Leo Frobenius and the Revolt against the West

Author(s): Suzanne Marchand

Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Apr., 1997), pp. 153-170
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
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Journal
of Contemporary History Copyrght
? 1997 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and
New Delhi, Vol
32(2),
153-170.
[0022-0094(199704)32:2; 1-2]
Suzanne Marchand
Leo Frobenius and the Revolt
against
the
West
'Wrath',
that
is,
the wrath of
Achilles,
is invoked in the first line of Homer's
Iliad,
and the
following tale, though
farcical
by comparison
to the tale of
Achilles'
adventures,
should
similarly open by emphasizing
wrath, rage
and
ressentiment. Leo Frobenius
(1873-1938),
German
ethnologist, was,
of
course,
no Homeric
hero, though
he
was, by
his own
testimony,
'brought up
to
be a
wanderer',' and
spent
his whole life in
motion,
between
Germany
and
Africa,
between the natural and the cultural
sciences,
between
lunacy
and
scholarship.
In addition to
spinning
out dozens of
speculative
ur-histories
involving moon-goddesses, mystical
numbers and the lost continent of
Atlantis,
Frobenius was a
prodigious
collector of data and artifacts and one of
the first
Europeans
to
try
to reconstruct the
history
of
pre-Islamic
Africa. After
the Great
War,
his
paeans
to
unspoiled,
ur-African blackness and his bitter
attacks on Eurocentric
historiography
and western 'materialism'
appealed
powerfully
to
many
of his
contemporaries;
his works
caught
the attention
of,
among others,
Ezra
Pound, Johan Huizinga,
the exiled German
Kaiser,
and an
important group
of African students in
Paris,
who
adapted
Frobenius's neo-
romantic fascination with
Negerheit
to their own anti-colonial
purposes.
A
man of
epic passions
and
dissatisfactions,
Frobenius was instrumental both in
launching
a vitalist
critique
of the west and in
crafting
the
methodological
weapons
that
helped
to
destroy
Eurocentric
historiography.
A devoted
ethnographer
and
disgruntled patriot,
Frobenius trained one
eye
on
primitive vitality
and the other on civilized
apocalypse.
He loved West
Africa with an
unprecedented ardour,
but could muster
only
disdain for his
discipline,
his
colleagues,
his
country,
and even his
hemisphere.
He was
certainly
not alone in his
generation
in
performing
remarkable feats of
treasure-trawling
or
conjuring primitivist reveries,
in
loving
Africa and
hating
Europe,
but his combination of traits otherwise exhibited
by
Heinrich
Schliemann,
Emil
Nolde,
Arthur Rimbaud and Paul
Gaugin
is
assuredly
I should like to thank the Leo Frobenius
Institut,
Frankfurt am
Main,
and
especially
Beatrix
Heintze,
for
allowing
me access to the archival material cited in this
essay.
I should also like to
thank
Anthony Grafton, George
L.
Mosse,
and Robert
Tignor
for their comments on earlier
drafts.
1
Frobenius,
Erlebte Erdteile, vol.
1, Ausfahrt
von der Volkerkunde zum
Kulturproblem
(Frankfurt 1925),
47.
Journal
of
Contemporary History
unique.
Frobenius shared with his
contemporary expressionists
a
longing
for
regeneration
and
redemption,
and with
ethnologists
and travellers of his era a
fascination with what he called 'the childhood of mankind'. A
product
of the
delirium of the
imperialist age
and
interdisciplinary struggles
for scientific
legitimacy,
the
protean
and
prolific
Frobenius
epitomizes
the
para-academic
underworld so crucial to the articulation and dissemination of Germanic
hypernationalism.2
But his
example
should
complicate
our
picture,
for in
Frobenius,
'cultural
despair'
was cut with an acute
appreciation
of the west's
blindspots
and crimes
against
'the rest'.
Fraught
with ironies and
agonies,
the
tale of Frobenius's revolt
against
the west should offer us some
insight
into the
complexities
of
fin
de siecle German culture.
If Frobenius was
important
in
formulating
a
critique
of
Eurocentrism,
he did
not,
of
course,
lack for sources of
inspiration. Paradoxically,
a
significant
portion
of the ideas that fed the first
critiques
of western
historiography
were
born in that foundational colonial
discipline, ethnology (or
cultural anthro-
pology).3 Ethnology
in later
nineteenth-century Germany
was
largely
domi-
nated
by
medical doctors on the one
hand,
and
geographers
on the
other;
and
despite
the establishment of a few
university positions
and the
building
of
a national
ethnographic
museum in
1886,
neither
group
felt their field
sufficiently appreciated by
the German elite.
Mid-century geographers,
ethno-
graphers
and
prehistorians primarily employed
methods borrowed from the
natural
sciences,
but after about
1870,
these
disciplines began
to
aspire
to the
status of historical sciences as well. This movement
away
from
description
and
classification toward historical reconstruction
quite rapidly
took
practitioners
into intellectual terrain unfamiliar to their fellow humanists
-
into worlds
where texts were
few,
and 'histories' had to be built on material
evidence,
ethnological
inference
and, often, speculation.
By
the
1880s,
work in this field was
already beginning
to
produce striking
critiques
of the conventional
historiography
of the
sub-Hegelian type.
Denouncing
historians for
defining
'universal'
history
such that it included
only
essential moments in the
spirit's development,
in 1882 the
'anthropogeo-
grapher'
Friedrich Ratzel lamented: 'Not
only
the cold and hot zones are
excluded from the
sphere
of
philosophical-historical study
... but also
Africa,
which "can
prove
no movement or
development"
and
America,
which is arti-
ficially
excluded from this
dynamic,
modern Geist.'4 Ratzel did
not, however,
confine his criticisms to the idealist
tradition;
in 1904 he even dared to attack
the revered
Leopold
von Ranke. 'If we were to
map
the areas whose
history
Ranke has
described',
he wrote in the
prestigious
Historische
Zeitschrift,
'we
2 For
examples
of the
importance
of this
cadre,
see Fritz
Stern,
The Politics
of
Cultural
Despair
(Berkeley 1961); George
L.
Mosse,
The Crisis
of
German
Ideology (New
York
1964).
3 For an
example
from British
anthropology,
see
George
W.
Stocking, Jr, After Tylor:
British
Social
Anthropology,
1888-1951
(Madison 1995),
34-46.
4 Friedrich
Ratzel, Anthropo-Geographie (Leipzig 1882),
31-2. 'It would be a
great task',
he
added,
'to demonstrate the influence of the
"people
without
history"
on
history
in
general,
as
Sallust and Tacitus
already
sketched in their
chapters
on Africa!'
154
Marchand: Frobenius and the Revolt
against
the West
would see that
only
a small section of the world has been
represented
as
historically important.'5
It is
possible
to see in this
geographer's
discontent a
clear
anticipation
of the
challenges
to
humanist,
academic
history
that would
be
raised,
as
travel, conquest
and
specialization pressed
the next
generation
of
scholars into
increasingly
more exotic studies.
Ratzel died in
1905,
and the
generational
divide between this scholar and
his
contemporaries
Adolf Bastian and Rudolf Virchow on the one
hand,
and
Frobenius and his cohort on the
other,
is
particularly important
for both the
political
and the institutional dimensions of this
story. Politically, many
of the
first
generation
of
ethnologists
were
liberals, opponents
of
Bismarck,
and
reluctant
supporters
of German
imperialism. Increasingly, however, they,
and
especially
their
students,
found
patriotic
rhetoric and the
prospect
of new
territories to
explore
difficult to resist. And if the first
generation,
like
Ratzel,
perpetually
lamented their outsider status with
respect
to the
humanities,
these
men did hold
positions
of
power
and influence. Their
students, however,
like
Frobenius,
came of
age
in an era characterized
by
an
over-production
of
specialized
scholars and a
widening gap
between students and
faculty.
