‘The Traveller’ by Andrea Wulf review

George Forster was ten years old when he and his father, Johann Reinhold Forster, left their German-speaking hometown in northern Poland to survey, on behalf of the Russian government, Germans who had recently migrated to the Lower Volga. Johann soon came into conflict with a Russian governor, things turned violent, and father and son departed for England without pay. Despite his fractiousness, the elder Forster managed to land the job of natural historian on James Cook’s second circumnavigation of the globe in 1772. George, then 17, joined him as draughtsman. The expedition stopped at a host of Pacific Islands and made history by crossing the Antarctic Circle twice. Returning to England after three years, Johann once again fell out with his employers and was barred from publishing his account of the journey. George, free from such restrictions, hastily wrote A Voyage Round the World (1777), which strongly criticised both the contemporary stereotypes about Pacific Islanders as living in simple, unchanging societies and the various hypocrisies of European chauvinism, such as deploring cannibalism while condoning devastating wars of conquest. It became a bestseller and he was fêted across Europe. Forster then took up a series of academic jobs in Europe before landing in Mainz, near the French border, in 1788.

In these years Forster befriended some of the Enlightenment’s leading thinkers, including Johann Gottfried Herder, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, and Alexander von Humboldt, and intervened in one of its most significant controversies, namely the purported nature of racial differences. First, he drew on his experiences abroad to challenge Immanuel Kant’s reductive division of humanity into five races. Kant, rattled, responded with an abstruse essay on teleology. Forster then turned his sights on Christoph Meiners, whose own eccentric racial theory had led him to vigorously support the transatlantic slave trade. Forster exposed Meiners’ double standards and uncritical use of unreliable sources. In both cases he made clear his opposition to slavery, dispossession, and other forms of exploitation.

By this point the French Revolution was underway. Most Germans supported the early Revolution but turned against it as the violence escalated in the early 1790s. Forster, by contrast, never wavered, even as the guillotine began to fall. When French troops took Mainz in late 1792, Forster and some local revolutionaries set about transforming the territory into a democratic republic. Forster’s intellectual circle were dismayed but he was undeterred. Mainz was declared a republic in March 1793 – widely considered the first democratic state on German soil – but it did not last. The city was under siege by April and fell that July. Goethe was among the victors (and would eventually publish his own version of events). Forster was in France when Mainz was captured, but his health had long been delicate; he died in Paris in January 1794, aged just 39.

Forster’s appeal for modern readers – explorer, revolutionary, and enemy of racial exploitation – is obvious. It will be no surprise, then, that recent years have seen a stream of books about his life and writings in both German and English. In English at least, these have tended to be written with specialists in mind. Andrea Wulf’s elegant and readable biography has therefore been much anticipated. Wulf is fluent in both English and German and writes with unfailing clarity, even when tackling thorny topics such as 18th-century political geography. Just weaving the many strands of Forster’s life into a coherent, chronological narrative is in itself a major achievement. The scholarship is lightly worn, but it is clear that Wulf has spent many hours with her sources. She is at her best when recounting Forster’s early adventures and scientific endeavours, with his time in Russia and with Cook making for compulsive, almost novelistic reading. Wulf also pays characteristic attention to Forster’s messy personal life, from his abusive father to his various friendships and a disastrous marriage. She is in her element here and the details, such as George’s agonised acceptance of his wife’s affairs, provide valuable emotional texture.

Still, one can’t help feeling that some of that texture comes at the expense of other important aspects of Forster’s life. The book would have especially benefited from more sustained discussion of Forster’s political engagements. Only 15 months passed between the French occupation of Mainz and Forster’s death, but the outsized importance of these events means they probably merit more than the few dozen pages they receive. More generally, Forster’s political thought never quite gets the space it deserves, while the Enlightenment itself is painted in brushstrokes broad enough to obscure its intellectual diversity. Not unrelatedly, Wulf arguably tends to idealise Forster, failing to reckon with the extent to which he regurgitated certain prejudices. Despite his relativism, he denigrated Poles as ‘draught animals in human form’ and even likened the differences between certain racial groups to those between donkeys and horses. Wulf rightly highlights Forster’s admirable opposition to systems such as slavery, but surely part of what makes him interesting is that he maintained such emancipatory principles despite his deployment of various stereotypes?

Of course, that there is so much to be written about Forster’s short life is both part of his allure and a major challenge for any biographer. Selection and a degree of simplification are necessary. It might be argued that most other studies of Forster focus too much on ideas and not enough on his personal life. In this sense The Traveller can be considered a corrective. Scholars will in any case find the blow-by-blow narrative and interpersonal details a helpful resource. For the wider reading public, and especially those more interested in exploration and adventure than politics and philosophy, this remains an excellent introduction to one of the most fascinating figures of the European Enlightenment.

• The Traveller: The Revolutionary Life of George Forster and His Search for Humanity
  Andrea Wulf
  Allen Lane, 512pp, £30
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)
   

Morgan Golf-French is a postdoctoral researcher at the Turin Humanities Programme.