Walter Behrman A German Cartographer, Geographer and Collector Walter BehrmanA German Cartographer, Geographer and Collector Sara Müller Walter Behrmann (1882-1955) was a German Geographer specializing in the field of cartography and geomorphology. He was a member of the Kaiserin-Augusta-River-Expedition, an expedition to the Sepik River (German name at that time: Kaiserin-Augusta-Fluss), in the German colony German-New-Guinea, between 1912-13. As geographer of this expedition, Behrmann conducted scientific research, drew maps of the river and its surrounding area, and collected objects. Walter Behrmann (back row on the right) and the other German members of the expedition in 1913. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum, Thurnwald 1913/14, Nr. II -29, VIIIB 16973 / Sara Müller (Reproduction). Behrmann: A Cartographer and Geographer Behrmann studied geography, mathematics and physics in Göttingen, Munich and Berlin. In 1905 he handed in his dissertation and started his academic career in the field of geography that lasted until his death in 1955. Among the academic positions he held, were those as assistant to different professors in Leipzig and Berlin. After his degree in 1914 Behrmann became the cartographer of the Institute for Oceanography in Berlin, until 1923 when he was appointed director of the Geographical Institute of the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-University in Frankfurt. He held this position in Frankfurt until 1944, when an airstrike destroyed both his house and the Institute. Behrmann then moved back to Berlin and in the following years established the Geographical Institute at the Freie-University Berlin. The Kaiserin-Augusta-Fluss Expedition In the early years of his career and during his time as an assistant to Albrecht Penck in Berlin, Behrmann became the cartographer of the Kaiserin-Augusta-River-Expedition. This scientific expedition was sent to the German-New-Guinea colony between 1912-13. Behrmann was one of six German scientists who were chosen to conduct research in the fields of botany, geology, ethnography, zoology, and geography. The other scientists were Adolf Roesicke and Richard Thurnwald, who conducted anthropological research and acquired most of the objects of the expedition, Carl Ledermann undertook botanical research, Josef Bürgers was responsible for the medical support and the acquisition of zoological specimens, and Artur Stollé, a geologist, was the leader of the expedition. This expedition relied heavily on the colonial infrastructure. It received help from Albert Hahl, the Gouverneur of the colony, and other employees and ship crews of the German administration. Members of the Steyler Missionary Society and the trading company New Guinea Company provided support for the expedition. For instance, all these actors delivered canned food to the expeditions camp at the Sepik and the companies’ ships transported most of the objects from the coastal ports to the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin. The colonial government of German New Guinea also helped supplying local laborers for the expedition: more than 200 men from China and different islands in the Pacific Ocean worked as police soldiers, cooks, boatmen, carpenters, house boys or carriers for Behrmann and his colleagues. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum, Thurnwald 1913, Nr. 476, VIIIB 16607 / Annette Hlawa (Reproduktion). Behrmann named the men supporting his research in his publications. The ethnologist Richard Thurnwald photographed those men who hiked through the hinterland of the Sepik with him. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum / Annette Hlawa (Reproduction). In the years after the expedition, Behrmann published widely about the geography of the Sepik region but also about his personal experiences during the expedition. Behrmann was the only member of the expedition that published a significant amount of the research he undertook in the Sepik region. Among those publications is Im Stromgebiet des Sepik (1922), a detailed description of his experiences, targeting a wider German audience. In this book, written almost like an adventure novel, Behrmann shared experiences of everyday struggles for the German scientists in the colony. This writing placed itself alongside a variety of novels published both by former scientists and travelers to the German colonies. The political climate in which these novels were published affected their content: many members of German society during the Weimar era wanted to keep the memory of Germany as a colonial power alive. Behrmann’s adventure novel and his memories Der weiten Welt Wunder, posthumously published in 1956, represented a valuable historical source to shed more light on the logistics of a scientific expedition. As an example, Behrmann named the men that helped him conduct his research, Jong, Kuenari and Mollebei, whom he employed as house boys. Behrmann’s account of these men, their tasks within the expedition and their biographical background provided a rare insight into the lives of the laborers who made large expeditions like the Kaiserin-Augusta-River-Expedition possible. Behrmann’s Collection In his publications, Behrmann describes the different methods expedition members used to acquire objects at the Sepik. According to the geographer, the objects were exchanged with the local population in their villages or on the river from one boat to the other. Artifacts like masks, chairs, rain covers, or pottery were traded for German products like glass pearls and axe blades, or fishhooks made of iron. Nevertheless, in many situations, expedition members coerced the local populations to gain access to the meeting houses of villages. Those houses often contained objects that were of particular interest to the expedition, such as skulls or masks and that were normally not given away freely by the locals. Behrmann and his colleagues also paraded through villages along the Sepik supported by armed police soldiers looking in and underneath houses, forcing the inhabitants to exchange objects with them at gun point. Even if these different methods of acquiring objects are mentioned by Behrmann it is impossible today to trace back the acquisition context for each individual object. It can be assumed that Behrmann acquired at least 120 objects during the expedition. The ethnologist of the expedition, Adolf Roesicke, included Behrmann’s objects in the official list of collected