For
these
young men,
some combination of
patriotic
fervour and
personal
ambition made the
prospect
of
collaborating
with the colonial
project
especially appealing;
we cannot overlook their nationalist
hubris,
of
course,
but we should not underestimate the
part
of their enthusiasm that was
rooted in this
generation's particularly
violent
longing
for
novelty
-
both in
experience
and
thought. Novelty
was bound
up
with academic success and
with national
distinction,
and for a
generation
for whom there were few
academic
jobs
and no wars to
fight, discovering
a new
species, unearthing
a
lost
civilization,
or
surveying
a 'blank'
spot
on the
map
satisfied the
longing
to
perform
a heroic act as well as the need to demonstrate
superlative occupa-
tional
proficiency.
For the academic
aspirant
of the
fin
de
siecle,
discovery
was
both a
personal
and a
professional imperative.
The
great problem
for these
eager
students
was, however,
that in
spite
of the
violent rhetoric
issuing
from nationalist
pressure groups, funding
for travellers
and collectors remained rather low and erratic
throughout
the Wilhelmine
era;
the
founding
of the Reich Colonial Office and the Colonial Institute in
Hamburg
in 1907-8
promised
a
brighter future,
but the war intervened before
much new work could be started. The brief intersection here of
personal
and
disciplinary
interests with
patriotic flag-waving
made this
period
between
about 1907 and 1914
exciting
for
aspiring ethnologists
like
Frobenius;
its
sudden
end,
it
hardly
needs to be
added,
came as a severe blow to their career
prospects, self-image
and
patriotic pride.
Colonialism, then, helped
to create new interest in and new sorts of
prac-
titioners of the
study
of
primitive
cultures. But
Germany's peculiar
colonial
history may
also have
given
some travellers and writers the
opportunity
to see
5 Friedrich
Ratzel, 'Geschichte,
Volkerkunde und historische
Perspektive'
in Historische Zeit-
schrift, 93,
no. 1
(1904),
44.
155
Joural
of
Contemporary History
the world in a
way
their 'western'
counterparts
did not. I want to
suggest
that
the Germans learned
something important,
if
only obliquely,
from their
jealous
observation of the other
imperial powers
and their late and
very
violent
encounter with their colonial
subjects.
The
targets
of the
Maji
Maji
and
Herero revolts and the keen observers of
British, Belgian
and French
imperial
blunders,
the Germans were the first to underscore the
fragility
of
European
rule. Well before
1917,
there were numerous German 'declines of the west' in
preparation,
if not
published, by
authors as diverse as Hermann
Hesse,
Hermann Graf
Keyserling,
Albert Schweitzer and Leo Frobenius. Of
course,
imperialism
alone did not
shape
these
critiques;
German adventures abroad
took
place
within a cultural world
simultaneously being shaped by
other
forces, including struggles
between the humanities and the natural
sciences,
between
religious
leaders and scientific
popularizers,
between an
older,
liberal-
positivist generation
and the rebellious and resentful
younger proponents
of
life.
But
perhaps by examining
more
closely
the
ways
in which
imperial
dis-
appointments shaped
German intellectuals' attacks on 'the
west',
we will
learn
something
about both the violence of this sentiment and its
appeal
to an
eclectic
group
of
pan-Africanists,
anti-establishment historians and
pessimistic
poets.
Reflecting
on his formative childhood visits to the
Eskimos,
Africans and
'inner-Asians' at the Berlin
Zoological Garden,
Leo Frobenius offered the
following explanation
of the
origins
of his
passion
for Africa and
ethnology:
'The maternal kindness of an
elderly
Nubian woman
essentially gave
the child
the vital content of his
calling.'6
Of
course,
such
retrospective prophecies
of
calling,
like Schliemann's
apparently
invented childhood dreams of
Troy,
are
suspect,
but in Frobenius's
case,
the tale has some
plausibility. Certainly,
the
Zoo's inhabitants and its
superintendent,
who
happened
to be Frobenius's
grandfather, helped
to stoke the
young
man's
exoticizing imagination.
He
immersed himself in accounts of German
explorations
in
Africa, and, perhaps
awed
by
his
grandfather's scholar-explorer friends,
he
developed
a
profound
admiration for
university professors
who
alone,
he
believed,
knew the answers
to all the
questions
he wanted to ask.7 In
1892,
when he was
19,
he
published
an
ethnological study
of the southern
Congo, having
read all the available
travelogues
but none of the
pioneering anthropological theory
of his contem-
poraries,
and
having,
of
course,
never set foot on the African continent.
Frobenius had
clearly
found his
calling,
but his
parents,
like those of
many
would-be scholars of his
day,
balked at his choice of
profession,
and
compelled
him to suffer a brief
apprenticeship
in the business world after
completing
his
Gymnasium
courses.
Frobenius's
passion
for Africa did
not, however,
wane
during
his
apprentice-
ship
as his
parents
had
hoped,
and on a visit to Bremen's
Ethnographic
Museum
(Uberseemuseum),
he was seized
by
what he described as 'the
6
Frobenius,
Erlebte
Erdteile, 1,
48.
7
Ibid.,
48-9.
156
Marchand: Frobenius and the Revolt
against
the West
unrestrained
hunger
for
personal experience'.8 Lacking
the
private wealth,
civil
service
post
or
missionary calling
others used to
indulge
their exotic
pre-
occupations,
Frobenius satisfied his
'hunger' by consuming
books and
journals.
At about this time he also met Ratzel's
student,
Heinrich
Schurtz,
who
apparently inspired
him to
study ethnography
at
university
level. As no
regular
courses in the
subject
were
offered,
Frobenius
began attending
Ferdinand von Richthofen's
geography
seminar
-
from whence also came the
intrepid
Swedish
explorer,
Sven Hedin - at the
University
of Berlin in 1893.
While in
Berlin,
he
managed
to secure an
apprenticeship
at the
Ethnography
Museum under director Adolf
Bastian,
the Catholic
evolutionist,
and
began
collecting
the
ethnographic photos
and
drawings
that would later
comprise
his
'Afrika-Archiv'. The
young
scholar was
nothing
if not assiduous in
assembling
his materials:
by 1925,
when Frobenius sold it to the
city
of
Frankfurt,
this
archive contained
13,140
small and
3,158 large drawings
as well as 750
photographs.9
Following
the German custom of
changing
universities after a
year
or two of
study,
Frobenius moved around the academic
world, ending up
in 1896 in
Basel,
where he
sought
to take his
degree. But,
in what was
surely
a life-
altering act,
the Basel
philosophical faculty rejected
his
two-part thesis,
destroying
in one blow his admiration for the
professoriate
and his
hope
of
a
university position.'1
Frobenius was
furious;
his naive reverence for the
academy
was crushed." But he
persevered
in his
ethnological
studies. The
field,
in these
years,
was in
any
case
very
much centred around museum
collections;
'fieldwork' remained the
exception
rather than the rule. In
1898,
Frobenius secured an
assistantship
at the Bremen
Museum,
now under the
direction of his friend Schurtz. A
year
or two
later,
he obtained a
post
at the
prestigious ethnography
museum in
Leipzig,
where he encountered Ratzel
himself, now in his last and most illiberal
years.'2
These
positions permitted
the
young ethnologist
to
develop
an
expert eye
for
stylistic details,
but did
not,
of
course, bring
him much
pay
or
prestige.
