CSF 2008

"World traveler or revolutionary?
Continuities and discontinuities in the life and work of Georg Forster"

University of Kassel, International House, June 20-21, 2008

Georg Forster is generally characterized as a "world traveller and revolutionary". Is this to be understood as purely additive, without one side of Forster's personality having anything significant to do with the other? Or should the two be seen in a closer context? In other words, when does the revolutionary Georg Forster date, a question that is highly controversial in research and has so far remained unanswered. Was he already revolutionary in his attitude long before the French invasion of Mainz? Or did he - and this theory is also widespread - just stumble into the revolution, so to speak? Or, and this view goes back to the 1790s, was he ultimately "driven into it" by the women around him? Forster himself justified himself in a letter to his father-in-law on November 10, 1792 with the words: "I cannot emigrate without sacrificing everything I have, my good name to boot, since my way of thinking is clearly evident in my work." So what about the continuities and discontinuities in Forster's thoughts and actions? How rooted are his revolutionary views in his cultural anthropology and in his scientific thinking of the 1770s and 1780s? What new explanatory approaches do his recently published scientific writings offer?

Lectures