Alfred Schachtzabel

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Alfred Schachtzabel in 1913/14 in Angola

Alfred Schachtzabel (born April 24, 1887 in Halle , † January 15, 1981 in Saarbrücken ) was a German ethnologist , Africa researcher and curator at the Berlin Ethnographic Museum . The main event of his professional life was a research trip to Angola in 1913 and 1914, which he undertook as the first professional ethnologist in this country and the results of which he published in 1923 in a work partly consisting of ethnographic descriptions and rather entertaining stories.

Life

Alfred Schachtzabel's father Emil Schachtzabel was magistrate secretary in Halle an der Saale, later magistrate's senior secretary. At the Municipal Oberrealschule of Halle, he passed the matriculation examination in 1906 and then began at the university there to study ethnology. During his studies he became a member of the Salingia Halle fraternity . Documentary evidence shows that he was awarded the Magdeburg State Scholarship for studying in Halle from September 1907 to September 1909 . Schachtzabel later switched to Karl Weule and Karl Lamprecht at the University of Leipzig . In 1904, Weule had separated the ethnology department from geography and established it as an independent discipline. In April 1911 Schachtzabel received his doctorate with his work The Settlement Conditions of the Bantu Negroes . From 1911 he was a member of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory .

From October 1910 to April 1911, Schachtzabel represented the head of the prehistoric department of the Museum of Ethnology in Leipzig . After completing his studies, he was employed in the same year as a research assistant in the African-Oceanic Department of the Berlin Ethnographic Museum. The head of this department, Bernhard Ankermann , had undertaken the first research and collecting trip to the grasslands of Cameroon , organized by the Berlin Ethnographic Museum, from October 1907 to May 1909 . Schachtzabel was entrusted with the implementation of a corresponding second trip, which should lead to Angola.

In the spring of 1913 Schachtzabel left Berlin and boarded a ship in Lisbon on April 10th that took him to Lobito in the Angolan province of Benguela . The actual expedition began on May 13, 1913 from the inland town of Huambo and was essentially without major difficulties. When Schachtzabel was already on his way back, the First World War broke out and the Portuguese suspected him of being a spy. On November 19, 1914, he was temporarily arrested and taken to Luanda , the capital of the Portuguese colony of Angola. After his release, Schachtzabel returned to Lisbon, where he arrived on December 17, 1914 and was initially stuck because he could not continue to Germany. On January 11, 1915, he was allowed to leave Portugal for Spain. Schachtzabel initially stayed in Madrid until he was hired in February 1917 as head of the press office of the Foreign Office in Valencia . In the same month he married Helene Marcus, the daughter of the Lisbon-based German shipowner Otto Marcus. After the end of the war in November 1918, the couple could not return home to Germany immediately, but only the following year.

In October 1919, Schachtzabel began his previous work at the Berlin Ethnographic Museum and was probably promoted to curator a little later. In 1925, Bernhard Ankermann retired as head of the Africa and Oceania department and Schachtzabel was his successor as director of the now independent Africa department, which was merged into a larger department in 1927. Since 1926 at the latest, Schachtzabel has been giving lectures on ethnology at Berlin University , although there was no department or institute for ethnology there until after the end of the Second World War.

Apart from the dissertation and the results of his Angola trip published in two versions in 1923 and 1926, almost no other publications by Schachtzabel are known. The biographical information collected by Beatrix Heintze (1995) also became sparse from the 1930s onwards. On May 1, 1933, Schachtzabel joined the NSDAP . From 1925 to 1939 Schachtzabel's 15 years younger colleague and also NSDAP member Hermann Baumann was employed in the Africa department of the Museum of Ethnology in Berlin. Because Baumann's intended goal, the department's custodian position, was occupied by Schachtzabel, he was instead entrusted with setting up a new Eurasia department, which fit into the ideology of an eastward expansion of the German Empire.

In 1936 Schachtzabel was given a temporary leave of absence due to a procedure that lasted several years. He was accused of undeclared possession of foreign currency, which was punished extremely severely during the National Socialist era . His "guilt" was that he and his family had received sums of money from wealthy in-laws from abroad, which, according to the indictment of 1937, he "... did not offer the Reichsbank." It was not until 1939 that the proceedings were discontinued.

In order to exchange ideas about how “the ethnological science of German colonial, especially indigenous politics” can best be used, took place on 22./23. November 1940 the “Working Meeting of German Ethnologists in Göttingen” took place. One of the eight speakers was Schachtzabel and among the audience there was an envoy from the Reich Ministry for Science, Education and National Education as well as a representative of the National Socialist German Lecturer Association , on whom Schachtzabel apparently made such a good impression that the Reich lecturer leadership made him head of the Institute for Cultural Morphology proposed in Frankfurt. There he was to succeed Leo Frobenius , who died in 1938 . The Hauptamt Wissenschaft used the proceedings against Schachtzabel to discredit him and instead endorsed Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann . In the end, neither of the two got the position which was temporarily headed by Karin Hahn-Hissink during the war and which was refilled only in 1945 with the politically unaffected Adolf Ellegard Jensen . Schachtzabel, on the other hand, was no longer employed because of his NSDAP past after the Second World War, and he (like Baumann) was not invited to the first conference of the German Society for Ethnology in Frankfurt in 1946. Schachtzabel has not been active in his field since then. As a privateer, he lived in Berlin and Saarbrücken until the age of 94.