This extensive
period
of
collecting
and
labelling
artifacts contributed
centrally
to Frobenius's conviction that
material culture could form the basis for an alternative historical
method;
at the same
time,
his
lowly professional
status and
longing
for
personal
experience
fed his
antipathy
for the academic
establishment,
his
jealousy
of
English imperial power,
and his
professional
insecurities.'3
8
Quoted
in
Janheinz
Jahn,
Leo Frobenius: The Demonic
Child,
trans. Reinhard Sander
(Austin 1974),
6.
9
Vertrag
zwischen der
Stadtgemeinde Frankfurt
... und Leo
Frobenius,
16
May 1925,
in
LFI,
Korrespondenz,
Institut #2.
10
Anon,
'Leo
Frobenius',
Dresdner Neueste
Nachrichten,
20
August 1938;
in
LFI, Kriegsakten
1914 und Verschiedenes.
11
Frobenius,
Erlebte
Erdteile, 1,
60.
12 Helmut
Straube,
'Leo Frobenius
(1873-1938)'
in
Wolfgang
Marschall
(ed.),
Klassiker der
Kulturanthropologie
von
Montaigne
bis
Margaret
Mead
(Munich 1990),
153-4.
13 For his
antipathy
toward the
English,
see
Frobenius,
Die
Zukunft Englands:
Eine Kultur-
politische
Studie
(Minden 1900);
on his alienation from
academia,
see
Jahn,
Leo
Frobenius,
7.
157
Journal
of
Contemporary History
Frobenius's
early
work is indicative of the
ambiguous
scientific status of
ethnology
in his
day;
if trained
largely
in the natural
sciences,
the
young
museum assistant
clearly
wished to
apply
his skills to the
rewriting
of human
history.
In a
pair
of
important essays published
in the
premier geographical
journal,
Petermanns
Geographische Mitteilungen
in
1897-8,
he
adapted
his
extensive
knowledge
of artifacts to the 'diffusionist' theoretical orientation of
Ratzel and Schurtz. The diffusionists conceived cultural
development
as the
product
of
exchange,
imitation or
conquest,
rather than that of
independent
evolution.
Similarly, Frobenius,
from the
outset,
was convinced that most of
humankind's
important
innovations had
originated
in one area and then
spread
to
surrounding regions,
where
particularistic
modifications occurred.
But he also retained some of the evolutionist Bastian's ideas in
insisting
that
around these borrowed and modified
customs, myths
and
artifacts,
auto-
nomous cultural wholes were formed. These cultural
wholes,
for
Frobenius,
were
organisms
-
the
organisms
-
and human
beings
were
simply
carriers or
objects
of
them;
culture was a third
sphere, inextricably
linked with both
nature and Geist. Most
importantly,
culture was to be located in the
ways
in
which humans
exploited
their material
resources;
and
geography, therefore,
was
critical,
both in
determining
which materials
might
be available for
use,
and in
creating possibilities
for cross-cultural
borrowing.
To transform these
claims about diffusion and its limits into a means of
reading
man's
prehistory,
Frobenius
pioneered
the
study
of
Kulturkreisen,
or cultural
circles,
which
were, essentially,
areas which shared a cluster of
stylistically-defined
and
historically-related
cultural features.4
Space
does not
permit
a full discussion of the
history
of culture-circle
theory, which, according
to one recent
commentator, 'shaped ethnological
work in central
Europe during
the whole first half of this
century,
and which
can be described as the most
significant methodological
contribution of
German-speaking anthropology [Volkerkunde]
to the
history
of
ethnology'.'s
It
is, however, significant
that the
origins
of the
theory lay
in the
hyper-
diffusionist work of
Ratzel,
and
especially
in his
study
of the
history
of bow
types,
which
hypothesized
a
prehistorical
link between Oceania and West
Africa.16 It is also worth
noting
that Frobenius received little credit for his
theoretical contributions to his
discipline
until the late
1920s, partly
because
of what Ratzel described as his
'pretentious' style
and his 'carelessness and
inexactitude and lack of
clarity
in
presenting
the
big picture'.'7
But if
inexact,
Frobenius
certainly
did not lack the ambition to
lay
out a
breath-taking 'big
14
See, e.g.,
Leo
Frobenius,
'Der westafrikanische
Kulturkreis',
Petermanns
Geographische
Mitteilungen,
44
(1898), 193-204;
265-71.
15
Straube,
'Leo
Frobenius',
167.
16 Herman
Lommel, 'Mythologie
im
Bildern',
Leo Frobenius: Ein Lebenswerk aus der Zeit der
Kulturwende
(Leipzig 1933), 77-8;
see also Dewitt Clinton
Durham,
Leo Frobenius and the
Reorientation
of
German
Ethnology,
1890-1930
(PhD dissertation,
Stanford
University 1985),
26-31.
17 Ratzel to
Frobenius,
15 December
1898, quoted
in 'Abdriicke aus der Kritik' in Leo
Frobenius: Ein
Lebenswerk,
153.
158
Marchand: Frobenius and the Revolt
against
the West
picture'
of
prehistorical
cultural diffusion. Like a
pendulum,
he
argued
in a
subsequent essay,
cultural
development
had first
swung
from west
(Europe
and
West
Africa)
to east
(Asia Minor);
after a
hiatus, during
the Bronze
Age,
the
pendulum
had
swung westward,
across
Europe
to
Spain
and
Portugal,
and
from thence to the New World.'8 In this 1899
article, then,
Frobenius
already
demonstrated what would
prove
to be a
life-long proclivity
to mix
highly
insightful ethnological analyses
with
wildly conjectural global
histories.
Frobenius also infused his first
publications
with an unusual
degree
of
passion, particularly
in his
prefatory
laments about the sad state of his
discipline
and
warnings against
the destructive effects of the
homogenizing
tendencies of the modern world.
Very early
in his work one finds a
powerful
admiration for
authenticity coupled
with an
expressionist
love of innocence
and a
deep antipathy
to the
corruptions
of indirect
colonialism;
'the
Negro
in
a frock coat' is the
metaphor
he
regularly
invoked to
denigrate
the
superficial
adoption
of
foreign
traits induced
by French, Belgian
and
especially English,
rule.'9 This combination of elements makes for rhetoric that often sounds
very
much like
anti-imperialist
diatribe. In
1898,
on the heels of a British
expedition's rapacious
excavation of numerous bronze
sculptures
in
Benin,
a
furious Frobenius wrote:
With our iron fist we smash other
peoples.
We sow our colonies on the
corpses
of
putrefying
races and
cultures,
and burn down the
dwelling-places
of other
types
of
development
in order
to erect our
palaces
on the
smoking
ruins. . . . The
burning
of the
library
at Alexandria
robbed human
history
of
important
materials in the
space
of a few hours. The
European
ocean of
fire,
which extends across the
Earth, may
have
destroyed
within a few decades the
largest part
of
living
and dead 'world
history'.
