruction of forests could lead to human induced climatic catastrophes was generally discredited.

Article in Spanish, Abstracts in English, German and Spanish. "Like antique bronze statues" – Dissolving classicism in Alexander von Humboldt's Relation historique du Voyage aux Régions équinoxiales du Nouveau ContinentThe "antiquization" of America, using classicist motifs as imperial models of appropriation, is a central rhetorical strategy in Alexander von Humboldt's travelogue. Over the course of the colonial experience this discourse is infused with tension: metaphoric and metonymic types of references collide; positive and negative connotations are superimposed; incompatible modes of temporalization are contrasted; colonial as well as dissident identifications are laid out. The concept of "antiquity" is de-authorized, deconstructed. Readers witness the dissolution of European classicism as a politico-aesthetic 'dispositif' due to contact with cultural difference.

Article in German, Abstracts in English.In this short essay, the Alexander von Humboldt scholar Kurt-R. Biermann (1919-2002) shed some light on the relationship between the famous conservative Austrian statesman Prince Metternich and the liberal Prussian scientist Alexander von Humboldt. It is one of the old legends that Humboldt and Metternich had studied together in Göttingen. They first met 1807 in Paris and corresponded in the most polite manner basically on one common field of interest, namely the promotion of the sciences.

Article in English, Abstract in English. My essay attends to a number of passages in Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative in which the Prussian explorer expresses anxiety about the apparent dangers posed by the overwhelmingly productive tropical landscapes he observes. In these passages, the excesses of an “exotic nature” threaten European identity and modes of civilization—and they trouble the accuracy of Humboldt’s own observational project. I also explore Humboldt’s related worry that South American vegetable (and visual) overload will exert a destabilizing effect on his aesthetic sensibility, disrupting his ability to represent the “New Continent” accurately in writing. Finally, I sketch the influence of Humboldt’s representations of tropical excess on nineteenth-century British cultural thought and literary practice. Studying the instabilities experienced by Personal Narrative’s expatriates and colonists promises to draw out important tensions latent in Humboldt’s treatment of tropical landscape and to illuminate broader epistemological and aesthetic shifts being worked out during the period.

Article in German, Abstracts in English and German. Humboldt’s „Kosmos“ or „physical world description“ aimed at the same time at the outer and at the inner world. Corresponding to Horace’s famous dictum it was meant to be useful and to delight. Such a description was characterized by two notions, that is by force and by liberty. The paper deals with Humboldt’s conception of his work, with his notion of nature, taken from the elder Pliny. Again and again Humboldt named his famous model namely Laplace whose methodological principles coincided with his own convictions. The paper demonstrates that and how Humboldt was influenced by Herder without mentioning Goethe’s friend and explains Kant’s role in this context. The final aims of Humboldt’s conception of natural science were the laws of nature which connected natural phenomena with each other. Finally Humboldt’s high respect for mathematics is analysed.

Article in Spanish, Abstract in German

Article in Spanish, Abstracts in English, Spanish and GermanThis article studies the recognition of Humboldt and his works at a late moment of his life, during the reign of Isabel II (1844-68), when in 1847 he received in Potsdam the Gran Cruz of the Real y Distinguida Órden Española de Carlos III, founded by Carlos III in 1771 and given since then to selected person for special merits related to the Court. We also publish the unknown letter that Humboldt sent to the prince Sotomayor to express his gratefulness for the decoration awarded to him (9th of August 1848). In this study are also included his prior appointments as correspondent member of the Real Jardín Botánico, the Real Academia Médica Matritense as well as the Real Academia de Ciencias, whose president Antonio Remón Zarco del Valle seems to have a significant importance related to the political recognition of the reign of Isabel II by the central European governments.

Article in German, translated by Wolfgang Böker, Abstracts in English and GermanBoth Alexander von Humboldt and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe have been portrayed in their later years anachronistically before the background of a mountain that had been of high significance in their earlier biography and carreer. For Goethe this was the Vesuvio, and for Humboldt the Chimborazo. This paper examines the numerous conceptual and formal parallels between the two paintings which make it probable that the Goethe portrait served as a blueprint for the portrait of Humboldt.