Plant and the trip to Angola

Schachtzabel was considered a typical colonial ethnologist in the professional world, whose main focus was applied ethnology, the results of which should be useful for the colonial administration of Africa. Theoretical discussions on the subject do not appear in Schachtzabel's publications. Accordingly, he gave his lecture in Göttingen the title Applied Ethnology in Africa . The slow education of the continent should be possible through the precise knowledge of the spiritual and material cultures. He expressed this idea, which is already contained in the dissertation of 1911, against the background of his conviction that “Germany absolutely needs colonies to survive and must keep the colonial idea alive until this necessity is met.” He was able to make prejudices and derogatory assessments typical of the time Even after a seventeen-month stay in Africa, he cannot be replaced by a fundamental understanding of the socio-cultural phenomena observed, which is why stereotypes such as these often flow into his considerations: “Thoughtlessness in action is a prominent trait of the Negro, but it is reinforced by his innate laziness. “Although he always sought contact with Africans and - to their astonishment - stayed overnight in African villages and not in European settlements, he found it difficult to win the trust of the locals, so he often did cultural work le background could not be found. He particularly laments the shyness of women when he tried to photograph them. He also criticizes the Portuguese living in the country and considers them to be not very committed and the colonial administrators to be mainly interested in their own enrichment. He only finds words of praise for the work of the missionaries.

From Schachtzabel's dissertation it can be read that he spoke Portuguese. It is possible that he already had private contacts to Portugal before his trip, which prompted him to choose Angola as his travel destination. His journey took place between the beginning of the German colonial acquisitions in Africa in 1884 and the end of the First World War, when numerous German expeditions explored the continent for national interests. Schachtzabel's trip falls out of this context, as it did not go through areas to which Germany could lay claim. The trip took place on behalf of the Berlin Völkerkundemuseum and had the primary goal of expanding the museum's ethnographic collection, with Schachtzabel placing "the study of the natives of the district" in the foreground in his written summary entitled Journey in the Benguella District. The lasting value of his travelogue lies in the fact that it is the earliest and in some cases most valuable source for some regions, which have hardly been explored in the following. This applies above all to the Ganguela area in the south-east of the country, where the civil war in Angola, which lasted almost uninterrupted from 1961 to 2002, almost completely destroyed the culture found by Schachtzabel. Overall, however, the organization of his trip corresponded more to the expeditions of the 19th century than to modern ethnological field research. Since he was not on the road on behalf of a colonial administration and did not express himself further in scientific publications, he achieved high print runs with the two book editions, but otherwise his work had no significant influence.

At the beginning of May 1913, Schachtzabel took the train from the port city of Lobito via Benguela inland to the railway terminus in Huambo . At the beginning of the expedition on May 13, 1913, which led into the area of ​​the southern Ganguela, Schachtzabel was traveling with a “Burenwagen” (four-wheeled wagon ) pulled by 18 oxen , which was loaded with two tons of luggage. He also had "three precision rifles", a mule and an "escort team". On some stretches, instead of the oxen, he was traveling with 50 to 60 porters whom he had laboriously recruited from the Ngonyelu ( Bantu group in southern Angola). For a few later trips he took a riding ox or a mule. When he arrived in the Chokwe area , he released his ngonyelu porters, who only returned to him in November. Until then, he had been out of touch all summer. On the way back, he was able to avoid meeting 500 Ovambo Kwanyama who were on a campaign. When he stopped for a month in a village near the Nyemba (subgroup of the Ganguela), he received the news of the outbreak of the First World War in mid-September, whereupon he immediately went to the next train station in Ganda and took the Benguela train to Benguela on the coast returned. He arrived there on October 22, 1914. The reason for Schachtzabel's arrest on suspicion of espionage at the beginning of November was an incident near Naulila on the border between Angola and German Southwest Africa on October 19, in which five Germans were shot in Angolan territory, whereupon the German protection force carried out a punitive expedition against the Cuangar fortress and others undertook Portuguese military posts. Schachtzabel was interned for a few days until he was released and arrived in Lisbon by ship on December 17, 1914.

For the main purpose of his trip, the collection of ethnographics, Schachtzabel carried two plate cameras and, in order to make sound recordings, wax rollers for the phonograph . In a letter to Ankermann dated January 1915, Schachtzabel mentions 1117 collected ethnographic objects, 418 photos and at least 44 wax cylinders. During the turmoil of the First World War, only part of the collection, which had passed through numerous hands, arrived in Berlin, and there all the photo plates and a considerable part of the objects were destroyed in the Second World War. Schachtzabel's photographs formed the first systematic, photographic documentation of Angola's culture. The lists of objects created by Schachtzabel on the way have been preserved. A recording with choral singing by the Ngangala (Nkangella) on a wax cylinder from 1913 in the collection of the Berlin Phonogram Archive was published in 1963.