With the destruction of each
people's
peculiarity,
a document
disappears
forever. And
only
he who ... in terrible
pain
has
struggled
in vain to discover the reason for such a
loss,
who with a shudder
recognizes
too late the
value of
possessions
now
destroyed
for
eternity, only
he can have an
inkling
of the terrible
and
rightful
scorn of our
descendants,
who will not be able to
forget
that we knew so ill how
to cherish and
preserve
these
precious
documents.20
Frobenius
certainly
did care about the fate of the
Africans,
and
probably
at
this
point
in his career
sympathized
with left-liberal
critiques
of
imperialist
overstretch. But he also cared
passionately
about the
Africans,
at least in
part,
because he
thought
them to be
living
documents of an otherwise unrecoverable
universal human
past.
The
passage just quoted, therefore,
is not
yet
a frontal
assault on western civilization's
universalisms,
but rather the
ranting
of an
angry young
museum
assistant,
bitter over the
rejection
of his
thesis,
and
resentful that others are
destroying
the source materials for his
path-breaking
18 This
argument
is laid out in Frobenius's Die
naturwissenschaftliche
Kulturlehre
(Berlin
1899).
19
E.g., Frobenius,
The Childhood
of Man,
trans. A.H. Keane
(London 1909), 22-4; idem,
Vom
Kulturreich des Festlandes: Dokumente zur
Kulturphysiognomie (Berlin 1923),
18.
20
Frobenius,
Der
Ursprung
der
afrikanischen
Kulturen
(Berlin 1898),
viii. For another
example
of this
attitude,
see
idem,
Paideuma: Umrisse einer Kultur- und Seelenlehre
(Munich
1921),
14.
159
Journal of
Contemporary History
research.21 In this
preservationist
attack on the destruction of
'documents',
however,
there are
already
the seeds of a
later,
more
global, critique.
In 1904 Frobenius abandoned museum work and
theorizing
for a
time,
in
order,
at
last,
to visit Africa. He would never
again
feel
fully
'at home' in
Europe.
Most of the
funding
for his first
trip
came from the
ethnographic
museum in
Hamburg, which,
as Frobenius later
explained, required
that while
travelling
he 'amass as
many things
as
possible
for as little
money
as
possible';
the Reich
bureaucracy
had refused to fund the
trip ostensibly
because
Frobenius had a weak
heart,
but more
probably
because he seemed a loose
cannon.22 After
spending
two
years
in the
Belgian Congo,
he returned to
Germany
in 1906 with a collection of
8,000
artifacts and a
burning
desire to
return for more
study.
In the book
describing
his
trip
and
results,
he
denounced abuses of colonial
power
and insisted that
greater understanding
of
African customs was crucial if the Germans were to avoid fresh disasters like
the Herero wars.23 In
1907,
he embarked on another
two-year sojourn,
this
time to
Gambia,
French West Africa and
Togo; following
a short
trip
to
Algeria,
between 1910 and
1912,
he travelled
extensively
in
Nigeria
and the
Cameroons. It was on this fourth
trip
that he discovered the
highly-developed
culture of the
Yoruba,
which he believed to be descended from the lost
civilization of Atlantis. This
grand discovery
intensified his anxieties about the
imminent
passing away
of authentic African culture and whetted his desire to
perform grand-scale collecting projects.24
The older
generation
of
Africans,
he
argued,
was
dying out,
and the
younger generation, caught up
in the colonial
economy,
lacked
appreciation
and
knowledge
of traditional
myths,
tribal
histories and rich burial
grounds.25
Before the first world
war,
as
after,
Frobenius's
greatest difficulty
was
obtaining funding.
The
expeditions
he
planned
were elaborate and
expensive
and his unorthodox methods and outsider status in academic circles made it
hard for him to
tap
the usual sources of scientific
patronage.26
But Frobenius
was
nothing
if not determined and
ingenious.
As we have
seen, collecting
artifacts was one means of
acquiring
museum
funding; during
his
pre-war
travels,
he
acquired
so
many (a
total of some
26,000)
for the
Hamburg
collec-
21 See
J.M. Ita,
'Frobenius in West African
History'
in
Journal of African History, 13,
4
(1972),
682.
22 Frobenius
quoted
in
Jahn,
Leo
Frobenius, 7; Frobenius,
Im Schatten des
Kongostaates (Berlin
1907),
10.
23
Frobenius,
Im
Schatten,
2214.
24 In 1913 he
petitioned
the Kaiser for
permission
to
operate
a
lottery
which he
hoped
would
raise the needed
500,000
marks for a
four-year trip
and four simultaneous
archaeological digs.
Frobenius to
Kaiser,
16
January 1913,
in
PZStA,
RMdesI 16305.
25 Ibid.
26 Frobenius's
ethnographic
methods included the
recruiting
of individuals from each culture he
visited to
accompany
him to his
subsequent stops;
in this
way
he
hoped
that his
subjects
would
perform
their own
ethnographic self-analysis, learning
to see their own cultures with new
eyes
after
having experienced
the otherness of their
neighbours.
See
Frobenius,
Erlebte Erdteile,
vol. 3:
Vom Schreibtisch zum
Aquator: Planmdssige Durchwanderung Afrikas (Frankfurt 1925),
27-9.
160
Marchand: Frobenius and the Revolt
against
the West
tion that the museum could not afford to
buy
them all at the
agreed price
of
ten marks an item.7 He solicited the aid of businessmen and
aristocrats,
and
attempted
to set
up
a
lottery.2
In
1913,
the
ethnologist
obtained
25,000
marks
from the
privy purse by importuning
Kaiser Wilhelm
II,
who in fact found
Frobenius's
stranger
theories
deeply compelling.29 Still,
on the eve of the Great
War,
Frobenius had amassed
personal
debts of
approximately 140,000
marks;30
he had
lost,
rather than
gained,
his fortune in the service of
Germany
and science.
In his works before the
war,
Frobenius combined a conventional
reportage
of observations with a
growing
affection for non-Islamic Africans and a
speculative ur-history
of
astonishing
ambition. In his Die
Ursprung
der
afrikanischen
Kulturen of
1898,
Frobenius had
already praised
the
creativity
and
simplicity
of
unspoiled
West African
culture,
as
against
northern and
eastern African
cultures,
which he believed to have been tainted
by
the west.
This
preference
for
'Ethiopians' (the
term for black Africans used
by
the late
Enlightenment physical anthropologist Blumenthal,
and more
importantly, by
Herodotus)
over
lighter-skinned
'Hamites' was
very likely
a
response
to
attempts by
British
anthropologists
- and German historians
-
to establish
the
contrary;31
but it was also the result of Frobenius's
lifelong
search for
uncorrupted
-
and
perhaps
just
as
important,
unstudied
-
ur-ancestors.32
Over
time,
Frobenius
grew increasingly
resentful of the
public's
failure to
appreciate
this Edenic
race;
and in his
popular
multi-volume account of his
findings,
entitled Und
Afrika sprach,
he turned his venom on western historio-
graphy,
which saw African
history only 'through
Islamic
glasses',
that
is, only
through
the
testimony
of written sources. To this
corrupt historiography,
Frobenius
juxtaposed
a
history
based on
myths
and material
culture,
a sort of
ethnohistory,
which would throw off old
prejudices
and
lay
the basis for a
'real'
history
of the ancient world.
By 1912,
he had established a master
narrative,
which described the co-dominance of an ur-historical West African
Atlantis and its
trading partners
in the
Mediterranean,
the
Etruscans,
and
emphasized
the
persistence
of these 'Geschwister' down to the time of the
Phoenicians. His
proof depended
on a few
quotations
from
Herodotus,
a
geo-
27 Felicitas
Bergner, 'Ethnographisches
Sammeln in Afrika wahrend der deutschen Kolonialzeit',
Paideuma,
42
(1996), 227; Afrika-EthnoGraphisch:
Eine
Bilderausstellung
des Frobenius-
Instituts
(Frankfurt 1996),
23-4.
