Hans Steffen (geographer)

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Hans Steffen
Portrait from the yearbook of the University of Chile

Friedrich Emil Hans Steffen , also Juan Steffen Hoffmann , (born July 20, 1865 in Fürstenwerder , † April 7, 1936 near Davos , Switzerland ) was a German geographer who carried out extensive hydrographic studies in southern Chile . With the determination of the continental watershed in West Patagonia and as a technical advisor to the Chilean government, he made an important contribution to the peaceful definition of the then disputed border with Argentina .

Life

Career

Hans Steffen was born as the son of the military doctor Karl Emil Steffen and his wife Anna Luise Hoffmann in Fürstenwerder in the Uckermark. A few years later the family moved to Berlin-Charlottenburg , where he attended the humanistic Kaiserin-Augusta-Gymnasium in Berlin . At the age of 18 he began studying geography and history at the royal Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin in 1883 . There, in addition to Ernst Curtius and Theodor Mommsen , he attended lectures by the geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen . After a year he moved to the University of Halle , where the geographer Alfred Kirchhoff became his academic teacher. In 1886, Hans Steffen did his doctorate with a geographic study on Lower Franconia . The following year he worked in Rudolstadt as an expert in geography on the new edition of the German Encyclopedia edited by Philipp von Nathusius . In 1888 he began his military service, but ended it prematurely due to illness.

Teacher and researcher in Chile

In 1889, Hans Steffen was appointed by the government of Chilean President José Manuel Balmaceda as a lecturer in history and geography at the newly founded Pedagogical Institute of the University of Chile in Santiago , where he belonged together with six other Germans (Alfred Beutell, Friedrich Hanssen , Friedrich Johow, Rudolf Lenz , Reinhold von Lilienthal , Jürgen Heinrich Schneider) as the first faculty for the training of high school teachers. Steffen had been selected by the diplomatic representatives of Chile in Berlin on the recommendation of Ferdinand von Richthofen and belonged to the minority within the group of German scholars who did not have a habilitation under German university law (except for Steffen, this only applied to Schneider and from 1891 also to August Tafelmacher , who replaced the mathematician Lilienthal , who was appointed to Münster ).

A former student, the Chilean historian Luis Galdames, described Steffen's teaching style from a student's point of view:

«El doctor Steffen es alto, delgado, flexible, de una tez enjuta y curtida, color rojizo, inclinado a moreno. Sus cabellos, de ink castaño, son abundantes, pero los lleva cortos; the frente es despejada y subraya la expresión haciendo arrugas; los lentes de oro estrechan la nariz y velan la mirada inquisidora que sale de unos ojos oscuros y pequeños. […] Habla ligero, en español correcto, pero de acentuada pronunciación germánica; y su gesto es de una seriedad inalterable. Jamás se insinúa ni sonríe; So expone y ordena. Entra siempre a la sala con el mismo ademán de colgar el sombrero y sentarse para decir su relato, con la ayuda del cuadernillo impreso. Más tarde supimos que se trataba de unos textos alemanes, escritos por Meyer y muy usados ​​en los colegios de Prusia. […] The clase de Historia se alternaba con la de Geografía Física; y aquí sí que las cosas cambiaban. El profesor abandonaba el texto; y de pie junto a la pizarra, hacía su demostración con tiza de colores, explicando detalladamente cada rasgo orográfico, cada ley climatológica, cada materia oceanográfica, etc. Y todo animadamente, con la unción y el placer de enseñar. Incuestionablemente, estábamos delante de un geógrafo. Tal era, por cierto, la especialidad del doctor Steffen, su vocación manifiesta. Nunca le agradeceremos lo bastante sus lecciones geográficas, como tampoco le agradecerá lo bastante el país sus exploraciones patagónicas. »

“Doctor Steffen is tall, slender, agile and has a lean, tough face with a reddish complexion that tones into coppery brown. His auburn hair is thick, but he wears it short; the forehead is broad and its wrinkles underline the expressive facial expressions; the golden glasses narrow the nose and obscure the searching gaze of the small, dark eyes. [...] he speaks fluent, flawless Spanish, but with a strong German accent, and his gesture is consistently serious. He is never curious, nor does he smile; he only communicates and orders. He always enters the hall with the habit of always hanging up his hat and sitting down in the same way and then giving his lecture with the help of a small printed booklet. We later found out that these were German textbooks, written by Meyer and widely used in Prussian schools. […] The history lesson was followed by geography lesson, and here it was completely different: Now the teacher left the book aside; Standing at the blackboard, he held his demonstration with colored chalk, explaining in detail every orographic feature, every climatological law, every oceanographic subject matter, etc. And everything with liveliness and a noticeable pleasure in teaching. Without question, we had a geographer before us. This was clearly Doctor Steffen's specialty, his obvious calling. We can never thank him enough for his geography lessons, just as the country can never sufficiently thank him for his Patagonian research. "

The Patagonia Expeditions

Expedition member 1896/97 ( Río Aisén ), Hans Steffen in the middle
Watershed in the headwaters of the Río Cisnes and Río Appeleg.
Croquis by Hans Steffen, 1898

When Hans Steffen came to South America in 1889, seven years had passed since Chile and Argentina had agreed in a border treaty on how their common border was to be determined. This should run in the Andes "[...] along the highest peaks of this cordillera, which divides the waters ...". This simple rule could not be implemented so easily in Patagonia, because the continental divide there is often east of the Andes in the pampas . While Argentina would have liked to draw the border over the highest Andean peaks, Chile invoked that the watershed was the determining element of the agreed demarcation. This led to serious tensions between the neighbors over the territorial conditions in this region, the topography of which was largely unexplored. So there was a political and scientific challenge in exploring Patagonia. A challenge that was taken up by the geographer Steffen.