Article in German, Abstracts in English and GermanIn 1869 the “Naturwissenschaftlicher Verein” was founded in Magdeburg (Saxony Anhalt). That was the time when the scientific world celebrated Alexander von Humboldt’s 100th birthday. In this context, Humboldt’s achievements were remembered during the founding ceremony of that society. The paper which was read in September 2003 on a meeting of this organisation, focuses on three famous naturalists who celebrated Humboldt because they owed him much help in their own professional careers. The botanist Matthias Jacob Schleiden gave a memorial speech in 1869 in Dresden. The physiologist and pioneer of electro-biology Emil du Bois-Reymond honoured his mentor A. v. Humboldt on the occasion of the dedication of the statues of Wilhelm and Alexander in 1883 in Berlin. Charles Darwin expressed his gratitude to Humboldt by sending him in 1839 the report of his travels and received an interesting reply. These three scholars represented a new epoch in the development of the natural sciences. The paper includes a recently re-discovered letter from Humboldt to Schleiden, dated April 13, 1842.

Article in German

The aim of this study is the significance of the development of the Alexander von Humboldtpublications‑, resulting from his famous American expedition (1799-1804). Various authors have stressed the immense contribution of this Prussian voyager to scientific investigation. Here I analyze critically and in greater detail the precise nature of his contribution examining the impact of both the great information about America, and his new interdisciplinary and holistic concept of science. The goal of this work is not to classify his contribution to distinct academic disciplines. I attempt to study the impact of his greater vision and to see what was new and valuable in his accounts and his scientific investigation, as well as his method for the advance of science in both Europe and America.

Article in Spanish, Abstracts in English and SpanishTraducción: José Aníbal Campos Alexander von Humboldt's American travelogue (Relation historique du Voyage aux Régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent, 3 vols., 1814-1831) defies generic definitions: It is a complex hybrid of diverse scientific discourses, documentations of empirical data, diary writing, and traditional forms of travel narrative. Humboldt's poetics specifically undermine the conventional format of the travelogue. All its central features which could lend the text coherence and make it readable for the recipient, are charged with multiple meanings and become thus destabilized:(1) the subject (traveller, author, narrator, signature, personal pronouns),(2) the object (the countries that the travelogue is supposed to thematize, their various and contradictory forms of denomination and description in the text),(3) the addressee (the explicit narratee as well as the implicit reader and the interpretive community), and finally(4) the text itself (as a literary genre or discoursive phenomenon, its format, its polyphony, its self-reference and self-reflection).A narratological analysis and a structural reading lead us to the question of how Humboldt's poetics reflect his approach to cultural difference. The specific kind of deconstruction of the travelogue which is at work here de-authorizes imperial forms of colonial writing. There are no "identities" and "differences" which can be defined unequivocally from a privileged perspective. Humboldt's travelogue can thus be read within the paradigm provided by contemporary postcolonial theory: In the encounter with "the other", Homi Bhabha observed, "the language of the master becomes hybrid".

Article in English, Abstracts in English and GermanTogether with their wives Otto and Richard Schomburgk arrived in Port Adelaide (South Australia) on August 16th 1849. The essay looks at how these two brothers, who had received their scientific training and promotion in the circle surrounding Alexander von Humboldt, reacted to the unfamiliar conditions in the young British colony. Some indication will be given as to the differences between the Schomburgk brothers treatment of the natural resources of the new colony and that of the English colonists of the time.

Article in German, Abstracts in French and German.

Article in German, Abstracts in English, German and FrenchIn modern times the instrumental reason is meant to be a condition for objectivity and rationality. Referring to this consideration the lecture turns to the question, in which way the instrumental reason impresses upon the encounter with the foreign around 1800 and on which organizational forms of knowledge it is based. How do the representations of European stores of knowledge shape that global reference framework, in which the travel reports and diaries of Alexander von Humboldt are today?The thesis is, that his recordings about the conquest of the New World place the relation of the European world of senses to the supposed directness of the appearance and to the world of senses in the center. Furthermore a comparison to the writings of Georg Forster shows, in which way a change of representational forms at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, which goes far beyond the genre of travel reports, was introduced.