28 Frobenius to
Kaiser,
16
January 1913,
in
PZStA,
RMdesI 16305.
29
Jahn,
Leo
Frobenius,
8.
30
Johann Albrecht, Herzog
zu
Mecklenberg,
to
Kaiser,
17
July 1913,
in
PZStA,
RMdesI 16305.
31 On the British
conception
of
Hamites,
see St Clair
Drake,
Black Folk Here and There: An
Essay
in
History
and
Anthropology,
vol. 1
(Los Angeles 1987),
128-9. This time-honoured
prejudice
was not
only
ethnic but also
religious; generations
of
Europeans
had considered
Muslims
(usually lighter-skinned)
more civilized than
'pagans'.
See Aissatou Bouba '"Lauter
Breite
Negergesichter":
Die
Darstellung
der auIeren
Erscheinung einiger
nicht-moslemischer
Ethnien aus Deutsch-Nordkamerun in der Vorkolonial- und
Kolonialzeit', Paideuma,
42
(1996),
63-83.
32
See,
for
example, Frobenius, 'Kulturgeographische Betrachtungen
Nordwest-Afrikas'
[1909],
reprinted
in Erlebte
Erdteile, 3,
285-313.
161
Journal
of
Contemporary History
grapher
called
Hanno,
some Etruscan
clay masks, glass beads,
a little Max
Muller,
and on Schliemann's
example,
which was never
very
far from the
eccentric
ethnologist's
mind.33
The motto for Frobenius's 1912 account of his
discovery
of the lost Yoruba
Atlantis read: 'Africa must be drawn more into the field of vision of certifiable
[beglaubigt] history
and cultural
history',
and Frobenius
certainly
did mean to
raise the status of African
history
in the
eyes
of his academic
peers.
But his
pre-
war work was also
shaped by
more
practical,
and
political, motives, many
of
which would not have
pleased
his
postwar
admirers. He
decried,
in a 1907
essay,
the cruel and inefficient rubber extraction
practices
of the
Belgian
Kassai-Company,
which were
destroying
Africa's social fabric. He often also
berated his fellow
Europeans
for their
derogatory
statements about African
behaviour, insisting,
in a Rousseauist
vein,
that
Africans,
far from
being
less
mioral
than white
folk,
were
actually
more
so; they simply
exhibited none of
the artificial manners of
repressed Europeans.34
But Frobenius did not
denounce
imperialism itself, and,
in the
years
before his
discovery
of the
Yoruba,
endorsed white
superiority
without
demur;
he
simply
believed that
the
Belgians
and the
English
had failed to cultivate the colonies' most
profit-
able resource: the native labour force.35
It is
important
to
recognize
that Frobenius believed the
preservation
of
African culture and
paternalistic
benevolence on the
part
of
Europeans
to be
not
just
a
general good,
but a crucial means of
instilling
the work ethic and
preventing
unrest. Fear of
provoking
a
revolt,
and the desire to
prescribe
the
means of
avoiding
one, is,
in
fact,
at the heart of his work in the
period
1904-14. In
1907,
after
visiting
an American
Baptist
mission which tried to
integrate
African customs into its
services,
Frobenius
wrote, disapprovingly:
I want to
underscore, explicitly,
that I see the
Negro
as a
primitive
form of
mankind,
and it is
demonstrable,
based on the
history
of all
colonizing
nations and on the lives of almost
every
individual, that,
if the
Negro
is
deprived
of the sentiments of his
primitive
kind and if he falls
prey
to the
obscurity
of
equalization
in matters of cultural
production,
he
puts
not
only
the
cultural work of the white
race,
but also himself in
great danger.
I have
repeatedly
returned
to this
idea,
and I
believe,
that I have conducted
my
studies in an
objective
manner.36
Similarly,
in his 1912 account of his travels in what is now
Nigeria,
he
offered a
long polemical
discussion on the evils of indirect colonialism and the
cultural
mixing
of blacks and whites that occurred in cities like
Lagos
and
Ibadan;
British
tolerance,
he
argued,
in a section entitled 'The serious side of
33
Frobenius,
Und
Afrika sprach,
vol.
1, Auf
den Trummern des klassischen Atlantis
(Berlin
1912),
364-74.
(Friedrich)
Max Muller was a
comparative philologist
whose work was
widely
popular
in the second half of the nineteenth
century.
Muller believed that most
myths
were
based on
worship
of the sun and that their
idiosyncracies
and variations were
largely
the result of
degenerative changes
in
languages.
34
Frobenius,
Schwarze Seelen:
Afrikanisches Tag-
und Nachtleben
(Berlin 1913),
10.
35
See,
for
example,
Im
Schatten, 39; Frobenius,
'Kolonialwissenschaftliches'
[1907], reprinted
in Erlebte
Erdteile, 3,
193-253.
36
Ibid.,
233.
162
Marchand: Frobenius and the Revolt
against
the West
pants-wearing Negrodom [Hosennegertums]',
would end in
tears;
at best it
would
bring
on
only
economic
cataclysm;
at
worst,
we would see 'the whole
ruling
class
swamped
and
negrified'.37
It would be better to
capitalize
on
indigenous
African industries like wood- and
metal-working
than to introduce
European
forms of
production
and consumer
goods
into this alien world.38
Having
travelled
through
some of Africa's hottest
spots,
and seen
grotesque
examples
of
European arrogance
and
cruelty,
Frobenius
simply
concluded
that
shouldering
the white man's burden would be a trickier
proposition
-
and
require
more
ethnological expertise
-
than his
contemporaries
had fore-
seen.
Frobenius's horror of
English-style Hosennegertum
was not at all irrelevant
to the sort of African
history
he wrote. In
fact,
as he
explained
in Und
Afrika
sprach,
he found the
process
of
'negrification' very interesting,
... for this
may
have been
typical
of African conditions in earlier times. In this
book,
which
is devoted to
[uncovering]
the traces of older
cultures,
we will often
speak
about the
problem
of
colony-formation.
. . . Here we will also be interested in the
question,
how did older
colonial
cultures,
which were once established
here, collapse,
or
disappear?
He is a bad
ethnologist
who doesn't understand how to formulate laws out of the
phenomena
of the
present.39
Thus,
Frobenius's
picture
of the Yoruba Atlantis
-
traces of which remained
in the
'degenerate'
black cultures of his
day
-
was based on a
pessimistic,
but
not
oppositional, theory
of colonization which
emphasized
the eternal return
of
imported, high
culture and its
equally
inevitable
conquest by
the
colossal,
fateful
power
of African sloth.
Why
did the
Portugese
fail in their efforts?
'Because', Frobenius
explained,
... the
capacity
of that
[African]
race to bear
[white culture]
was
overestimated,
because
[the
Portugese] forgot
to differentiate between what could be
externally
absorbed and what could
take root
within,
because the race
question
was not
recognized.
The
race-power
and the race-
will of the whites was absorbed
by
black
phlegm;
the
race-energy
of the whites was dissolved
in
negrification.40
If he lauded the
glories
of the
long-lost
black Atlantic
culture,
Frobenius
clearly
retained a
wholly
'orientalized' view of his
contemporary
Africans.