From the very beginning, Steffen was far more interested in geographic field research than in his academic teaching and soon began organizing his own expeditions. In addition, he studied historical and contemporary sources in Santiago. This included, for example, the reports on missionary trips by the Jesuits from the 18th century. In February 1892 he organized his first expedition on his own to the Osorno volcano near Puerto Montt , which he climbed to just below the summit, and to the cordillera on Lago Todos Los Santos east of the volcanic cone. His team also included the geodesist Wilhelm Döll and the geologist Carl Ochsenius .

Then he was able to convince the head of the Chilean border commission Diego Barros Arana of his ideas for exploring Patagonia. In the following years up to 1899 he received government contracts for seven expeditions with his support, in which several other German experts also took part. Through his research trips and numerous publications, Steffen became an outstanding and well-respected expert on West Patagonia, who was put on a par with other Chilean travelers such as Charles Darwin or Alexander von Humboldt by some Chilean observers and who is still highly regarded in Chile today.

Delegation Council for Chile

Chile and Argentina submitted to British arbitration in 1886 to settle their border disputes peacefully. So in October 1899 the expert Steffen was appointed to the scientific advisory board of the Chilean delegation in London. He traveled to Great Britain and was significantly involved in the preparation of the exposition, which should give the arbitral tribunal the Chilean position and an impression of the geographic nature of Patagonia. Then Steffen as representative of Chile and Francisco Pascasio Moreno as representative of Argentina accompanied the British envoy of the arbitration tribunal Sir Thomas Holdich on an inspection tour through western Patagonia. Finally, there was a second expert lecture in London. The English king's award was made in November 1902.

In the following years, Dr. Hans Steffen continued to focus on the determining topics of his research life and numerous publications about Patagonia and the border-finding process in which he was involved appeared. Due to a lung disease, he was forced to leave Chile in 1913. From then on he lived near Davos in Switzerland, where he died on April 7, 1936.

Later commemoration

The Italian mountaineers and documentarists Silvia Metzeltin and Gino Buscaini found Steffen's forgotten grave in Davos a few years ago and campaigned for a worthy commemoration. Finally, at the instigation of Chilean authorities, the urn Steffen, who had wanted a final resting place in Patagonia, was transferred to Chile in April 2001 and buried in a specially built mausoleum in Aisén in November 2006 .

Web links

  • Hans Steffen's estate in the digital collections of the Ibero-American Institute - Prussian Cultural Heritage

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hans Steffen: Lower Franconia and Aschaffenburg. A geographical study based on the "Bavaria" . Naucke, Halle a. P. 1886.
  2. ↑ Thomas Gerdes, Stefan Schmidt: Hans Steffen (1865-1936). Borderline experiences of a German geographer in Chile. Ibero-American Institute, Berlin 2016, p. 5.
  3. ↑ Jaime Caiceo Escudero: Formación de profesores. El largo camino hacia la profesionalización docente. In: Intramuros ( UMCE , Santiago de Chile), No. 12 (2003) pp. 10-17 ( reference ).
  4. ^ Carlos Sanhueza Cerda: La gestación del Instituto Pedagógico de Santiago y la movilidad del saber germano a Chile a finales del siglo XIX. In: Estudos Ibero-Americanos ( PUCRS , Porto Alegre), Vol. 39 (2013), No. 1, pp. 54-81 (68).
  5. ↑ Gilberto Sánchez Cabezas: La contribución del Dr. Rodolfo Lenz al conocimiento de la lengua y cultura mapuches. In: Boletín de Filología de la Universidad de Chile (BFUCh, Santiago de Chile), Vol. 33 (1992), pp. 273-299 (273, note 2).
  6. ^ José Miguel Pozo Ruiz: Hans Steffen: Maestro, geógrafo y pionero de la Patagonia Occidental. In: Universum (University of Talca ), Vol. 20 (2005), No. 1, pp. 112–123.
  7. ↑ Thomas Gerdes, Ibero-American Institute (ed.): Hans Steffen (1865–1936). “Borderline experiences” of a German geographer in Chile. (PDF; 972 kB). Lecture manuscript, Berlin 2007 (accessed: August 2017), p. 2.
  8. ↑ Hans Steffen: In Patagonia . In: Hans Joachim Wulschner (Ed.): From Rio Grande to La Plata. 19th century German travelogues from southern America . Erdmann, Tübingen 1975, ISBN 3-7711-0205-7 , pp. 454-459.
  9. ↑ Manuel Rojas : Hans Steffen y la lealtad. In: Babel. Revista de Arte y Crítica , No. 37 (January / February 1947), Nascimiento, Santiago de Chile, pp. 24–35 ( magazine download via Memoria Chilena ).
  10. ^ Verónica Moya: Repatriarán Restos de Investigador. In: El Mercurio , April 19, 2001, accessed August 2017.
  11. ↑ Hans Silva: ( Page no longer available , search in web archives: Hans Steffen, el gran explorador de la Patagonia ) blog article, July 20, 2006.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / villaohiggins.com
  12. ↑ Cumplido deseo del explorador. In: El Mercurio , November 21, 2006, accessed August 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Steffen, Hans
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Steffen, Friedrich Emil Hans (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German geographer
DATE OF BIRTH July 20, 1865
PLACE OF BIRTH Fürstenwerder
DATE OF DEATH April 7, 1936
Place of death near Davos , Switzerland