Kantia

Kantia is the name of a fictional island in the Caribbean , often incorrectly referred to as the Phantom Island . The history of the island and its discovery by the world traveler Johann Otto Polter was described by Samuel Herzog in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in 2004 . It has since been adopted by numerous other publications and non-fiction books. According to the Hamburg sociologist Wulf D. Hund , the story of this discovery is a pure fiction by Samuel Herzog.

Origin story

Samuel Herzog described Kantia as a phantom island in the Caribbean that the Leipzig merchant Johann Otto Polter wanted to see in 1884. The situation was with the “14. Latitude below the Tropic of Cancer ”inaccurate and incomplete.

According to Herzog, Polter named the supposedly inhabited island after the philosopher Immanuel Kant and tried in vain to find it again in four further expeditions until 1909 in order to take possession of it for the German Emperor . This had confirmed Polter in a document as the discoverer of Kantia.

literature

Samuel Herzog: “The savages seem well-disposed” , Neue Zürcher Zeitung , May 22, 2004, p. 62 ( online with photo by Polter)
Axel Bojanowski : A Dream of an Island , Süddeutsche.de , July 14, 2009

Individual evidence

↑ Wulf D. Hund : Review by Rainer Godel / Gideon Stiening (eds.), “Klopffechtereien - Misunderstandings - Contradictions? Methodical and methodological perspectives on the Kant-Forster controversy ”. Archive for Social History, Friedrich Ebert Foundation, August 19, 2014 (PDF).

[1] Wulf D. Hund : Review by Rainer Godel / Gideon Stiening (eds.), “Klopffechtereien - Misunderstandings - Contradictions? Methodical and methodological perspectives on the Kant-Forster controversy ”. Archive for Social History, Friedrich Ebert Foundation, August 19, 2014 (PDF).