During
the
war,
Frobenius
managed
to
get
a seventh
trip
funded
by
the
Prussian General Staff. His official task in the winter of 1914/15
-
persuading
the
Abyssinians
to
join
the Central Powers
-
failed,
but this
trip provoked
a
profound
reorientation in Frobenius's
thought.41
The
quiet
of the desert in the
37
Frobenius,
Und
Afrika sprach, 1,
39.
38
Frobenius, 'Kolonialwirtschaftliches',
248-53.
39
Frobenius,
Und
Afrika sprach, 1,
40.
40
Ibid.,
41.
41 Frobenius's official manoeuvres can be reconstructed from
Embassy Abyssinia
to
Foreign
Ministry
28 December 1914 and other documents in PA/AA 305/2
(Geheime
Akten betreffend den
Krieg 1914), copies
of which are held
by LFI,
binder marked:
Kriegsakten
1914 und
Verschiedenes.
163
Journal
of
Contemporary History
face of
Europe's explosion,
he wrote to his
father,
marked a sudden reversal of
poles.
The war had
destroyed
the somnambulism and
superficiality
of Euro-
pean materialism; Europe
was
returning
to nature at
last,
and
replacing
Africa
as the continent of movement.42 The war's
unhappy end, however,
turned
Frobenius's
optimistic apocalypticism
to ashes and revealed to him the essen-
tial,
cultural differences that
underlay
the
European
landmass. 'The renowned
internationalism
[Weltkultur]
of the
period
before
1914',
he
reflected,
'was a
masquerade.
The world war served the
purposes
of a
demasking. Only
the
future will show what the
physiognomy
of cultures
really
is.'43 In
1920,
he
collaborated with his friend Oswald
Spengler
in the
founding
of the
Forschungsinstitut
fur
Kulturmorphologie
in
Munich,
devoted to
establishing
a real
physiognomy
of cultures.
Although
the two mavericks soon
parted
ways,
Frobenius continued his
quest
to
identify
cultural differences as
products
of the
soul,
not of
acquired
refinements or skills.
Unquestionably,
it
was the war that led Frobenius to
suggest
the
spiritual unity
of Germans and
'Ethiopians',
a
gesture
that the African
poet
and
politician Leopold Senghor
found
very moving.44
In the war's
aftermath,
it was
very important
for
Frobenius to show that similarities between
Europeans
were
only skin-deep.
Interestingly,
Frobenius's
quest
to discover the real
physiognomy
of cultures
parallels
in time
attempts by
the
great
French and British
anthropologists
like
Marcel Mauss and A.R. Radcliffe-Browne to
get past
the accumulation of
ethnographic
factoids,
and to understand culture as a
psychological complex
of interrelated elements. Frobenius's
project, however,
was formed in
postwar
and, importantly, post-colonial
Weimar,
and
by
a man without the liberal
pro-
clivities or institutional
power
of a Mauss or
Radcliffe-Browne; moreover,
Frobenius had not lost the conventional
pre-war
conviction that culture was
shaped by geography
and
climate,
and in fact the war seemed to
deepen
the
determinist elements of his
thought.
His diffusionist
ethnology
still bore the
shape
of Ratzelian scientific
geography,
but the content of his
hypothetical
histories
increasingly
marked him as the heir of such eccentrics as
J.J.
Bachofen and the so-called
'Pan-Babylonists',
a school of
philologists
who
traced the
origin
of all
religions
to the
astrological
worldview of the
Babylonians.45
Frobenius now
emphasized
intuition as the
only
means
by
which one could
properly
understand
self-sufficient, Spenglerian
cultural
organisms;46
and larded his
speculative
histories with denunciations of western
materialism and Eurocentric
historiography.
In the
1920s,
Frobenius made his
goal
the
grasping
of the essence or soul
42
Frobenius,
'Die Umkehr'
[1915]
in Erlebte
Erdteile, 3,
453-65.
43
Frobenius,
Vom Kulturreich des
Festlandes,
18-19.
44
Leopold
Sedar
Senghor,
'The Revolution of 1889 and Leo
Frobenius',
trans. Richard
Bjornson,
in
Africa
and the West: The
Legacies of Empire,
eds Isaac
James
Mowoe and Richard
Bjornson (New
York
1986),
86-7.
45 He had
already
demonstrated his affinities with this
group
in his 1904 Das Zeitalter des
Sonnengottes (Berlin 1904).
46
Frobenius, Paideuma,
7.
164
Marchand: Frobenius and the Revolt
against
the West
of
culture,
which he dubbed
paideuma.
In a 1921 volume that
caught
the
imagination
of Ezra
Pound,
Frobenius described the two basic
paideumae
operating
on the
planet:
that defined
by
the cave
mentality,
and that defined
by
the wide
open spaces mentality (Hohlengefiihl
and
Weitengefiil).
The former
belonged
to the
Hamitic,
and also Semitic
people
of the
Orient;
the latter to
the
Ethiopian
and Germanic
peoples.
These
paideumae
were constitutive of
cultures,
but
overlying
this level was a world-historical
trajectory
with four
stages:
the
mythological,
the
religious,
the
philosophical
and the material. The
mythological
still dominated Oceania and South
Africa,
the
religious
East Asia
and India. The
philosophical stage
continued in Central
Europe,
but in
Western
Europe
and in New
England,
the material
stage
had
triumphed.
Though initially
seduced
by materialism, Germany actually belonged
in the
world of
high religions
and
philosophy,
or on the side of the soulful Orient as
opposed
to the
greedy
Occident.47
But in addition to these
paideumatic
and
historio-geographical dimensions,
for
Frobenius,
cultural
history
also had a
temporal aspect.
Cultural forms
passed through
a series of
organic stages,
from
childhood,
to
adulthood,
to old
age;
or from the
daemonic,
to the
idealistic,
to the factual.
Predictably,
the
Africans remained in the 'daemonic' childlike
stage,
while the
Europeans
were
placed
in the adult
sphere.
But in Frobenius's view
-
which
provided
the
major inspiration
for the
play-theory
of the Dutch historian
Johan Huizinga48
-
the
nineteenth-century
values
usually
attached to these
categories
are
reversed. In
childhood,
intuition and
creativity
are at their
height,
while in
adulthood, only
utilitarian and
scientifically proven thoughts
can be con-
sidered valuable
-
egoism reigned
and the
vitality
of culture ebbed. Present-
day Europe,
Frobenius
argued,
was
arrogant,
senile and obsessed with facts.49
But a sincere
longing
for
Africa,
and for
childhood,
had
begun
to seize his
countrymen;
the
appeal
of African innocence was now
apparent,
he
argued,
'in
our
longing
for the
far-away,
in our
coveting
of the naive and
untouched,
in
our
flight
from the stink of sweat and machines
produced by
the
degeneration
of our will to achieve into the tedium of routinized work'.50 Cut off from
Africa,
his ambitions and ideals
destroyed by
the
war,
an
ageing
Frobenius
turned his romantic reflections on the loss of innocence into a direct
critique
of
European
'civilization'.
This loss of innocence was
also,
for
Frobenius,
connected to a nefarious sort
of
hubris;
senile
Europe
had
forgotten
its
pan-historical insignificance.
As he
argued
in 1924 in a book with the
improbable
title, The Head as
Fate,
it was
time
Europeans
learned some lessons from the
unspoiled
Africans. These
47
Frobenius,
Vom Kulturreich des
Festlandes, 146;
also
idem,
Schicksalskunde
(Weimar 1938),
72.
