“Memoirs Science”: German Colonial Studies at the Close of the 19th – in the Beginning of the 20th Centuries

Abstract

By making both actual and discursive exploration of exotic lands, in a variety of genres German colonial literature, along with fictional entertaining products, has formed two lines of codified scientific literature. Retaining the ethnographic, geographic and biological (in the context of general anthropology) approaches, it is developing two methods of the discovery verification: with a help of descriptive tools of positivist science and through fusion of a scientific fact with a memoir. It is in the context of the second technique that a body of works of educational and popular character was formed, focused on the cognition of the colonized territories not only by demonstration, but also through the introduction of an autobiographical fictionalized figure of a scientific researcher, an eyewitness. Aimed at the process of learning and discovery, these scientific-journalistic books borrow their technique from the genre literary fiction that allows us to speak about specific modality of “scientifically oriented unverifiable memoir” in German literature of the late nineteenth - early twentieth centuries.