Karl Nauer

Karl Nauer (born November 27, 1874 in Obergünzburg , † October 7, 1962 in Eldorado (Argentina) ) was a German South Sea explorer and captain .

life and work

Karl Nauer grew up as one of three sons of a soap boiler in the Allgäu . After attending elementary school in Neuburg an der Donau, he attended grammar school in Kempten for six years . He left this with the upper level entrance qualification (Mittleren Reife) and the authorization for shortened military service as a “ one-year volunteer ”.

Nauer, who had already made the decision to become a captain at school, did military service in the Imperial Navy in Kiel . He then signed on to the Danish brig "Anna & Mathias", later on to a British four-masted barque , on which he sailed around Cape Horn and came to Tahiti for the first time . After five years at sea, he attended the Hamburg helmsman school ; He was then assigned to military exercises on the artillery training ship SMS Mars and the coastal armored ship SMS Odin .

On April 23, 1895, he entered the service of North German Lloyd . In July 1899 he was first employed as fourth officer , in 1901 he passed the boatman's examination in Hamburg and received the captain's license . From December 1901 he was third officer on the armored cruiser SMS Maria Theresia , then second officer on the "Halle" and from October 1902 second officer on the "Erlangen".

Since 1903 he stayed in the South Seas (colony of German New Guinea ). In 1906 he took up his first command in Melanesia on the coastal steamer ( Reichspostdampfer ) " Sumatra ", which was mainly used for the transport of copra from the islands in the Bismarck Archipelago and the northern Solomon Islands . The "Sumatra" was deployed from 1904 to 1914 in island service in German New Guinea. Karl Nauer was the captain of the "Sumatra" until 1912/1913. When the First World War broke out , the "Sumatra" was confiscated by Australia . It sank in 1923.

Later Nauer took over command of the Lloyd passenger steamer "Sierra Nevada (I)" (built 1912, tonnage 8235 GRT, manufacturer: AG Vulcan Stettin , launched in Stettin, launched in Pernambuco in 1914 , confiscated by Brazil in 1917).

On one of the South Sea collecting trips of the director of the Bremen Überseemuseum , Hugo Schauinsland , he came into contact with Nauer in 1905/06, who was considered one of the best experts in this region at the time. Due to its good relationships with plantation owners and locals, the Museum of Nauer acquired numerous ethnographic and natural history objects between the First and Second World War , including everyday objects and handicrafts such as boats, large masks and even entire huts from Melanesia and New Guinea . The "Karl Nauer Collection" (KNS) located in the Überseemuseum, including documents and photos from Nauer's estate, not only provides a good insight into the Melanesian culture at the beginning of the 20th century, but also about the interactions between the western and the oceanic cultures. Other objects collected by Nauer are now in the ethnological museums in Stuttgart, Leipzig and Munich as well as in the Obergünzburg South Sea Collection .

Together with Captain Karl Nauer, the zoologist Ludwig Cohn carried out research in 1908/1909 on his first research trip to the Solomon Islands, Buka and the town of Toboroi on Bougainville , as well as on the island of Tijob . Nauer was given a leave of absence for a few months from North German Lloyd for this research trip.

Until 1914, Nauer was in command of the "Sigmaringen", which was then serving in South America and East Asia. In August 1914 he was drafted into the Navy, where he was first used as a first lieutenant in the reserve on the SMS Wettin , a battleship of the Wittelsbach class , and later in the North and Baltic Seas and with the submarine flotilla in the Mediterranean. He received the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd class.

Nauer owned two plantations in New Guinea and a building site in Tsingtau , which together were supposedly worth 865,000 gold marks .

After the First World War, with which Germany also lost its colonies, Nauer lost his possessions and his employment in the South Seas. He was given an indefinite leave of absence from Lloyd and returned to the Allgäu. He tried to run a small dairy farm on a leased farm in Probstried near Kempten, who had already had to hire cows as a child, but failed when the foot-and-mouth disease broke out . In January 1923, Nauer again received a contract as first officer from Norddeutscher Lloyd, and three months later as captain on the passenger steamer "Crefeld". From August 1924 until his retirement on March 31, 1935, Nauer was the captain of the newly built steamer Sierra Morena , which mainly sailed from Germany on the South America lines of Lloyd, on which many Germans emigrated to South America at the time. Nauer died in Argentina in 1962 as a wealthy businessman and is buried there.

The collector Nauer sent a large number of the collected pieces from the South Pacific to his home town of Obergünzburg at an early stage. In 1913 he handed over his ethnographic collection consisting of 1,300 objects to the market town, which was supposed to "preserve the legacy of the South Sea collection". Today, Obergünzburg is home to the South Sea Museum, one of the largest and most complete South Sea collections in southern Germany and the only Melanesia collection in Bavaria. In 1913 the objects were exhibited for a short time for the first time. In advance, however, Nauer wrote to Obergünzburg in 1912 that he did not find all the pieces in his collection to be suitable for this: "I consider a bird collection to be more harmless to good Christian Catholic souls than my great guys with their extraordinarily strong genitals, the priests and other dirty spirits only caused restless nights. " There was another exhibition on site in the 1960s, otherwise the items had been stored in different places for decades. In the special show " Oceania - Cult and Visions" in 2003 pieces from the Nauer collection were shown in the Lippisches Landesmuseum Detmold . From October 2005, the construction of a separate museum building next to the local history museum of Obergünzburg, which was opened in 2009, began to adequately present the outsourced collection.

A friend of Nauer, the youth book writer Otfrid von Hanstein , processed Nauer's oral memories in a story, and another literary processing of his life was written by the Allgäu author Ernst T. Mader .

In Obergünzburg a street is named after Karl Nauer. In 1913 he received the honorary citizenship of the place.

literature

• Andrea Müller: Karl Nauer - A collector in the South Seas. Recontextualization of an ethnographic collection , master's thesis Univ. Bremen, Cultural Studies course, 2002
• Andrea Müller: The Lloyd captain Karl Nauer as a collector in the South Seas for the overseas museum . in: Workers' Movement and Social History, Zs. fd Regional history of Bremen in the 19th a. 20th century, No. 10, December 2002.
• Rainer F. Buschmann: Karl Nauer and the politics of collecting ethnographic objects in German New Guinea . in: Journal of the Pacific Arts Association, 21/22, pp. 93-102, 2000.
• Otfrid von Hanstein: Anchor up !: how the Allgäu farmer's offspring Karl Nauer became a seafarer, South Sea pioneer and Lloyd captain: the mündl. Memories of the captain Karl Nauer of the steamship "Sierra Nevada" retold , Königsbrück / Dresden: Drei Quellen-Verl., 1934
• Klaus Wittmann: The secret chamber. An Allgäu farmer drives to the South Seas as a captain and brings home a treasure , in: "Die tageszeitung" from January 7, 2005, p. 20
• Ernst T. Mader: Karl Nauer. How the South Seas came to the Allgäu . Blöcktach: Verlag an der Säge, 2008, ISBN 978-3-923710-18-8

Web links

• Captain Karl Nauer and his collection , Überseemuseum Bremen
• Object from the collection of Captain Nauer , from an auction catalog of the Sotheby’s auction house . It comes from the Admiralty Islands and was collected by Karl Nauer around 1905.
• The imperial mail steamer "Sumatra"
• South Sea Collection Obergünzburg - Reopening May 2009

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.mitfanoe.dk/index.php/da/fanos-historie/942-fano-i-sejskibstiden/skibsdata/skibe-a/1282-anna-mathias-brig-1890-niels-madsen
2. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from March 18, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ↑ quoted from Mader, 2008.