48 See
Huizinga's
Homo Ludens: A
Study of
the
Play
Element in Culture
(London 1949),
15-
27.
49
Frobenius, Paideuma,
56.
50
Frobenius,
Das unbekannte
Afrika: Aufhellung
der Schicksale eines Erdteiles
(Munich
1923),
3.
165
Journal
of
Contemporary History
people,
Frobenius
showed, recognized
their subservience to the fate
imposed
by
their cultural forms and did not
attempt
to
escape
their destinies.
Germans,
too,
he
suggested,
should abandon false universals and learn to love their
culturally-determined fate;
in
1931,
he cautioned: 'The man who lives in the
twentieth
century,
but chooses a role from the
fourteenth,
or who is German
but wants to
play
the
Indian,
fritters
away
his life.'51
The onset of the troubled 1920s
brought
Frobenius some new
recognition,
if
little
positive change
in his finances
-
he was
only
able to return to Africa in
1926,
11
years
after his last
voyage. Ironically,
in this decade he at last
acquired
an
adjunct teaching post
(in
1925,
he obtained
permission
to teach at
the
newly-founded University
of
Frankfurt;
in 1932 he
acquired
an
honorary
professorship),
but also
began
to
profit
from his
hostility
toward the academic
establishment. In an era of
increasingly
bitter assaults on bookishness and use-
less
(especially humanistic) learning,
Frobenius's intuitive
approach
and exotic
expertise
won him new admirers,
Frobenius's reversal of fortunes
began
soon after the
collapse
of the
Wilhelmine
Empire.
In
1921,
his friend and
drinking partner Eugen Diedrichs,
the
leading publisher
of volkisch
works, put
out the first in a series of 12
volumes of African stories collected
by
Frobenius before the
war;
the last
volume of the
lavishly produced 'Atlantis-Ausgabe' appeared
in 1928. Now
employing
his charisma to charm
German,
rather than
African, audiences,
the
ethnologist
became a
popular public speaker.52
He
developed
an intimate
relationship
with the former Kaiser Wilhelm
II,
who
corresponded excitedly
with the
ethnologist
about
pagan goddesses
and Chinese
symbols,
Sumerian
religion
and
Germany's
fate. Confined to the
European continent,
he returned
to his
attempts
to convert diffusionist
ethnography
into
global prehistory,
lamenting
that after a
quarter-century
of
promoting
African art and
culture,
only now,
when all
possibility
of further
study
seemed
foreclosed,
had his field
become fashionable. 'At that
time',
he
wrote, referring
to the later
1890s,
...
philology
and the natural sciences
reigned.
Culture in
general,
and
especially
the culture
of such a 'wild' continent as
Africa,
was
anything
but
popular. Today,
on the
streets,
in
salons,
and even in the lecture
halls, nothing,
it
seems,
is so much discussed as culture.
Today,
Buddhas,
African
figurines
and Oceanic masks are
highly valued,
in intellectual as well as
monetary
terms.53
Once obsessed with documents and seduced
by
the
superficial
charms of
Asia,
Germans were
finally beginning
to
appreciate
the
depth
and
profundity
of the
African
past.
By
the time Frobenius turned 60 in
1933,
his star was
clearly rising. Many
of his nemeses had retired or
died,
and he was
receiving
new
plaudits
for his
work. But he had
fought
so
many
titanic battles with the status
quo,
his
51
Frobenius, Schicksalskunde,
193.
52 Hans
Rhotert,
'Der
Werdegang',
Frobenius: Ein
Lebenswerk,
21.
53
Frobenius,
Das unbekannte
Afrika,
xii.
166
Marchand: Frobenius and the Revolt
against
the West
student Hans Rhotert claimed in a
birthday testimonial,
'that
today,
when his
ideas have
essentially triumphed,
he
may
often
think,
"Too
bad,
it's all
already
over",
and his
colleagues
often have trouble
preventing
him from
fighting
where there is no
longer
a battlefield.'54
Opportunist
that he
was,
he did
fight
to maintain his institute under nazi
rule,
and he did save
it, although
he did not
retract his claim that culture was more essential than race.55 He continued his
work on ancient
Africa, focusing
now on the
study
of rock
paintings,
and
planned
another
trip
for
1936,
which failed to come off. But the
following
letter of late 1935
(to
ex-Kaiser
Wilhelm)
demonstrates the extent to which his
passions
had cooled:
It is true that I am now
living
in
gloomy
times. The horizon is
again heavily
clouded and as
has so
oftenlbeen
the
case, my
hours of wakefulness in the
night
are consumed
by searching
for an answer to the
question,
to be or not to
be,
to
stay
or to
go,
to bend or to break .... In
earlier
years
I could drink a bottle of red wine and
bury
the anxieties until the next
day
[when]
a
fresh, joyful waking
showed them to be
spectres
that could not
compete
with the
real
powers
of a man. These
days
are no more. That
means,
the black clouds on the horizon
remain the
same,
but the
joyful spirit
that had so
long
confronted them
unbroken, begins
more and more to lose its
powers.56
Prevented from
recommencing
his
odyssey by
ill
health, poor finances,
and
political limitations,
Frobenius
began
to lose his
epic energy. Fittingly,
his
notoriously
weak heart
stopped pumping,
not while he was
tramping through
an African desert but while on
holiday
at an Italian resort.
Rest,
not frantic
movement, polished
off the eccentric vitalist.
One could
say
that in Frobenius's cultural fatalism the stoicism of the later
Spengler
meets the anti-westernism of the volkisch
movement;
such a
cursory
conclusion would describe the nature and
consequences
of his
postwar
work
in familiar
anti-modernist, proto-nazi
terms. But
clearly
Frobenius's audiences
read him in other
ways, and,
in
fact,
the main
impact
of his cultural
history
was not in the nazi
world,
but elsewhere. To illustrate this
point,
I want to
conclude with a
shortinvestigation
of two central and influential
aspects
of
Frobenius's work with salience
beyond
the German institutional and
political
context: his defence of
ethnology
as a historical science and of Africa as an
important part
of world
history.
As we have
seen, Frobenius, following
Friedrich
Ratzel,
believed it was the
task of
ethnology
to
provide
the basis of a 'real universal
history',
as
opposed
to the
narrow,
Rankean sort of Mediterranean-centred
tale;
Heinrich
Schliemann,
whom Frobenius once described as the
'conqueror
of "the world
beyond history"',
had shown the
way
to a new sort of historical understand-
54
Rhotert,
'Der
Werdegang',
13.
55
See, e.g.,
Frobenius to
(General)
Carlus v.
Malaire, 28
February 1933,
in LFI,
Korrespondenz,
Institut
#1;
Stellvertreter des Fuhrers
(Adjutant)
to Frobenius 6 March
1934,
in
LFI, Vorlesungen;
Dr Gross
(Kulturpolitisches
Archiv des
NSDAP)
to Herr Ruder
(Gauleitung
Frankfurt),
22
June 1938,
in
LFI, Kriegsakten
1914 und Verschiedenes.
56 Frobenius to Kaiser
Wilhelm,
12 December
1935,
in
LFI, Frobenius to Kaiser Wilhelm.
167
Journal
of
Contemporary History
ing.57 But, eager
to
give ethnographic
evidence the same historical
validity
as
was then accorded to
archaeological remains,
Frobenius went
beyond
Schliemann and
Ratzel,
and sketched out a sort of ethno-historical
approach
to universal cultural
history.