objects sent to the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin. Roesicke created a detailed account of the objects including place and time of their acquisition. Hence, this list reveals that Behrmann acquired objects on several trips along the Sepik in 1912 and 1913. Due to Behrmann’s acquisition practices, some of those objects come from parts of the region that the ethnographer himself never reached. In one of his letters, Roesicke stated that all members of the expedition collected objects. Those objects were not necessarily meant for the “official collection” of the expedition. Many members acquired objects for their private collections or to sell them to private collectors or museums worldwide. This was most famously done by the captain of the ship of the expedition, Reinhold Hollack. His sold collection was exhibited in Bremen even before the first objects from the expedition were showcased in Berlin. It can be assumed that Behrmann collected objects for himself as well. In the previously mentioned memoir Der weiten Welt Wunder, Behrmann describes his house in Frankfurt, destroyed in 1944, as follows: “My beautiful home, decorated with many irreplaceable memorabilia from all zones of the earth, with works of art from the Stone Age (...)” (p. 10). It can be assumed that those “works of arts from the Stone Age” referred to objects Behrmann brought back from German-New-Guinea. In several of his publications about this region he refers to the people living at the Sepik as so called art-loving people from the Stone Ages. Painted Sago spathe-Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum / Claudia Obrocki The objects that Behrmann acquired for the “official collection” of the expedition were sent to the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, like the painted sago spathe (Berlin No. VI 48111). Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum / Claudia Obrocki. Not all the objects from the expedition became part of museums in the German capital. Often, these objects were sold or donated to other museums and art dealers. Among those museums which received objects from the Sepik were Stuttgart, Munich, and Vienna. Some objects were also given to the Völkerkundesammlung in Lübeck. The council of this city had supported the expedition to the Sepik with 1,000 Mark. In return, the local museum in Lübeck received 136 objects in 1916. Among them we find three objects collected by Behrmann: a belt, a wooden mask, and a chair. Years later, in 1939, another piece of Behrmann’s collection left Berlin. A skull was donated to the university collection in Göttingen. The Berlin Museum also sold some of these objects to art dealers like Artur Speyer. As a result, not only objects from the Sepik expeditions in general but also the objects collected directly by Behrmann reside in different German museums and private collections today. Mapping the Sepik – Locating Objects The map of the Sepik, drawn by Walter Behrmann after the end of the expedition. Behrmann, Im Stromgebiet des Sepik, Berlin 1922. Behrmann’s publications contain a map of the Sepik with detailed names of villages, mountain ranges and the course of the river. Behrmann also included in this map information collected by other travelers before him about the Sepik’s tributaries, mountain ranges and villages. The details he added were based on the research he undertook in 1912 and 1913. Behrmann’s updated map served several functions. Firstly, it extended the European knowledge of the Sepik region. Secondly, the map showed where the expedition members travelled, where they collected data, and where they acquired objects. Thirdly, the map proved the extent of exploration of the expedition into the Sepik and the contribution the expedition made to the exploration of this region. Finally, this map unveils a connection between the origin of the objects and the names of the places it indicated. The names of localities were often provided by local actors. If this was not possible, names such as "Dorf I" (Village I) were assigned to these localities. Rivers or mountain ridges were immediately renamed with German names. These names were often given by Behrmann himself and by the head of the expedition, Stollé. Roesicke included both the requested local names and the newly assigned names in his list when indicating the origin of the objects. Stool, (Berlin No. VI48013) acquired by Behrmann in the so called “Dorf I” at the Süd-Ost-Fluss, a tributary of the Sepik. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum / Volker Linke. Knowledge about Behrmann and Objects As shown, Behrmann’s publications and his map of the Sepik are valuable sources. These historical sources help to understand the logistics of the Kaiserin-Augusta-Fluss-Expedition, providing the name of the actors involved and give an insight into the origin of the objects. Behrmann’s publications are regularly used for provenance research of objects from the Sepik and to reflect upon German colonialism in Oceania. Nevertheless, the extent of Behrmann's role as a collector of objects is not fully known or reflected in museum collections. As mentioned above, it is almost impossible to say whether Behrmann himself had his own private collection from the Sepik and although many museums house objects collected by Behrmann, this information is often hidden or has never been transferred from Roesicke's lists to the index cards and entry books. For example, in the museum in Berlin and in Göttingen, Behrmann is not listed as the collector of the objects he actually collected. A drum (Berlin No. 41772) acquired by Behrmann and today in the collection of the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin. Behrmann as a collector is not yet named in the online catalogue of this object. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum / Heinz-Günther Malenz. Literature about Behrmann: Freitag, Ulrich: Die Beiträge von Max Groll, Walter Behrmann und Georg Jensch zur wissenschaftlichen Kartographie, 1994. Gräbel, Carsten: Die Erforschung der Kolonien. Expeditionen und koloniale Wissenskultur deutscher Geographen 1884-1919, Bielefeld 2015. Wagner, Julius (Ed.): Walter Behrmann zum sechzigsten Geburtstag, in: Frankfurter Geographische Hefte, 16/1942 (1). Publications by Behrmann quoted in this article: Der weiten Welt Wunder. Erlebnisse eines Geographen in Fern und Nah, Berlin 1956. Im Stromgebiet des Sepik. Eine deutsche Forschungsreise in Neuguinea, Berlin 1922.
