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to the point where it became the main medium for overseas information, and by 1784 Germans
had also become the biggest consumers of travel literature in Europe. This was helped largely by
the fact that very few managed to actually travel outside of Europe, let alone take part in foreign
expeditions to the Americas or the Pacific. 9
The German-speaking public seemed to relish the first real German example of ‘travel
writing’, with its genuine local and reliable version of events through unique first-hand
experience, which resulted in Georg Forster being regarded as the German authority on the South
Pacific and responsible for a new genre of writing in this part of Europe through exciting the
imagination of its people with accounts of newly discovered lands and inhabitants. With his
newfound reputation during the height of his fame, in which he translated and wrote a number of
articles and book reviews of the latest publications regarding South Sea discoveries, he became,
as one scholar labels him, the “Pacific expert” 10 of the latter period of the eighteenth century in
Germany, which raised the bar on German travel writing to take it from a fairly standard work of
dry scientific facts into something which encompassed not only the natural sciences and
philosophy, but was also written in a very readable and colourful language. Before his
controversial involvement in the founding and running of the revolutionary ‘Society of the
Jacobins, Friends of Liberty and Equality’ in Mainz in 1793, which both tarnished his name in
Germany throughout the nineteenth and even twentieth century and forced him to live in exile in
Paris until his untimely death on 10 January 1794, Georg managed to meet and, in many cases,
influence such prominent German intellectuals, poets, writers, philosophers and naturalists as
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried
Herder and Alexander von Humboldt, leading to his later epithet as a ‘classic of German prose’. 11
Reiseliteratur über Australien und Neuseeland 1750-1810. St. Ingbert: Röhrig, 1992, 1-3, 17-33; cf. Corkhill,
Antipodean Encounters, 9-17.)
9 Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 32f.
10 Leslie Bodi, “Georg Forster: The ‘Pacific Expert’ of Eighteenth-Century Germany”, in: Historical Studies,
Australia and New Zealand 8:32 (1959): 345-63.
11 Friedrich von Schlegel, “Georg Forster: Fragment einer Charakteristik der deutschen Klassiker [1797]”, in:
Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe: Bd. 2: Charakteristiken und Kritiken. Herausgegeben von Ernst Behler, unter
Mitwirkung von Jean-Jacques Anstett und Hans Eichner. Paderborn; München: Schöningh, 1967, 78-99. For general
biographies, see, for example, Ludwig Uhlig, Georg Forster: Lebensabenteuer eines gelehrten Weltbürgers (1754-
1794). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004; Gerhard Steiner, Georg Forster. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1977; Ulrich
Enzensberger, Georg Forster: Ein Leben in Scherben. Frankfurt a/M: Eichborn, 1996; Klaus Harpprecht, Georg
Forster oder Die Liebe zur Welt: Eine Biographie. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1990; Thomas P. Saine, Georg
Forster. New York: Twayne, 1972; Kurt Kersten, Der Weltumsegler: Johann Georg Adam Forster 1754-1794. Bern:
Francke, 1957. For the New Zealand/Pacific connection see also James Braund, “The Pacific Legacy of Georg
Forster”, in: Europe’s Pasts and Presents: Proceedings of the Fourteenth Biennial Conference of the Australasian
Association for European History (Brisbane, Australia, July 2003). Eds. Stephan Atzert and Andrew G. Bonnell.
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