Georg Forster - Views From The Lower Rhine

Views From The Lower Rhine

In the spring of 1790, Forster and the young Alexander von Humboldt started from Mainz on a long journey through the Southern Netherlands, the United Provinces, and England, which eventually finished in Paris. The impressions from the journey were described in a three volume publication Ansichten vom Niederrhein, von Brabant, Flandern, Holland, England und Frankreich im April, Mai und Juni 1790 (Views of the Lower Rhine, from Brabant, Flanders, Holland, England, and France in April, May and June 1790), published 1791–1794. Goethe said about the book: "One wants, after one has finished reading, to start it over, and wishes to travel with such a good and knowledgeable observer." The book includes considerations in the field of the history of art that were as influential for the discipline as A Voyage round the world was for ethnology. Forster belongs, for example, to the first writers who gave just treatment to the Gothic architecture of Cologne Cathedral, which was widely perceived as "barbarian" at that time. The book conformed well to the early Romanticism intellectual movements in German-speaking Europe.

Forster's main interest, however, was again focused on the social behaviour of people, as 15 years earlier in the Pacific. The national uprisings in Flanders and Brabant and of course the revolution in France sparked his curiosity. The journey through these regions, together with the Netherlands and England, where citizens' freedoms were equally well developed, in the end helped him to sort out his own political judgements. From that time on he started to be a confident opponent of the ancien régime. Similarly to other German scholars, he welcomed the outbreak of the revolution as a clear consequence of the Enlightenment. As early as July 30, 1789, shortly after he heard about the Storming of the Bastille, he wrote to his father-in-law, philologist Christian Gottlob Heyne that it was beautiful to see what philosophy had nurtured in people's minds and then had realized in the state. To educate people about their rights in this way, he wrote, was after all the surest way; the rest would then result as if by itself.