One of the
great
collectors of novel forms of
historical
evidence, including myths, songs, photos, drawings
and all manner
of artifacts and works of
art,
Frobenius
pioneered
the
writing
of
pre-Islamic
African
history, inspiring
others such as Eric
Wolf,
author of the seminal
study,
Europe
and the
People
Without a
History (1982)
to create innovative forms of
historical reconstruction.58 He
recognized very early
that
archaeology
and
ethnology
had
opened
the
way
for the articulation of a much
deeper
-
and
less elitist
-
universal
history,
and that it was not
just evidentiary
difficulties
but also Eurocentric
presumptions
and conventions that stood in the
way
of
historiographical reconceptualization.59
His methods were unconventional
and sometimes
unscrupulous;60
his ideas were
shaped by
his own
ideological
predispositions
and delusions of
grandeur. Nonetheless, ethnohistory
undoubtedly
owes Frobenius
many
a theoretical as well as a material debt.
Appropriately,
however,
our
idiosyncratic ethnologist
had
perhaps
his
greatest import
outside his
profession proper.
As
early
as
1932,
a short selec-
tion of Frobenius's work had
appeared
in the Parisian
avant-garde journal,
La Revue du Monde
Noir, accompanied by
some words of
praise
for his 'dis-
interestedness and the remarkable
knowledge
that he has
put
in the service of
the
history
of African
civilizations,
which make him
worthy
of the admiration
and
recognition
of all those interested in the dark continent'.61
Particularly
after the
appearance
of the translation of his
Kulturgeschichte Afrikas
in
1936,
Frobenius became
extremely popular among early
African
nationalists;
his
praise
of black African
purity
-
Negerheit,
or in its more familiar French
form, negritude
-
appealed especially
to
Leopold Senghor,
the Paris-educated
future
president
of
Senegal.
In
1973, Senghor
remembered Frobenius's
pro-
found effect
-
'like a
thunderclap'
-
on his circle in Paris in the 1930s:
We knew
by
heart
Chapter
II of the first book of
[Kulturgeschichte Afrikas],
entitled 'What
Does Africa Mean to
Us?',
a
chapter
adorned with
lapidary phrases
such as this: 'The idea of
the "barbarous
Negro"
is a
European invention,
which in turn dominated
Europe
until the
beginning
of this
century.'62
57
Frobenius, Schicksalskunde,
45.
Schliemann,
Frobenius
claimed,
had created 'eine Bresche in
die
Skepsis
historisierender Tatsachen-Kritik'.
58 See Wolf's comment in
Europe
and the
Peoples
without
History (Berkeley 1982),
411.
59 For
example,
see
Frobenius,
Indische Reise: Ein
unphilosophisches Reisetagebuch
aus
Siidindien und
Ceylon (Berlin 1931),
221-2.
60 Frobenius's
system
for
extracting prize
artifacts from the Africans included
flattery, bribery,
deceit,
and cultivation of the
hard-up.
His own
description
of his
acquisitions
in
Yorubaland,
and
the controversies that
followed,
is well worth a read.
Frobenius,
Und
Afrika sprach, 1,
49-67.
61 P.
Desroches-Larouche,
'Le
spiritisme
dans l'interieur
de
l'Afrique',
La Revue du Monde
Noir, 2,
5
(March 1932) (reprint; Nendeln,
Liechtenstein
1971),
20.
62
Leopold
S6dar
Senghor,
'The Lessons of Leo Frobenius' in Leo Frobenius: An
Anthology,
ed.
Eike
Haberland,
trans. Patricia
Crampton (Wiesbaden 1973),
vii.
168
Marchand: Frobenius and the Revolt
against
the West
Frobenius,
he
wrote,
'more than
any other,
more even than
Bergson,
reinstated
intuitive reason in our
eyes
and restored its
position
as
pre-eminent'.63
In addi-
tion, Senghor claimed,
Frobenius
gave
them a new
appreciation
of the
unity
of
African culture.64
Celebrating
the
inspiration
Frobenius's studies of ancient
African civilization had
given
the Pan-African
movement,
W.E.B. DuBois
called the German
ethnologist
'the
greatest
student of Africa'.65 Of
course,
there are
plenty
of African and Afro-American sources of
negritude; Senghor
himself
gives
credit to Claude
MacKay,
Aime Cesaire and the surrealists as
well as to Frobenius and other Africanist scholars.66 But Frobenius
provided
the
inspiration
for a
particular
sort of
critique
of
European hegemony,
which
resonated
powerfully
both in
Europe
and abroad. His neo-romantic search for
an
unspoiled
black Atlantis
provided
the anti-colonial
movement, longing
for
liberation from western
tyranny
and Eurocentric
history,
with the
energizing
form - and distorted contents
-
of
myth
on an
epic
scale.
It has been said that if not for
negritude,
Frobenius would be
wholly
forgotten.
Few
ethnographers
now cite
him;
most cultural theorists have never
heard his
name,
much less read his work. I
hope
I have offered some reasons
above for members of these
groups
-
especially
those interested in the
histories of their
disciplines
-
not to overlook Frobenius. For those interested
in the
history
of
Afrocentrism,
the career of this
peculiar
German should
help
to
clarify
the institutional and intellectual
origins
of some
part
of this anti-
establishment
theory.
In this
essay, however,
I have
emphasized
the
light
Frobenius's career casts on the cultural world of German
imperialism.
We have
seen how the wrath of
Frobenius,
directed both at the 'west' and at the
German academic
establishment, expressed
itself in the form of
post-colonial,
expressionist ethnology.
This
wrath,
I have
argued,
was
shaped by
the inter-
section of a
generational
revolt in the cultural
sphere
and the onset of
hyper-
imperialism,
and was exacerbated
by
the frustrated ambitions and bleak
lessons of the first world war. In the
postwar era, critiques
of
imperial
misrule
were turned into attacks on a
demonized, cosmopolitan west; by
the same
token,
the
critique
of text-based humanism was turned into an assault on note-
shuffling specialists
and a
song
of
praise
for
intuitive,
vitalist
historiography.
Frobenius,
of
course,
was
only
one of the
players strutting
and
fretting
on this
stage,
but
perhaps by understanding
his curious
conglomerate
of
longings,
obsessions and
fears,
we will have
gained
some better
comprehension
of the
para-academic
German underworld that came of
age
around
1890,
and of its
simultaneously liberating
and destructive wrath.
63
Ibid.,
viii.
64
Ibid., x,
xii.
65 W.E.B.
DuBois,
The World and
Africa (New
York
1947),
79n.
66
Jacques Hymans, Leopold
Sedar
Senghor (New
York
1971), 19, 45-7, 53,
60-70.
169
170 Journal of
Contemporary History
Archival Sources
LFI: Leo Frobenius
Institut,
Frankfurt Binders:
Doom,
Kaiser Wilhelm an
Frobenius; Kriegsakten
1914 und
Verschiedenes; Korrespondenz
-
Institut
#1; Vorlesungen;
xeroxes from PA/AA
(Bonn,
Politisches Archiv des
Auswartigen Amtes)
PZStA:
Potsdam,
Zentrales Staatsarchiv
RMdesI: Reichsministerium des Innern
Suzanne Marchand
is Assistant Professor of
European
Intellectual
History
at
Princeton
University.
She is the author of Down
from Olympus:
Archaeology
and German
Philhellenism,
1750-1970
(Princeton 1996)
and is
currently working
on the cultural
history
of colonialism in
Germany.