En este artículo se da a conocer la memoria autobiográfica que Alexander von Humboldt entregó en la American Philosophical Society de Filadelfia, por primera vez en su traducción al español. Este texto fue redactado en junio de 1804 durante su estancia en los Estados Unidos, cuando estaba finalizando su famosa expedición americana y constituye la primera —y hasta ahora única— narración completa de esta expedición hecha por el viajero prusiano. Con objeto de encuadrar bien este texto en una serie de notas autobiográficas que escribió Humboldt a lo largo de su vida, en la introducción se mencionan brevemente estas memorias, para después definir las características del escrito presentado aquí.

In current urban design and landscape architecture practice, designers often address sites from static and material perspectives: as empty grounds where new design inventions are played out at the whim of their creators. Despite such design works claiming site specificity as their guide, generic outcomes that ignore or overlook local conditions abound, lacking response to ephemeral yet essential site properties such as temporal dynamics and atmospheric encounters. The focus of this NANO note seeks methods for site exploration to inform site transformation through representing the narrative, ephemeral, and dynamic qualities of places that could contribute to open work design approaches.

Tot i pertànyer a generacions diferents i representar formes diferents d’aproximació a l’estudi de la natura, Humboldt i Darwin comparteixen el fet de tenir en l’aventura individual d’un gran viatge iniciàtic la fita determinant de la seva fructífera carrera científica.

Bibloiography

There have been attempts to subsume Charles Darwin's theory of evolution under either one of two distinct intellectual traditions: early Victorian natural science and its descendants in political economy (as exemplified by Herschel, Lyell, or Malthus) and the romantic approach to art and science emanating from Germany (as exemplified by Humboldt and Goethe). In this paper, it will be shown how these traditions may have jointly contributed to the design of Darwin's theory. The hypothesis is that their encounter created a particular tension in the conception of his theory which first opened up its characteristic field and mode of explanation. On the one hand, the domain of the explanandum was conceived of under a holistic and aesthetic view of nature that, in its combination with refined techniques of observation, was deeply indebted to Humboldt in particular. On the other hand, Darwin fashioned explanations for natural phenomena, so conceived, in order to identify their proper causes in a Herschelian spirit. The particular interaction between these two traditions in Darwin, it is concluded, paved the way for a transfer of the idea of causal laws to animate nature while salvaging the romantic idea of a complex, teleological and harmonious order of nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Latin America, Alexander von Humboldt is a household name. This is mostly due to the grand scientific voyage through the Americas that Humboldt undertook in the years 1799-1804. The 29 volumes of his work Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent (Paris 1805-1838) are the scientific output of these famous travels. The manuscripts we know today as Humboldt's American Travel Diaries are at the core of this extensive opus. Today, we find ourselves in a crucial moment for the research of Humboldt's Diaries. Since 2014, there has been a joint research project between the University of Potsdam and the Berlin State Library, focusing on conservation, digitization, research and scholarly analysis of these historic documents. Since 2015, there also is a long-term research project at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, dedicated to the scholarly edition of both the Humboldt Travel Diaries and all manuscripts related to his travels that can be found in his literary legacy in the archives of Berlin and Cracow. The scholarly edition will be hybrid, that is, both in print and digital form. Editing such a complex corpus of texts poses a challenge but, at the same time, gives us an opportunity to meet the expectations of the digital era. To conceptualize a hybrid edition means to understand that we are currently in the midst of a media diversification between the printed book and digital scholarly editions. The results of this diversification are still not clearly defined and largely depend on the work of a current generation of scholarly editors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Humboldtian landscape is the best result of a close relationship between artists and scientists in the context of the Enlightenment. Many artists inspired Humboldt to develop his concept of landscape as the best way of representing Nature, but some British artists in particular were a strong reference for him. Thomas Daniell and William Hodges had travelled to Asia creating a particular imagery, which inspired the desire to travel and the feeling of the exotic taste in Humboldt. Around Humboldt, mainly two types of artists have been studied: on the one hand, painter travellers who received direct instructions from Humboldt after his experience in America, and on the other, artists who started their trips by themselves after reading his works. However, this paper is focused on the links between Humboldt and these British painters of the Orient, whom he met on a European tour with Georg Forster, before making his trip to America.