Medical-demographic German New Guinea expedition

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Excursion route

The medical-demographic German New Guinea expedition of the Reich Colonial Office in 1913/14 was one of the last expeditions of the German Empire before the end of the German colonial era as a result of the First World War . The medical purpose was to research the high death rate of the indigenous population in German New Guinea . This expedition became better known in terms of cultural history as the South Sea voyage of the German-Danish painter Emil Nolde , who was largely free to do his demographic work. On this trip he created numerous watercolors, paintings and small wooden sculptures.

Attendees

The scientific leaders of the expedition were professors Alfred Leber (leader) and Ludwig Külz (deputy). Alfred Leber was a professor of ophthalmology at the Georg-August University in Göttingen and had already participated in the expedition to Samoa , Saipan and Sumatra in 1910/11 . Today he is considered the founder of tropical ophthalmology in Germany. Professor Ludwig Külz was a recognized tropical medicine doctor who had worked as a doctor for the German colonial administration in the Togo colony from 1902 to 1905 and later in the Cameroon colony until 1913 . A niece of the Berlin entrepreneur and art patron Eduard Arnhold was chosen as the nurse for the expedition . Arnhold made the participation of his niece Gertrud Arnthal (1890–1914) dependent on another woman accompanying the expedition. The wife of the painter Emil Nolde, who was scheduled for the expedition, was chosen as such; Ada Nolde born Adamine Frederike Vilstrup (1879–1946) was a Danish actress who also documented the expedition as a photographer.

Expedition route

The arrival of the participants Leber, Arnthal and the Nolde couple started from the Berlin-Zoo train station via Moscow and the Trans-Siberian Railway in October 1913 and included an excursion with the Chinese Eastern Railway from Harbin over the entire Korean Peninsula to Japan and from there via the large cities in China finally with the imperial mail steamer Prinz Waldemar from Hong Kong , Manila and the islands of Yap and Maron to Madang , then Friedrichs-Wilhelmshafen . In New Guinea , the expedition first turned to Rabaul . Emil Nolde, who fell seriously ill with dysentery at an early age , soon had to stay behind and was brought to the hospital in Herbertshöhe by his wife as soon as he could be transported . He still reached Kavieng and the island of Manus , but the expedition as such was divided. Gertrud Arnthal contracted typhus and died on April 18 in Rabaul.

Emil Nolde traveled on to Indonesia in May 1914 and in June 1914 with a final detour to Burma via Ceylon and the Suez Canal to Port Said . Here the Reichspostdampfer Derfflinger was stopped by the English blockade. Noldes got to Genoa on a Dutch ship under adventurous circumstances and from there they were able to return to their home on Alsen via Switzerland and Berlin . The pictures and drawings Nolde created on the trip are compared with Paul Gauguin's South Sea pictures and have since shaped the Central European world of imagination.

The medics continued their part of the expedition that was fateful for Leber; he did not return to Germany during World War I and stayed in the Dutch East Indies .

literature

  • Ada Nolde: Some memories. In: Manfred Reuther (Ed.): Emil Nolde - Die Südseereise 1913–1914. DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 2008, ISBN 978-3-8321-9083-5 , pp. 43–71 (A planned lecture about the joint trip to the South Sea).
  • Manfred Reuther (Ed.): Emil Nolde - Die Südseereise 1913–1914. = Emil Nolde - the journey to the South Seas 1913–1914 (On the occasion of the second exhibition of the Berlin branch of the Nolde Foundation Seebüll “Emil Nolde - The South Sea journey 1913–1914”, February 1, 2008 - May 18, 2008). DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 2008, ISBN 978-3-8321-9083-5 (English and German).
  • Manfred Reuther: Emil Noldes "East Asia trip and the moving South Seas trip". In: Manfred Reuther (Ed.): Emil Nolde - Die Südseereise 1913–1914. DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 2008, ISBN 978-3-8321-9083-5 , pp. 21-27.
  • Johannes W. Grüntzig , Heinz Mehlhorn: Expeditions into the realm of epidemics. Medical ascension orders of the German imperial and colonial times. Elsevier, Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, Heidelberg et al. 2005, ISBN 3-8274-1622-1 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ J. Grüntzig, H. Mehlhorn: Alfred Th. Leber (1881-1954): A pioneer of tropical ophthalmology - lost in the South Seas - rediscovered in India. In: Clinical monthly sheets for ophthalmology. Vol. 201, No. 10, 1992, ISSN  0023-2165 , pp. 254-262, doi : 10.1055 / s-2008-1045905 .
  2. ^ Ekkehart Krippendorff:  Wilhelm Külz. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 13, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1982, ISBN 3-428-00194-X , p. 210 f. ( Digitized version )., Twin brother of the liberal politician Wilhelm Külz .