German naval expedition

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Malanggan masks from New Ireland. Ethnological Museum, Berlin-Dahlem

The German Marine Expedition 1907/09 was a research and collecting trip sent by the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin to Neumecklenburg (today's New Ireland ) in Papua New Guinea . Their aim was the comprehensive ethnographic and anthropological research of the then German colonial area . The German Marine Expedition was one of the first German scientific research trips that carried out locally stationed field research to gain sociological , linguistic and anthropological knowledge about the populations.

background

New Ireland was administered by the New Guinea Company from 1885 to 1899 and was part of the German colony of German New Guinea from 1899 to 1914 . During the period of German colonial rule, various scientific expeditions to research the area took place. Georg von Schleinitz explored the island in 1875 on his circumnavigation with the warship SMS Gazelle . Felix von Luschan , the director of the Africa and Oceania department at the Berlin Museum of Ethnology, initiated a scientific expedition to the German colonial area in what is now Papua New Guinea in the summer of 1907. Originally, the Western was Neupommern provided as a destination, but on the ground and under the influence of Albert Hahl , the German governor of New Guinea, it was decided to focus the research on New Ireland.

Organization and financing

The costs were largely borne by the Prussian Ministry of Spiritual, Educational and Medical Affairs . The expedition was under the supervision of the Imperial Navy , which also contributed to the originally planned amount of 50,000 marks , which was expanded by 6000 marks in March 1909.

Participants in the expedition

The expedition took place in the years 1907-09 and was initially under the direction of naval medical officer Emil Stephan . His work, published in 1907: South Sea Art. Contributions to the art of the Bismarck Archipelago and to the prehistory of art in general, the first publication to deal systematically and from the perspective of a scientist with the art of this region, recommended him for this task. After Stephen's death, Augustin Krämer took over his position with his wife Elisabeth Krämer-Bannow . Both expedition leaders were paid by the Imperial Navy. The other participants in the expedition were the Swiss anthropologist and ethnologist Otto Schlaginhaufen, the Berlin ethnologist Edgar Walden and the photographer Richard Schilling.

The expedition

The expedition members arrived in Simpsonhafen on November 3rd, 1907 . On November 29, 1907, Walden reached Planet Kavieng with the survey ship SMS and set up a station in the town hall of Fezoa, in the north of Neumecklenburg. From there he went on trips to the Tanga Islands , the Tabar Islands and New Hanover for months .

The southern camp was established on December 1, 1907 in Muliama, a small port on the east coast of southern Neumecklenburg. It existed until the end of December 1908. In addition to the scientists Schlaginhaufen and Krämer, Krämer-Bannow and the photographer Schilling, nine local police soldiers, a cook and several servants, a total of up to 20 men, were temporarily active in the Muliama camp. The colonial conditions shaped the implementation of the expedition. The researchers usually only entered unknown villages in the company of the police soldiers. The voyages also took place on board ships that were on punitive expeditions. It was an advantage for the researchers that they could use the facilities and services of the Navy at low cost.

The participants of the expedition visited the offshore islands of Neumecklenburg and other islands of Melanesia . They went hiking in the interior of the island as well as along the coasts. One of the tasks of the expedition was to list the places and populations of the island. The most common individual motif of the 796 photographs of the expedition recorded in the inventory book of the Berlin Museum were people who were involved with rituals and objects that were related to them, as well as physiognomically oriented photos of people and photographs of houses and village complexes. Extensive vocabulary lists of several languages ​​in Neumecklenburg have been compiled. Otto Schlaginhaufen collected around 800 skulls for the Royal Saxon Museum in Dresden , 357 of them on the Feni Islands alone .

Emil Stephan died on May 25, 1908 in Namatanai on Neumecklenburg of blackwater fever . After Emil Stephan's death, the marine doctor Augustin Krämer became head of the German naval expedition. At the beginning of 1909, Krämer moved the camp to Lamassong in central Neumecklenburg and later to Hamba (Amba), ten kilometers to the north, the center of Malanggan and Uli carving. Krämer dated the end of the expedition to May 1909. Shortly afterwards he traveled to Micronesia , where he took over the management of the Hamburg South Sea Expedition . Walden continued the research he had started in the north of Neumecklenburg until 1910. From June 1909 until the end of the year Schlaginhaufen undertook a study trip to the Sepik in New Guinea, financed by Georg Arnhold , on behalf of the Dresden Museum .

Results

Augustin Krämer was not able to publish the results of his research until 1925. To commemorate his student days in Freiburg, Emil Stephan donated some duplicates from his South Sea collection to the Museum of Ethnology in Freiburg .

literature

  • Augustin Krämer: The Málanggane of Tombára. Georg Müller, Munich 1925.
  • Elisabeth Krämer-Bannow: With art-loving cannibals of the South Seas - walks on Neumecklenburg, along with scientific remarks by A. Krämer. Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 1916.
  • Otto Schlaginhaufen: Orientation marches on the east coast of Neu Mecklenburg Mitt. German. Protection area 21, 1908, pp. 213-220.
  • Otto Schlaginhaufen: A Visit to the Tanga Islands Globus 94, 1908, pp. 165–169.
  • Otto Schlaginhaufen: Travel Report from South New Mecklenburg Zeitschr. Ethnol. Berl. 40, 1908, pp. 566-567.
  • Emil Stephan: South Sea Art. Contributions to the art of the Bismarck Archipelago and to the prehistory of art in general. Royal Museum of Ethnology in Berlin with the support of the Reichs-Marine-Amt, Ed .: Emil Stephan, Dietrich Reimer (Ernst Vohsen). Berlin 1907; Reprint: Salzwasser Verlag, 2012, ISBN 978-3-86444-342-8 .
  • Emil Stephan, Fritz Graebner: New Mecklenburg (Bismarck Archipelago): the coast from Umuddu to Cape St. Georg: Research results. Georg Reimer Verlag, Berlin 1907, Nabu Press 2010, ISBN 1-147-59606-9
  • Edgar Walden: The ethnographic and linguistic conditions in the northern part of New Mecklenburg and on the surrounding islands . Correspondence sheet of the German Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory (42) 1911, pp. 28–31.
  • Edgar Walden, Hans Nevermann: Celebrations of the dead and Malagans of North Neumecklenburg . Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 72, 1941, pp. 11-38.
  • Markus Schindlbeck: German scientific expeditions and research in the South Seas until 1914 . In: Hermann Joseph Hiery (ed.): The German South Sea. A manual . Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2001, pp. 132–155, ISBN 3-506-73912-3

Individual evidence

  1. Anette Schade: Photography and ethnographic work: the "German Marine Expedition (1907-1909)" to New Ireland (Papua New Guinea) In: Irene Ziehe, Ulrich Hägele (Ed.): Photographs from everyday life - Photographing as everyday life, vol. 1 , LIT Verlag Munich 2003.
  2. ^ Jorge Freitas Branco: A South Sea Story. In: Katja Geisenhainer, Katharina Lange (Hrsg.): Movable horizons: Festschrift for Bernhard Streck. Leipziger Universitätsverlag Leipzig 2005, ISBN 978-3-86583-078-4
  3. Annual Reports 1907/08: 279; German colonial newspaper 25.1908: 461
  4. Augustin Krämer: The malanggans of Tombára. Georg Müller, Munich 1925.