In Angola, Schachtzabel also had to leave some of his diaries behind. Originally he had planned to publish two books on his return to Berlin. One was intended to be a "popular travelogue" for a general readership and one was intended to be a "scientific publication". Because his years of efforts to regain the scattered collection and the missing records were largely unsuccessful, he was unable to realize this project. In the end, he only brought out one work, which essentially consists of an entertaining travelogue, in which individual chapters are woven with factual, ethnological descriptions.

Beatrix Heintze re-published Schachtzabel's work in 1995 as an "integrated source edition" with a few cuts. In doing so, she leaves out all too personal and (dis) judgmental sections of the travel narrative - as Jan Vansina (1996) suspects in order not to scare off potential African readers - and instead adds notes and photos of objects from his collection to Schachtzabel's text. She justifies this approach with the fact that neither the travel narrative nor the unpublished texts alone would justify a critical source edition. Through this “reconstruction” the entire estate of Schachtzabel should be brought into the new context of a time-enduring ethnographic source.

Publications

  • The settlement conditions of the Bantu negroes. In: International Archive for Ethnography, Supplement to Volume 20, pp. 1–79, EJ Brill, Leiden 1911 (dissertation)
  • The natives of South Angola and their colonial-political significance. In: Koloniale Rundschau, Volume 12, 1920, pp. 204-208
  • In the highlands of Angola. Study trip through the south of Portuguese West Africa. German book workshops, Dresden 1923
  • Angola. Research and experiences in South West Africa. Die Buchgemeinde, Berlin 1926 (largely identical to the text of the 1923 edition, some ethnographic details left out, instead chapter Angola under Portuguese rule , pp. 174–186, supplemented, foreword and concluding remarks changed, different selection of photos)

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hugo Böttger (ed.): Directory of the old fraternity members according to the status of the winter semester 1911/12. Berlin 1912, p. 172.
  2. ^ Journal of Ethnology. Organ of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory. Behrend, Berlin 1918, p. 19
  3. ^ Yearbook of the City Museum for Ethnology in Leipzig, Volume 4, 1910. R. Voigtländers Verlag, Leipzig 1911, p. V ( at Internet Archive )
  4. Bernhard Ankermann : Report on an ethnographic research trip to the grasslands of Cameroon. In: Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, Volume 42, Issue 2, 1910, pp. 288–310
  5. Andrew D. Evans: Anthropology at War. World War I and the Science of Race in Germany. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2010, p. 103 ( online )
  6. Beatrix Heintze, 1995, p. 14, footnote 36
  7. Beatrix Hoffmann: Unique or duplicate? On the change in the meaning of museum collections from the holdings of the former Museum für Völkerkunde Berlin. In: Elisabeth Tietmayer u. a. (Ed.): The language of things. Cultural-scientific perspectives on material culture. Waxmann, Münster 2010, p. 104
  8. Beatrix Heintze, 1995, p. 14, footnote 30
  9. Carola Lentz, Silja Thomas: Miscell the history of ethnology. The German Society for Ethnology. History and current challenges. In: Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, Volume 140, 2015, pp. 225–253, here p. 237
  10. Beatrix Heintze, 1995, p. 14f
  11. ^ Alfred Schachtzabel, 1926, foreword, p. 8
  12. Alfred Schachtzabel, 1926, p. 35; see. Beatrix Heintze, 1995, p. 17
  13. ^ Alfred Schachtzabel, 1926, p. 31
  14. ^ Alfred Schachtzabel, 1926, p. 17
  15. Beatrix Heintze, 1995, p. 18f; Schachtzabel stayed at the Cubango mission station for two and a half months , where he received all the support he needed for his research. See Heintze, 2007, p. 80
  16. Beatrix Heintze, 1995, Appendix 1, pp. 331–337
  17. Beatrix Heintze, 1995, p. 38
  18. Beatrix Heintze, 2007, pp. 17, 327
  19. Alfred Schachtzabel, 1926, plate 2 shows the car "stuck in the swamp".
  20. Beatrix Heintze, 1995, p. 27f
  21. Beatrix Heintze: In Pursuit of a Chameleon: Early Ethnographic Photography from Angola in Context. In: History in Africa , Vol. 17, 1990, pp. 131–156, here p. 141
  22. ^ The demonstration collection from EM von Hornbostel and the Berlin Phonogram Archive . Double LP with booklet (comments by Kurt Reinhard and George List) Ethnic Folkways Library, FE 4175. Folkways Records, 1963; see. Gerhard Kubik : Harmony in Traditional African Music. In: Transition, No. 47, 1975, p. 41
  23. Beatrix Heintze, 1995, pp. 28, 35f
  24. Jan Vansina : Sources vs. Text: An “Integrated Edition of Sources”. In: History in Africa, Vol. 23, 1996, pp. 461-465, here p. 462
  25. Beatrix Heintze, 1995, pp. 39-41