August Heinrich Petermann - Slipping and Death

Slipping and Death

At the end of the 1870s geography started to change its objects and goals, which upset the previously important position of what was then called the ‘Gotha Academy’. When Charles Darwin published The descent of man it was the beginning of the expansion of human geography, which till then was only rarely focused upon, except in the field of ethnography. The physical-deterministic view of humanity that followed led to the rise of the branch of geography we now call anthropogeography, especially after 1875, when Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) was the first new professor of geography appointed in München and later Leipzig (only Carl Ritter ever before had been professor of geography worldwide).

In 1856 Petermann had married Clara Leslie and had two daughters with her. They were divorced in 1875. A year later he married for the second time. As time wore on he seemed to have suffered more and more from family problems. It is also supposed that for many years he suffered from manic-depressive moods and he seemed to have always kept a revolver in close proximity. All these changes and troubles may have contributed to the fact that Petermann died by his own hand at Gotha on the 25th of September 1878. The fact that Gotha was becoming less exclusively the center of exploration — which so enchanted the large masses — and became more scientifically focused might also have played a role. In 1902 J.G. Bartholomew wrote: "It is only a fair tribute to Augustus Petermann to say that no one has done more than he to advance modern cartography, and no man has ever left a more fitting monument to himself than his Mitteilungen, which still bears his name, and under the editorship of Dr. Supan, is the leading geographical authority in all countries. But to the absorbing facsination of his work Petermann sacrificed all other interests in life and died a martyr to geography". That fame perished quickly was shown by Hermann Wagner in his article of 1912, when he commemorates the merits of the Gotha epoch under Petermann and finds that nobody up till then had written about the making of the history of geography and cartography and that all those pioneers were all but forgotten, even though the journal carried Petermann’s name since 1879. In 1909 a monument with Petermann’s effigy from the workshop of Max Hoene-München of Gotha was erected in the Ducal gardens of Gotha, a stone’s throw away from the institute where he had worked for so many years. The monument was offered by the German geographical societies. Petermann in his time was well paid by Perthes as is shown by his beautiful villa close to Gotha’s railway station. A fine way to meet his guests, friends, scientists, explorers, etc.